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She slowly backed down the corridor, her breaths becoming quick and shallow when she realized the teleport had failed. She bumped into something and turned around: a dead end, just a smooth wall with a mirror. She stared back at her reflection, gaze focusing in on the way her braces-covered teeth jutted out.

Laughter echoed in the maze and she flinched, clutching her Manual closer to her. She couldn't see the source, just an endless corridor full of mirrors. She began walking, her steps hesitant, nervous.

So many mirrors. Her skin crawled as her eyes shifted to glance at her reflection as she passed.

Her knees were too knobby. Her face was covered in acne. She was too tall and gangly. Her jaw looked crooked from the hinge glued to her teeth, and her huge, dorky glasses emphasized how square her face looked.

And those pigtails. God, what had she been thinking? Never mind how much her mother told her the knotted pigtails looked adorable on her, they were hardly considered attractive at her school.

She was too scrawny. Her boobs were too big, to the point where the other girls had tried stealing her clothes, demanding to know if she stuffed her bra.

The laughter echoed down the corridor again.

Her reflections began shifting slightly as she passed, and she knew, in the way one knows when one is dreaming, exactly what each mirror was showing her. She couldn't avoid seeing it. In that one—she was a failure. She was stupid. She was pathetic. She was useless. Worthless. Ugly. A loser.

Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless. Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless.

All her worst fears laid out for her to see, and she broke into a run, the laughter getting louder. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see other faces in the mirrors, faces she didn’t recognize, some of them not even human—but whenever she turned to look, she couldn’t see anything but herself.

She ran into a circular room coated in mirrors, and when she turned around to try a different path, she found the way out had disappeared.

"Stop it!" she screamed.

"Stop it! Stop it!" her voice echoed tauntingly.

"Leave me alone!"

"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"

She dropped her Manual and covered her eyes, sinking to the floor.

"Crybaby! Crybaby!"

"She thinks she can be a wizard!"

"She can't even pass fifth grade!"

"Hahahaha!"

She screamed, and the mirrors shattered, the glass falling to the floor with a soft tinkle at odds with the reverberating screams.

When she opened her eyes, the room was clear of glass, empty save for her, her Manual, and... herself, staring at her with a curious glee.

She stared back. "Who are you?"

The other her smiled. "You know me," she said. "I've been with you for years now... that little voice in your head, that entity looking over your shoulder, watching every last little mistake you make..." She began circling, eerily reminiscent of a shark. "Do you have any idea how stupid you were to come here? No, probably not. If you did, you wouldn't be in this situation in the first place."

The would be wizard slowly crouched to grab her Manual, not taking her eyes off the doppelgänger. "Why are you doing this?" she whispered.

The doppelgänger laughed. "Why? Because I can. It's not like you've ever tried to stop me before. Loser."

She swallowed; her palms were slick with sweat and her knees were shaking. "You're my Ordeal?"

The doppelgänger rolled her eyes. "Uh, duh." The circling continued. As she walked, she began to change, going from knobby-kneed, acne-covered, to... beautiful. Breathtaking. Poised, confident. The doppelgänger stopped, spreading her hands and smirking. "That's the problem with you... well, one of a really long list of many. You're always too busy overthinking things. Idiot. Of course I'm the Ordeal; what else could this possibly be?"

She lowered her eyes, blinking back tears. Of course. Of course. She should have known from the moment she entered the maze. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

"You are stupid," the doppelgänger said coldly. "But hey, you're not a totally lost cause yet. Maybe if you ditched your Manual and went home, put all this behind you, accept you'll only ever be mediocre at best, you might actually be worth something." She shrugged. "Or you can stay in here and die of starvation. Seems more likely. Too dumb to cut her losses and run, and try to salvage what's left of your pathetic life."

"Why are you so mean?!" She burst out. "What did I ever to to make you hate me?"

The doppelgänger was suddenly standing in front of her, eyes blazing. "Absolutely nothing. And that's what makes it so. Damn. Easy."

They stared at each other for a long minute; the silence stretched between them, tension palpable. She was trembling; the words were familiar, words she'd thought hundreds, thousands of times before, but never had they come from such a familiar face.

The doppelgänger laughed and turned away as mirrors began to fade into existence, hemming them in together. "Oh, wow, you really think that?" She turned back, and her face had changed, mirroring the wizard's again. Acne, glasses, braces, and everything else that just emphasized how ugly she was. The doppelgänger opened her mouth, clutching dramatically at her cheeks. "Maybe if I wasn't such a failure, Mom would love me!"

"You're me," she realized, her heart sinking.

The doppelgänger applauded sarcastically. "Took you long e-freaking-nough."

"But if you're me," she muttered, "then that means I'm..."

"Your own Ordeal, yes, yes. Get on the same page already, gawd."

"Shut up!" she snapped. "I'm thinking."

"In your own slow, dimwitted way, maybe."

"SHUT UP!" Her voice echoed around them. "You're not—you're—you can't just say things like that!"

A soft light flared out from around her, and then faded.

"And why not?" the doppelgänger said, before she had a chance to wonder at the light. "You've been saying them to yourself for years! Why stop now?"

