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The plane's wheels thumped down with a jolt. Sam was staring out the window—he'd seen a lot of sunny, dry red desert before they got to the city landscape, all slightly different in character from anything in America. Beside him, Dean made a queasy sound even though the jolt wasn't anything worse than a thousand speedbumps they'd rolled over in the Impala.
"No kangaroos yet," Sam commented, hoping to distract from his brother's airsickness. "Some funny-looking white birds, though...I wonder if those are…"
And then abruptly, everyone on the plane was frozen motionless, absolutely still.
“What…” Dean just had time to say, before a teenager appeared out of thin air, storming down the aisle towards him. “Who…”
“You thought you could get the jump on me, eh?” the boy spat. “Well, I got news for you chumps, I saw you coming from miles away! I’m not gonna let you just waltz in here like you can hunt anywhere you want! This ain’t America anymore, you’re on my ground now!”
Sam carefully looked as confused as possible. It was pretty easy since that was how he felt. “I think there’s been some misunderstanding,” he started, but the boy looked even more furious.
“Shut up! You’re not going to talk your way out of this!”
“Listen, kid,” Dean cut in, “We’re not…”
Abruptly, the plane stretched, wavered, and dissolved around them and they were somewhere else. Somewhere outdoors, with the great blue dome of the sky arcing overhead and trees towering above them.
Those trees were amazingly gigantic. Sam hadn’t realized there were trees that big here. But something was off; he couldn’t move, or not much anyway—he felt oddly stiff and...small. It wasn’t just the trees, there were giant blades of grass surrounding him, and rough dirt and mushrooms the size of his arm.
“Dean!” Sam yelled, because no matter how unfamiliar the situation was, its seriousness would always depend on whether he could see if his brother was okay.
“I’m here, Sammy,” Dean said from close by.
Their voices sounded weird. Sam could have almost missed the change to his own, but Dean’s usual growl was decidedly less deep, and odd-sounding. Sam managed to turn his head (it rotated like it was on a pivot, even if he couldn’t seem to tilt up or down) in the direction of the sound.
“Oh bleep…” There was a life-sized lego man wearing what looked a lot like Dean’s plaid shirt and jeans. Except Sam had a terrible suspicion that it probably wasn’t life-sized at all—it was just the same size as Sam was, right now, too. “Dean? Is that you?” He frowned. "Why can't I say bleep?"
“Sammy,” growled the lego man, dashing Sam’s faint hopes that this was not actually happening, “I’m gonna kill this sonuvableep—oh COME ON. Just because we've been turned into kids' toys, we can't swear now? Why are we toys in the first place?”
But Sam’s attention was caught by something past lego Dean in his field of vision. “Holy bleep, what the bleeping bleep is that?”
Dean, painfully slowly, figured out how to rotate his head too. “It’s a giant spider, Sam,” he said, remarkably calmly given the circumstances. “Why the bleep is there a spider that big, Sam?”
“I think we’re actually just that small, Dean,” Sam said. “We should probably see if we can move.”
Moving was not too much of a challenge. They weren’t actually paralyzed, even if it felt like it. They could pivot their heads, swing their arms and legs, and bend at the waist, like any good lego toy man.
The problem was translating those motions into actually standing or walking, much less running from a giant spider that could probably jump over their heads and land a foot away from a standing start. A lot of panicked flailing got them flipping off the ground and cartwheeling through the air: gravity had less effect than they were used to. Sam landed on his head, bounced into a flip and a half, landed face down, and reflected that it was probably actually a good thing, once the surprise wore off, that they were so durable and lightweight and able to lever themselves around with so much strength, or they’d probably be stuck on their backs like stranded turtles.
“Oww,” groaned Dean. Sam was pretty sure he was more complaining than actually hurt, because his own plastic body hadn’t actually taken any damage despite the instinctive freaking out of the human mind about landing at a bad angle on the face.
“Are you actually hurt?” he asked.
