***GABE***

"I like swimming as much as the next guy, but...mer-boys, Alex? Really?"

"What?" Alex spins around in the water around us, almost whipping me in the face with the business end of his gleaming indigo tailfin. "You say that like it's a bad thing, being mermen."

I glance down at my own tailfin, which is seafoam green with gold scales scattered throughout. I gotta say, it's pretty, uh, pretty, especially with the way the scales smoothly transition into my peach-colored skin around my waistline, but still... "I don't feel like much of a man in this getup, for some reason."

"Why, 'cause you don't know where your dick goes?" I just know he's about to drop that Zoraida Córdova quote, the one he remembers the best, as much as he likes to pretend he's above those kinds of jokes. "'Not to worry...there's a pocket.'"

Hearing my thoughts, he laughs. "Gabe, there's more to the Vicious Deep books than that one line." See what I mean?

I tighten my grip on the serrated harpoon I've apparently been carrying since this dream started. "Can we just go do our mer-dude warrior thing already? I know you're dying to."

He reaches down and, out of nowhere, his own harpoon appears in his hand. Hashtag #BecauseMagic. "Who says we're not mer-dude hunters? Wouldn't warriors use tridents? Like how Aquaman does."

"But we're not Aquaman. Aquaman doesn't have wings." I cast my eyes over to Alex's back, where his wings are plastered to his back, shining darkly against his skin. Okay, how come he doesn't have a green tailfin? At least that would make a little more sense than a green tailfin on me. He does kind of have that greenish undertone to his skin. It really is olive-colored.

"Aquaman doesn't normally have a tailfin instead of legs, either, does he?" Alex wiggles his again, and I think he's enjoying his a lot more than I am mine.

"Maybe when we surface," I say, "our legs will come back."

"Ready to put that to the test?" Alex looks up at the near-infinite blue above us.

"Well..." I look a little lower down myself. "First, don't we have to take care of our incoming horde of enemies?"

Alex follows my gaze and sees the swarming shadowy ugly mofos way off below us. They swirl around in the dark depths of the water like they're made of ink - which they probably are, if they're not some kind of monster straight out of J.K. Rowling's nightmares. Maybe an Obscurus, or a Selkie, or (horror of horrors) a grindylow.

Dear Ms. Rowling,

Your grindylows gave me nightmares for years and made me almost too scared to try calamari.

Sincerely,

Gabe Snow

That's some good fan mail, right? I'll have to remember that and write it down when I wake up. Can I send snail mail between 'verses? What about owl post? I'll have to ask Annie or Harlan about that.

But for now, I've got undersea beasties to take care of with my best bro. Cthulhu's spawn to wrangle. Fish fry to wrap up this Friday night, and it's not even Lent. Yeah, like it really matters what time of the liturgical calendar it is when I'm a little bit removed from the real world.

I get my harpoon ready. In the real world, I'd probably have a ton of trouble lifting this. Even with the muscle tone I've built up in the last couple of years, I'm not used to wielding weapons of this weight for extended periods of time. Although building up my ice powers has helped, because while water elementals aren't particularly well-known for their shredded bods, ice is tougher to work with and takes a little more physical strength.

It's tempting to use powers over weapons, but I'm pretty sure that someday soon, powers won't be enough to take on our enemies. Hell, the last time we encountered Peppermint people (technically the first time, I know, don't nitpick me to death over it), some of them either used actual weapons, or they used their powers in such a way as to resemble weapons. This dream, this scenario of me and Alex being merman warriors, it could provide some good practice.

So, despite the ache building in my biceps, I keep on hefting the harpoon. "This may be a stupid question," I say to Alex, "but do we wait till we see the whites of their eyes?"

Alex looks down at the approaching tentacular navy, the front lines of which are now less than fifty feet away. "I dunno. Is it even possible to see their whites?"

"I guess we'll find out any second."

The swimming scaries stop about twenty feet away, looking up at me and Alex, sizing us up. They've got their own spears and shit, holding them up and pointing them high. I glance over to Alex and see him tighten his grip on his own harpoon, so I copy him. Yeah, monsters, who's got the bigger hard-on, huh?

One of the creeps separates from the rest of the shoal, the horde, the flock, whatever collective term they have for themselves. It swims up to me and Alex, revealing itself to be very much along the lines of what I expected - a swirly mass of coal-black tentacles hanging from the head of a curvy merwoman.

Is it wrong that I kinda wanna do her? Alex thinks.

Kinda... My own thought-voice trails off. But I see what you mean. She's pretty, even with the Medusa thing going on with her hair.

She hisses, as if hearing the thoughts passing between me and Alex. I almost expect her individual hairs to hiss as well, but they're tentacles, not snakes, so they merely stand on end. And bare her breasts too. Needless to say, Alex is mesmerized. Surprisingly, so am I.

Her hissing turns into words in plain English. "So...this is the best the Snow Clan can send us in our time of need." Her hair rises again and, with a mind of its own, slowly caresses Alex's chest, leaving oily black marks reminding me of Harris' powers.

