Conditional Reality

Halftone Quicksand lived in the spaces between comic book panels. She confused and confounded the regular comic book characters by lobbing empty speech balloons into the panels from her hiding place. The regular characters, who lived and thrived in the detailed and colorful panels, were mystified by the balloons. Some of them offered stark zen-like explanations for the speech that was not speech, expressing thoughts that were not thoughts. Eventually they stopped trying to figure them out. Probably just a subatomic anomaly, they said, or maybe something to do with sunspots. Halftone heard them and sunk deeper into the gutter.