"Because... because..." She trailed off, closing her eyes. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her that she was about to say something she couldn't take back; that what she was about to say couldn't possibly be true, but if this was her Ordeal, and her small act of defiance had caused that light to appear... maybe this was what she had to do. Maybe... she just had to believe. When she next spoke, it was with the Speech. "Because you're wrong."

Light flared out around her again. The doppelgänger flinched back like she'd been struck. "What?"

"Because you're wrong," she repeated, more loudly, and the light brightened. "Because maybe I'm not the best at everything. And maybe I'm not the bravest, or the smartest, or the prettiest—but I'm doing my best, you hear me?!"

The light kept growing, and she began walking towards the doppelgänger, hands tightening around her Manual. "I took the Oath because it gave me hope! I thought I could finally make something of myself!"

"You were wrong!" the doppelgänger yelled, jerking away from the light as it reached her. "You were wrong, you're going to fail at being a wizard, just like you've failed everything else—"

"I haven't failed yet, though!" she yelled back, and hope swelled in her chest and the light brightened in a halo around her. "And if I haven't failed, there's still a chance! I can keep going and—and improving, and getting better, and nothing you can say will stop me!" She opened her Manual, running her fingers over its pages. "I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—and I will not be afraid of myself any more!"

She pulled the stick of chalk from her pocket and crouched on the ground, beginning to redraw her spell from before, only this time, she made sure to get her name right—her real name, her name that was more than just her flaws and fears and downfalls, a name that was also her hopes and dreams and assets. Her doppelgänger screamed and raged, but made no attempt to touch her, and she tuned her out, focusing on her spell. This place, this… maze, she didn’t know what it was, but she knew it had to be destroyed before it could claim any other wayward souls.

“Alright,” she muttered to herself as she began working on the main part of her spell. “Alright, let’s see here…”

It wasn’t enough to just collapse this place like she’d originally thought. When she tried to listen to the walls, she heard nothing. Everything that was alive spoke to her, but this maze was… dead. No, not dead—worse. Darker. More ancient and evil, designed to prey on the lost and scared. How many other wizards had been trapped here when they failed to properly write their names, trapped and doomed to fail in their Ordeals?

Over the screams of her doppelgänger, she could hear whisperings coming from the walls.

The chalk in her hands was damp from sweat and her knees were covered in white dust, and still, she kept working, tugging her Manual along after her as she worked her spell. When it came to the part where she had to describe the maze, though, she froze.

What was she supposed to write? How was she supposed to know the words she’d have to Speak to collapse this place?

“See?” the doppelgänger said, breaking into her thoughts. “You’re a worthless, spineless, pathetic excuse for a wizard! Can’t even think of what—”

“Shut UP!” she roared, her shoulders tensing.

The whispering stopped for a moment, and then resumed.

She stared down at the circle she’d already constructed. This would take so much raw power to complete—if only she could figure out the words.

Her thoughts drifted back to how she’d gotten here, with her botched attempt at a teleport. Something in that spell had brought her here.

If this maze—this entity—didn’t have a life of its own, it had to draw its energy from somewhere.

From the mirrors. From its victims. From her.

Her hands shook as she wrote her name, her broken name. The name that she’d written containing only her worst aspects. And she mirrored it, and she twisted it into the warped abomination she’d found herself running from, and she sealed the circle.

“Don’t you dare!” hissed the doppelgänger.

She didn’t bother responding, instead standing up and dusting her hands off on her pants and picking up her Manual. And she began to read, weaving her spell as the doppelgänger screamed and thrashed and convulsed behind her. Sweat beaded on her forehead and she could feel her grip on her Manual becoming slick, but she pressed on. The light began to grow brighter and brighter as she continued to speak of light and life and hope. She spoke of joy and passion and of love, and the light grew brighter and the doppelgänger’s scream became even louder, threatening to drown her out.

There was a deafening sound of shattering glass, and she had to shut her eyes against the blinding light.

When she opened them again, the sky was blue and the grass was green, and a gentle wind caught her pigtails. She laughed and closed her Manual, falling backwards onto the grass and kicking her feet up in the air as she hugged her Manual to her chest.

She was still afraid, dreadfully afraid—but she wasn't going to let the fear hold her down like before. She had passed her Ordeal and she was now a wizard. Maybe not the best, maybe not the brightest, but a wizard all the same.

And surely, that had to count for something.

((Once again, a massive thanks to Delta Juliette for helping me out with this one and giving me the last bit I needed to make the spell feel right. Wouldn't have been able to do it without her.))

God Mode Sues tend to be very popular because a lot of sad, lonely, mediocre men on the internet have latched onto this series and think that they can Decisions Good. They cannot. They do not. Their characters compensate for this by being brutally overpowered even by the standards of Worm.

As for an Entity, well, they're essentially Suvians already - their power, as it were, is having literally all the powers, and the entire narrative hinges around them. Also they are pretty and gold. =]

YW crossed over with Worm would be... interesting, to say the least. One imagines that the Entities are a race that the Lone Power really, really got to - they're a broiling mass of infighting, constantly-hungry alien death monsters that exist in loads of universes at once. Who could ask for better minions? Thus, wizardry has to compete with triggered capes in the fight against the heat death of the universe, and when capes are really bad at working together, that's a problem.