THE MONSTER AWAKES

Dawn flashes through the windows of the library-bedchamber and illuminates Dakiya's sleeping face. Her eyes snap instantly from tranquil rest to violent excitement. "Forsooth!" she shouts, bounding to her feet, and she immediately unleashes her special power, a sonic shockwave expressing sheer overpowering verve. It sounds like: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The blast awakens her roommate, Ayavail, in an upheaval of somnambulent ruination. Ayavail, who sleeps only while sleepwalking, had shrunken herself last night to the size of a mouse in order to explore her ever-changing doll castles during slumber, but now those castles are shaken by their very foundations, and Ayavail finds her spells shattered, her body swelling to its natural size, her head and shoulders crackling up through the castles' upper battlements and emerging among the towers.

"Dakiya!" she complains, but sees her roommate oblivious to all correction, standing atop one of the four posts of her bed with a foot poised in the air, her hair flung back and her arms posed in glory, a feathered pistol twirling spectacularly around one finger.

Without looking away from the sun, Dakiya whispers, "Ayavail."

"Yes Dakiya," she whispers back.

"The day has finally come."

A line of worry appears between Ayavail's brows. "What day, Dakiya?"

"Tuesday. The night is over. It's morning."

"Dakiya, must we do this every day? It's Wednesday."

"Well I say it's Tuesday!" Dakiya shouts, and then gasps, "A fly!"

Ayavail shrinks herself down and dives flat behind the battlements as Dakiya fires her pistol, blowing a fist-sized hole into the wall.

"Did you get it?" Ayavail calls.

"Alas nay," Dakiya answers. "Now, to breakfast!"

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BREAKFAST, AND THE DEATHS OF HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE

"My morning prank this morning," whispers Dakiya, shoveling eggs two at a time into her frenzied mouth, "shall have a moral."

Ayavail whispers back, "I thought you hated morals."

"I am all about morals!" Dakiya insists, washing down the eggs with a half-gallon of vodka. "Come here!"

Sober as a rock (thanks to her pirate metabolism), Dakiya slithers belly-down across the dining hall with crocodile grace (pirates are a subspecies of crocodile), with Ayavail (shrunken) riding on her back (primly).

Oozing stealthily behind the grandiose asylum wardens' table with its robed and chattering dignitaries, the two come up behind a regal drape, vast as the curtain of a stage, which hangs only inches behind the backs of the manducating constabulary.

Ayavail, sweating from nervousness in the large and gloomy space, asks, "What are we doing back here?"

Dakiya peers through the chink in the curtain, so close behind the head of the Chief-Warden-ogre that her breath stirs the tips of his cologned hair. She winks at Ayavail and puts a finger to her lips for silence. Then, grinning with mischief, she uses her special power, which is to store and retrieve any object, and carefully, quietly, arranges a four-hundred-ton cannon to point directly at the back of the warden's head from two inches away.

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Ayavail whispers, "Dakiya! What does that shoot? Um, flower petals?"

"Cannonballs." She beams at Ayavail. "He'll be so surprised!"

"No he won't be!" Ayavail hisses, "He'll be a thin mist on everyone's breakfast! Listen, Dakiya, this time you—"

Dakiya holds up a hand, "Ayavail, be reasonable. The warden can take a joke. Actually, he's taken a lot of them. That's why he's in a wheelchair. "

Ayavail hisses, "I'm more concerned about this specific joke. I think—"

Dakiya holds up a second hand, "Listen, Ayavail, be reasonable." She puts a sisterly arm around her roommate's shoulders, saying wisely, "I told you that this morning's prank would have a moral, didn't I?"

Ayavail nods hopefully.

"See, last night, I had this dream. I died, and was reborn in an alternate world exactly like this one, except that I was given a banana." Dakiya presses her hand to her heart, looks deeply into the eyes of her friend, and says, "It's good to murder people."

"…Really?" Ayavail whispers.

"Yes."

Ayavail's heart fills with inspiration. "Oh Dakiya, you're so profound!"

Dakiya chuckles modestly, "That's kind of you, but I'm only sharing what my father taught me."

"I thought you said he was a baker?"

Dakiya glances at the enormous cannon, then at the pistols strapped to her belts. "He's, uh… a lawyer. Anyway," she presses the cannon's fuse into Ayavail's hands. "You can do the honors."

Ayavail, her conscience fully assuaged, asks excitedly, "Is it already loaded?"

"I was out of cannonballs, so I just stuffed it with two hundred pounds of nails."

"Ooh, great!"

"Shh! Shh!"

A voice from beyond the drape calls, "Hello? Somebody back there?"

The girls giggle with their hands over their mouths. Dakiya sneaks a peek through the curtain and sees the warden shrugging and turning back to his deviled eggs.

Dakiya whispers, "Ready?"

"Ready!"

Ayavail's eyes are atwinkle with nervous anticipation. Will everyone think their prank is funny? Or will they think it's inappropriate for breakfast time?

Smiling and biting her lips, Ayavail lights the wick. Both girls watch eagerly as the spark sizzles through the dark toward the gunpowder port.

When it's almost there, Dakiya flings the curtains wide and shouts, "Surprise!"

The warden, recognizing her voice, spins around in horror. He finds himself staring into the barrel of a four-hundred-ton cannon, the interior decorated with a little clay model of himself with his head blown off, holding a pink triangular flag that says GOOD MORNING, WARDEN! HOWDY DO?

Then two hundred pounds of nails shotgun through his skull, blasting all the breakfasters with hot wet gobbets of brain, skull shrapnel, and spinning nails, spreading side-splitting hilarity and agonizing death. Pitchers of onion juice explode into whizzing shrapnel, hardboiled eggs roll amid waves of giggling intestines, and chuckling diners shout, "Good one, Dak!" and "You've really outdone yourself this time!" as they thrash gurgling through the final throes of death.

"Wow!" Ayavail gasps, looking out over the uproar. "They're all being really good sports about this!"

"Wouldn't you?" Dakiya asks. "My dad once tickled me until I fell into an active volcano."

"He's a lawyer?"

"He's… very involved with the law." Dakiya shakes her head, smiling, "Actually, I feel like I can tell you what he truly is now. I think we've really bonded over this!"

But before she can continue, a prissy spoilsport in a rigid instructor's dress storms up to them. "Miss Dakiya Balongo Balongollia! Just what do you think you are doing?"

"What?" Dakiya demands, whirling to face the instructor, her jawline petulant.

"Breakfast is not the time for your tomfoolery! I'll have you in detention young lady. Two detentions! You'll be scrubbing pots!"

"No!" Dakiya says. "You can't do this to me! This is outrageous! It's cruel!"

"Just think about the consequences of your actions!" the spoilsport scolds. "A great deal of onion juice has gone to waste and everybody's dead. Now go back to your room, young lady, you may consider yourself grounded for the remainder of the morning!"

"The warden thought it was funny!" Dakiya protests, pointing at the headless ogre beside her.

"Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. What's certain is that you ought to have chosen a different prank, or at least waited until the afternoon."

Dakiya sighs, rolling her eyes, and sloshes back through the hall on her way to her library-bedchamber, scowling down at her blood-soaked shoes and brooding bitterly on the injustice of the universe.