The first thing you notice is the mist; grey and swirling, but not cold or threatening. You look around curiously, not frightened at all. There’s nothing in this mist to fear, you sense. You walk down the smooth road in front of you as you look around, and pretty soon you see a glow of purple up ahead. You hurry forward, wondering what it could be.

It’s a sign above a parking lot that says, in neon purple letters, "The Realm of Insanity." Maybe you’ve heard of it; maybe not. At the moment all you can do is gape at the various vehicles packed into the small parking lot. Apparently they’ve just been shoved in wherever they could be crammed the best, in several strange arrangements that seem physically impossible. If anyone wanted to get out, everyone would have to move their stuff. And ‘stuff’ is accurate. A small plane is up against the trees on one side while some sort of spacecraft is on the other. A giant, rusted-out Dodge van seems to be the central point of the mechanical mess (although the string of horses doesn’t APPEAR to be made of metal...) in a way that indicates that it was the first to arrive, and the rest of the cars, vans, trucks, hovercraft, and whatever (you see an Optimus or two in there somewhere) are piled around it.

After a couple minutes of trying to identify some of the weirder modes of transportation you finally turn your attention to the building behind the parking lot. Two stories tall, with scaffolding showing that another level was in construction, it dominates the area behind the ‘parking’ lot (you’re willing to bet that very little actual parking was involved). The windows are brilliantly lit, and even from where you are standing you can see that there are people chaotically milling around inside and hear the revelry. Curious, you pick your way through the maze of vehicles and climb the steps to the wrap-around porch.

"Halt!" someone bellows, and you freeze as one of the shadowed areas between the lighted windows produces a manta ray robot bearing a chain saw in one hand and an empty beer stein in the other. He blinks at you in drunken thought. "You gotta invitation?" Depth Charge asks with a slur in his voice.

You fumble awkwardly in surprise, but the double doors in front of you open before you have to make an excuse. Rampage stumbles out holding two full steins, obviously more intoxicated than the ray-bot.

"Don’t need a invitation ta go in," he hiccups. "It’s open ta all!"

You edge past the two as they sway their way back into the shadowed area, already forgetting that you are there. The doors had swung shut behind the crab, so you have to struggle to open one of them before you can slip in. You stop, completely taken off-guard at the sight in front of you while behind you the doors close silently.

The bar running up one side of the huge room has a young woman with a microphone bouncing around on top of it with another, slightly more sober Rampage as she calls out line dance steps (blatantly ripped off from Dilbert) to the shambles of a line dance on the floor below. "Slap your partner in the face, write bad checks all over the place--"

That’s not the part that startles you. Even the fact that a good half of the people attempting to dance are following the instructions to the letter isn’t the startling part. No, it’s the shock of seeing the open expressions of grief and, strangely enough, joy on every face.

Ten or twelve Depth Charges are on the dance floor or sitting at the tables, either too drunk or too sunk in their grief to notice the Rampages scattered around the room. A wildly finned femme is sitting at a corner table near the back of the room by a swinging door, changing colors constantly from blue/gold to dull black to multicolored as she stares into the drink she’s holding on the table. Next to her one of the Rampages is trying to talk to her. The Cheetors in the room are varied in appearance and apparent maturity, but you hear one of them wail something about a ‘Big Cat’. A couple of Rattraps walk by talking about how well they’re dealing with the death of Dinobot.

Most of the humanoid creatures in the room are crying, but everyone still seems to be having a pretty good time despite the tears. It makes you wonder what’s going on, but suddenly someone grabs your hand and you find yourself being drawn into the stomping crowd of dancers by a Depth Charge. "Dance!" he urges you, and then the woman on the bar shouts instructions for an actual line dance. You follow them almost instinctively as her voice quickens, coaxing rowdier moves out of the press of people around you.

"Swing your partner ‘round and ‘round, now let go and touch the ground! Get back up and ‘round you go, now switch partners--don’t be slow!"

You’re passed from partner to partner in the steadily faster, whirling dance. Faster and faster and faster until faces blur into each other and your last partner lets you go to grab onto somebody else, leaving you leaning against the bar dizzily. Half-laughing, half trying to calm your breathing, you turn away from the crowd to face the bar.

The woman leaves the dancers to their fate (no one’s listening anymore, anyway) and jumps down behind the bar as you sit down on one of the tall chairs (NOT barstools) before it. She stands in front of you holding some sort of power tool while you recover from the breathtaking romp still going on behind you, and you immediately notice her T-shirt. It’s black with white letters declaring ‘Don’t Annoy The Crazy Person’.

She gives you a lopsided grin when she thumps the tool onto the bar in front of you. "Most bartenders polish the bartop with a rag or dishcloth," she tells you as she checks a few dials on the power tool and puts on some safety glasses. "I prefer a Power Sander 3000."