“No, you’re right,” Dean answered. “I’m not feeling any pain, here.”
“Of course, the pain could be just being stored up for when we get our real bodies back,” Sam hypothesized, pushing himself up with his arms and rocking a little to try and gauge the force he needed to stand without falling over.
Dean suddenly tumbled over in a graceless somersault. “Look out!”
The giant spider was moving toward them. “Oh, shoot!” Sam yelled, and flipped himself into the air again, trying to put distance between himself and the spider. Its spindly spider legs were much longer than he was tall. Sam hated it when monsters were bigger than he was. "Oh, hey, I can say shoot."
Dean was cursing a bleeping streak as he tried to run on his stiff, square lego legs. “Can’t believe the Aussies wouldn’t let us bring any guns, gobbleepit! How do they expect people to live with giant bleeping spiders everywhere around here if you can’t even shoot them?”
“If we were normal sized, we probably wouldn’t need to shoot the spider, Dean,” Sam pointed out, trying to be reasonable. “Just get out of there!”
“I’m trying…” Dean leapt over a few mushrooms in his way, tumbled and landed in an awkward spin, but before he could get back upright the spider was on top of him. “Sam! Don’t let it eat me!”
“Don’t worry, plastic is indigestible by nearly all eukaryotes, you’ll be fine!”
The spider reared up and spat blue webbing out of its rear end at Dean, using its two front legs to roll him over as it kept spitting web until he was wrapped all up in the stuff, hopelessly tangled considering his flexibility right now was almost nothing.
“I’ll kill you, you junkless wonder! Let me go!” He struggled against the blue webbing but the spider just started pulling on the ropes, dragging him across the rough ground as he yelled.
“Dean,” Sam yelled, uselessly. “Hang in there!”
“Do not tell me to hang anywhere right now, Sam!” Dean yelled. “Hanging from a spiderweb is the last thing I want to do!”
“Okay, yeah, fine, whatever!” Sam looked around. “Hold on, I’m going to see if I can pick up that stick!”
“Hurry!”
The spider had succeeded in dragging him where it wanted him: there was a massive blue spiderweb stretched across the ground and it deposited Dean in the middle of it. It stood over him, hissing and clicking, heaving with breath from the effort of moving him, head warily tracking Sam as Sam tried to circle around it.
There was a stick—twig, really, considering Sam’s size right now—but it looked just the right size for Sam to fit in his stupid yellow half-circle plastic hand, and that was the important thing. He picked it up and swung experimentally. He couldn’t do side to side, really, but he had a great up-and-down swing, and if he added a little twist of the wrist as he completed the swing…yeah, that worked. Except he’d have to be careful not to overbalance himself with a hard swing.
“All right, Leggy, you’re going down,” he growled as he turned to rescue his brother.
But as he turned, he became aware of a great shadowy shape a little way distant. A person, a regular-sized human, more than big enough to swallow him whole (if anybody was actually inclined to eat legos, he reminded himself: thankfully indigestible plastic) but unmistakably standing there watching them.
It was the kid, the teenage boy from the plane. The one who’d done this to them. And suddenly, Sam saw something about the tilt of his face in the sun, and he had a flash of memory: a small plastic toy Castiel, complete with trenchcoat and upraised blade, and the boy who’d transfigured the angel effortlessly, afraid of what he might do. ”Jesse? Jesse Turner?”
“Yeah, duh,” Jesse rolled his eyes. “Don’t try to pretend like you weren’t here for me, I’ve been waiting all this time for someone to come after me…”
“Listen, kid,” Dean said, “Hate to break your little me-me-me bubble there, but we were not thinking about you at all until you decided to come at us for no reason. So can the crap and turn us back to regular human, okay?”
“You’re lying,” Jesse narrowed his eyes. “You lied to me back when I was just a kid, and you’re lying now. I don’t blame you, I understand you have to for your job, but it just means I can’t believe anything you tell me, right?”
