lengthy PRI excerpt

"Okay, fine, if you want to be a joy-killing not particularly good love interest—"
"I protest that statement!"
"—or whatever you call yourself, I'll explain in a flashback."
"Why a flashback? Can't you just tell me, I don't know, in plain text?"
"Fine, fine, if you just want to be a spoil sport."
"Can we get on with this whole explanation?"
"Sure." She glared at him again. "So, as you know, we were not exactly doing very well against Sterling all things considered. Then, thankfully, a large explosion happened during which you got that rather irritating-looking head wound, which you really should bandage. A large zeppelin appeared from somewhere deep within the fabric of space-time or time-space and came very close to crushing Sterling himself; in actuality, it failed and only knocked him equally unconscious, thanklessly."
"That much," Mikkau said, "I remember."
"At that point you did... something quite thoroughly stupid, I don't remember exactly what myself and she can't think of anything, which gave you that head wound. The zeppelin dispatched an entire battalion of presumably Swedish pirate ninjas which promptly for some presumably-tenuous reason decided to kidnap us. After some time of traveling we wound up here. I hadn't been searched properly as they only took my gunblade; my screwdriver was close at hand, and I spent the next forty-five minutes disabling the various security measures they had in place. Hardly high quality stuff. As soon as I poked my head out into the corridor, those two attacked me; one was wielding my gunblade which I promptly retrieved and went about doing that to them."
"Oh. Thanks for the exposition, I don't know how the author would have functioned without it."
"HA!" She shouted, pointing at him accusingly.
"What?"
"You broke the fourth wall! You refused to break the fourth wall until now, but you finally did it! If we get back alive, Kuruta owes me several hundred dollars' worth in various raw materials."
"Fourth wall?"
"You mentioned the author, therefore you broke the fourth wall."
"What is this fourth wall of which you speak?"
"When a character in a fictional story refers to the fact that they are in a fictional story, as opposed of course to a real story."
"Wait, we're in a fictional story?"
"She's telling a terrible story, though it shouldn't diminish her glory."
"Except she's unmarried and we aren't pirates."
"Wait, you keep swapping between acknowledging this fact and denying it. What are you trying to pull, Mikkau?"
"Trying to pull? I don't know what you're talking about."
"Rrrrr, you're so irritating."
"And shouldn't we, you know, be getting out of here before the presumably deadly Swedish pirate ninjas, which are supposed to be simply Swedish pirates except for errors inserted by the author in an earlier scene—"
"—you're doing it again—"
"—find this entire mess and do something entirely reasonable such as for instance killing us? I have an allergy to death."
"You're kidding."
"No." Mikkau brought out some small piece of paper from the pocket underneath his jacket, placing it on the ground. "I have a doctor's note and everything, you know."
After a moment of studying it, Julien looked back up. "Um..."