Chapter One - Rub a Dub Dub

Crossover: Cinnamon Bun by RavensDagger

Dreamer was out and about with Abigail. Even after being proclaimed Empress of Everything (by Dreamer), Abigail still insisted on going to school and working hard doing stuff for mortal money. Dreamer didn’t get it, but she wasn’t going to stop Abigail from having her fun.

Besides, school was where Abigail had her friends, like Charlotte and Daphne, and Abigail liked learning things.

The teachers were all very nice to Abigail ever since Dreamer threatened to consume their planet if anyone bothered her. The Inquisition people with the hats ran about and tried to make sure things worked out so that there was as little planet-eating as possible.

Anyway, Dreamer was with Abigail, which didn’t mean that she was only with Abigail.

You had to be really weak to only be in one place at a time.

Dreamer looked around the café. It was certainly a place. A geographical location.

...

She didn’t know what she was doing there, but she figured that she might as well do something while she was there. After all, Abigail had plans for the place. “She mentioned cleaning it up,” Dreamer muttered.

She reached over to one of the tables and swiped a finger across it. It came back covered in grey dust.

“Yup, it’s dirty in here,” Dreamer said before sticking her finger in her mouth.

She frowned. She couldn’t remember ever actually cleaning anything before. Sometimes Abigail would sniff her and decide that she needed a bath. Did that count?

Dreamer looked around the room. It wouldn’t be too hard to fill the entire café with water. Then all she’d need was a lot of soap and a rubber ducky.

Did she need more than one rubber ducky? When she took a bath there was only one that Abigail set in the water next to her, but that was one bathtub of water. Were the number of rubber duckies meant to be proportional to the amount of water used?

She stared around her. How many rubber duckies in volume was a café anyway?

Dreamer rubbed the underside of her chin with a tentacle. Maybe she could ask for help?

She blinked her eyes, those on the body that was currently with Abigail and Daphne and Charlotte. The three of them were sitting at the back of one of their classes, murmuring to each other while working on something. “Hey,” she said.

All three turned to her. “Yes, Dreamer?” Abigail asked.

“How many rubber duckies is a room?”

“... What?”

Dreamer sighed. “Nevermind.”

She’d have to figure it out herself. Or maybe she could ask someone else? Dreamer clapped her tentacles. She had an excellent idea.

When Abigail needed help taking over the planet and being accepted to her academy, she summoned Dreamer. Dreamer could do the same thing! It was a simple and elegant solution, and nothing could go wrong with it.

She wondered where, exactly, to do the summoning, then shrugged and moved out of the café and up to the second floor. It was probably best to do it in the living room. She wanted to summon something alive, after all.

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Dreamer didn’t know much about magic, so when it came time to make a summoning circle, she just got some long, ropey tentacles to form a circle on the floor. She stared at it. It was mostly round, which was a good start.

“Oh, right,” she muttered. She wanted something for cleaning.

She walked around and searched under the sinks, the place which was usually the dirtiest in the house, and where mortals put their cleaning stuff for some unfathomable reason.

After grabbing a tentacleful of cleaning stuff she returned to her summoning circle and placed them here and there. Some soap in one lumpy side, a bit of bleach in the other, a moldy sponge nearer to the middle.

It didn’t look right.

Dreamer huffed and tried to think about what was missing, then it hit her! Magic, Abigail had said, was about balance and symbolism.

She wasn’t home, and didn’t feel like going all the way back, so she sent some tentacles searching through the homes in the neighbourhood until she found what she needed.

First, she found a rubber ducky. But it wasn’t a ducky so much as a rubber bunny. It was close enough, she figured, and she did steal it from someone's bath. They screamed a lot when her tentacle slithered through their wall and scooped it out of their bath, suds and all.

That would represent something clean.

For the dirty part, she grabbed a magical item from under someone’s bed. A wand of cure hysteria, something that Abigail once told her not to touch or talk or even think about because it was so dirty.

She placed both on opposite ends of her summoning circle while not thinking about it.

Now she just needed to actually summon someone!

Dreamer knelt down and placed her hands on her summoning circle tentacles. She gave them a comforting squeeze, then tried to think of something appropriately spell-like to say. She wanted someone clean, so... Ah! That was easy. Abigail often sang sing-song ditties while taking baths.

“Rub-a-dub-dub,

Monster in a tub

Ja kuka luulet olevasi?

Teurastaja, luoja, puhtauden tuoja

Purging dirt and nastiness scrub!”

Dreamer didn’t have magic, so she yoinked some form out of thin air and poured it into the summoning circle.

It wobbled and burbled, magic going wild until Dreamer shoved some of the gurgly bits back down and trimmed off the sharper edges. The world twisted and distorted and wiggled a bit, then, with a soap-bubble pop, someone appeared about a metre off the ground.

“Huh?” The person said. Then they said “Ow!” as they landed on the floor with a heavy thump.

“Hello!” Dreamer said. She was quite happy that her magic had worked. She could tell that this person was from elsewhere, they still had a tendril connecting them to the place they were from, and also they had bunny ears atop their head, which wasn’t normal for people from this planet, at least as far as Dreamer knew.

“Ow,” the person repeated. She shook her head--Dreamer assumed it was a girl because she had a blue skirt on and her top clothes, which were made of metal, had room for chest lumps. “This isn’t the Beaver.”

“No, this is the living room,” Dreamer said. “Hi! Do you know how to clean things?”

***