She turns it on.

"RRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRRR--"

"What’s your poison?!" she yells over the noise.

You nervously move your hands away from where she’s concentrating on the bartop. "Um..." You look at the menus on the wall behind the bar and blink at the selection...and the prices. Each drink and food item has a list of prices in different currency. None of them top pocket change, and at the end of the lists (which have obviously been added onto several times) there’s even a paying option of ‘Washing Your Own Dishes’.

"Sorry ‘bout the prices!" she yells again when she looks up from her sanding and notices you looking at the menus. "I had to up them to pay for The Realm’s additions!"

"--RRRRr-rrr-rrrrr-RRRRR!!!!!"

You pick a couple of random items off the menus (you don’t recognize most of them anyway) and shout them at her. She nods and turns off the power sander, then rubs her hand on the bartop.

"See? Works like a charm. Gimme a second here while I get your drink..." A few moments later she plops a glass of something down in front of you and waves her hand at the color-changing femme in the corner. "Order up, Overdose!!" she screams above the dancers’ excited shouts and cheers.

You see Overdose perk up and launch herself from her chair towards the swinging door and wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. By the time you’ve turned away from watching the mass of dancers, though, the woman wearing the T-shirt is back with a plate of some sort of food. You poke at it with a fork (it looks edible, but it’s too hot to try at the moment) before asking her a question.

She raises an eyebrow. "I’m Lady Dementia, The Demented Angel. I own this place." She looks at you silently for a minute before grinning again. "You must be new here. Sorry ‘bout not introducing myself right away, but with this many people around my memory isn’t that reliable for picking out strangers. Um..." her eyes cross briefly, "...there’s something I’m supposed to tell the new customers...I can never remember--OH! Yeah. There’s The Realm’s only rule," she points at the sign up above the menus, "so make sure you obey it. And have a good time, okay?"

Lady Dementia yelps and laughs as the Rampage she had been dancing with when you came in charges behind the bar, slings her over his shoulder, and carries her off. You’re left looking up at the sign, which says ‘Don’t Annoy The Crazy Person’ just like her T-shirt, and you wonder once again what you’ve gotten yourself into.

Later on you’ve stopped wondering and are just enjoying yourself. Everyone is having a great time, and you’ve gotten caught up in several strange discussions that range from serious to hilarious and break up the moment another topic comes up. You complimented Overdose on her cooking and danced half a song with her as a result. Lady Dementia gave you a couple free refills on your drink and pointed you towards the game of Tall Tales going on in the corner (you promptly snorted half of one of your refills through your nose at Rhinox’s Tall Tale involving his invention of Duct Tape). You started a Pun-All contest and conceded the victory to an atrocity thought up by one of the Megatrons, who then made a wisecrack at Optimus that started another Pun-All on another subject different than the original one. It took a while because someone wanted to get their car or whatever out of the parking lot so everyone had to pile out of the building to clear a path, but the last four contestants decided to settle for a tie: Overdose ("Welcome to the Buddhist Hamburger Joint: we’ll make you one with everything!"), TM2 Dinobot ("Welcome to the Junkies Hotdog Stand: we’ll sell you one with the works."), Airazor ("Welcome to the Jewish Burger King: we make it Yahweh!"), and Inferno ("Welcome to the Hacker’s Fast Food Hut: you can have chips with it!").

You wander upstairs to The Realm of Insanity’s Fanfiction Library and spend a little while talking to the Librarian, Dawn, as she shoos the drunken Bouncers out of the Library (you don’t ask what they were doing there--quite frankly, you don’t want to know). She recommends several fanfics to you after talking with you and invites you back sometime when you’re more inclined to sit down and read. You accept Star’s offer of a tour of The Realms Fanart Gallery that’s temporarily set up in the corner of the Library (part of the third story that’s still being built is apparently going to house it later) and laugh out the windows at the weird antics of the crowd below.

Then you think to wonder why there’s a crowd outside of The Realm. So you go downstairs again to find out.

To your surprise you find that you had actually arrived early; The Realm of Insanity has continued to fill to the point where The Demented Angel has made a temporary bar inside her Dodge van and declared a tailgate party in the parking lot for the overflow (and there is much rejoicing...). You wander around greeting those you know and meeting new people for a while.

It’s gradually starting to bother you more and more that even those who are smiling in this huge gathering are obviously grieving, too. Those who can are crying; those who can’t occasionally look like they want to when they’re not laughing. You want to know why, but it seems like an awkward question to ask of the people you see as you make your way back to the bar. At least it seems awkward until The Demented Angel appears before you again asking if you’d like a refill.

You say yes, and then you ask what’s going on.

