Fore Some People, Dreams Come True

            Another day went by, and the boys were now flying over the big island of Montreal. “Cooool,” Pascal exclaimed with fascination. Tony was riding on his friend’s back, unable to fly since he was still in his earthling form. They were passing over a place filled with people and giant unusual mechanisms, and even from high up they could hear the bursts of screams, some which sounded like “Woohoo! What a great time!” while some sounded more like another outfit ready for the Laundromat. Tony explained him what La Ronde and what an amusement park in general was all about, and Pascal found it very interesting.

            “But unfortunately,” Tony clarified, “We need tickets to go in there and we don’t have any money to�"and then Pascal swooped down to the wonders below, with Tony screaming in refusal. Pascal aimed and then dropped his friend down like a bomber plane releasing its projectiles.

 After a few incidents, Pascal learned that by dropping his friend from un-survivable heights, it forced Tony to transform into his nemusian form. That would give him a little break from having to carry him around and hear him complain all the time. However, Tony was starting to get more and more used to heights, becoming less scared, but when the smartass swooped down like that or when he “accidentally” dropped him, that scared him out of his mind. When Pascal did that, the height he had to drop down before transforming was the worst torture for a boy that would usually cry in terror when trying out the Pendulum Viking Boat ride at the Beauce Carnival.

Pascal transformed into a raven, his clothes flying out in the wind (too excited to have thought about it), and swooped down to the ticket booth exactly when the ticket vendor held out his hand to give four tickets to a happy family. The raven shook its head furiously until only two tickets were left in his beak, and then it searched for the perfect place to conceal itself so it could transform back.

Tony swiveled his arms to de-rust himself from the process of bone fracture recovery (he transformed just a little too late) and waved his hand to everyone around him to say he was okay, and that he just tried to climb up something he wasn’t supposed to, like any unsupervised kid would do.

            The Haunted House seemed like the perfect dark place to transform without getting noticed. He parked himself in front of a plastic, electrically moving, red-eyed skeleton to shift back to his little boy self, and just as he did, white strobe lights went on for the two seven-year old girls that walked through the ride with their parents, revealing flashes of a naked blond boy and his willy where a moving skeleton was supposed to scare the hell out of them. The purpose of the Haunted House was to scare people, and it worked perfectly for the two screaming girls that came running out, but the parents were insulted and made a beeline for the complaints department right after grabbing the hands of their daughters.  The two next people to come out of the Haunted House were two young teenage boys. One came out not scared at all. He was either too old for this, or so high that he didn’t even notice anything except flashing lights and a naked kid, which must only have been a natural hallucination symptom from the shrooms he had eaten. He had his rapper Pepe Jeans to his knees and his Phat Farm shirt so large that it went under his crotch. He had the classic gangster army camouflage boots with the useless Velcro sticking out and white long socks that he shoved his pants in so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. His New York Yankees baseball cap was half reversed, half tilted, half on his head making people wonder how it could even hold there. The other teenager came out naked. Security arrived and the teenagers told them about the assault they suffered in the Haunted House, but with the absence of any witness and mostly because they looked pretty intoxicated, they just kicked them out and called their parents.

            The two heroes finally rejoined, Pascal in clothes that were absolutely too big for him, but fortunately they were also too big for the person he stole them from so he had a belt to hold his pants together. The Velcro on his shoes proved useful because by using it, it kept him from losing his shoes. They walked around the place, Pascal going on a couple of rides and Tony watching him because he chickened out on most of the rides, except the boring ones that Pascal didn’t find any use to go on. Then they came across the Orbit, the rocket launching ride of La Ronde.

            “You are doing this one, and I am watching you.” Pascal said to Tony.

            “You are out of your mind,” Tony answered, shaking his head right and left like an epileptic, “There is no way you’re gonna make me do this.”

            After receiving numerous wet-willies while being caught in a triangle choke, Tony stepped up into the line, quivering uncontrollably like someone about to do a purely sadistic suicide attempt without the use of any drugs. Pascal was beside the line, sitting on a bench and fist-pumping while screaming; “You can do it! You’re a man!” He then muttered to himself, Maybe he’ll stop screaming and complaining about my flying after witnessing this ride.

 Tony’s turn was up, and he sat on one of the seats beside another boy that looked about the same age as he. He stared at the security belt he had to attach, and the robust thing-of-a-jig he had to lever down to secure his body from his shoulders down to his abdomen. To put it shortly, once he’d fasten those two things, there was no way out of this ride. The boy beside him said, “Oh, you don’t know how to fasten those, don’t you?” And before Tony knew it, he was trapped and doomed to rocket launch up and down into hell. He closed his eyes, trying to calm down and focus on… you know, anything else that didn’t have to do with dying, and he then got an unexpected flash of the future.

