I'm more than a dream... Do monsters wash the dishes?
Well, my worst fears are confirmed. If left to his own devices, America turns his dreams into YouTube kids. Or something much worse.
I'm serious! I… I was bored tonight, so I phased into his dream for fun, and… why is he wearing nothing but Superman underwear while propelling himself through the air with his own farts and shooting broccoli-scented eye lasers at a monster that looks like the Incredible Hulk with a helicopter propeller for a head? Why is this happening in Cleveland of all places? I'm a founding father of the Antic Masters' Lodge and a cardinal member of the Order of the Basement Dwellers, and never in my 800-odd years of existence have I seen farts and broccoli eye lasers used at the same time.
There's an explosion, and to my left, another giant monster drops from the sky. This one's a shiny red phlegm-covered zombie with undulating pecs and two giant spiders for eyeballs. It raises its fists, then slams them down on the Cleveland Stadium, blasting dust and exploding every water main for a mile. America florble-flarts his way through the atmosphere until he can get close enough to land a punch on the monster's forehead. Its jaw drops open as if made of rubber. Out spills an immense slobbery blue tongue that spawns a horde of fanged and bat-winged Furbies.
The sky erupts into a roiling sea of orange Fanta. Sizzling drops fall from the clouds and splatter down on the sidewalk. I'm drenched in sticky pop before I can even think to make a shield around my body. Meanwhile the two cursed kaiju take turns flexing their muscles and sprouting outrageous appendages. The helicopter hulk has six extra arms and a toilet plunger growing from its bellybutton. The great red zombie pulls off its head, which dries out until it's a wad of aluminum foil stuck through with toothpicks, and uses it as a bowling ball that nearly impales my gas-powered pal before he clenches his buttcheeks and rockets above the Old Arcade just in time. (It explodes, of course, with fire and glass littering the mounds of decimated concrete.)
"Prubo! Dude!" he cries, beginning his bloated descent and landing way too cleanly next to where I stand shivering. "Why aren't you fighting with me? I dreamed up the weirdest monsters so we could battle together!"
I gaze through all the haze. America's loosened his control on the dream, and it's beginning to dissolve back into the normal chaos of the Nonexistent realm. The kaiju melt down into puddles of caramel, and all the toilet plungers root into the ground to start growing like trees.
"Did you dream up weird stuff because you thought it would please me, or are you just this weird when given the power to alter your surroundings?"
"Uh, prob'ly both! W'll I've been experimenting with the laser eyes, and the sky always turns into pop eventually. That means I'm hungry in real life. But, but the monsters and stuff are all my own ideas! I've got so many notebooks full of monster designs and cool power-ups and gadgets I can use to fight them. I made up some for you, too! Wow, you're really here, right? In my dream? Like, your body doesn't even exist in the real world right now?"
I spit out a flat breath of Fanta. "Don't ask questions like that, kid. With my ascended nature, I may be present in every atom in the universe. But yeah, I phased my whole body into your dream. You're the one who's drooling on his pillow in the real world."
"So cool. That means you could stabilize my dream, right? And… and you could keep us in here as long as we want!"
Toilet plungers begin to sprout all around our feet. I grunt as a rubber bowl slaps my Prutt.
"I'm gonna let you wake up naturally this time. Your dreams are weirder than most of the stuff that happens to me in real life. I don't wanna enable it," I tell him.
"What? But dude! You haven't even turned me into a puppet here!"
I snap my fingers and he explodes in a puff of steam, only to reappear as a floppy bundle of felt and stuffing upon the sticky sidewalk.
"My reality-warping power is a lot stronger here. Watch your mouth or I snap you into a donkey turd."
He raises one flimsy puppet hand, but before I allow him to snap me into something even worse, I kick off the ground and let myself drift through the nonexistent aether. The Fanta clouds envelop me before the stretchier fabric of dreams gives way. I'm surrounded by shimmering ribbons of pure energy, flashing in colors only known to those who dream. (And those who frequent dreams!) Ah yes, the color glackle, and its complement, glurkle. And a positively perfect prism of purest putrid pibowinkle!
I got bored and started watching Journeys, okay?
I start to giggle. It's one thing to lucid dream. It's quite another to actually be alive inside a dream, feeling the not-air and not-clouds and not-stars all pop against your skin like sudsy baby shampoo. Ach, that thought brings me memories of Lud as a little kid. I pull up my Notes app and add "shrink Germany" to my list. Then I realize it's already on my list in four different places. I just haven't had the chance to do it yet.
"Dear Prusse! What a pleasant meeting!"
I glance down. Through the sparkling purple clouds it's France! He must be sleeping in today! His dream is so vivid! He's standing in the middle of a field of tulips doing the dishes. His hair is swept up in hair curlers, and his feet are clad in oven mitts. Strange the amount of weirdness you don't notice about dreams until you've got waking consciousness.
I float down to France while he scrubs his teacups. Clouds of sweet-smelling mist waft all around us, and I know a small sea is opening up about a mile off in the distance.
"Hey Francy. Pretty dream you've got here."
"Oho, life is a dream, mon ami. Did you bring the seagulls and coconuts like I asked? My frog is so itchy today!"
Seagulls? Itchy frog? Oh. I remember that France isn't lucid like America. Of course he'll speak nonsense. Even if I give him a coconut, he won't remember asking for one.
