They Bring the Rulebook Home

What did you do when you found a rulebook with the power to alter the universe? Well, if you were Lisa and Diana, you shoved that shit into your bag and headed for your house at your full speed, never looking back once. The twins felt like they were living a dream as they made their way back to their house, each one expecting to wake up at any moment. It was like walking through that moment when you were not quite sure whether you were awake or asleep, except that it didn't end. It stretched on and on.

The twins did not have a large home. It was a basic apartment, a few rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a place to store old junk. It was cheap, and that was what mattered. The two were college students, having moved to the city to attend it from nearby, and the apartment offered the twin enticing bonuses of cheapness and location. Additionally, since the two happily lived together, they could combine their savings, and make their lives a little bit easier compared to those students who had to live alone. They had a shared dining room, with a single large and old table, upon which Diana placed the rulebook, the two sisters sitting on chairs on either end of the table, staring at it as though they expected it to get up and speak.

"This has to be magic." Lisa said. "There is no other way..."

Diana frowned, but did not contradict her sister. She was right. The older of the twins could find no other way the rulebook could do what it had done.

"It altered the past." She said. "That's what it did when we told it what to do... I wonder what else it can alter."

"Let's find out." Lisa's face flashed with fascinated interest as she grabbed a pencil, and leaned over the table.

For several hours, the sisters worked, trying to pin down the rules on how the book worked. They didn't get everything, but they started to get a rough picture. The book was...special. When you wrote something, it seemed to always understand what you wanted and meant, so that even if you left a detail out, it would more often or not be included just because you would have wanted it to be. The book was not self aware, as far as they could tell. Attempts to communicate (Largely consisting of Lisa talking to it like a dog) failed.

It had the power to alter history. That much was obvious. The twin sisters first tried to alter the recent past, and then moved further and further back, and to their surprise, it seemed to have no limit. They could change anything, so long as it was tied to a rule of some sort.

The book worked in rules. It would respond to nothing else. You could write on it or draw on it, but so long as it wasn't a rule, the book didn't care.

"I wonder if you tried to draw a pictograph..." Lisa mused. "Expressing a new rule, would the book take note?"

"Probably." Diana said, having leafed through the previous pages. "We're not the first person to have it, a lot of these words are in languages I don't understand... here is Russian, this one is Swedish, and this one seems to be eastern in origin, though I am not sure what it is exactly. It seem to have no trouble understanding any language. All it needs is a rule."

"It can alter history, and can understand what you want no matter how badly you phrase it." Lisa mused. "Plus, it can change the current world, or even the future as well..."

"Yeah." Diana said. "Terrifying, right?"

"Yeah." Lisa agreed. "What do we do with it?"

"I don't know." Diana admitted. "Maybe we should use it...for the good of all. Get rid of hunger or disease or cancer."

"Or ****." Lisa said. "This could make **** totally a thing of the past."

"Fuck." Diana sat back. "I didn't think of that. Holy shit. This thing is... it's on a totally different level...We could do anything with it. Anything we wanted..."

"So what do we do?"

"I don't know." The older sister closed her eyes, messaging her forehead gently. She had long dark hair, cascading down to her back, as well as hazel eyes which blinked once or twice before focusing again on the book. "This whole thing is so sudden, I have no idea what we could do with it. Part of me says do nothing. Another part of me says that would be the worst thing to do. To have all of this power and do nothing with it..."

"Better than having all of this power and fucking it up." Lisa said, "We're in no rush. Let's think about it for a while. A few days or even a few weeks. This is...this is huge. No one would blame us for thinking about it for a while."

"You know what? I think you're right." Diana said. "We'll keep it in the apartment for now, hide it in my room. Then we'll just...just think for a while. Try to figure out what we're going to do with it."

Of course, the sisters did not know it yet, but very little of what they hoped for was going to come to pass.