You've Got Another Thing Coming

Liam and Cherokee were standing on firm, well-behaved ground.

One moment there hadn’t been anyone standing on it, and the next time you looked, two very handsome men – appearing thoroughly confused – stood, wobbling slightly from the impact.

“Wha…?” said the fairy, taking a moment to survey his surroundings.

“What the…?” added the soldier, scratching his head in bewilderment.

“Where the…?” continued Cherokee, his lilac eyes wide with uncertainty.

The two men looked at each other. Then they looked down. Then they looked around again.

“I have the feeling we’re missing something vitally important, here,” said Liam. His hand rummaged around in his gorgeous locks. “Like, besides the basic ‘what/where/when/why/how’-questions.”

Cherokee nodded, but – in his common demeanour – said nothing. Yes, you’ve heard it all before, yet; that is what he did and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.

After a short pause, Liam said: “Where do you suppose we are?”

Cherokee shrugged. “Somewhere, I’d suppose.”

“Somewhere where the interior designer should be shot,” Liam concluded, staring at the scenery.

It was not much of a scenery, but the little that there was, wasn’t pretty.
Our pretty boys were now located in a room of some sort, which carried itself with baby pink-coloured walls and floored itself with a white, thick carpet. Pink, fluffy curtains hung from sugary-sweet windows and shelves were stacked all over the room, stuffed to the brim with obscenely cute cuddly toys.

One single, large bed was standing in the middle of the room, pink covers and white pillows, and over by one corner there was a desk – mandatory white with a pink chair to match – crammed with piles of paper and more toys.
Paintings hung like cotton candy with a brick in it would hang if ever attached to a wall, and portrayed kittens, puppies and other un-developed creatures fooling about with yarn, shoes and whatnot.

Liam shuddered involuntarily.
“Only a severely disturbed person can live like this,” he stated, and looked to Cherokee for confirmation. Cherokee, however, had frozen in place. His eyes were now wide with terror, rather than ambiguity.

“The Queen,” he said, the words falling from his trembling lips like nails getting hammered into a coffin lid.

Liam gasped. “No!” he shouted in utmost denial. He began to walk about, frantically, and stuck his fingers in his ears in a defiant gesture.

His actions seemed to strike a chord with Cherokee, who snapped out of his horrified state of mind and settled for staring in disbelief at the French soldier, who had now started singing a national anthem of own composition and tried to whistle at the same time.

Cherokee raised a hand, in order of the ever-present urge to punch any man behaving in ways as described. He lowered it, however, and did with kicking Liam very hardly on the shins.
“Get a grip on yourself, man!” he hissed, as Liam began dancing around on one leg with one arm wrapped around his aching shin and yowling like a cat in labour.

“What’d you go and do that for?” Liam howled, but steadied himself and tried to stand upright. His beautiful, gorgeous face was a mask of the most heart-wrenching portrayal of hurt. His bottom lip even pouted a little.

Cherokee found it hard to focus around all the magnificence that was Liam, mostly because he seemed to find the stunning man so annoying.

“If you could just focus for a second,” Cherokee fought with all his might to not growl, “then you’d have noticed we are currently in the Queen’s bedroom.”

Liam looked a bit peeved. “How’d you know?” he asked, pettishly. “It’s just a really badly decorated room.”

“Just trust me,” Cherokee snapped. “The King told me all about how the Queen’s room looked. He was much exited to have seen it, that time when he told me. It was the first time ever the Queen had opened her door for him.”

Liam tried to, but failed to stay uncurious. “When did he tell you this?”

“At a banquet,” Cherokee said, his mind now a bit further away than he liked. “It was a couple of years ago.”

“Ah,” Liam nodded. “They’d recently gotten married, then? Since the King hadn’t been in the Queen’s room before?”

Cherokee, now even further away in his memories, answered absent-mindedly:
“Oh, no,” he waved his hand about, “they’d been married for some odd ten years then.”

Liam turned to stare at the fairy, but noticed there was no humour traceable in Cherokee’s distant features. He shrugged.
“Seems like monarchy is doomed even without our interference,” he mumbled, referring to the French resistance. He then directed his next words directly at Cherokee. “So, what the hell do we do, then?”

Cherokee snapped back into reality. Judging by the look on his face, whatever it was he had been seeing wasn’t something nice. Knowing the King and his forward ways, it probably wasn’t, either.

