Melissa’s eyes shot open.
Her breathing was fast, ragged, and loud, as she stared at the closet across from her bed. She was drenched in sweat which, combined with the chilly winter air, caused her to slightly shiver under her covers. It didn’t fully hit her yet that she was awake, so she starred in fear-laden courage straight ahead waiting for whatever horrid event or creature from her nightmares to come out. When it didn’t, she allowed herself to blink, then shut her eyes and tried to will herself out of what she was still certain was a dream. When she didn’t feel the uncanny rumble of her mind that signaled her forcibly waking up, she opened her eyes and felt her body relax.
A dream, or more appropriately a nightmare, had finally ended. Melissa told herself that she remembered nothing that happened within it as she continued to shake. It was clear that much had carried over from her dream. The sweat on her entire body was also unwelcome, but she knew all it would take is a morning shower to get that dealt with. She needed it after both not taking one the day before and the events that had occurred the previous night. Events that, now that she thought about it, she needed assurance was real due to both how unnatural it all was and the need to grasp if she did indeed kill something.
Sitting up, the first thing she looked at was her shirt. The previous night she had tossed it off without much care, but she could make out the shine of the knight's pin. That alone was enough to prove some portion of it was real, but she wanted to make sure. Melissa got out of bed and walked to her shirt, slipping it on and taking a deep breath. With that all done she closed her eyes and spoke.
“Dreams of my desired reality, manifest before me,” Melissa said, her words followed by a sound she could only describe as glass shattering coming to her ears. Opening her eyes and looking down, she saw herself in the same dress she was in yesterday. “It… it was all real. Then that means…”
She held her palm out, letting one of her revolvers materialize on it. Melissa hung her head as she saw it, unable to finish what she had tried to say. There wasn’t a need to finish her sentence when the answer was so clear before her. With said answers obtained, she dematerialized both her garb and weapon. She curled her hand up into a fist and shook her head simultaneously, stomping the ground with her foot as if it did anything to reaffirm what she tried to tell herself.
“I’m not like him. I’m not like him,” She chanted softly. After a couple more times of repeating the same sentence, she stomped the floor again. “The nightmare tried to kill someone, and then attacked us. Everything I did was justified.”
Melissa’s words didn’t convince her mind at all. Instead they only seemed to make her question her decision even more. Human or not she had spilled the blood of a living being, and she couldn’t quite figure out how to process it. None of the emotions she felt had names she knew save for one: disgust. It didn’t matter the reason she had killed, for in the end it was that simple.
She was a killer now, just like her father.
In an attempt to purge the thought from her mind, she shook her head and focused on the more immediate need of a hot shower. She grabbed a towel and her shampoo and conditioner from her closet, grabbed a fresh pair of clothes and her student ID, and then opened her door. Neither Lucy or Dragon were waiting in front of the door, meaning she was awake at a somewhat reasonable time. She let a “huh” escape her mouth as she realized she was out of her room before them.
“Oh, finally, someone’s awake.”
Melissa’s gaze fell down near the floor. She hadn’t taken notice of Vee until then, the nightmare doll laying flat on the floor. Melissa blinked once, then twice, followed by her looking down both ends of the hallway, and lastly blinking again as she turned back to Vee. Any disgust from her actions the previous night turned into confusion as she stared at the floor. Melissa squated, balancing on her toes and tilting her head.
“Why are you lying on the floor?” She asked the doll.
Vee raised its mouth-head up and looked at her. “You talking to me?”
Melissa nearly gave a sincere answer, only to realize that Vee had set her up for a reference. With a devilish smile, the trans girl leaned in a bit.
“Maybe you should get a job,” She stated with the most smug look possible. Vee placed its head back on the ground and let out a groan of annoyance. Melissa couldn’t stop herself from internally giggling at the site. “No, seriously though, why are you out here?”
“I learned that the smell of nightmares increases when dreamers sleep and I didn’t want to lose control around Dragon and Lucy,” Vee replied. Melissa couldn’t help but describe its tone as being abhorrently dead inside. “So I spent the entire night out here… alone… with nothing to do. I’ve never hated not needing to sleep in my entire life until just now.”
“Huh, strange. I don’t usually have the problem,” Melissa replied standing up. Her eyebrows went up high as something Vee had said finally registered. “Wait, Dragon slept with Lucy last night? If she was nervous about the other nightmare wouldn’t it have been better to sleep with me?”
“Oh that isn’t the reason,” Vee answered, picking itself up from off the ground. “The window in Dragon’s room is broken. Zarlaus and Deam’s fault.”