The happy, cheerful look drops off her face, and you suddenly notice that her eyes are also tear-bright. She looks past you at the crowd like she’s thinking, and just when you’re starting to fear that she won’t answer her eyes turn to meet yours again. When she speaks her voice is somber, sad, and quiet, but you can still hear her clearly over the party.

"It’s something like an Irish Wake," she explains. "We’re partying in the memory of friends and family who are gone. We remember them and honor their memories by having a great time. You see, when the fanfic stops the pain doesn’t, and there really isn’t anything these characters can do about it until their authors write more." A look of grief passes over her face briefly, but she distracts you by pointing at the dancing Depth Charges. "Most of them are in mourning over Omicron, so they’re letting it out through activity since it’s practically useless to try and kill Rampage, or anyone for that matter, off-fanfic. The author would just write on, and he’d come back the same as ever. He probably wouldn’t even remember being killed. These characters can’t really die; words created them, but the ideas behind the fanfics make them all immortal. Take them, for example." She points again, this time at an entire group of characters, both Predacons and Maximals, who are sitting or standing around a table. "Their author died," she continues sadly, her tears shining brighter as you both stare at the slumped shoulders and hopeless expressions gathered around the table. "They’ll probably never be used again in a fanfic unless another author takes up the series, but here they are. They can’t die, they can’t change, and they know their biggest fan, their author, is gone. They’ll mourn forever for her. She was all they had..." Lady Dementia sighs. "I pity them."

You glance around the room with what she’d said in mind, and this time you begin to recognize characters from fanfics you’ve read with new eyes; suddenly their grief makes sense. Something inside you vibrates with their grief, reminding you of your own memories and past.

Lady Dementia ducks beneath the bar for a second, and when she comes back up she’s holding a can of Wild Cherry Pepsi. Clearing her throat, she climbs up onto the bartop and stands tall. "Alright, you hoolagins," she orders sternly, "quiet down!"

The revelers who can hear her spread the news, and soon The Realm of Insanity is calm (well, relatively). The ones inside crowd closer to let in as many people outside in as they can, and those who can’t cram into the doorway and open windows; everyone senses that some important announcement is going to be made by the bartender who is now looking silently down at her feet, tears sparkling on her cheeks. Even the Librarian and Star come downstairs, shooing the Bouncers before them again. You vaguely wonder how they got upstairs again and what exactly they were doing THIS time before returning your attention to the bar.

The young human woman looks up again, and her eyes travel around the room. "Grief can weaken us and lead us into despair," she says softly to you all as the tears stream down her face, "and despair can destroy us. But if we share that grief and celebrate it, sometimes it doesn’t hurt as badly. Tonight helped you, I hope, and I’m planning on holding one of these Wakes whenever I feel it’s necessary. But for tonight, I propose a toast. The All-Purpose Toast."

Lady Dementia raises her drink high, saluting the mourners in her Realm of Insanity, and they all return the favor, you included. A lopsided grin flashes through her tears.

"To all the ones who weren’t so lucky."

The roar that returns The Demented Angel’s toast almost deafens you, but you find yourself shouting just as loudly as anyone. You have your own grief to celebrate and ease, and this Toast touches a nerve.

"TO ALL THE ONES WHO WEREN’T SO LUCKY!!!"

She’s picking up chairs and righting tables when she finds you relaxing underneath one. You dimly remember laying down after that last refill she brought you. Right now you are involved in counting the number of knots in the wood of the table, but she moves it and interrupts your counting.

"Having fun?" she asks, completely without sarcasm.

You smile up at her and nod, then accept the hand she extends towards you to help you to your feet. She puts up with your stumbling and exhausted ramblings with patient amusement while she guides you towards the door gently. She even tries to answer all of the questions you ask her about the people and whatnot you had seen last night.

"If you hadn’t come so early and stayed so late, you would probably be able to answer half of these questions," she says wryly when you pause for breath as you reach the door. "I’d let you crash in one of the rooms up in the third story, but there are only a couple completed yet and they’ve already been claimed." She directs a suspicious look up the building as you gape in amazement at the mostly-empty parking lot while slowly getting down the steps. "The Bouncers got one. I really need to do something about those two..."

You’ve regained your breath and gotten over the shock of seeing the lack of chaos in the parking lot (when had everyone left? You can’t remember...). She laughs and starts answering your questions again. When one of them doesn’t get a response, it catches your attention. You ask it again.

She helps you walk across the parking lot and to the road into the mist before answering. "Why hold a Wake?" she repeats wearily. "Because even The Demented Angel weeps." She gives you a gentle shove into the gray mist. "Come back anytime. I’m almost always here, and I like visitors."

And Lady Dementia turns and walks away towards The Realm of Insanity as you start towards home again. She doesn’t look back.

Back to Lady D. Fanfiction Index