I'm a pizza parlor hostage … Who let France be the scary one?
PRUSSIA'S GRAND TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE, DAY 2!
I really must admit I'm the homebody of the family.
Not that I don't enjoy a grand excursion to the candy store or an expedition to France's place because I accidentally used up the pasta. (Not even Italy's an example. He never measures portions right. He always makes too much. Leaves so much pasta in our fridge I want to slap a wig on the guy and call him Nonna.)
It's a thing of the times, traveling. In my 800 years of experience, I've tromped over the same dirt from Iberia to Siberia so much that it's given me an epiphany: Europe is mostly bland and wet and gray! Wet mud, gray mist, bland agriculture. I know America worships ag, but in the grand scheme of things, it's still new to him. He started off as a tobacco hobby farm, and we old guys have been turning the same dirt for daily Schrippen since time began. I suppose there's something spiritual about it for nationkind, but religion has gone completely out my ears in the last few months. Germany yelled at me just the other morning for mentioning the Cosmic Truth that if Soup Equals Soup, then Infinity Equals Infinity.
I, of course, have no recollection of doing such a thing. Must have been a fit of divine ecstasy.
Well, it's the twenty-first century, and national home-bodying is a sin punishable by Western Cringe, and so I find myself tasting very bizarre holiday locales. Germany never gets tired of Italy and the Netherlands. I, for one, take them like a bowl of pasta — delicious, but also the same grain fibers I already ate seven centuries ago.
So here I am! Now with an entire universe to explore, I have no excuse to stay at home for long. Germany would rather I kept my travels short, but even spending a week in another world would leave me a much worldlier man. I wanted to stay a couple of days with the pangolins, but one look at that "Germalin" fellow, and I forced myself to warp out. He was even cuter than the pangolin me!
I re-enter the Anticanon pleased with myself. I've got a ton of new photos to troll that turdwobbler Sealand with. Now, on to another parallel world, hopefully even stranger than the last.
It's true that the Anticanon is a little bit liquidy. Whatever worlds are touching part of the cosmic membrane impress upon it, leaving their mark on the dream projections who happen to be passing through. The airport had pangolin people scuttling through its patrons. In the space I just entered, there's a more aquatic theme. Octopuses… Octopi? Octopodes? EIGHT-ARMED SQUISHY CEPHALOPODS are swimming through the air, and eels are wiggling and smiling down at the astonished dreamers. There's a calming blue light streaming from the vague mist surrounding this patch of nonexistence. A cheerful blubbing echoes, and I feel like I'm in a vast aquarium, populated by teleporting sharks and a multitude of multi-colored fish for them to feed on.
"Time to dive right in!" I tell the crab scuttling up my left arm. Then I raise my arms high and leap down into the floor. The cosmic membrane weakens and liquifies at my touch, and with a sploosh, I dive down into whatever world is waiting for me.
This was a mistake.
In the split second before my magic kicks in, I'm squeezed to death over a dozen times by the pressure of a mile of water on top of my head. I grimace, feeling my bones crackling back together and the bloating sensation of my body equalizing. My lungs inflate, filling with the nonsense of air instead of water. I flex my hands through the water. Strong, and fully protected from pruniness!
This place is just depressing. It looks like a whole underwater town! Or… the ruins of one. The buildings are all coated with rust or slimy with algae. Cars have long been crushed by the intense pressure of the deep sea. Traffic signs are all bent and snapped, left to let the ocean currents bury them in sand. Schools of brownish fish circle like a disturbed herd of cows — yellowed teeth and glowing eyes haunted by something too bright to forget.
I certainly catch their eyes, and they swim like ravenous beasts to start gnawing on my flesh. It heals instantly, but those teeth sting really bad! Frantically, I angle my body and squeeze the water pressure around myself to jet through the deep, dark murk. Down, down, down, to where the pressure crushed that semi like a pop can. My hair tickles my ears as it waves in the water. I kick and swim until I reach the very bottom and set my feet in the muck.
Light!
I see a light not too far from where I'm standing! Seeing that shark in the shadows, I bound over, kicking up loads of slimy sediment. My body floats. I swim to a squat building that glows with a soft, golden light. Before me is an ironclad door. I press a glowing red square, and the muffled sound of a doorbell comes from within.
Above me, the laser eye of a mechanical camera scans my person, then the gears on the door unlock, and the door slides open. Once I'm inside, the door closes again, only for an alarm to sound and the small chamber to drain. My hair sticks in my eyes, and I peel strings off just as the second door becomes visible. I pull the latch, and I'm in.
