The pipsqueak was Agwyn. Elrhain groaned, then tried to push her away, but she kept crying and slathering his lab coat with tears and snot.

She hugged him tight, wailing louder.

“There, there. It’s okay.” Elrhain gave in and patted Agwyn’s quivering shoulders. His girlfriend, like him, was no longer in her toddler body.

She still had dhionne features. Leafy-long blue hair, chalk-white skin with floral tattoos, her violet blush, and big lilac eyes glossy with water. All beautiful.

But her figure was like when she was a human, in her late twenties at the prime of her life, with no physical alterations she had done in her later decades. And she wore the same Gigantomachy exogear she had worn before her death.

It took a few more minutes for her to calm down. She sat on Elrhain’s lap as he leaned against the corridor wall, scrutinizing his face with fear and relief.

“Hey, handsome.” Agwyn shadowed a smile, kissing him. “Why did you leave me?”

“Hi to you too, Hilda.”

“I’ll follow you if you die!” Agwyn beamed at her past life nickname, then kissed him again.

“Don’t promise that!”

They laughed and let the silence take over again.

“We can talk about this later. Let’s figure out what the hells happened and where we are.” Elrhain stood up, dragging a hug-a-holic Agwyn along. It wasn’t hard. She was thirty centimetres shorter than he was, which was a nice thing for a change since the toddler Agwyn was half a centimetre taller than toddler Elrhain.

“Mm-hmm. Okay.”

“How did you get across? I didn’t see you.” Elrhain asked, peering at the other side. The runic chains twisted and stretched along with the floating debris. There were broken fragments of holo-material doors and steel plates moving ever so slowly in a strange pattern. They seemed to float downwards.

The layout looked strangely organized despite the apparent randomness.

“I jumped up in a trajectory and glided,” Agwyn said, pointing at a few free-floating flotsams without runic chains. “I figured they were like objects in free space. So, I could probably make it across if I angled my jump right.”

“Ahhh.” Elrhain nodded. He really didn’t think things through. Rather than a typical platformer game, it was a platformer in zero gravity.

“How is it over on your side?” Elrhain asked before explaining what he had seen in his side of the mindscape.

“That’s about it. Oh, right!” Said Agwyn. She carefully inched closer to the edge of the derelict dream corridor and pointed down. “I saw a door down there while I was gliding across. There it is.”

Elrhain followed her finger and saw the mesh. Rather than a door, it was more like a jury-rigged gate. Multiple broken door frames, holo-material detritus, alloy energy pipes and electrical wiring circuits were bound together with runic chains into a door-ish shape. It was about a hundred meters down facing upwards but tilted ever so slightly from left to right.

“Do we… jump?” Agwyn asked.

“No way in hell. It’s too far, and there are so many floating wreckages in between. Junk scraps with sharp edges. Even if this is our mental world, I do not want to see what happens when injured. Not to mention what happens if we miss our landing.” He observed the makeshift construct keenly.

“Doesn’t it seem like it’s getting closer?” He commented. “Those chains are constricting and expanding in a certain, intentional pattern.”

“Now that you mention it, the other debris floating in spare is also getting closer,” Agwyn added. “I first thought they were drifting randomly. But look.” She pointed at a few spring plates, possibly part of the corridor’s suspension system, connected by runic chains.

The chains swayed despite there being no wind. When the debris was about to float away, the chains faintly constricted. When the debris floated inward towards the corridor, they expanded.

“It’s repairing the dream corridor?” Elrhain guessed. The chains gathered all the stray parts, including the gate down below, back to the corridor.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Looks like it.” Agwyn beamed. “We don’t have to jump down then. Let’s wait until that gate is within reach.”

****

With the rate the chains were gathering the debris, Elrhain thought it would only take a few hours. But that was a grossly incorrect assumption.

It’s already been days, maybe weeks even. But the gate had only come up halfway. Elrhain realized why.

The repairing process was far more comprehensive than he had assumed. Two adjacent rubbles connected by chains weren’t only glued together. If they were originally from the same entity, they fused together ever so slightly, as if repaired by nano-bots. When they weren’t from the same entity, like rubble from the floor and from the walls, the chains expanded and constricted in such a way that they slowly rearranged all the scrap in the correct order.

This took time. Even if there were many debris parts gathered near the corridor in one moment, they might be pushed away the next.

And as the chains repaired the corridors, they slowly lost their glow. It was obvious, thinking about it. Even if the dream corridor was a mental construct, repairing it took energy. But at this point, Elrhain wasn’t even that sure if the dream corridor was something their subconscious mind made up or if it was actually real.