I thought I wouldn't have any sex dreams tonight, he thinks. Not after...well, that's not important.

At least you're not getting off on this, I tell him. Please don't do that in front of me, okay?

The Medusa-looking lady's hair paints lines down Alex's stomach, coming dangerously close to his...pocket. His knuckles pop out as he redoubles his grip on his harpoon, trying not to lose it completely.

"Kelly...what are you doing...?" The words leave his mouth before he can stop himself. "Kel...I'm...I'm not ready for another-"

"This coldwater fighter is ready." She kisses Alex on the lips, then turns around and beckons forward a second member of her army. "Prepare his brother."

The scaly, spear-carrying merperson assigned to me swims up next to his lady boss - and how the hell did it take me this long to realize she was Kelly Jackson in Marvel-grade movie makeup? Which I guess makes sense only when I realize the merman now at her side is a merman version of Harris. Though his skin is, of course, lighter than Kelly's, it's still a lot more greenish and scaly than that of the real deal, and his hair is just as lively a mass of tentacles, though a little more brown than black, and a lot shorter than Kelly's. Still, though, his tentacle-hair is long enough to come to life and touch my chest, leaving long dark lines and a ton of tiny marks from all those suckers. Each time a sucker captures a centimeter of my skin and then lets it go, it feels like a kiss, so multiply that effect by a couple of hundredfolds...no wonder Alex looked like he was on the point of creaming himself.

If only getting tats felt this good in the real world, huh? Alex laughs as merman-Harris finishes the pattern on my torso. Now Alex and I are matching, with three stripes across each pec (the stripes being longer the higher up they are, thus resembling wings) and a double V across our abs. Only now, of course, do I notice that mer-Kelly and mer-Harris have the same pattern themselves, only theirs are painted in white.

Mer-Harris finishes the paint, then swims up and kisses me just like mer-Kelly did for Alex.

"Both ready?" Harris nods to Kelly. "Good," she says.

"I kinda wanna know..." My voice dies in my throat until I clear it. "Uh, what's the secret?"

"To what?" asks Harris.

"These tattoos," Alex says, gesturing to his own markings with his free hand.

Our mer-lovers smile, exposing sharp teeth. "The suckers draw a little bit of blood," says Harris, "and that mixes with the ink in our hair."

"So are there some with white hair-ink?" Alex now gestures to their white tattoos.

Kelly rolls her eyes, then says in the voice of someone explaining things to a little kid, "You should know, coldwater fighters. Your Frost Clan partners."

I glance over to Alex again. You remember any of this in the dream manual?

There's a dream manual? Gee, that'd be hella helpful.

"Let's not prattle." Kelly takes charge once more. "We have Lava Clan scum to scour." Holding out her spear, she swims on, leaving some tiny trails of ink in her wake. I notice now that as the rest of her people (I'll have to ask their clan name) move en masse, they leave similar trails of ink floating in the water. They float ephemerally, but all at once they collect into a bit of a black mass, which probably explains why they looked so menacing when they were coming up to meet us.

We're the Salt Clan, I hear Harris think to me as he swims in between me and Alex. That's why we're all scaly instead of partly scaly like you guys. Not that it makes us any less pretty, does it?

I look Harris up and down. Scales all over, yes, so it's tough to tell where his tailfin begins, other than it's a little more teal or blue, not golden-green like his torso. A torso which, I notice, is wingless. I'm not used to the sight of him not having wings - it's easy to forget sometimes he started out as a human. But you know what? I actually like that look on him. It makes it so much easier to see his shoulder blades and lats working gracefully under his skin as he swims.

And of course I've got the contents of my...pocket...threatening to make themselves known as I think this. So I turn away from Harris - and also from Alex so I don't traumatize him. The last thing I want to do is give him a nightmare, which would make this a nightmare for me too because what if I get trapped in whatever black hole I send his mind warping into?

I keep talking about "intimacy" re: Harris, but let's face it, there's nobody I'm more intimate with than Alex. Sure, we'll never share our bodies with each other, but we think next to nothing of sharing mindspace. Knowing Alex, he doesn't share mindspace easily, if at all, but with me, he can. Even though our age difference is too minuscule to really matter, I, as the official older twin, can't help but want to protect him. Which is funny, because between the two of us, it's Alex who, I think, has more of a hero complex. A "saving-people-thing," as Hermione Granger once said to Harry Potter. He does want to save everyone whenever he gets a chance, whereas me, I don't feel that instinct for anyone and everyone.

Mostly him.

My baby brother.

The Sammy to my Dean.

Alex and his talent for trouble.

Damn, every twelfth word or so out of my mouth today is another Harry Potter reference, isn't it? Well, screw it, I'm a Potterhead and I'm proud.

The water grows warmer as we keep on swimming towards wherever these Lava Clan assbutts live and play. Warmer, and with an orange light growing ever closer, overtaking the blue all around us. Is it possible to sweat while underwater? I feel something stress-related pooling in the pores of my pits. Which, oddly enough, are hairless - now that, even more so than having a solid tailfin from the waist down, is utterly alien, especially after four years or so of having little tufts of dark gold in which to trap my deodorant.

