Read to the end

Hey, thanks for reading this story! Hope you like it!

Okay, so, you’re a hero on an adventure. You go to the palace and the king sends you on a quest to slay a dragon. You—

What? That’s boring and you want to stop reading? No, don’t close the tab! Just give it a bit longer, please.

You head out into the wilderness and seek out the dragon’s lair. Along the way you come across a little village where the people need your help with all kinds of things. So you help them with their jobs, go out and slay monsters for them, help the librarian organize their shelves…

I’m sorry, did you just say “What’s the point of any of this”? The point is what you make of it. But if you stop reading, that’s a permanent solution to the temporary problem of you being a little bored with this story I churned out in half an hour to meet an arbitrary self-imposed challenge. Don’t do anything rash!

While you’re helping out these villagers, you hear tell that the dragon descended on the castle town. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men tried to kill it, but they were slaughtered. Castle town? More like ghost town, am I right? So even if you slew the dragon, now there’s no one to award you the bounty.

“That sucks,” I hear you saying. “Maybe I’ll just stay in this little village for the rest of my life. I guess the story’s over now?”

No! The story’s not over until I say it’s over! Besides, think about all those villagers whose lives you improved. They’d miss you if you stopped reading! You don’t want to make them sad, do you?

So, about the dragon. While it was returning to its lair in the mountains it hit its head on an airplane, suffered a concussion, and fell to its death. So now I’ll just have to bullshit some other completely different story for you to read. Don’t worry, I’ll come up with someth—

Hey!

Where are you going?

Wow, you’re so selfish.