 

***

 

The ride very slowly went up, making the stressful ticking sound it always made, and it rose about three quarters up the stronghold, letting a nice view of the whole amusement park, the Jacques Cartier Bridge running along a panoramic view of the Saint-Lawrence River, with a background of thousands of buildings and factories, and even the famous Montreal Olympic Stadium from afar. There were an infinite amount of tiny cars zooming back and forth on the bridge, reminding the boy how small the people below in La Ronde were, almost looking like ants from this high. “Le Monstre” and “Le Splash” were seen very well from his position, and to resume, the view was just fantastic. However, Tony felt no penchant for it, having seen all those things only because he kept looking erratically at different spots, only to try and ignore that he was going to fall down and maybe get a seizure before that. Just then, he saw a small shadow enlarging on his thighs, and a small blur appeared in the sky. And when they finally reached the top there was a brief pause, with the gleeful entertainer chanting in the microphone “Blast off in 10, 9, 8…” the blur had very quickly reached its destination, becoming an immense dragon with a silver mask. It swooped down like a jet, ripping off the top of the ride, along with its passengers. Metal, wires and sparkles of electricity spangled viciously as blood and gore splattered all across the chaos of unexpected demolition. Then there was a millisecond of immeasurable physical pain, followed by complete darkness.

 

***

 

Tony’s eyes were fixed in emptiness, and he looked paralysed, and a bit traumatised, almost as if in a trance, convulsing from time to time. The employee asked his co-worker, “Is he alright?” and his co-worker, who had a couple years’ worth more of experience answered, “He’s just scared out of his mind. He should’ve thought about it before jumping on that seat like the ‘tough kid’ he is.” A loud clash was heard, and then the employee said in a microphone to entertain his guests, “Are you ready ladies and gentlemen? Let the Orbit ascend to the skies!”

The ride slowly started its way up, making the stressful ticking sound it always made, and Tony woke up to the sound of it, his eyes flashing green for an instance, and he then shrieked as loud as he could, “Nooo! Let me out of here! We’re gonna die stop this ride!” He kicked his legs crazily and shouted continuously at the top of his lungs. “Stop the ride, stop! Stop!” When the Orbit was about five metres off the ground, Pascal noticed quickly that Tony’s “No” and “Stop” went in such loud and high pitches that it was evidently impossible for a human being to make such a sound. Pascal wasn’t sure if it was only his fear of rides that could have caused the nemusian transformation. Tony screamed inexplicably loud, and in a sudden, a burst of green light rose from Tony and the whole structure that held him fastened to his seat fell down in a mini explosion of five or six broken pieces. The Hero immediately slid down his demolished seat and fell on his feet down below. Before he could even warn his friend, Pascal had seen the impending danger with his supernatural eyesight. Pascal blasted off and Tony took the opportunity to run away while everyone was aghast from the ride’s “malfunction”.

They were here, just as Rosayan had told him. He took out what seemed to be a cellphone and then he started talking to it: “Master, the nemusians are still here. Now sit down and enjoy while I take care of business.”

“Not right now!” Rosayan barked at the other end. “Wait until they leave the place. Keep track of them and once they’re some in some deserted place, you go and�"

Smigz turned off his cellphone. It was too late; he wanted to kill them right now and make a huge mess while doing it. He had always been a rebellious and turbulent creature, even though he was shot regularly with the submission formula. Rosayan didn’t want to kill him because even though Smigz was impulsive and careless, he was certain that this creature was probably his strongest creation as of yet. Most of his strength was probably due to the fact that he was about fifty feet tall.

The Orbit ride was stopped at mid-height when the operators hit the emergency stop button, which made it even easier for the giant dragon to ram his entire body into the immobile mob of screaming people. The monster dove down like a bullet to charge face-first in the hard, steel structure before him (he didn’t wear a helmet for nothing). Smigz’s helmet made a hard collision that unexpectedly got him to an almost full stop. From the feeling he felt on his head, he thought that his aim had been off, and that he had only gotten the tip of the monument, but why was it so solid? He looked up and saw a little boy sent flying away like a starfish at full speed. Half of the boy’s body caught the Orbit’s tower, making him ricochet off to the side in a crazy spinning maneuver.

“So this is  the strength of a nemusian…” Smigz told himself. It had to be one of them, or else that little boy was just an earthling that had fallen off a plane or something, but that was improbable.  The kid that had intercepted him was way too heavy. The contact had made Smigz shrivel up like a spring for a half-second when he hit that boy and it made him stop completely a couple of meters later. Now his back was hurting and he was pissed. “Little kid, you have ruined my act of destruction!” The angry beast roared, “Now you will die among all those puny humans!” And it was to those words that the Canadian Military and a group of field biologists started to arrive among the crowd of panicking people.

Tony was running away just fine before a rollercoaster came tumbling his way, and before he knew it he saved the lives of hundreds of peoples in this chaos while Pascal was trying to divert the dragon’s attention so it could attack him instead of the amusement park below. Smigz did a very fine job doing both. Therefore, Tony had his job of helping the people to safety, and Pascal’s was to beat the hell out of that lizaard.