Sam and Dean exchanged looks. It was a lot harder to emote when their faces were made of yellow plastic with painted lines drawn on them. Yeah, the lines that represented their mouths moved when they talked (magic was ridiculous sometimes) but it wasn’t the same as being able to read a real expression. Still, Sam had a pretty good idea what Dean was thinking: Oh, come on!
“Jesse,” Sam said. “It’s good to see you’re doing okay.”
Jesse crossed his arms and snorted, but didn’t argue out loud.
“If you want, I can tell you why we came to Australia, and you can judge for yourself if it’s more likely we’re here for that, or here to try and trick you somehow.”
Jesse grinned nastily. “Maybe I’d rather see you fight it out with that spider, actually.”
Sam rotated his head around to look at the spider, still hovering menacingly over lego Dean, wrapped and trapped in blue spiderweb. He looked back at Jesse. "Come on, without any weapons? What kind of fight is that?"
Jesse tilted his head, but then shrugged. "Okay, fine," he said, and suddenly Sam was holding a plastic semiautomatic in his free hand, while his twig transformed into a tall, vicious war-axe.
"Alright, now we're talking," Dean yelled. When Sam looked, he was holding a long plastic machete. "This thing better be sharp, kid." He started whacking away at the web surrounding him. Luckily, it seemed to slice the strands apart just fine, although Dean was somewhat constrained by his shoulder only letting his arm swing straight up and down.
Sam took the opportunity to propel himself into the air in a big leap at the spider's head, bringing his axe down on it in an impressive strike for the circumstances. But his angle was off, unable to adjust as he was used to in his regular body, and the flat of the blade hit instead. The spider immediately retaliated by spraying him with web as he tumbled to the ground in front of it, trying awkwardly to roll to his feet.
But Dean was working himself free, getting more practiced as he swung the machete again and again. "It's all in the wrist, Sam," he called, and Sam took an experimental chop at the stuff with his axe, twisting his wrist at the end of the swing to really increase its punch. It cut through just like Dean's machete did, but at the same time the weight of the swing sent Sam flying back out of the path of the spider, trailing a line of web behind him as he went.
Dean hopped and whacked through it as Sam flew, so it didn't bring him up short, and he hit the ground and rolled, clunkily, managing to scrape off the stuff still clinging to him. The spider made angry clicking noises at them and charged at Dean again, but Sam pointed his rifle at it and squeezed, hoping desperately that if the machete and axe were functional despite being made of plastic instead of steel, this weapon somehow would be, too.
Despite the gun not exactly having a trigger or, indeed, Sam having any fingers, squeezing his yellow plastic lego hand around the gun's grip did accomplish what he meant it to, and the gun spat a hail of rat-a-tat-tat projectiles at the enormous spider, which juddered angrily and backed off.
"Yaaaahhh!" Dean didn't hesitate to charge it, brandishing his sword wildly, and the spider clearly rethought its life choices and decided they weren't worth the trouble.
"I nearly shot you, Dean," Sam protested—it had taken his hand a second to unclench.
"With your aim? I'd like to see you try," Dean shrugged it off, then craned his body backwards at the waist to look up at the giant figure of Jesse. "Anyway, we got bigger worries."
Jesse looked like he was pouting a little that they'd driven off his spider. "I can summon more spiders," he warned them. "Other stuff, too. Scorpions. Snakes."
"Please don't," Sam said, feelingly. "What if we agreed to leave and not bother you any more?"
"You'd leave Australia entirely?" Jesse squinted suspiciously. "That easy, after you just got here?"
"Yes. You beat us, we give up, we just want to go back home now," Sam said, trying not to sound exasperated.
"Wait, we do?" Dean asked. "I was totally going to stab him with my machete a few times until he turned us back to regular human."
"Turning us back to human would have to be part of whatever deal we made here, of course," Sam said smoothly.