I'm in what must be the most inaccessible pizza place on earth. Conveniently, they have a sign that says "We Deliver."
I walk up to the counter and face the college girl working there, wearing a shirt she's trying to pass off as clean, but with a face she didn't wash before she came to work.
"Take out?" She asks in English.
"Uh… can I order something now?"
"Sure! Do you need to look at a menu?"
The long string of delivery tickets is taped to the edge of the counter, and even my infinite mind is struggling to piece such a convoluted amount of information together. Can she clearly see she is at the bottom of a post-apocalyptic ocean?
"You know, can I just get a large pepperoni and sausage or something?"
"Yeah, we can do that," she says, punching things in on the terminal. "I just need a name and phone number first."
Should I give out such perilous information? I might not have enough US dollars in my backpack for this transaction, and this world may as well have Hamilton on the bills instead of Washington. But I'm hungry, so I give her my name and number.
As soon as my name enters the atmosphere, the pizza place goes silent. I turn around to see the patrons, all happy with their pizzas and calzones, are now staring at me. They're wearing deep blue jumpsuits with an angelfish insignia over a flag of origin stitched on the breast. People from all over the world are in this room. I see France, Russia, China, UK, US…
Okay, those are actually my friends, the countries. They're standing at the back of the room, and their jumpsuits are a deep purple shade. France takes one look at me, then makes a hand signal forcing the other countries to sit. He comes up to me, and without saying a word, handcuffs me and drags me by the shoulders to the back of the room. I'm shoved into the booth next to America and told to stay quiet, or I'll have my spine removed. I guess in this world, that's bad.
My friends look a bit different here. America's without his glasses, England's got a rockin' jawline, China's fat, Russia's so lanky he could play the Coraline mom, and France…
France has the purple aura of doom Russia's supposed to have.
"So guys, what's up? Oh, can I have some of that? I am famished. The pangolins are vegetarians."
In the same instant I duck my head down and bite some cheese pizza, France takes out a weird, pincer-looking device and clamps it onto the top of my spine. The pincers squeeze, and there's an awful click. The top vertebra is snapped clean off the others before the pincers emit an electrical pulse that utterly dissolves it. I gasp, then slump onto the table, my face sinking into more pizza.
"You talk again, another gets removed," France hisses into my ear.
"Ceesus Chips," I curse.
Another vertebra is removed. Utterly useless torture method, since they're growing back cleanly every two minutes, but it's shocking and pinchy. France gives the pincers to England and instructs him to keep on clamping.
"This isn't right. Let the guy go. He's Prusse! He's innocent!" America says.
France slaps his hand. I've never seen America recoil so suddenly. "Prusse is dead. This man has accelerated regeneration even by our standards. He may not be Prusse, but he is a mutant. Tell me, just how did you slip past the invisible walls and infiltrate our stronghold?"
"Uh, am I allowed to speak?"
France shrugs. "Oui, fine. Angleterre, let him speak."
England quits removing my spine and places his hands in his lap. Sheesh. His chin is so big in this world the eyebrows are hardly worth noticing.
"Uh, not sure what you're talking about. I'm from a parallel world. Did I do something bad in this one?"
"That is the excuse of an octo!" Russia exclaims.
"Strip him of his spine. Completely!" China adds.
"Expose him for the invertebrate he is. Regeneration mutations be damned," England growls.
"Guys, guys! Don't take my spine! Just explain what's going on here. I'm sorry I'm in your secret base. Not sure why it's a pizza place, but—"
"I don't understand why it's a pizza place either," China scoffs. "Why are we delivering pizzas to the invertebrates!?"
"Why do the invertebrates pay us is a better question," England says.
"So you're at war with these… invertebrates," I begin.
France boxes my ear and strips me of half my vertebrae. I miss the pizza and smack my jaw on the table. My back feels all hollow and tingly.
"You should know why the Angelfish Alliance is left to conduct operations from a pizza place at the bottom of the Midwest Sea. Why it's our last stronghold in North America and our last beacon of hope."
"Are you trapped here?" I ask.
Well, there goes the rest of my spine. My ribs click together in the jelly of my stomach, and my back turns completely to rubber.
"It's been five years," America snarls. "Five years of this godawful war. The Midwest was supposed to be unfloodable! But then the Rockies went under…"
"You know you're next to be banished," France spits in his face. "Your citizens are mutating the fastest. Your spine's getting softer, and the moment we see a sucker anywhere on your body, you're out. No longer my son. If you want pizza, you'll get it delivered."
