Jimmy had nothing to his name but the name itself and the clothes on his back. The Multiverse at large no longer cared about him, for he was no part of its truth. He was non-canon. Without even realizing it he had crossed over the Canonical Demarcation Line, and as soon as he had done so everything about his life had passed away from his perception until he was left with only the gray-white mists of the Lost Stream, where all non-canon persons and events in existence end up. Those mists took away his possessions, his memories, and his sense of self, leaving him with only his life. If he could even be said to still have that.
He lived in a small cabin in the middle of the endless, eternal void, having inhabited it since discovering it a few months after his arrival in the Stream. Before finding it he had wandered half-freezing across flat infinity, with nothing around him but white emptiness. He had screamed and screamed for someone to come find him and tell him who and where he was, but no one heard him. Or if anyone did hear him, they didn’t care.
As he was still just a boy, Jimmy had few words to describe how he felt—but the image that lingered most in his head was that of a crow who had been separated from his flock. Occasionally he would be visited by flashes of memories, and he had a faint impression of having once been yelled at by one of his parents for wanting to help an abandoned crow he had found. His screams of distress had been little more than distant, meaningless squawks—mundane sounds, which ordinary folks on an ordinary day would simply ignore.
At least the cabin made up for the hardship of those early months. It was cozy, being possessed of both an upstairs and downstairs fireplace, as well as a pantry that restocked itself with both food and firewood. All the food was dried or canned, but he didn’t mind that much. In fact it made him feel rugged, like a pioneer on the trail…whatever that was.
Yes, the cabin kept him safe—for Jimmy felt deep down that there were many things to safeguard against. This dimension was too big for him to be alone in it. He didn’t like imagining what might step out of the mist someday and find him. He viewed the Stream as a prison, or a place otherwise forsaken, and he figured that it was home to monsters, hideous beings who no longer had a place in existence at large. Initially he had questioned if the cabin’s isolation would drive him crazy. But as time passed he grew as thankful for the solitude of his home as he was for the sturdiness of its walls.
He hoped with everything he had that this sense of safety would never leave him.
Then, one day, the scarecrows appeared.
