“Now that I have caught up the students who opened their Dreamscape during their stay on the island, it is time for all of us to move onto the next part of your training. For the past three months you all have been learning to visualize things mentally, and how to control your dreams while you sleep. This has aided you in seeing your Dreamscape and creating objects within. Now we will start to build your Wit. I say build because that is essentially what we will be doing. Building.”

He walked around the room of his Dreamers and handed out a book for each of us.

A Mind Palace - How to Make One and Its Uses

“This is a book written by a man named Fredrick Jameson. Nothing outside of this book is known about the man because he wrote it before The Drowning. However the Coal Empire adopted this technique early in their growth and it helped them dominate the battlefield. Before this most Dreamers had messy unorganized Wits, you could barely call them that in fact. However by creating distinct sections of your Dreamscape you can separate it so you can have multiple different abilities for your Wit. For those that went through The Forest of Living Dreams I would like you all to think back on what you all have learned about yourselves during your trip, and begin planning on what your first ability should be.”

I raised my hand.

“Yes Monty?”

“What would you consider a reasonably good ability? I understand that for each of us it will be different, but would it be better for us to create one to serve a unique function or a combat related one because of the dangers that come with being a Dreamer?”

“Any commander in the military would say that a combat Wit is the way to go, but they only see us as weapons. We are Dreamers, so if one of you guys’ Dream is to never harm and save lives then it would be damaging to try and force out a violent Wit. The best abilities are those that can be used both in and out of combat. Like this.”

A ripple of sky blue light went down Professor Pure’s tattoos and a pair of ethereal blue wings blossomed out of his back. The feathers had little arcs of lightning bouncing between them and the air began to swirl in the classroom.

“With this I can fly, simple, I can also attack using lightning and wind. I can scout, I can travel. I can escape, and I can maneuver.”

Professor Pure let the Wit fade and moved to the blackboard.

“Some of you may have a Dream that is simple and does not require steps to achieve it. To give an example, “I want to kill as many people as possible.” Simple right? Well you choose a method to do so and that’s that. However for something that needs individual steps or has many methods to achieve the Dream it is better to section off your Dreamscape so individual environments or rooms can be made with each piece in mind. For example, “I want to be a chef.” You can break down or generalize the steps as much as you want based on need. Hunting an animal, butchering it, preparing the meat, seasoning, cooking it, serving it. Or a musician, you could seperate based on genre, and instrument.”

He drew the three examples on the board. The murderer one was a cartoony guy holding a knife and the other a guy also holding a knife, but with a little chef's hat, lastly the singer had two knives sticking out of them.

“I have a more complex process for forming my Wit, but simple execution of using it. If you believe you have a simple process for forming your desired Wit, I would recommend talking to Mr. Rider or Professor Alyci. Myself and Professor Liraca have more complex Dreamscape Mind Palaces and can aid you in your creation.”

I immediately knew that a simple one was out of the question for me. It wasn’t that I was looking down on simple Dreamscapes, if two out of four of the professors had simple ones then there must be a reason.

However my Dream could be divided into steps, I would just need to decide on how many. More steps meant more time creating different abilities for my Wit, and possibly more time to upkeep them in my Dreamscape so they did not fade. Less steps, or rooms, meant less focus each ability could have.

Perhaps I would be able to have certain abilities that were more focused and other abilities that were more general.

I had to pause in my note taking because one of the other students asked a question.

“Professor Pure a Mind Palace will help us to create separate abilities but why can’t we just have them all in the same room just in separate piles?”

“Do you shit in the same room you eat? And if your room is messy can you find everything you are looking for? Those were rhetorical by the way.”

He once again moved to the blackboard and erased the three cartoony figures. Then he drew the layout of a typical house.

“Each room should serve a function, even the hallways should you have them. These separations are more of a self imposed mental barrier in your Dreamscape than a physical barrier. Without them your abilities could blur together and interfere with one another. When using an ability within a Mind Palace you are visualizing the room, but if there are no separations then you will see, feel, hear, the other objects that coincide with another ability.”

Then next to the layout of the house he began to draw a map. It seemed to show a small amount of land, but it had rivers, a forest and even a section of rocky terrain.

