I find a finger in the Backrooms… Can I hug the whole earth?

"Those nation-folks should congregate every once and a while to talk about their feelings" is a sentence that no one actually said throughout all of human history.

There were social nights in the tavern. Meetings in the trench. Moments staring at the wall in a boarding house somewhere, or staring at each other, but these were never organized. The concept of the modern "world meeting" probably got its start from the Benelux siblings being so chummy with each other in the 1940s. They're so smug about it nowadays. "We did the EU first. Before you were even done with your silly wars, we were making economic agreements, with our tea and sandwiches and polders and Tintin."

As thoughts of integration grew, so did the face-to-face interactions between us nation-folks. Germany became the black hole of Europe, of course, though he screamed and whined behind closed doors about balancing brains and coolness with a crushing amount of social anxiety.

Hey, I taught the kid to yell. When I first made him, he would barely even speak.

Honestly, the purpose of these meetings keeps getting vaguer and vaguer the more we have them. It's like any meeting that has more than eight or ten immortal beings in one room is just pointless from the start. I don't get why Germany doesn't allow me in, even to listen. Doesn't want to be embarrassed by his awesome big bro, I suppose.

Luckily these days I can just half-warp myself into nonexistence and listen in anyway. I've been told I have a fetish for pointless bureaucratic processes. "The world's most fascinating man, with bathwater interests," wrote Virgil, a good few centuries before I'd get super into ska-punk. Whether today will be intelligent or not, I'm all up for it. Already, America's being a spaz, France is seeing how long it takes for people to notice he's staring at them, and England's trying to hide the fact that he's wearing Doc Martens. Only Spain has seen them so far, but everyone else has learned to ignore when he laughs for no reason, so England is safe… for now.

To these mere mortal immortals, my whole setup is completely invisible. They could hardly suspect that in the corner of the room is one lawn chair, one pineapple-tasting spinach smoothie, and one impeccably-dressed albino ready to warp himself even further out of existence if Germany's PowerPoint makes him proud.

I might as well stay up to date on those nation-folks' feelings, right?

Someone taps me on the shoulder.

I screech, then feel a weird, wavery sploosh as my atoms all flip over to their nonexistent mode. The meeting room disappears, then fades back in, as if I fell underwater for a second before floating back to the surface. That was weird. I didn't warp on purpose. Is the fabreality unstable here? The Sad America was bad enough. Are some Sad Prussias burrowing their way to the world where I like ska-punk instead of punk-punk?

"So Prussia's an esper," someone says right in my ear.

"A what?"

"You're an esper. You can bend reality."

"Well, I'm a lot more than that, but the universe won't tell me shit. Now who's asking?"

The air bubbles and shimmers, and the fabric of reality folds down into the shape of a hooded sweatshirt, from which a pink nose and purple eyes peek out.

"You can call me the nation of Canada. I like snowmobiling and dubbing the kids' cartoons you watch when there's nothing else on."

I nearly drop my smoothie. "Canada!? I know who you are, though. What… why… how can you see me? How are you doing that!?"

"What, this?" Canada asks as he grabs onto the folds of his fabreality hoodie and pulls them apart like curtains. His true body phases completely into existence, tan suit and red tie all disheveled.

"Yeah, that! You have powers like mine?"

He shrugs. "I'm so forgettable as a nation that I can actually see and hear the realm of nonexistence. I've been able to touch the fabric of reality since I was a kid. It's like my whole universe is slightly at an angle to everyone else's. All I have to do is reach behind me and pull on those wonky molecules, and suddenly I'm not here anymore."

"I thought you were just invisible! I told Germany he should have your forgettability. It could help him melt into the background when he's stressed."

"Welp, my landmass sits right between the human pufferfish and the guy who wants to put George Lucas on a $500 bill. It really is nice to be forgotten sometimes," Canada says with a smirk. There's a noise like a squirting sponge, and he bubbles out of existence, only to pop back in on the other side of me. "What about you, now? How long have you been an esper?"

"Over a year now," I tell him. "I thought I was going to die, but I got transformed into a weird cosmic super-entity instead. It is the craziest story."

"Knowing that it's you, Prussia, I won't even question it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean I once saw you dressed all in black with skinny jeans and a beanie, and when I looked over your shoulder you were choosing a ska song."

"Ska-punk," I hiss.

"The Aquabats are not punk."

"So what if I like fun music while trying to look edgy and cool? Maybe I fail at being a hipster, but I'm enjoying myself!"

"You're… enthusiastic," Canada says, his voice in a hush. "The universe must find you so interesting that it wants to see more of what you can do in the twenty-first century."

"Exactly. So I've got these powers now."

"And you use them to… sneak into meetings?"

"Yup."

Canada nods for a bit, then screws up his face. "Odd, but your thing I guess… Your form is a little weird. Do you just warp directly into the Anticanon?"

My eyes brighten. No one talks to me like this. Germany's weirded out by my terminology, and America makes up his own.

"Yeah," I say. "Just in and out. I don't bend reality, though. It's more like my atoms can decide by themselves whether they exist or not."

"Hm… so you've never been to the Void?"

"Oh, I've been there. Hope to never go back."

"Have you ever nocliped? Been out of bounds?"

"There are bounds?"

Canada gives me a grin so much like his twin brother's that it's eerie. "Aw, dude, I gotta show you nocliping. It's frickin' great. Okay. So I like to use a solid surface, like a wall."

He shows me to the nearest pale yellow wall of the meeting room, then places both hands on it, taking a few slow breaths. His eyes sharpen, and his fingers begin to sink below the surface of the paint.

