The subway cult is mean to me… Does this mean I'm a normie?
So I think I need to stage an intervention for America.
He's shirtless and pasty-eyed and scratching out "EMMET DLC" in primrose crayola marker on the windowpane overlooking the street. It's backwards to the people down there walking their dogs. I don't know what kind of activism America likes practicing where he and I are the only people who can read the sign.
Actually I think that says a lot about American activism. Lots of echo chambers. Extra echoey when America plugs his political podcasts into a reverb speaker and puts it under my bed at night to subliminally influence me… or to make me sublimate. We've had a couple issues with my state of matter and some of those podcasts are wacky-shit-phobic enough that they work like a charm to get me solid again.
"You are acting like a silly little girl tumbling around on the tumblr, America. They are not going to make an Emmet DLC. And if Emmet were here, I don't think he would want that either. Not if he saw the way you're dragging your knuckles around and calling him a "funni train man uwu baby."
He shouts something incoherent at me and then throws the marker. A purplish dot paints me directly between the eyes. I snap my fingers, and a puffy blue bathrobe shimmers onto his body. Then I direct him to the couch and plop him down in front of the children's public television.
Oh, schiznitsch. It's the dinosaur train.
Now he's curled up and crying.
America comes into the living room from the bathroom then. His teeth are all shiny and he's dressed to the nines. Another day out making fun of England, I suppose.
"Aw, Prubo dude, get Sentimentamerica off the couch. He's gonna soak the cushions and then I'll get a wet ass when I wanna sit back and laugh at the lemon inventor," my world's America tells me.
"I just put him on the couch," I spit back. "He's your problem. Tell him he needs to stop coming to our world. He's sad all the damn time about the stupidest things."
"But he's me! I gotta help a me in need!"
"He's crying about a fictional train conductor!"
"Prubo, if we don't get even a mention of Emmet in the DLC, there will never be justice. You gotta understand that."
I look at both Americas. The one with the perpetual smile and the one with the perpetual frown.
"Why do I still live with you?"
"Uhhhh… 'cause you don't eat my cheese sticks? If you ate my cheese sticks then you wouldn't be allowed to live here. And I'd kick you in the face so hard you'd fly right into Uranus… which I suppose could be an actual thing with your powers, but I don't wanna test that out. I've already accidentally vored you like three times this week."
"C-can I have a cheese stick?" Sentimentamerica whimpers from the couch.
"Sure you can, sad me! Then you should probably be getting back to your own world for the day. Your England and Prussia will be worried about you."
"My world's Prussia is dead."
"Trust me. He's not," I deadpan.
"He's not… dead…? Then… where is he…?"
The tears well up in Sentimentamerica's eyes, and I know he's on the verge of a complete chapter of introspective soliloquying in some tumbling girl's therapeutic fanfiction. Having none of this, I quickly scoop him up under the butt and shove him back into the tattered hole in the fabreality which permanently hangs open and loose under the kitchen cabinet. He fades and disappears, and I spend the next ten minutes kneading and folding and stitching and creasing the rip until it seems solid and sealed for good.
"No more Sentimentamerica," I declare. "If it causes imbalance in the universe, then the universe can sort that out on its own time. I should've patched up that hole ages ago anyway. Who knows what other wacky visitors we've had."
"Oh, we've had a lot of them! There's a hole in the fabreality under my bed too! That's where the spider me came out of! And there's one in my closet, where we had the squirrel version of England, and the one in the dishwasher, which is where I got to talk to the Italy made of tin foil, and the one in the subway!"
"Was? How could there be a warp in the subway? I haven't been down there at all."
"It's the one you made intentionally. Ya know. The other night. You were pretty darn drunk on neutrinos and I was trying to explain the Emmet DLC thing to you and you said 'Why don't I just tear a hole in the fabreality in the New York City subway and maybe that'll fix things in real life, if not in your shitty wii game.' And then I said it's not a shitty wii game. It came out for the switch four months ago. We watched England get the Tobuscus tattoo, remember? Then you said 'Look at those shitty graphics.' I said they look shitty 'cause nothing was thought out very thoroughly. That's why there's no Emmet DLC yet. And then you and I popped across town and you tore a hole in the fabreality right in the middle of Grand Central Station, and there haven't been any disasters yet, as far as I'm concerned."
"Disasters," I whisper. "I didn't know I was living in Italy."
"We're not living in Italy. If we were living in Italy, I'd be sleeping in the bathtub n' there'd be monsters coming out of our toilet every night."
"But America… there is a monster living in your toilet. It's your brother Canada. He toilet-travels."
"What even is this conversation?"
"I don't know, but I'm going to Grand Central Station to plug that hole."
"Good idea," America says. "Also a good way to convert more normies."
"You are not a freaking fourteen-year-old tumbly cultist! You are a grown man landmass!"
"Hey, I don't think I'm the one constantly talking about all the women from other worlds who love him."
