Despite general public knowledge of how each and everyone's deity is supposed to work, in a way, countries are somewhat like the gods of the people in their land. No matter who their people are praying to, they hear it all. They get to hear each and every little wish, even the smallest of ones upon a shooting star. And sometimes, it gets to be a little bit too much.

Like right now when Canada was sinking to his knees in the middle of his room beside his bed in the middle of yet another panic attack.

They'd been coming faster and closer together lately.

It is just so hard to make everyone happy.

So so hard. Impossible even. Yet, that was what he was expected to do, according to the voices he heard in his head pleading, praying, crying for something to happen, anything. And he couldn't do a thing about it all.

Then there are the times when he can do something about it.

Canada had heard of how some of the other countries could be temporarily driven mad by the voices in their heads, but he hadn't paid too much attention to the rumours of what happened to them because, really, he had a population of about 36 million. In the whole grand scheme of things on this planet, that wasn't a lot. His population simply wasn't big enough.

He wouldn't be one of those countries driven mad, he'd thought to himself over and over again.

Then he had been driven mad. Slowly slowly, every day, he'd gone crazy, and it had been too gradual for him to even notice it before now.

All those reassurances to himself that, oh, that will never happen to me, were now proven false. He was now a hypocrite.

This would be his downfall, he knew that now.

There was one rumour that he remembered hearing about though back when he still paid attention to such things. It said that when the voices get to be too much for a nation, they go mad and gain a type of godly power. He had also heard that it was not a good kind of power.

This made him a bit anxious about the feelings he was starting to feel stir within the tingling sensation he'd been engulfed in as soon as his knees had touched the floor of his room. Those uncertain and anxious feelings washed away little by little, bit by bit, with the demented smile spreading across his face as toxic yet deceiving as the rainbow dancing upon a bit of water infected with pollution.

Now his thoughts about this had changed too. He was no longer having panicked thoughts about what he was experiencing, all he felt now was an entitled sort of confidence he had never before felt in his life. That thought disappeared quickly, and with it went his thoughts of how he used to be concerned about what he was experiencing.

His last conscious thought as Canada, Mathew Williams, was that the voices he heard all the time had become too much for him, and he'd been swallowed up by them.

In those last few moments while he was still aware of himself, he said a prayer himself, and thought of where it would go to if he'd been the one hearing all of his people's prayers before. Would it even go anywhere? His last prayer, and one of the very few he'd uttered since the voices had started increasing steadily with his population wasn't even heard by him. His hearing was replaced with a ringing sound. He just knew that he had said it out loud. And he hoped that someone out there had heard him.

And someone had.

When Canada had said, "I hope that the other countries can restrain me before anything happens", a small, fuzzy, white engulfed head had poked around the door into his room and asked with small, confused black eyes uncomprehending of the scene before him betraying no complex thoughts and conveying no hint that his prayer would be known beyond them, "who?"

Inspired by the cover done by Juby Phonic of the song, "Outer Science". Don't even ask how I got this from that, I don't even know.

You know, never once have I ever gotten that captcha code right the first time around, and that's what's driving me insane so far on this site.