Jesse scowled. “Well, duh, I can’t leave you running around as lego people forever. But I could just kill you instead.” Despite his tough words, he didn’t look too enthusiastic about killing them, Sam was happy to note.
“Yeah, and cause the end of the world when the big bad we’re fighting doesn’t have us keeping him down anymore?” Dean had finally caught on to the strategy, which was not ‘kill the bad guy,’ this time. Today’s strategy was, ‘negotiate with the surly teenager.’ “Unless maybe, you want to do our job and fight whichever bozo thinks he’s in charge of heaven or hell this time?”
Jesse visibly quailed. “I don’t think…”
“I bet he’d do fine, with his powers,” Sam offered generously. “Not to mention all the lesser monsters running around slaughtering people.”
“And ghosts,” Dean added. “Unquiet spirits gotta be laid to rest by someone, or they’ll cause no end of havoc.”
Jesse cringed. “I don’t do ghosts! Look, I don’t actually want to kill you guys, I just want you to go away and leave me alone.”
Dean pretended to consider. “And how do we know you’re not a public safety hazard, if we do? Last time we met, it was because some pretty gruesome things were happening to innocent people around you.”
Jesse was shocked and indignant in a way that looked genuine. “I haven’t! I don’t! Not since I came here. I never meant to hurt anybody, you knew that."
"Yeah, we did," Sam said more gently.
"Then why are you here," Jesse practically wailed.
"Because, you young idiot," Dean yelled, "We were chasing an alpha ghoulpire and he came running down here to your bleeping island continent!"
Jesse froze and looked very uncertain. "What?"
Dean would have folded his arms if they hadn't currently been stiff unbendable plastic. "You heard me."
"A ghoulpire? That's not really a thing. Is that really a thing?" he appealed to Sam.
Sam held out his stiff arm and rotated his hand back and forth at the wrist: so-so. "They're called Nachzehrer, actually. Ghoulpire is a terrible name that Dean made up."
"But accurate!" Dean had to point out.
"And this one was definitely killing people," Sam continued relentlessly. "Lots of people, if you add it up over time. We decided it was worth the trip to make sure he was stopped."
"Oh." Jesse scuffed a foot, suddenly looking very awkward. "So when I attacked you on the plane…"
"We did try to tell you at the time that we weren't here for you," Sam said. To his credit, he didn't huff. ...Well, he didn't huff much. It was barely audible.
"Yeah, okay fine," Jesse mumbled indistinctly.
"Does this mean you'll turn us back into people now so we can go kill the ghoulpire and get out of your hair?" Dean pressed.
"I guess," Jesse sighed, then flared one last bit of defiance. "But you can see why I'd be afraid that you were here for me!"
"There's an important lesson in here about not allowing panic to make you do rash things instead of listening to people who might have information you don't, but how about we skip that for now and just move on to the part where we get our regular bodies back," Sam suggested.
The spider was eyeing them from a safe distance, somewhat sulky-looking, so Jesse nodded and all of a sudden they were growing, flesh softening and skin fading from bright primary yellow to their normal pale skin-tone.
"You might not want to stay in the sun too long, down here," Jesse commented, eyeing it. "But whatever. Are we done?"
"What about the people on the plane with us? Are they going to think we magically disappeared?" Dean asked.
"Yeah, and what about our luggage? How far are we, even, from the airport?" Sam added.
"No, I messed with their memories, they won't remember you even being on the plane," Jesse told Dean. "And your luggage has already been confiscated by airport security," he cocked his head, listening to something far away. "They've got a team going through it as we speak. Didn't anyone tell you you can't import weapons to this country without, like, a mile of paperwork?"
Dean groaned. "I hate flying. How soon can we go back to America?"
"Depends," Sam said. "Jesse, want to help us hunt a ghoulpire?"
Jesse shuddered. "No way. You are totally on your own for that." He vanished suddenly out of existence, a soft pop of air rushing to fill the space where he'd been.
"Wait!" Sam called, belatedly. "You didn't say how far we are from the airport!"
END