The bodies they were currently in, the adult versions of their dhionne selves modelled after their prime human physique, acted like real objects.

Usually, when they were in their dream corridor while asleep in reality, they could fly-float-swim and do whatever they wanted, limited only by their imagination. Change clothes, summon supercars, and eat gourmet food from the bronze age. All was possible.

But now, after a bit of experimentation, they realized they could not change into pyjamas or summon corn chips. They couldn’t even conjure a video player from their memories, one of their favourite pastimes while lucid dreaming in the previous cycles.

But their bodies and current clothes weren’t totally real objects either.

Agwyn’s exogear had a plasma gun built-in, along with life support modules and defensive armament functions. But only the form now remained, like a prop with no substance. She could take off her exogear manually, unhinging the clutches and sliding the locked seams. Yet, the compressed ionic ammo storage in her belt was empty as a shell.

As if only keeping the bad and doing away with the fun when lucid dreaming. Agwyn despaired. She missed her short-cake smoothie.

They also could not switch body shapes, returning to being toddlers. On the flip side, Elrhain couldn’t morph into his favourite Gundam either. This wasn’t something they worried much over, though.

Despite their restricted freedom, the mindscape felt as real as reality. No matter how much Lucid dreams had bent to Elrhain and Agwyn’s whims, they always felt muted. As if a blanket had been put over their five senses, be it touch or sight. But now, pinches were painful, and caresses were ticklish.

According to Agwyn, kissing while toddlers felt cute even in reality. But kissing while adults, deep with their tongues and lips, was as sexually stimulating as it was heart-fulfilling, despite all this being essentially a dream.

She suggested if Elrhain wanted to do other activities, now that they were physically mature, mentally speaking. Activities involving thighs, napes and waistlines. She had then chased a panicked Elrhain down with her exogear gun all the way to her side of the mindscape after he called her an itching nympho. At this point, neither of them knew that the weapon was merely a prop.

As well as the significant wreck in the midpoint of the corridor, the dream corridor was cracked and splintered all over the place. The chains repaired everything at their own paces, including the dream doors.

But neither of them could access them even if they looked fully repaired, with the memory ‘thumbnail’ on the door surface no longer glitching.

These chains were a healing force, as much as it was a restricting one. At this point, Elrhain could work out that they prevented the two from returning to reality.

With no memories to lucid dream nor new places to explore, they devolved into a routine of speculating what happened in the outside world, talking about mindless nothings, kissing and cuddling, and eagerly waiting for these repairs to finish.

They could also cultivate. But this siphoned manna from the chains, slowing the repair process. Cultivation was boring anyway, so that wasn’t a loss they mourned.

Finally, after two more months (they kept tally), the wreckage was just about mended to its previous form. The gate, jury-rigged into a unified magic-punk structure, was embedded into one of the walls beside the many orange dream doors.

“It looks like one of the stone gates under the Loch Sagathan Temple,” Elrhain remarked, eyeing the magic engravings on the gate. The whole design reminded him of the gate he saw inside the elder’s rest on the night of the blessing. Behind which, he met Maeog and saw the apocalyptic visions caused by the dance ritual etched on a stone wall.

It wasn’t orange, but a bluish violet, unlike the dream doors. There wasn’t a thumbnail either. And the chains seemed to meld through the gate, going inside to who knows where. The way the chains converged here reminded Elrhain of the blue door within his mindscape with the CommLink logo.

“Seems like we can open it.” Agwyn also came to the same conclusion. She held his hand, entwining her fingers. She had done the same on the night of the blessing when they had reached the top of the Loch Sagathan temple after treading a thousand stairsteps.

“No use waiting, then.” Elrhain touched the gate with her hand in his. He pushed mentally, and the gate buzzed as if there were motors in places he could not see before sliding away.

A soft draft breezed in, tickling their hair, along with an ambient echo in silence Elrhain could not recognize. He saw a gangway behind the gate, like the gangways of the Gigantomachy used to exchange cargo and passengers with another spacecraft.

The gangway angled down in steps, meeting a stony surface. Because of the angle and the gangway hood, they could only see that much and not the surroundings. However,

“A fish gremlin?”

At the feet of the gangway sat an adorable fish gremlin, holographic black and orange yet so solid and real. It tapped its button paws and wagged its bunny tail.

The moment the tiny critter saw them, its big beady eyes sparkled like a wonder. It stuck its puppy tongue out and jumped up the stairs into Agwyn’s arms with an adorable “Yip!!!”