Smigz’s size and shape was a lot more intimidating than the previous lizaards that the heroes had encountered so far. He had gigantic black wings, allowing him to fly at deadly speed. Long spikes came out from the side of his thighs, and the claws on his toes and fingers were humongous. He had spiky blue gills that came out from his calves, from the top of his forearms, from the middle of his triceps, on the back of his head and on the tip of his chin, the latter almost giving him a goatee look. Those gills, without mentioning that their edges were as dangerously sharp as dried corals, made him more aerodynamic. His tail was as long as his upper body and it was equipped with a big, heavy spiked ball-mace-shaped exoskeleton at its tip. His silver helmet had two holes for his eyes, two holes for his nostrils and it had two big metal fangs that grew out on each side of his muzzle. Smigz had the ability to breathe fire and energy beams. What’s more, he could stomp joyfully on his victims since he was approximately the height of a two-story house.

Smigz kept spewing fire and energy beams down below, now focusing his aim on the tanks and helicopters. The helicopters’ annoying bullets tickled and he did not feel like laughing. The tanks’ projectiles though were more equivalent to a Thai boxer’s knee in the face and that’s what made him feel compelled to get rid of them first. Pascal was only the most irritating thing to have around in a time like this, like when you’re trying to do the dishes and the two boys you’re babysitting are jumping on you and humping your leg; one’s crying and from the smell you know the other one made a huge load in his diapers. But you can’t take care of them right now, because you’re trying to open every window and stop the fire alarm after burning the Shepherd’s Pie in the oven while the phone’s ringing. Oh, and you also burnt yourself on that f*****g pie. Smigz then understood that Pascal was so annoying that he had to be the one going down first. He smacked Pascal out of the way with a Scottish backhand, and prepared for a huge energy beam. He bloated his stomach and inhaled to launch his tremendous fire power at the infuriating nemusian that was buzzing around him. He had almost burst the hot air out of his mouth that he ate the shell of a tank right on the side of his cheek. The smack made him spit the fire in emptiness and Pascal took it as a chance to slam his a*s down below with a two-hand Volleyball spike on the head. Tony flew up to regroup with his partner after seeing the giant creature getting assailed by the military right in the middle of Laronde. He pulled him by the arm as he zoomed by to signal that they should leave. Pascal took a last glance behind to see the giant dragon getting invaded by a smoking hazard of bullets and projectiles from the army below.

 “I guess they’re gonna take care of the rest,” Tony said, flying beside his friend, “Let’s continue forward.”

“But don’t we have to kill him?” Pascal asked.

“The army’s gonna kill him, it’s fine. We have to get out of here before one of them spots us.”

“Why? They already saw us.” Pascal answered. “Look.” He said as he waved to a soldier below, and the soldier waved in response. “See? No big deal.”

“Yes it is a big deal! We’re gonna show up in newspapers and on TV and stuff and that’s not good!”

“But we helped them beat up the monster so won’t they like us for that?”

“Things don’t work that way buddy. Come on, let’s fly faster, we have to hide somewhere.”

“Aww man I’m tired of hiding all the time!” Pascal complained.

Tony was astonished because he recognized that dragon-looking creature. It was the very same dragon that he had dreamt of twice before. “This can’t be real…” the boy uttered, “Can I see the future?”

“What?” Pascal asked.

“Oh… it’s just that, you know, that lizaard we just met? It was in one of my dreams a couple days ago and that’s freaking me out.”

“Really? How strange is that ey? Does that mean you can dream of things that will happen later on?”

“Well that’s what I’m starting to wonder…” Tony admitted, bewildered by such a possibility.

“So where do we go next?” Pascal then asked, still eager to discover.

“I know where to go now.” The confident boy replied. “We’re in Montreal right now so we have to continue down that same route as last time, the Highway 117. Eventually, we’ll fly over this small town called Mont-Laurier and then, we’ll be flying over an endless forest for countless hours. The Vérendrye Forest is what separates the city of Val-d’Or from the rest of the world. But don’t be discouraged, there is an end and we will reach it.”

“Sounds boring. Why don’t we choose another path?”

“There’s no other way. My parents always take that route when we go to Montreal.”

“Yeah but you guys probably weren’t flying! There are always alternate routes in life.”

“No, no other alternate routes. We take that one.” Tony stated.

“Why do we have to take your path?” Pascal whined.

 “Because I’m older, so I’m the supreme monarch of all remaining�"

“I’m eleven.”

“What! Really?”

“Yeah. So tough luck I’m going to be the next Superman!”

“What are you talking about? And you actually know about Superman?”

 “Cloudfire read me a book about it once and he told me I should be like him one day. He’s not from Earth either you know and he still saves people. He’s from�"

“Yeah yeah I know the story; everyone knows Superman.”

“Okay then, where does he come from?”

“Well, he’s from that planet, with crystals and all that…”

“It’s Krypt�"

“He comes from Krypton.”

“I just said that.”

“Nuh-uh.”

And the two heroes left on their trail to find Tony’s home. Tony really hoped he wouldn’t have to encounter another monster on his way, but also, he had no idea what would happen once he’d arrive home so he was worried. Even with his over-developed nemusian intellect right now, he couldn’t find how to explain all this to his parents.