Which makes my Prussian lips quirk into a smirk. I've had a fair amount of hobbies in my life, birdwatching and committing antics being the primary two, but in my current life situation? I've found a new passion for committing Dream Antics!
My own dreams are the same thing as real life now. Just slightly weirder. So of course when my body phases into the Anticanon, of course I have to go see what the other countries are up to. Whether they're reliving the daily lives of their citizens or lost in a field full of tulips, I'll be there to shake things up a bit. France and Spain, being naturally oblivious, are perfect targets. So while America reenacts whatever he was looking at on DeviantArt before he popped his melatonin gummy, I'm going to make frogs rain from the sky.
I snap my fingers, fully expecting it to happen, and just like that, the sky begins to blacken. Static crackles and forms long strings that thicken into full bolts of white lightning. Thunder rumbles and growls in the new darkness. Hailstones tumble down and splatter the suds of France's sink. And then, then, a green tree frog tumbles down after it, landing with a croaking splat on France's forehead.
He blinks.
Then sighs.
The horror doesn't register. After a minute or so hundreds of frogs are tumbling out of the sky, and my guy keeps doing his dishes like nothing happened! Surely he'd gain some amount of lucidity and start whining about the slime in his hair! Sheesh! Must've had too much wine last night! Either that or he's not alone in the real world. But that is a subject for another unreliable narrator.
Well fine. Time to take an egg out of America's row. Funnily enough, this next tactic has proven to be quite entertaining, and I see why he uses it so often. I reach into my breast pocket and pull out a vial of emerald fluid. Bracing every muscle in my body, I gulp it down and wait for the tell-tale stomach gurgles of transformation.
My insides bubble and twist. My flesh glorps and warps. My bones go crick and crack and I watch with the utmost heated intrigue as my fingers thicken and shorten and bend into claws with hideous chewed-and-dirty nails. My muscled chest flattens. My abs melt and disappear into a budding bit of pudge. My wild white hair poofs up into a dingy blond mop of, what would France say? Ennui!
"Hey, France, you utter pillock," I lilt, furrowing my massive eyebrows and slapping my new English elbow over the faucet, "Did you really think you could have a pleasant dream when I'm here to ruin it?"
France takes notice. His face crinkles up into a primadonna scowl. I let my smirk grow wider and inspect my gruesome nails. One flick of my left hand and the sink crumbles to ash. Then a snap of my fingers and we're both wearing the drab forest green uniform England wore to world meetings well into the 60s. Plainest-looking member of the Eurosphere, and that's including his vanilla brother Wales!
"Angleterre! What are you doing here!? I was eating the greatest sandcastle in the galaxy! You can't boil my toes until I finish felting all the macarons!"
"Too late for that, old chum! You know I'm pants with patience. If you want your toes boiled, you'll have to put up with it now of all times."
I kneel down and start digging. The flower bed gives away like putty, and I easily mold and shape it into a large, deep cauldron in the earth. I squeeze the nearby tulips until all their moisture squirts down into it. Then I wave my hand and steam pours off the undulating surface.
France skitters away, but under the influence of the England Potion, I have enhanced psychic abilities, and I stop him in his tracks with a single thought. A faint green aura envelops the poor man, and his toes make tracks in the mud as I slowly drag him back toward the earthen pot. The surface is boiling now. Nice and hot for French feet stew. I think I'm the one speaking nonsense now!
My whole life is nonsense. This is just a little extra nonsense. It's within normal nonsense parameters for me to be in the shape of England and smirking while France levitates above a magically-boiling mud cauldron getting his toes turned into stew.
"Has anyone ever drawn you as a Furby, Mr. Ayoade?" I quip.
France just moans.
I make a flicking motion, and my old neighbor rockets off into this area's version of a stratosphere. The sun is streaming in through his window in the real world. I can see it starting to phase into view. Better leave before the place his brain has constructed collapses.
I kick off and soar through the aether again, feeling the crystalline wind on my face and the burning hot snow of nonsense tickling under my shirt! The not-stars, eternal in their nothingness, twinkle and greet me with their eerie light. It's like looking into a future of endless possibility. Everything that never existed, but could be dreamed. More than anyone ever dreamed in history.
I'm not surprised when I find myself back in Fanta-soaked Cleveland. America's still asleep it seems, and it doesn't take me long to find him sitting on the corpse of the defeated helicopter hulk.
"I'm back," I tell him. "Wake up already. I want you to make me the Buttshrooms for breakfast."
But when America turns to face me, I almost gag. His face is completely smeared with emerald lipstick, and right behind him is a green-skinned cutie wearing a spiky crown and draped in a long, minty toga. She blushes the color of broccoli eye lasers, and America goes as pink as France's tulips.
"England? W-what are you…"
"It's Prussia."
This news isn't any better. I seem to have caught him right in the middle of his guiltiest fantasy. It's gonna take a third omnipotent party to break us out of the awkwardness.
~N~
Please go subscribe to the supreme Englishman Matt Rose over on YouTube. He's going to read the most accursed thing I've written all year when he hits 200k. Also, speaking of Journeys, I'm gonna write a fic for that fandom over winter break here. It's gonna have eight chapters and be called "My Previous Life Was a Thunder God," so look out for that!
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net December 19th, 2021. Reposts cursed. Reviews appreciated~~~