"Shift your atoms to 'not existing,' or whatever, but don't warp completely into the Anticanon. Imagine that you're pushing through this wall, but instead of phasing cleanly through to the other side, you get caught between the fibers and shoot sideways, so you're looking at the wall from the inside out."

"Won't I get trapped in the Void, though?"

"The Void is nowhere. If you want to go somewhere, you'll end up somewhere. Just make the fabric of reality twist, and then slide into it while it's twisted. Follow me."

He submerges his hands fully into the wall, then wrenches himself diagonally and disappears. I place my own hands on the wall, amused and terrified. I want to go… somewhere. Reality is twisting around me. I want to see the inside of this wall, not the other side. Just a little push. Not all the way through. And…

I hold my breath and plunge, my body squeezing straight through the wall. Darkness floods my vision, and I'm falling down through oblivion, striped with flashes of odd colors and formless shapes. Tendrils of pixels of substance float by. Bubbles escape my mouth, flickering on the surface of the sky so far, far above me.

"You're upside-down," Canada says, popping up below me. He grabs my wrists and spins me until I'm floating right-side up in this dark, distorted place.

"Where are we?"

"Inside the wall," he says, gesturing. To our right is a wall — it must be a wall because it's infinite length and width and appears solid, though it's a deep, deep blue color, and shimmery shadows of deeper black move and float like ghosts beyond the veil. On every other side of us is shiny oblivion. We're floating, yet standing on some fibrous, ethereal surface.

"This is incredible! Multiple dimensions exist at once!"

"Of course! We're outside the universe looking in. The laws of physics don't apply."

I look at my hands, mesmerized. They're bloating and deflating so smoothly, from three to four to five to eight to eleven dimensions and back down again. The sensation is strange, but painless. I reach out with my left hand and touch infinity, then stretch my right foot far down to the root of Everything.

"Follow me," Canada says. He floats up to a place on the wall where the bubbling glass is a bit pockmarked. Then he presses his hands in and noclips again. I do the same, wrenching myself through the planck width of screwy space-time.

We're back in the meeting room, but it's scary. All the colors are reversed, things like garbage cans and water bottles are all pixellated, and the people are moving in slow, slow motion. The tinny sound of plucked strings echoes everywhere. If I squint, each nation is glowing his EP aura color. Germany is bright gold amidst the screeching reds and ultra-rainbow-blacks.

Canada whirls around on a floor with no friction, phasing right through Germany and America and the glitchy table. He grabs a void-filled water bottle and chucks it right at my face, laughing when it flies on through my skin and bones out to the other side.

"I have no idea what this place is, but I call it the 'Ghost Zone,'" he says. "I think it processes time."

"It scares me," I tell him, watching as Germany's cells all collapse and reanimate, shining the golden light of his immortality.

Canada jumps through the table and disappears once more. I follow, emerging in the same kind of realm, only this time everything is a bland purple color, and the nations above us are featureless polygons.

"So this is why you've been hanging out with America, huh? He's been studying your powers?"

I reach up and pull a rectangular prism down through the shifting two-dimensional squares of nothing-matter. It transforms into an apple, and I sneeze. "Yeah."

"That time you showed up at my cabin, then. Did you actually hear me talking about you and travel through space-time just to say 'butthole?'"

"Well, you summoned me with your butter knife, but I'll explain that when we're not… here."

He nods. "Yeah, it's kinna unsettling after a while. Regular nonexistence is fine enough for me. We can get back."

He shoots up and noclips one more time, through a blue spinning triangle. I kick off and fly toward the ripple he made, but a sudden gust of particles picks up, and my body burns for a moment before I find myself lying on a dense, scratchy surface.

"Canada?"

My voice echoes. Something hums above me.

I lift my head, and my eyes go wide. Yellow. Yellow everywhere. Greenish-gray below, but everything else is yellow. The dim, crackling lights, the putrid papered walls, the stains on the chipped white baseboards and the tarnished brass hinges without doors…

I push myself up and walk into the next yellow room. Still the same. The next is the same. Yellow room with yellow walls and a gray carpeted floor and gross musty air. The next room is the same. The next is the same.

"The Backrooms…" I mutter, my voice instantly growing dry from the dust of the air. "They exist."

I find a severed finger lying fresh on the floor in one of the rooms. It twitches, and I scream, tearing through room after room after room. There is no furniture, or windows, or even a break in the carpet. I'm really and truly in the space between the space between worlds — some demon's terrifying torture dungeon where all is yellow, yellow, yellow—

Oh, wait, I found a bathtub. All good.

With a splat and a sploosh! I schlorp down the drain and noclip as hard as I can, hoping to get somewhere.

When my eyes open, I'm in the meeting room again. Normal colors that don't shift. Normal matter that doesn't waver. There's even a normal Canada standing next to me, and a crowd of nations now staring right at both of us.

"Prussia! When did you sneak in here!?" Germany screeches.

"Mmmm, gonna leave this one up to you, buddy," Canada says, warping himself into the forgettable nation he is. "Hey, did you by chance see a finger when you were in the Backrooms? Italy just walked in, and he's missing one."

~N~

I saw the trailer for Hetalia: World Stars and just... Italy's finger went to the Backrooms. Now that video is private, so... are they working on getting his finger back?

EDIT: THE TRAILER IS PUBLIC AGAIN AND HIS FINGER IS FIXED! THEY SERIOUSLY TOOK IT DOWN SO THEY COULD RIFLE THROUGH THE BACKROOMS AND FIND IT FOR HIM.

Updated by Syntax-N February 8th, 2021. Reposters cursed. Online colleg is only a simulation.