I try on some tentacles… Do mermaids lay eggs?
PRUSSIA'S GRAND TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE, DAY 2, ZWEITER TEIL!
It's times like these when I think back to when Germany was a little kid and I would tell him stories at bedtime.
Sometimes he was more of a son to me than a brother. Just little Ludwig and his proud papa. I took him out hunting. I brought him to the tailor when he kept outgrowing his clothes. I trimmed his hair into an adorable mushroom shape and called him my little man. Best of all, I told him stories of my own youth — the way I led armies when I was ten apples tall, fighting the "good fight," or whatever squabble was currently going on. Sometimes there was no point to fighting at all, and still we carved our way through the gray mud of Europe! I loved it to the very bottom of my vibrating molecules! Chaos! Carnage! The mess no one wanted to clean up, least of all the knights who did the work in the first place!
Germany grew fast, very fast, but it was a while before I let him have his own adventures with steel and smoke. Until then, I teased him with tales that would make the most stoic German a Man of La Mancha. The perfect mixture of truth and fantasy, only achievable by a soldier of the mortal and immortal realms.
See? That's me! Mortal and immortal! The kid didn't know what was real! He'd sit in his bed, all flushed and steamy from the Empire's politics whipping his little butt every day. I remember when his hands were small and his fingers were skinny, and the way they clutched the duvet, trembling at the sound of my voice as I told of the time I survived a week in the wilderness with a conductor's baton sprouting from my stomach.
That one was unfortunately a true story. But don't you dare think of spreading it around! I know those tales of college antics inside your head are a lot more entertaining! Skateboarding in the tunnels and sticking googly eyes on all the toilets on campus… rise, my new order, and make your five dozen bird-shaped cookies in that tiny res hall kitchen.
My soldiers would rise and report to the battlefield at dawn, and even before I led them to their doom, I was thinking of how I would translate the experience into a children's story. Do I add some giants? Men of incredible strength and skill? Does the enemy have stink bombs? Oh, little Luddy loved when the enemy had stink bombs. Not even the crown prince of central Europe could haul his head out of the chamberpot.
"He never, ever hauled his head out," the ghostly green merman says on my right-hand side.
To recap my escapades, I'm in a parallel world — one where a virus started mutating people into mermaids. It spread and spread throughout the globe. (Oh, definitely enough to justify that email you got from college today about the new bubble-wrapped dorm policy!) Eventually, the fish virus got so out of hand that France, this world's batshit crazy superpower, started a mermaid genocide. He was the one who killed me at the iMac when my hands started webbing. Germany sought revenge by genetically-engineering his own virus — one that mutates people into weird octopus things. But that virus was even more aggressive, and now only a small percentage of the world's population is still fully human. It's a world at war, vertebrates versus invertebrates, and it's a stalemate.
"Your world sounds so relaxed," Mer-me says.
"Well, there's propaganda to convince you of anything in my world," I tell him, "and you don't even need a zombie playwright to make it anymore! It's possible to always live on the edge of destruction — politically, socially, environmentally, or you can just ignore that stuff. All depends on what kind of shame you want to feel. Shame is a hot commodity in my twenty-first century. But lately I've stopped giving shits. Ever since my ascension, I've sort of floated through the world, sometimes literally. Germany can't figure out if it's wisdom or laziness. Drives him totally nuts."
He chuckles in his eerily blubbing way. "Yeah, that's why when I died, I asked the toga guy to let me live on as a ghost. If I'm done, then I'm done. I'm still a spirit of pure chaos. Now I just watch the chaos unfold instead of making it myself. You can always find something to do in an infinite ocean."
"You just asked to be a ghost?"
"Oh, hell yeah. All those guys care about is that your world's got a Prussia. I must've been due to turn out like you did, but nah, I wouldn't have liked living another day. They made me fill out a bunch of paperwork, some of it in 4-D geoscript that took an eternity to read, but I didn't have to come back to life. I'll haunt the sea for eternity!"
Well shit, I think to myself. This guy's even more chaotic than I am. I'd at least leave a note in fridge magnets if I were going to haunt the sea for eternity. Everyone's a bit… colder in this world. There must have been too much ice leftover from the Ice Age, and it mixed with nation blood.
God, what if I hadn't taught Germany the importance of recycling?
We're off on the sidelines, watching the biggest underwater battle of the century. France leads England, China, and Russia, along with some human troops in purple wetsuits, against a mutated Germany and his squadron of octos. I can't find sympathy for the guy. His appearance is so distorted, so tentacle-y, that I just can't relate this monster to my cake-baking, sock-washing bro.