“My Dreamscapes Mind Palace does not resemble a building at all however. It is not smart to reveal one's abilities casually to one another, however as a teacher I should give a thorough example. My Wit allows me to use the abilities of Nightmares. My Dreamscape is a vast land with many different terrains and inside of those environments is the Nightmare whose abilities I imitate. At one time I had a zoo for my Mind Palace, however even then I could feel that it was not the right structure for my Dreamscape. So my separation is not as clear as a building, but it is more natural for me, and it comes with its own benefits and detriments. You Mind Palace doesn’t even need to make structural sense, it could be a floating island, or the inside could be much larger than the outside might imply.”

That was… very interesting. If what he said was true that meant he had a truly huge Dreamscape, and with size comes volume of Intent. Did that mean that the trees and grass in his Dreamscape were less clear than most other Dreamers Mind Palaces? Could I do something similar? Quantity was a quality in of itself after all.

“As almost everything will dissolve within the Dreamscape over time I will only give you three days to think out what you would like to do. Think of the ability you want and the initial structure you want to try. Also read the book you all received for the basics on how to build a Mind Palace.”

After that he left to go back to the class of non-Dreamers. There had to be a better word for that. Normals? Norms? The Undreamed?

“This is so exciting!” Elina whispered to me.

“Yes. Do you have any ideas for your Dreamscape?”

“No, none whatsoever, honestly Monty, I don’t even really know what my Dream is yet. I’ll need to work on that. What about you?” She asked, sitting back in her chair and blowing a strand of red hair out of her face.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I have some ideas that I will need to work out, I have no idea the structure that I would want for my Mind Palace.”

“A hospital?” Elina supplied.

She had heard rumors, how they spread I do not know, about my trip through The Forest of Living Dreams. Surprisingly she hadn’t been put off by it, at least not openly.

“I do not think that will be terrible for me, but not genuine enough. Hospitals are there to heal people, and I want to do more than that.”

“What about a university? Those places do research.”

“That is true.”

Perhaps, but I had never been to a university before. Would it be special to me if I had no real experience of it? I would need to do research. The more important thing was for me to think up an ability.

He said we had three days to think up ideas, but I wanted to start experimenting now.

I knew that I wanted to become something like a flesh engineer; and any engineer would tell you that the best way to learn about something is to take it apart and put it back together.

My first step would be to take apart, to dissassemble.

Dissassemble was not the same thing as destroy. It preserved the form to the best of their ability to be researched and used later. However a Wit that could just turn a person into an anatomical display with the wave of my hand seemed illogical to me. Cystella told me about Locks, conditions that needed to be met beforehand, during, or costs that needed to be paid after.

Delving straight into Locks was dangerous, anything that required a price could easily end in disaster should I mess up.

What was the most efficient way for me to experiment? Mind Palaces were a series of rooms and each one would be an ability for someone’s Wit. Or was it Wits plural? Was Ravik’s pen one Wit and the paper another? Were the words he spoke another room in his Mind Palace?

I was idly drawing a small diagram of my old house in Eichlin when it hit me. I didn’t need to make a life sized room in order to test out a version of an ability. I could make small versions of rooms and buildings and tap into them for a less powerful version of an ability.

That would decrease the amount of time it would take to form the rooms and decrease the danger to me and others, therefore it would also increase my familiarity on how making an ability worked and increase the effectiveness of each attempt. My hand shook as my mind took off ahead of it. Theoretically as long as the rooms were properly separated I could test out a dozen abilities in the time it would take someone else to do one.

My eyes bore into my notebook. I had drawn a hundred almost perfect squares right next to one another.

“Monty? Helllooooooo?”

I jumped in surprise and looked to my right. The door to the class was open and the last few students were making their way out.

“Lunch,” I stated.

“Yes,” Elina agreed with a cocked eyebrow.

“Why is your eyebrow raised?”

“What?”

“What emotion or implication does the raised eyebrow mean? I assume some sort of disbelief but I feel as though it can also convey that a person feels superior to the other.”

Elina lowered her raised eyebrow.

“I- Lets just go with disbelief,” she finally said.

“Understood,” I said, and took down a note.

—

The more I started to plan on my miniature rooms for testing the more I realized how minute I would need to make things, and how each minute thing may increase or decrease the effectiveness of my Wit.

