Too much YA fiction

As soon as I woke up I made a bunch of scrambled notes. It's not very often my dreaming self is this sarcastic.

The first section is muddled. Something about flying into a giant bank, in disguise. The bank was a huge square cavern, filled with slowly rotating gold coins, each the size of a car, floating in a grid pattern. I had a shopping bag with an Apple logo on it, which I dropped down into the ranks of coins. Was it sabotage, or was I just trying to make a deposit?

The walls shook. Tragic music swelled. All the gold coins began to crumble into dust. Whoops! The item in the bag was some kind of magic artifact from my ancestors. Looks like it didn't react well to banking.

I shrugged my shoulders admist the thundering chaos, poofed into an insect, and flew out the way I came. A short bank teller in coattails nearly caught me with a butterfly net, but I dodged. Outside the huge doors of the bank I landed on the outstretched palms of my friend, and he walked away with me. Mischief managed or something.

Now I was with a group of kids, all high-school age. We were starring in a movie version of some epic book. It was the middle of the movie where we go on a journey, across various fantastic realms. Time for the effects budget to really get cashed in.

Each realm had different architecture and geography. This one was flooded by the ocean, with domed buildings and lots of sharp cliffs. I was pretty sure it was based entirely on that "Thames" logo that ran in front of some British cartoons in the 80's, where the buildings rise up from the riverbank and trumpet music plays. There was no time to actually explore the realms in this movie; maybe later in a sequel. We trudged on, pulling out into a line, so the camera could catch us all in profile.

We approached a giant tower seemingly hanging in space over a mountain range. It was divided into two sections, creating a vertical gap of air between the massive halves. The gap was a quarter of a mile wide. Clouds on either side bent upwards to avoid passing over the gap. There was a structure hanging in the space below the tower and above the mountains, also divided in half, massive and made of shiny metal. It looked like two parentheses pointing outwards.

As we all stood gaping at this, I noticed a sign planted nearby. The sign had a painted white arrow on it pointing helpfully up towards the sky tower. Next to that it said: "Proposed new division between the realms."

"Jesus, they couldn't just do that in dialog?" I muttered to myself.

Now we were walking up the inside of a tower. It was tilted at an angle, as if halfway through the act of falling over, and it was gently turning on its axis, just slow enough for us to walk along the interior walls, which were lined with stair-steps in a spiral, moving up the inside of the tower. It was a sort of inside-out corkscrew of stairs and I thought it was pretty cool. I took out my phone and tried to take a video of the steps as they rotated, but the focus wasn't cooperating. I got everything framed and focused just as we reached the top of the stairs and arrived at a tilted platform.

Some crude, un-official looking stairs had been carved into the rock wall ahead of me, continuing upward, so I followed those, but the steps got softer and shallower until they vanished, and the ceiling got too low to continue. It reminded me of being in a dirt basement underneath a house. I slid back down the stairs on my butt and joined my nephew James, why was trying to open a door on another wall.

I was in a circular meeting hall with several friends. Thick tables were arranged at the walls, set with cutlery, making an outer ring where people could eat and converse. In the middle was a sunken area, making a circular ledge just high enough for people to sit on facing inward. I was seated there, facing a large man standing in the middle. He was entirely red - red skin and a red leather coat - and had sharp looking horns bursting up from either side of his head. He looked a lot like Hellboy. He was an emissary from the adjacent realm, threatening us with war.

"So how does the divide work?" I asked, in a tone with a hint of mocking.

"It works by preventing anything physical from crossing it," he rumbled back.

"Right, so the way it works is, you have no idea. It just does." I shot back nastily.

Hellboy-dude looked annoyed.

"You know, planets are round," I said. "And walls don’t go up forever. Fly up far enough into space and you can just go over the dang wall."

Hellboy grunted and began describing his giant war machines, and the huge engineering project his realm was engaged in, building roads to move his war machines all around and defend the skies from below. He was trying to change the subject, and conceal the stupidity of this whole realms concept.

It was a good try, I thought. I knew these books never held up to scrutiny in their grand metaphorical features. I was on a roll though. "All you'd need to do is drop a few rocks down from orbit onto that road, and blast massive craters in it. Hey, actually can't you just apparate things? Teleport them or whatever? Just teleport the rocks up there, and let the planet rotate them over the wall," I said. I made an arc with my arm. "Fssssnhh, boom! Fuck your roads!"

One of my friends leaned in to my ear. "You can't just apparate objects," he said.

"Yeah but you can carry them. So have someone teleport up there carrying a rock, drop it, and teleport back. Hold your breath or something. Wear a fishbowl. Duh."

There was a general muttering around me. Hellboy-boy looked exasperated. He stepped aside, as big doors opened at the other side of the hall. Some people began pushing a big marble statue into the center of the room on a wheeled platform, along a trench cut into the floor connecting the center with the doors.

"Besides," said another man, "we can’t apparate any more. Not since You-Know-Who. He started the apparate keys back up again while he was alive but they stopped again when he died."

"... I don't think that's canon," I said. "Are you telling me that all those people who were going to the Tri-Wizard Tournament, or football games or whatever, were teleporting there using magic enabled by Whats-His-Face?"

More muttering, but no coherent reply. Hellboy-guy stared at his cloven feet.

The statue arrived in the middle of the room and stopped. It was Voldemort. The bone-white statue had glowing red eyes that darted around the room. Obviously the real Voldemort was hiding inside the statue and would burst out of it at a dramatic moment, sowing chaos. "Oh the drama," I thought. "Why is this even in here?"

His eyes locked onto me.

I stood up, took a deep breath, and bellowed: "STOP STARING AT ME."

The whole room shook, rattling the tableware. The pictures fell from the wall. I bared my teeth, and long red spikes of fire extruded from my eyeballs towards the statue. I hissed at it, sounding a bit like an upset goose, which was rather anticlimactic.

The statue broke eye contact with me and began looking elsewhere around the room, avoiding my face. I sat down, satisfied.

"That’s right," I reminded myself. "I am as powerful as a god in this universe. No wait, I am god in this universe."

" ... How boring," I thought. And woke up.