A full body shudder pass through Melissa as she heard that. Nothing else needed to be said for her to know just how horrible that would be. She filed her remark of lake Champlain having a vendetta against her as false. Clearly it wasn’t just her but all of humanity that the lake wished to make suffer. Perhaps it was it’s revenge for mankind inventing the most obvious loch ness monster rip-off in the entire USA.
“Yeah, understandable then,” Melissa replied. She looked up at the ceiling, then shrugged her shoulders and started walking away from Vee. “Well, got a shower waiting for me. Have fun doing fuck all.”
At those words Vee started flailing its arms at the trans girl. “W-w-wait! I need you to–“
“After the shower,” Melissa said, giving Vee a glare before making her way downstairs and out of view.
Vee stood in silence for several seconds, staring at where Melissa had previously been. Then, tilting her head up, she released another groan of annoyance. Flailing her small limbs, that single groan grew louder and louder until she started stomping the ground.
“Why is she such a jerk?!” Vee asked the empty hallway. “I just wanted to fix Maria’s room!”
----------------------------------------
Half an hour later, Dragon stood outside the door to her room with Vee held snugly in her hands. She was waiting for both Lucy and Melissa to get changed, the former due to having just woken up not long before and the latter from the shower. While the door to her dorm room was shut tight, she could feel a slight chill escaping from the cracks. It took a lot to hold in the annoyance that every single piece of clothing, furniture, and otherwise was going to be cold to the touch. The only solace was that it was just a few degrees warmer than it was the previous day, which normally would help if it wasn’t for the fact the day’s wind chill brought it down to negative one.
“Are you sure she can fix it?” Dragon asked the doll in her hands.
“Yep, though she might have a bit of trouble with it at first,” Vee replied, giving a nod as she spoke. “Given my interactions with Meany, and what you told me last night, she seems like the kind to hold more stock in reality than fantasy. She’ll likely say it isn’t possible at first, despite everything she witnessed yesterday.”
“Yeah that does sound like Melli,” Dragon replied, the tiniest of giggles escaping her at Vee’s words. “She’ll accept it once she sees it, but not until she sees it.”
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Lucy came out of her room first, stretching her arms as she let go of the door knob. She gave a confident smile to Dragon, who returned it with a much softer smile of her own. The french girl leaned against the wall, hands in her pockets and tapping her foot. It took Dragon some time to realize that she was wearing earbuds, which were no doubt blasting folk rock at as high a volume as possible. That was pretty much the only genre Lucy ever listened to.
“Our resident sailor scout is still getting dressed?” Lucy asked, taking out one earbud. It proved to not be necessary to hear Dragon’s or Vee’s answer, as both nodded instead of speaking. Lucy let out a sigh. “Good. After last night I was a little worried.”
“Do you think she’ll be fine with you two telling me about… that stuff?” Vee asked.
“Yeah. She would prefer we do it instead of her,” Dragon explained, eyes panning to Melissa’s door. “I know she’ll need some help with all this, but that is why she has us.”
“Drew and I were the only ones told directly, and that was because she revealed it over a dm on a messaging app,” Lucy said, plugging her earbud back in but turning the volume of her music down a bit. “She couldn’t bring herself to tell Dragon or Holly. She asked us to do it for her, and we agreed. It was only later that she asked both of them how they felt about her.”
Vee looked to Melissa’s door, then down on the floor. The doll found itself contemplating if it had made the right choice, seeing what this group of friends seemed to be going through. It knew well of Dragon’s troubles, seeing as how the girl had given her life, and had just learned a horrifying bit of Melissa’s childhood. Vee found itself looking back to Lucy, wondering what she or its dreamer’s other friends had gone through.
Could it really force them to be the savior’s of two realms with the amount of baggage they all had?
Vee shook its head, banishing the thought and turning its attention to something else. “I’ve heard you two mention Holly a few times now. I gather she is another friend, but what is she like?”
“Couldn’t you just get that from my memories in the same way you read my thoughts last night?” Dragon asked, tilting her head.
“Can’t do that, though it would help a lot,” Vee answered, looking up at Dragon. Its mouth-head smiled at its dreamers. “I can feel what you are feeling at the moment and see what you are thinking but your memories are out of reach to me. Probably for the best, if you ask me.”
“Ah. Well, I won’t spoil too much then,” Dragon replied, smiling. “Long story short, Lu and Melli met her because Drew and her got together. I met them all about a month or so after. She’s cool, and the least likely of us all to start a fight.”
Attention turned back to Melissa’s door as it opened, the trans girl stepping out. Her hair was still clearly wet, a fake smirk on her face as she turned to her friends. She had her jacket and backpack on already, the knight’s pin clipped to the latter. The bags under her eyes told both Lucy and Dragon all they needed to know about how well she slept the previous night.