“Well, I don’t know how we got here, but this is the place we were heading for,” the fairy concluded in a very business-like tone of voice.

“We were?” said Liam, surprised, as Cherokee began to rummage around in the backpack he had so conveniently found was still on his back.

“Of course we were!” sneered Cherokee, busy with plucking at random items. “We’ve been on this godforsaken journey for too many hours for me to be comfortable with. So if we could just get everything done and over with and hand that package to the Queen-” He stopped short.
Liam looked at him expectantly, but when nothing came out of Cherokee, Liam motioned for him to go on.

“Yes?” he said. “What package are we talking about, here?”

“Oh, no…” Cherokee was white in the face, his entire body radiating dumbfounded anxiety. “Oh, gods…”

“Oh, now I know!” said Liam, now with an explanatory grin. “That guy we brought in had a package that I was supposed to open,” he said, rallying it all up in his mind, “but then that guy got turned into a girl, who was originally a girl who got turned into a guy in the very first place, and then she was all in tears and you said that she was blonde and then out of nowhere we get zapped into a tree which starts to sink down a swamp and then the girl tries to help you up and then she falls and screams and then…” he stopped to take a breath, and then went on, a bit slower, “and then we ended up here…?”

Cherokee’s mouth was opening and closing rapidly, like a fish on dry land. His eyes, lilac as they were, were spread wide. All trace of uncertainty had been washed away.
All that was left was pure, unadulterated terror.

Liam then seemed to find something missing.
“Hey,” he said, turning his upper body round and round, looking. “Speaking of the girl… where the hell is she?”

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“So,” said I, going over it all again in my mind, as I found it hard to make the information stay there. I looked over at the large heap of stone in front of me, daisies and all, and tried it again. “Your name is Rock?”

“Yes,” said the heap, smiling ever so slightly.

“And...you’re a mountain?” I said, disbelieving it even as I said it.

“I’m a piece carved from the very living mountain,” corrected the large monster in front of me, still smiling patronizingly.

“So, you’re carved from a mountain, and your name is Rock,” I said, helping myself to some more confusion.

“I’m carved from the very living mountain,” repeated Rock patiently. “There is a huge difference. Being carved from just any mountain wouldn’t make much of an existence. The Very Living Mountain is the first thing that ever attained life on this earth. I am a piece of that mountain.”

I nodded, severely trying to understand. “You’re a living rock, and your name is Rock.”

“That’s right,” said another voice, as gentle as the rounded pebbles in a forest river.

“And you’re Roll,” I added, pointing at the source of the new voice, which was another heap of stone.

“Correct,” both pieces of mountains commended.

“And you’re married to each other?”

“Yes,” they answered. “We’re Rock and Roll, married inasmuch as we can without being seen to by a priest.”

Roll giggled and winked conspiratorially at me, “It’s kind of hard to have a religious wedding when you’ve been around for longer than the gods themselves.”

I glanced down at a nugget that was sitting on my shoe, looking mouth-and-eyes-wide up at me.

“This is Indie,” said Rock, motioning towards the nugget. “He’s our little offspring.”

Both parents grinned proudly at their bouncing baby boulder, who continued to stare dumbfounded at my incomprehensive self.
I opened my mouth to speak, but found that nothing that was going on in my head was fit to be put in words. I closed it.

Roll, whom I appreciated to be the feminine part of the two, saw my terrible puzzlement and took sympathy.
“Poor sweetheart, you must be very confused by all this,” she said, and patted my hand in a motherly way. I felt the bruise start to form immediately after she removed her heavy, well-meaning fingers.

“I am,” I agreed, nodding. “Not just by all this talk about mountains being alive – no offence! – but by everything that’s been going on here. This world is so strange!”

“Yes, yes,” conceded Rock, bobbing his head up and down in sympathy. “This world can be very bewildering for a human such as yourself.”

Time froze.

I gasped out loud as I reeled back and went over his words again in my head.

Time unfroze.

“How did you know I was human?” I whispered, my voice so tiny it could’ve crept under doors.

Roll waved the issue away with a large swipe of her hand.
“Ah, sweetheart!” she smiled. “It’s not as if you’re the first human to ever end up in the world of dreams.”

The bewilderment previously mentioned now doubled. “I’m not?”

Roll continued: “Well, granted, your kind isn’t very common around these parts. But the first one? No. Nor do I think you are the last one, either.”

Rock looked at me sternly. “The reason why so few humans roam around here is because their dreaming is what makes this world exist. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. If they weren’t in their right place, both our worlds would collapse.”

