The Dreamer

2 - A Clown & His Pipe

I enter the Gateway, a flash of light engulfs my eyes, the milk seeps in the corners where spiders crawl out of, and then darkness. Then bright lights again, this time, in a night sky, where I encounter a bustling citadel with large buildings and smooth floors. Semi-rectangular boxes with lights and windows howl at others of its likeness, and centipedes of neon-green cover parts of the large edifice complices of glass and refined wet rock that seem to be a fairly common theme with this place.

I get pushed by a random stranger.

"Hey, watch it!" The stranger said.

"Sorry!" I responded.

Then I went to another random person, it could've been anyone but I decided to ask him.

"Excuse me?" I asked.

"Yeah?" He asked.

"I'm a wanderer, see?" I stated. "Where am I?"

"What, you didn't fucking see the sign when you came here?" He asked.

"There's a sign?" I asked.

What appeared next was the densest confusion I've ever seen from any stranger.

"Ok..." He uttered, musingly. "You're in New York, buddy!"

"Oh, ok then. Thanks." I said to him as I left him.

New York. I've heard of it in the Boiling Isles Department of Transportation before, hailing it as a "capital for all kinds of entertainment, from their literatures and musical plays, to food stylism and shit pizza." Heh, at least I'm not in Chicago with their "pizza". I've heard all kinds of things about Illinois' pies from the Department's clamoring travelling-persons and customers - so to speak - by the rest areas, with them claiming that "it's like Fairy Pie, but worse".

But know that even vipers mind the venom lacing their tongues. They might be talking shit or whatever. Besmirching it. However, as I aren't but a man-of-the-people person, I'll take their words with two grains of salt. With a pinch of pepper.

I begin to wander the place, astonished by its many intricate oddities, from their "hot dog stands" where people are crowding in dozens just to eat ground and squashed up animal corpses on a piece of bread - weirdoes - with yellow syrup, to just the accents of people here who might be local commoners here, saying "p-u-asta" and "bolls".

This is truly an enchanting city, as the Toegres encouraged.

I begin to wander more, and that's when I encountered the largest crowd moving in a single direction I've ever seen. Seemingly thousands of individuals are specifically projectile-ing themselves in a straight trajectory where a building situated just a slight walk from where I'm standing - large as a spooking glass and tall as a star - was advertising a play in its lightened boards and billboards installed on the building itself titled "The Lion King". Who wants to see a lion as a king? Lions are scary cats. Get a tiger-dragon instead! Wait... speaking of tiger-dragons, I've heard lots of individuals back home, talking about, and complimenting each other for watching, a show called "Toradora", which - from what I've heard - is about a human couple; one with the spirit of a female tiger; and the other, with the spirit of a male dragon.

Interesting, right?

I should try to walk through the crowd so I can go where it takes me.

As soon as I entered the crowd of ecstatic fanatics with an appetite for musicals and weird taste for stories - I can relate - the electricity flowing through their veins of stardust increased, with possibly wax drugs of felicity and forgetfulness to amplify the already accentuated nature of their surrealist half-humanity.