"So, welcome to my little talk about metafictional techniques and how they can be used to enhance flavortext." With a flourish, she turns on the projector. It begins to display a variety of cheesy corporate slides, which unless otherwise stated bear little relevance to her speech.

"Most of you here are familiar with metafictional techniques. Some of you are aware that your actions are being dictated by someone else, i.e. a player, to which this world is merely a forum game." Miki stares directly at the fourth wall, then turns back to her audience. "If you're familiar with Homestuck, and of course most of you are, you should understand that the original comic contains a lot of metafictional elements, in which characters within the story affect the medium through which the story is told, sometimes in a manner that subverts expectations of what is normal in a typical narrative. Things like John's retcon stunts could only be done within the format of an online publication where records can be altered, making them specific to a certain format."

"So, let's step back. This entire lecture, to the players, is contained within an external webpage, which is formatted to look like a Spacebattles post, Spacebattles being the site on which the forum game is hosted. The point of such a format is to enable the author, and by extension me, to subvert the expectations of what is normal within the limits set by Spacebattles' forum settings."

Miki takes out a pen and reaches through the fourth wall. She writes out a few hundred lines of HTML and CSS manually in the span of a few seconds.

Miki presses a button on her clicker and the medium shifts.