A sonic laser blast zings right past my right ear. The brave warriors have all forgotten about me and are focused completely on annihilating each other. Mud is kicked up everywhere. Tentacles are going places they shouldn't. I hear the low grumble of torpedoes being armed somewhere deep beneath the pizza place.
"Is this like, a world-deciding battle?" I ask.
"Hm? Oh, I guess it is. Yeah, whoever wins this one takes control of the whole ocean. Geez, we gotta stop that! If somebody wins, it won't be fun for me to watch anymore!"
"That's your biggest concern? What about Germany? Your brother?"
"Not my brother anymore. This isn't your world, other me. Here, people are a little more accepting of their proneness to observe catastrophe. Maybe if I blow some holes in Germany's noodles, he'll ink out of here and try again later."
Now that was a sentence I never thought I'd hear coming from my own mouth, (though I have considered it.)
He wiggles his tail impatiently, and when I'm too stunned to act, he darts forward through the water and folds his body down around France. The purple-suited warrior stiffens, thrashes for a few seconds, then calms as the ghost takes control of his movements. In an instant, he's fighting like a Prussian, an even more Prussiany Prussian than Prussia himself, or at least, the Prusshie Prussia I know. Flashes and booms rock the whole ocean floor at each blast of his laser pistol. A dozen octos are taken out in one clean sweep of the arm. His only trouble is his legs, which are too used to moving as a unit. He flails them wildly before collapsing in the sand. But he manages to shoot down three more soldiers, hitting them right in the beaks of their guts. His arm raises again. He aims, clicks the trigger…
"No, Germany!"
I don't care if this creature looks nothing like my brother. He's clearly disturbed! And a guy shouldn't have to talk about why he's disturbed if he doesn't have to! Between men, I know he's just trying to make amends! So I squeeze the water around my body, jet forward, and smash into the octo so hard I feel myself liquify. It's always the easiest mode of possession in my world. It should work here, too!
My consciousness splits. I feel my cells all coordinating independently, disassembling and going inactive where they land between the host molecules, while my mind gets up in the proverbial driver's seat inside Germany's swollen head. There's a kickback. Neural impulses go haywire, and through clouded, tennis ball eyes, I see the tentacles flailing. But I force myself in. Prussian jelly in tentacle boots! Cosmic Prussia has ultimate clearance!
Okay. I have no idea how to operate this thing.
The tentacles have minds of their own. Literally. I wiggle my top two tentacles, but the others are still flailing. When I move the others, the top ones start flailing. I wiggle two leg tentacles, then the other two. Wiggling them all at once turns me on my head. I flip myself upside down and forget to breathe through my stomach-beak, leaving me already pooped. My muscles feel all fat and squishy. They'd rather move as one than twitch and glide like they should. I squeeze my middle, and it contracts, swelling out like I just ate a load of clams. Then I pop it in again, and I shoot backwards, landing hard on my back in the sand. I can barely flex my body to slither away in time before the possessed France can blow a hole in my noodles.
He's on his feet again, zooming toward me with his jet boots. His legs kick, then split, kick and split. Meanwhile I swell, and flop. Swell, and flop. I try pushing myself up with my tentacles, but they're way too snakey and slip in the murky muck. With all these sand clouds, I can't even see where they're sliding. I manage to get four on the floor and push myself to my wobbly "feet," but then I forget I have extra limbs, and they go on a rampage of wiggling again.
Damn, I can see why this is so frustrating. If I turned into this against my will, I'd want everyone else to be humiliated, too! My limbs have to be ten feet long each, and I can barely control them! One smacks a rock, while another wraps around my middle and almost trips me. My two left arms get tied into a knot that I can't undo without quieting my tentacle legs and reaching over with my other two arms. That much is a headache on its own. And to top it off, my eyes are so big, I can see both my huge, swollen, knotted tentacles and the wet-suited maniac pointing his pistol at me again!
"MmMm, mLeaVe me aMone, gAWK!" I choke out. The beak has no tongue. It's more of a shell-cracking, clam-slurping device than a noisemaker. I have to focus on my stomach to use it, which means I have to press my stomach forward and try to balance with eight tentacles all trying to choke me at once.
The fake France fires. I flail.
Now I realize my tentacles are covered in suckers. I stick myself onto a rock and scuttle around to the back, mini plungers popping just like you hear in the cartoons. But the jet boots are fast. My three hearts are pumping faster. I've never seen anyone so hellbent on sashimi. It still moves! Why would you eat that!?