“That’s right,” said Roll again, bobbing her head just like her husband. “If one thing or another gets out of place, then things starts to go wrong. The worlds will change, even if it’s ever so slightly, to try and adjust to whatever is going on. To have a human in the World of Dreams would cause this world to try and blend that human in, in order for the world not to cave in on itself.”

Through all the blah-blah-blah their speech sounded in my head, some of it actually made some kind of sense. I felt an Aha!-moment creep up on me.

“So,” said I, as so many times before, “the world would try to blend a human in… Meaning, perhaps, it would give this human special powers?”

“Could be,” agreed Rock. “Many things in this world are magical, so giving a human some magic would of course be one way of trying to adapt it to the situation.”

“It would not, of course, work in the long run,” Roll added knowingly. “Giving a human magical powers would be like giving a toad the keys to a chocolate factory.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, not quite getting the likening, and not understanding whether or not to be offended.

“She means that a human cannot handle magic,” Rock explained. “It will go wrong, sooner or later, as humans aren’t designed to be magical, or to be in our world.”

My immediate future swooped down on me like an eagle on a bunny rabbit. I felt the pressure of my random magical outbursts like a ton of weight on my shoulders, and for some reason I started blushing.

“What will happen, then?” I wondered, slightly fearing the answer. Both mountains, however, shrugged.

“Dunno,” said Rock.

“It changes, depending on the person,” Roll said. “Last one we had in here managed to get back fast enough for the worlds not to go bonkers.”

Rock shuddered. “But the one before that had us all…” he drifted off, looking like a word that is more uncomfortable than uncomfortable.

Silence settled. The suspense was vicious, and the air was thick with tension.

Again, I whispered. “What happened?”

Both Rock and Roll turned to look at me. Roll pursed what I deciphered to be her lips.

“You don’t want to know,” said Rock curtly and refused to meet my inquiring gaze.

“But you’ll get out of here in time, won’t you?” added Roll hopefully, again smiling motherly at me.

“Oh, yes!” I nodded vigorously, feeling my neck become sore from all the commotion. “I just have one small thing I have to do first, and then I’ll be off!”

“Good, good,” said Rock approvingly.

“Err,” said I, blushing again as I looked at the two mountains. “You don’t happen to know how I get out of here, do you?”

“Not a clue,” my foot said. Indie had got his breath back, and was not peering curiously at me. “You’re kinda ugly,” he said critically.

“Indie!” his mother hissed. “That’s no way to talk to a lady!”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “If I don’t like the way someone talks to me, I’ll just make them go away by magic.” I narrowed my eyes threateningly at the nugget on my foot, which, to some extent, scooted away.

“You’ve learned to control your magic, then?” wondered Rock, his tone both inquisitive and accusing.

I backed down, but not completely. “Not really,” I confessed. “I mean, when I’m seriously agitated or panic or something like that, I tend to end up in… weird places.”

“So your magic talent is to shift locations on command?” wondered Roll. “That must be rather useful.”

“I don’t-” I stopped myself. I hadn’t really thought of it like that before... “That must be it! I can change locations by will, and drag people with me!”

“Fascinating,” said Rock.

I got up on my feet and began pacing around. “It explains so much!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands in the air. “This must be why I got separated from Cherokee and Rose in the tunnel, why Cherokee disappeared from me on that meadow before I ran into Le Président, why we all ended up in that tree in the middle of the swamp and why I ended up falling from the sky and then I came here!”

“How very enthralling,” said Rock.

I stopped mid pace as something struck my mind. “But... If I dragged Cherokee and Liam along with me to the swamp…where are they now?”

“Good question,” praised Roll, who had picked up Indie and put another bluebonnet on her husband’s head. “Perhaps you should try and find that out?”

“Lovely idea,” approved Rock, who adjusted his bluebonnet with maximal care.

My mind was now reeling. “I think perhaps it is best if I’d get going now,” I said. “Thank you for all your help. You’ve been very kind.”

“Yes, yes we have,” agreed Roll, smiling yet again. “Be safe, little human.”

“Be safe,” rumbled Rock in agreement, and waved his boulder-like arm in one direction. “I’d search north if I were you,” he added.

“Thank you,” I said and took off sprinting, my heart suddenly in my throat. Before I was totally out of ear-shot I heard a small, peevish voice say:

“I still think she was ugly, mom.”