Well, that's certainly a spicy threat.
"But…" America looks at me in total wonder. My squished cheeks and cheesy forehead must be truly breathtaking. "It's Prusse. I mean, look at him! He's not an octo! He's not even that fish thing we saw before the war started!"
"He's gotten himself a disguise," England taunts. "If it's not a spinal mutation, it's nanotech."
"No, that's a real spine," I grumble out.
"Prusse is dead," France says. "He was too weak. When the fish virus became pandemic, he succumbed like the humans. His mutations progressed as quickly as theirs. He'd sprouted scales and could barely breathe air when I found him slumped at that iMac. So I finished him off. I told Germany he had to die. I told him all the fish people had to die. And he responded by flooding the world and creating the octovirus, making his soldiers and allies unstoppable."
"Along with infecting the rest of the world," England retorts. "My skin tingles every goddamn day. I'm scared to death I'll find a sucker."
"We wouldn't miss you," says France.
"Honestly, I'd love to lose my spine at this point," China groans. "My back aches from this booth. I want to be all squishy."
"You're all squishy already!" England yells.
"Because you're feeding me this trash! Might as well use that syringe of octovirus we confiscated and let me mutate!"
America starts stress-eating the rest of the pizza. He dips a garlic stick in some sauce and stuffs his face. "Ya can't think like that, man! We've held on for so long! We haven't even seen Germany in months! The octos just want our pizza! Not war! Remember what Italy said?"
"Oh god, Italy," England says, looking like he's about to tear up.
"Italy," Russia agrees. "He wanted us to be strong."
"He was our ally," France says. "He sacrificed himself back at the Battle of Bagley so we could make it here and keep fighting. You saw how much anguish he was in when the tentacles sprouted."
"Still doesn't justify living off pizza," China says.
"WOw, pIZzA? dO yOu hAVe CLaMs aS a tOpPinG?"
The voice is deep, distorted, a bit bubbly. France is frozen in fear where he stands. And then I see, just outside the window, this world's Germany.
He's naked except for a pair of skintight boxers, embellished with an insignia of an octopus with eagle wings. His body is all smooth and shiny — no lines marking where different muscles connect, but one huge muscle beneath the thick blue-speckled skin. Instead of legs, four tentacles wiggle and stick their suckers to the glass. Four more function as his arms, two on each side. His head is hairless, noseless, mouthless. Blue eyes are stretched to the size of tennis balls that flick around with their horizontal pupils. He speaks through a beak on his stomach that quickly starts pecking at the glass.
"Holy crap, dude, you summoned Germany!" America screeches in my ear.
"Trojan fish!" France exclaims. "Disguised to intrigue us, while bringing the squishy devil himself to our door!"
"Look, that has nothing to do with me! I told you! I'm from a parallel world! I just popped in near the pizza place!
"Sir, your take-out order is ready," says the college girl, completely ignoring the giant mutant octopus man outside.
"Ah, thanks. Smells wonderful," I tell her, banishing my cuffs to nonexistence so I can hand her a wad of cash and take my boxed-up pie. "Wow, otherworldly pizza. I can't wait to try this!"
"THey ArE UsiNg a LoOKaLiKe oF My bRotHeR tO TaUnT mE! BEfOre hE sUCcuMbeD To tHe fiSh vIruS!" Germany bubbles. His beak pecks harder, stronger, until the glass cracks. I wander over and press my hand to the fractures, focusing.
"Entropy begone. And, just for good measure, make this glass absolutely impenetrable."
The cracks seal up again, but the Angelfish Alliance are already brandishing laser pistols and paralyzing whips. The four countries, minus America, click their insignias. Bubbles blow up over their heads, and their jumpsuits pressurize. They're all pizza'd up and ready for an underwater showdown!
"Aren't you gonna be the hero?" I ask the last of them.
America looks at me with a wild hopelessness consuming his eyes. I can hear his stomach gurgling and bubbling, like he's filling up with water. Fearfully, he pulls back his sleeves to reveal his arms are breaking out in red sores. No, not sores. Suckers. Slowly, he slumps, moaning in pain, as his bones all start to melt away. Where once sat my good friend now lies a shuddering mess of twisting flesh and stretching tentacles.
And I can't help but think to myself, This is the best pizza and movie ever!
The ghostly green merman outside slurping his own cheesy goodness is in total agreement.
~N~
I dreamed I was sitting with the Allies at a pizza place. I told America he was cute. He said I was cute too.
Updated by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net July 13th, 2020. Reposters more cursed than this.