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I press myself up against the rock so tightly it feels like I'm shrinking. Wait a minute… I am shrinking!
There's a crack in the rock behind my body, and as I press myself up against it, my body is shrinking and squeezing itself down into the tiny hole. Loose muscle all contracts together until it's a small, dense chunk of flesh within the rock. My tentacles are all folded up nicely next to each other, so close they can't even move. Only my head sticks out of the crack in the rock, and the more I press, the more I take in the rock's texture.
I'm transforming! My skin is changing from its pale-with-blue-spots to a mottled brown, and swollen protrusions are popping up all over my face! It's like I'm becoming part of the rock! Ha! Octopus mimicry! Take that, you vile vertebrates! We spineless cephalopods are earth's superior creatures! So long, and thanks for all the clams!
"DuDe, yOu'Re sQuiSHinG mE!"
A pressure comes on my tentacles. I press back, squeezing with the force of a hundred tough-to-chew sashimi slices, but the foreign force prevails. I'm forced to squeeze back out the crack, and my skin returns to normal. Two great blue eyes appear, and Octomerica emerges from his hiding place.
"LoOk aT mE! nO onE's gOnnA tAke mE seRiOusLy nOW! We'Re oN eQuAL tErmS, oKaY?" He says before flailing and flopping just like I was a second ago.
Possessed France grabs both our bulbous heads and smacks them together, resulting in only a soft squish. Then he grabs one of my tentacles and shoves his laser pistol into it. It slips. He tries again. It slips again. He tries again. It slips again. I wrap a tentacle around his chest and squeeze until he lets the weapon go. Then I detach myself from Germocto's body and breathe a huge, bony sigh of relief. Octopuses don't need chiropractors, but boy is it difficult to use 100% of your muscles at once!
"gOt yOuR bAcK, bRO!" Octomerica bubbles. A stream of ink shoots from his beak, creating our smokescreen. He coughs and throws up a bit on the sand, but we're off!
The other Allies are circling France where he's fallen in the sand. If I killed him, he'll come back soon enough… I hope. He'll at least start the octo mutation process. Germocto's disoriented. I grab his top two tentacles and drag him far out into the sunken town. Here there are more lights on. I see some lovely octos enjoying the pizza they ordered. A delivery boy in a wetsuit is accepting his watery tip — a lot more than I gave the server, I'll admit.
"WhAt… wHo… wHerE... "
"You're safe," I tell my disfigured brother from another mantle. "I got your back… I got your back… I got your… tentacles."
"WhO tHe wAterY heLL aRE yOU?"
"He'S yOUr bRo, bUt fRom anOther wORLd," Octomerica explains. "hE cAme To sAvE yOU."
I grin. Mer-me is floating by, invisible to the mortal immortals. No malice left in his face, but he does look a bit hurt that he mistook me for Germs. Didn't want to dirty any part of his complexion, I see. I send him a frown and shoot one of my own laser blasts right at him. It scrambles his watery composition. Parts of him sink into the seaweed all the way across town.
The huge orbs of my brother, (yes, I can say orbs because he's an octo-man,) trace all over my form. Then a few tentacles reach out and tap along my body, smelling me, I think.
"yOu'Re hIm, bUt nOT."
"Yeah, same here. Your brother's a ghostly jerk."
"I knEW hE wAs haUntInG mE." He then turns to Octomerica. "yOu mUTatEd. I'm sOrrY. I cAn hELp yOu cOpE. I hOpE iT wAsn'T tOO pAInFuL."
"wAs GOnnA hApPeN onE oF tHeSE dAys. I tHinK I LiKE iT. nO mOrE mUsCLe kNotS."
"AcTuaLLy, a Lot mORe kNoTs, bUT I kNoW tHE bEsT OCtO mAsSagER."
"cOoL. FrIeNDS?"
"sUrE."
Aw, they're getting along. Germocto looks a bit pooped for the day, and Octomerica looks plenty relieved he doesn't have to get his vertebrae removed anymore. Maybe if they just order a pizza, things can start to settle down around this place. I know those injured octo soldiers rising up from the seafloor could use a pizza. Camouflage is cool, but not protective enough!
"So, I have just one question…"
"wHAT iS iT?" Germocto asks.
"Do octopus people just mate and then die?"
~N~
The conclusion as requested by AyakoA-chan. I'm glad I wrote this now... I wonder if that's a good thing... I learned a lot about octopuses today... they have small brains in their tentacles... so their noodles are actually noodle noodles...
Updated by Syntax-N FanFiction . Net July 15th, 2020. No tako sashimi for the repost gang.