We were making rooms, and the rooms must be filled. However, what about the walls? Wooden walls? Stone? Glass? What of support beams? Insulation? Doors? And then design itself. Boxy things represented strength and sturdiness. Pointed was dangerous and direct. Round was soft and elegant.

If I were to make a defensive ability, how beneficial would it be to have a wall with a square pattern on it? Would it be less effective if the floor was made of wood instead of stone? What if I made it out of diamond?

And was that all only applicable to me because the way my mind worked. What if there was someone who never looked at design, never at order, who only saw things in the most basic sense. If for them what if it was easier to just have a blank white wall made of stone? No support beams because they do not understand construction. What if it was just a series of identical boxes with things inside? Doors with no hinges and didn’t slide.

That thought sent a spike of unreasonable anxiety through my body.

Inside my dorm room I started to create the first mini-room. It was only to my knee in height and was shaped to be a stone cube. As I wanted this to be as realistic as possible I had measured everything beforehand on paper and then downsized it.

The door was a simple wooden one with hinges and a rounded knob with no lock.

The lights were four everlasting Sun Stones, tinted white by glass, set into the ceiling.

An interesting thing was that I could imagine my vision within the small room because there was no physical body inside the Dreamscape.

Back in the real world I wrote down my experiment.

-

Room Experiment 1

Name- Breakdown

Goal of Room- While utilizing the Wit ability our Intent will be used like a cloud and things within the cloud will begin to break down to their smaller working parts. We will start with mechanical things only.

Room- Cube, Slate.

Door- Wooden, oak, mid-tone brown. Hinged, outward opening. Center on wall.

Exterior Design- None

Interior Wall Design- None

Interior Design- Mechanical devices that are in the process of being taken apart.

Quadrant A- A door lock

Quadrant B- My Grandfather clock

Quadrant C- An old powdered lever action rifle

Quadrant D- A bicycle

Centerpiece- My Stygoscript watch

-

What Cystella had told me a few weeks ago made more sense now with the addition of Rooms. Multiple items in a Dreamscape working together for a larger whole. A room would have items dedicated to helping the Dreamer achieve a single purpose. The more diverse the items the more diverse the ability, which made it more flexible. The more focused the more efficient it will be at doing those things.

The Coal Empire used Mind Palaces for their Dreamers and made their Dreamscapes focused on war, at least most of them I assume. The Empire had been a place of war and industry, and their Dreamers had reflected that.

I often heard adults talk about how the “old days,” and how things were better then. I wondered how the Dreamers of today would stack up against the old Dreamers of the Coal Empire at its peak. Would someone like Professor Pure be considered strong? Weak? Or just average?

What about The One, the leader of the Bronze Isles, or Ridley Refill, or the Queen and King of the Glass Kingdom?

Could I one day stand up to them? Did I even want to?

It took me two days to finish my miniature Room and I was now ready to test it.

The Room I had made now had the five mechanical items inside and each was floating in the air.

“Test one,” I spoke aloud for my singular audience member.

Elina bounced in her seat of the training room. She had wanted to watch, and after letting me watch her take the Awakening Potion I had no reason to decline.

In my hand was a small cheap broken watch that I had purchased with a quick trip to Zuva. I wasn’t going to risk one of my beloved timepieces on an experiment.

Focusing on the Room in my Dreamscape I let the impressions I had put into each part of the Room flow through me and into my Intent. Inside the Room the floating objects began to disassemble into their parts, all of them floating around the items in a cloud of machinery. In my right palm my pure white Intent formed into a hazy cloud, and in the center of it lay the watch.

The two of us in the room stared at the watch waiting for something to happen.

“Are you doing it?” Elina asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said a bit more forcefully.

“Are you sure that you’re sure?”

I looked to Elina and gave her a flat look.

“Of-“

A metallic pop.

My gaze shot down and I saw that the case was now popped open. I moved my head closer and saw the tiny screws of the watch face slowly twisting out of place. The threads that kept the leather strap connected to the lugs was being pulled out. Another click-like pop and the hands were disconnected from the watch face.

It was falling apart, breaking down, right before my eyes. Only slower than I had been expecting.

“Test one. Success,” I breathed.