The more orange the water gets, the more we actually see the lava oozing from the rock walls in front of us. Once the veins of white-hot liquid fire become truly visible, mer-Kelly leads us to the left and up. Finally, we're about to surface, but I can't help but feel like we've tripped the Lava Clan's alarms. They must have lookouts camouflaged in the rocks, or even in the lava, watching and waiting to signal their superiors that we the intruders are coming.

Up, and up, and up...and soon we all leap out of the water, landing on a black sand beach straight out of Hawaii. On all of us, our tailfins have vanished, replaced with pairs of legs with heavy drops of saltwater snaking down our shins. The only evidence that any of us are anything but terrestrial lies in our general hairlessness below the crowns of our heads, as well as the loincloths we're all magically wearing, which match the colors (and, roughly, the textures) of the scales on our erstwhile tailfins.

And hey, bonus - no more pocket! That was actually pretty restrictive. A little too much so, even. Like wearing two pairs of skinny jeans simultaneously. Harris bragged about doing that once. Just once. He almost needed a full bottle of extra-virgin olive oil to peel those layers of denim off.

You'll never let me forget that, huh? Harris winks at me.

It's my job to never let you live it down. I wink back, and smile too for good measure.

"So who leads the Lava Clan, I wonder?" Alex asks. "Haha, it's probably Elijah. He usually has no problem-"

"Hey!" One of the other Salt Clan fighters waves his spear in the air, his Southern accent carrying across to us from the middle of the crowd. He brushes his long, seaweed-like golden tentacle-hair out of his face, the better to show us a filthy death glare.

"Oh, there you are," Alex says before turning around and making a "gag me with a spoon" gesture that I happily copy.

"I saw that!" Elijah yells at us.

"You were supposed to!" I say.

He flips us off, and Kelly clears her throat with a rumble that sets off my earthquake senses for a second. That's enough to scare him into retreating back into the crowd for good.

"So if he's not the enemy," Alex asks me, "who is?"

Ahead of us, a river of lava flows into the ocean at the end of this beach, and we now see something rising out of it. No, not something - someone. Someone bedecked in flowing orange-red robes and regalia, wielding a wrought-iron trident with glowing hot tips.

"Little weird, isn't it?" I narrow my eyes at what I can only assume is the Lava King. "Seeing fucking Penner with fire instead of light."

"Don't you remember Sharkboy and Lavagirl?" asks Lava King Penner. His voice crackles a lot more than that of his real-life counterpart, because every time his jaw moves, tiny bits of lava gravel break off his teeth and make crunching noises. "Lavagirl wasn't just fire, you know!"

Yeah, this must be my dream, Alex comments. It's drawing on my repressed memories of watching that movie and kissing the screen whenever- He stops when he hears Kelly laughing into her hand. What? Don't judge. I was two!

I'm amazed you remember that, I say, but don't take too much credit. I bet this dream is mine, 'cause Penner's been screwing around in my life again.

Really?

'Fraid so. He's got this new 'digital possession' thing, and he used it on this guy we just met, TJ Grant - took over his mind through a tablet... I notice Alex's eyes widen when I mention TJ's name. What?

Nothing, nothing...it's just...he's got a twin in Heaven I just met the other day. AK. And get this - Mom says we're their cousins!

A smile breaks out on my face. No shit!

"Enough of this." Penner spreads his arms, looking like an orange male Rita Repulsa, and summons his own horde of lava monsters to stand behind him.

Kelly is first to throw her spear.

Then we all start throwing, ready to impale these burning bastards with extreme-

"Hey, Gabe? Gabe? Wake up, man! We need you!"

"What?"

The beach disappears, and so do all the merpeople and lavapeople. It hits me, hard, that I'm stuck to the sheets, dripping in cold sweat (and of course now I feel it sticking in my pit hair again), with Harris shaking me awake.

"Dude! What...?" I roll away from him and look at the clock on the bedside table. "5:53? Really? God..."

Then I see that the lights are on in our living room.

Instantly awakened and on alert, I run in and see TJ sitting at the kitchen table while Dominic Park makes them both cups of coffee in the microwave. "You need to replenish your supply," Park says, turning around to see me. He then snickers, "Nice underwear, Gabe."

No pants. Right.

"What's going on?" I ask, unable to stop myself yawning afterwards.

"We've got a new mission," Harris says brightly as he walks past me. He must've already had some coffee. Maybe even Mintee Mochaz-style.

"And that's what?" I rub my eyes.

"We're gonna pay that Penner guy a visit and make sure he stays out of my head for good," TJ says.

I stagger forward and plant my ass in one of the kitchen chairs. "Uh...okay. Sure. Couldn't have waited till after sunup to break this news?"

Park removes the coffee cups from the microwave and slides one to TJ before giving me the second. "Nope," he says with a grin that reminds me very strongly of Russell.

I stare into the coffee's surface, barely able to muster the strength to stir it with a spoon.