He's got me there. Huffing, I grab the nearest butter knife and wish myself down to the station. The pink glitter builds up under my skin. I don't even bother with making it change blue before it bursts from my chest at this point. The pressure expands, the power slips up, and America suddenly has a lot of housekeeping to do before I get back. And good on him for his impudence. Now his fridge wizard is teaching him responsibility… again.
In this light, Grand Central Terminal looks a little more like Grand Central In-Between. It's still early morning, and the light streaming through the glass windows at the back is the same pale yellow color as that time I found Italy's finger in the Backrooms. (Should really start calling them The Bathrooms, now that I think about it. There were too many bathtubs in there. Canada was trying to explain the intricacies and significance of bathtub placement and the greater association of the tenders of the toilet shrines, and how when toilets and showers are combined into one ceramic fixture with the bowl at the bottom and the showerhead at the top you might as well use the sink for all your faculties because otherwise you'll have a very wet ass and you'll have desecrated a sacred structure.
I'm in the middle of trying to explain this to all the young women dressed in skirts sewn from little black and white triangles of fabric, holding up signs that say "REUNITE SUBMAS" and "WE DEMAND JUSTICE" and "PUTTING EMMET IN FUTURE SPAIN WON'T BE GOOD ENOUGH — ALL OUR FICS WILL FALL APART" and I'm starting to get very, very jealous of this other white-haired, eyebrow-penciling dishrag of a mistreated citizen of the universe.
"Oh, won't you girls just go home!? Emmet isn't the one you should be worshiping! It is I, the Great and Awesome Prussia, the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived and Never Died! I have actual power and dominion in this world! Don't you women understand? Fall in love with me!"
"We cannot fall in love with you," says the leader in her smart little conductor's hat. "You do not have sideburns shaped like knives."
"Oh, yes I do," I say. I hold the butter knife up to one of my ears and give the girls a very stern glare.
"And you mustn't glare," she says again. "Our Emmet would not glare so! Why, glaring is the penchant of the lost twin, his brother Ingo, whom we already know much about because he has been displaced, through space and time, and lost much of his memory, and is very sorry indeed to forget about his dear smiling brother Emmet. But we know nothing of his good, smiling brother Emmet. How he fares in present days, alone and wondering what has become of his elder half, the black to the white, the flow of passengers down the line while he represents the flow upwards. (Which, itself, may be an entirely subjective impression, and I do apologize with reckless abandon if you believe either one of them could represent some more expansive flow of passengers, into the aether and beyond our gray constraints.) And when you glare so, at us, our happy subway sisterhood, then we are reminded of all we know about the tragic displacement of Ingo, and we are very sad indeed. Please do not make us sad, sir."
"Well… well… I… What if I'm sad for Ingo, too? And that's why I glare? Because I'm giving alms?"
"Then give alms with us, dear stranger. But please do not speak as though Ingo shall never return to his brother, for then many of us will have meltdowns. We cannot bear the thought. Utter meltdowns, we shall have! And you shall be banished from the subway forever for your impudence."
So I sit with the girls for four hours or more, and I learn absolutely nothing about trains. (Turns out you don't need to know or care about trains at all. It's the men who drive them that matter.) We tumble. We riff. We list all the mental and social grievances we think each twin must have, painting them all over the terminal floor, and whether each twin prefers pizza or hotdogs, and then I am shown the ancient slash-runes of the tumbling sect of uwu-baby, and the girls attempt to teach me their meanings, but I find they are much too difficult to memorize. And I present the girls with the runes which I would prefer to have thrown at me while I'm tumbling with reckless abandon. And we tumble and tumble, and cackle and screech. And then one of the girls tumbles a little too hard and has a meltdown, and they all go out to get bagels, leaving me to fold up the rift I left in the middle of Grand Central Terminal. (Which I should really not call a terminal, because that word would make the Great Smiling Lord Emmet of the Pressed White Pants very, very sad. And he will bring his sadness to the drycleaners, because he will have spilled hotdog juice on his Pressed White Pants.
I'm just about to make the final stitch, looking like the most pathetic interdimensional being in all of New York City. (Tough contest, I think, after meeting those girls.) And that's when America finally joins me, stuffing hotdogs in his face and leaking condiments all down the front of his own Pressed White Pants.
"Any disasters?" he asks me.
I think he sees my face then. The weary purple blotches pooling under my eyes. The way my lips curl down in a sad droop. The light shadow of snow-white stubble blooming on my chin. My windswept white hair, fraying and split at the ends.
"Oh, so you learned why we need an Emmet DLC, didja?"
"No, I didn't," I tell him. "I learned that it doesn't take much in this modern world for people to become verrrry disturbed."
"Huh. Yeah. Maybe we should stop with the podcasts for a while, right? They drive me crazy some days, too."
"Fine by me," I tell America. "Let's watch funny train man animatics instead."
~N~
Dear lord why has this gone on for exactly two years and have almost over 9000 views.
Episode 50 next time...
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net May 20th, 2022. Reposters cursed.