I'd been vaguely suggesting to @Risukage that it would only be a matter of time before I wrote a parody of her fanfic in the same way as I did for some others. Now, months later, I finally did. Here is the result, in which Lysander is transformed into a sack of flour. She's read it already and approves even though I'm gently ribbing her writing style. As Lysander von Morgensonne awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a sack of refined, bleached, all-purpose flour. He was lying on the logo-side, the whole assemblage weighing upon him as though it were armor-plating, and when he tried to lift his head a little he could see that that would not be possible as he no longer had a head. Thrashing as he did in his sleep before his transformation, the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His plastified skin, which was pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, crinkled helplessly. What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of writing samples was unpacked and spread out-Lysander was a commercial musician in addition to a farmer-hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed him dressed as a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of his forearm had vanished! Lysander's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky-one could hear rain drops beating on the window gutter-made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself towards his right side he had no limbs. He tried it at least a hundred times, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never experienced before. He felt a shifting in the bed next to him, and a dull pressure as an arm came crashing down to rest on top of him. Oh, Lysander thought, that’d be Elliott. Oh, Elliott thought in his half-slumbering state. That doesn’t feel like Lysander. He does not usually feel this cold, or like glossy wax paper. Elliott awoke from his dream-filled slumber, in which he dreamed that he was doing all manner of things to Lysander in his previous, human, form, that were now inaccessible to him, as Lysander was not in the bed, and for some reason that he could not fathom beyond Lysander deciding to do something “quirky” and “random”, there was a bag of flour in it. Now why on Earth would he leave that where he was. It’s not as though I can properly cuddle up to a two-kilogram sack of refined, bleached, all-purpose flour. How mystifying. Elliott got up to go about his day while Lysander screamed at him that he was the bag of flour, silently, because he was a bag of flour and bags of flour do not have vocal cords. Elliott showered, and Lysander had mixed feelings about wanting to share the shower with Elliott and the fact that in his current state, he would melt away into runny, doughy nothingness that would block the drain and the pipes. Elliott checked the grocery list, which mysteriously had flour at the top of it. I suppose that he must have bought some flour, though the eggs, butter, milk, and other miscellaneous et ceteras he didn’t. How strange. Elliott went about writing his next novel, which was the same as the novel he wrote two novels ago, but from a different character’s perspective. How very post-modern I am. How meta. The reviewers will surely smile upon this latest work of mine. Lysander was torn between being encouraging of Elliott’s writing, and wanting him to discover that he had been transmogrified into a bag of flour. When Lysander did not return home by the early hours of the morning, which he could not have, as he never left, Elliott began to worry. It was not like Lysander to do rash and impulsive things… wait, rather, it was absolutely like Lysander to do exactly that category of things, but he usually had the courtesy to warn people when he did them. He climbed into bed and gazed longingly at the bag of flour. “Yes,” he said aloud to himself, and unbeknownst to him, also to Lysander. “it really goes against the grain of Lysander’s personality. What I would do for him to be in this bed at this moment, that I may look at him dough-eyed.” Lysander, who was coming to grips with the possibility of being turned into a bag of flour forever, screamed internally at the unwitting puns that were even more painful to him than that prospect at that moment. They slept uneasily. The following morning, Elliott took a careful look at the bag of flour, thinking it must contain some sort of clue to Lysander’s disappearance. “Truly, today I must investigate his absence,” he said to motivate himself. “It is truly no day to loaf around.” He rotated the bag of flour to find that it was from an unfamiliar brand, one that he never saw stocked in Pierre’s general store, or even the Joja Mart. “Witch’s Curse brand flour…” he mused. “What an awful branding and marketing decision,” he thought. Lysander agreed but was thoroughly mentally aggravated by another pun and how unbelievably obtuse Elliott was being in the face of the fact that he now knew he was transformed into the bag of flour by the witch’s curse. After inquiring around town as to whether anyone had any idea where Lysander might be and where this sack of Witch’s Curse brand flour came from, someone directed him to the wizard’s tower. Elliott hadn’t been one to visit Rasmodius since he was considering selling his soul to some dark powers to gain talent and commercial success at writing and Rasmodius suggested that might be a bad idea, and that he’d be better off writing mass-market serializations using the same central character and similar situations, wrapped in different genre tropes, as people seemed inclined to read that sort of thing these days. Elliott chafed at the idea, and he wasn’t really doing anything with his soul. But today, in the absence of better leads, he would go and revisit Rasmodius and see what he could learn. The wizard received him warmly for all of that past cold treatment and Elliott explained the situation. “Oh,” the Wizard said, “typically when witch’s curses transform people into frogs or other objects, a kiss would do the trick for restoring them. Have you tried that?” Elliott hadn’t, but he said he’d give it a try, closed his eyes, and began kissing the bag of flour with ferocious intensity. He didn’t know whether Lysander was indeed the bag of flour, but if he was, and if he were to transform back, he wouldn’t want him to think he was any less into it than usual. His thoughts were interrupted by a squeeze to his butt and a whisper in his ear that was unmistakably Lysander’s voice. “Nice glutens,” he said. It took Elliott a few seconds to process the fact that Lysander stood before him where the bag of flour once was, and closer to a minute to realize that he had also made a baking-related pun. He smiled. “You know, Lysander,” Elliott said tenderly, “I have been envious of your vast array of sexual exploits with more people of more descriptions than I could count, but I am quite pleased to be able to say that I shall be the only one in all your life to deflour you.” THE END. Post-writing notes: The first two paragraphs are more or less ripped wholesale from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I have been sitting on that closing pun for something like 5 months now and I regret nothing.
Ahh yes, an excellent deconstruction of the fan fiction genre, not only lampshading common tropes, but highlighting the inherent self-awareness that is so often lacking among both readers and writers of such literature. In short, a brilliant snark on my nonsense, and you win ALL the internets. *Standing ovation.*