“You two slept okay?” She asked. Both Lucy and Dragon looked at each other, the former giving a nod while the latter shrugged. Melissa let out a sigh. “Well, I’ll take it.”
“How about you? Slept okay?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah. Always a good night when you can’t remember what you dreamed about,” Melissa lied, her words fooling no one. She wasn’t going to give them time to ask again, turning her attention to Ver. “So you needed me to do something?”
“Bedroom window is broken. Vee says you can fix it,” Dragon explained, tilting her head towards her door. “Should have dried your hair more.”
Melissa’s eyes went from Dragon, to Vee, to the door leading to her friend's dorm. “Last I checked I’m a digital forensics major, not a repair woman.”
“You’ll just have to trust me on this,” Vee replied. “Open the door, Maria!”
With a nod of her head, Dragon brought one hand off Vee and to her bedroom door. Melissa crossed her arms, standing directly across from it without thinking. It proved to be a grave mistake, the immediate blast of cold air that hit her causing her hair to feel like icicles. She didn’t notice Vee jumped out of Dragon’s hands, trying to shield her face from the cold with her arms. When she lowered them, the first thing she saw was the shattered window that Zarlaus and Deam had entered through the previous night.
“I think that window is unfixable,” Melissa stated. “Nothing you can do about shattered glass.”
“By the logic and laws that drive your world, that is true,” Vee replied, a clear amount of cockiness in her voice. “However, you aren’t as bound by the laws of reality as you once were. Need I remind you that you summoned clothes and a revolver from nowhere yesterday.”
“Yeah, but I had seen enough magical girl shows where that sort of shit made sense,” Melissa replied, shivering as she followed Vee into Dragon’s room. Lucy felt even more frozen than her, having not thought about needing a jacket. “How the hell does someone fix a shattered window? Glass isn’t exactly known for being easy to put back together.”
“You're thinking too much about how your realm works, and not the one you have power from,” Vee said, turning back to the trans girl as it reached the shattered glass. “You can do so much more than you are mentally allowing yourself to be able to. Just give it a try. Reach out with the power within you and try to fix the broken window.”
Melissa looked before, taking in the cause of the cold that had filled her friend’s dorm. She looked to her hands, then to the glass on the ground, and once more back to the window in confusion. There was no reason she could think of as to why forming her outfit and weapons seemed more logical than what was being asked to do. It was strange, otherworldly, but as Vee had pointed out to her it was also correct. Even if it ended in failure, helping Dragon was worth the time. It helped that she could say ‘I told you so’ to Vee if it didn't go as the plush doll had planned.
“Dreams of the desired reality, manifest before me,” She called out, closing her eyes and reaching a hand out towards the window.
Lucy and Dragon watched as Melissa’s clothes changed to the knight outfit she had adorn to the previous knight. Vee tilted her head, about to ask the trans girl why she had done that before feeling a piece of glass glide against the back of her head. As soon as it left contact with the doll's body, it turned around to see what was going on. Vee had anticipated Melissa to form new glass in the shattered window, but what it saw instead was all the glass being picked up from the floor back up to the window, and melding itself back into one piece.
It was only after the window was repaired that Melissa opened her eyes, feeling the sudden change in the cold. It was still present, but instead of a blast of cold air hitting her body all she got was a lingering chill. The cause for the change lay in the fact there was no longer a shattered window before, but one that looked as if it had never even had a finger pressed against it. She blinked, then rubbed her eyes to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, and then pressed a nail into her pointer finger just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. The pain the feeling left her gave one simple, if strange and illogical conclusion.
“I… guess I can fix windows,” She said, eyes drifting to her gloved hands. The fact her hands were gloved led her to look over her body, realizing now that she was in her knight outfit. “Wh-why did my clothes change? That wasn’t what I was trying to do.”
“Beats me, but the results speak for itself,” Lucy said, making her way to her friend’s side. Her eyes were on Melissa’s chest, something that the trans girl blushed at, bringing a hand across her to feel her breasts in both nervous habit and slight gender euphoria. “I gotta say you are the most fabulous looking window-repair specialist I’ve ever seen.”
“Of that there is only one you know, being me,” Melissa quipped, trying her best to hide her embarrassment. Her eyes trailed down to the armored dress she was wearing. “Seriously though, why the fuck did it appear when I didn’t call for it?”
“Perhaps a part of your brain found that logical,” Dragon replied, Melissa bringing her eyes up to the girl. Her face reddened further when she realized they were watching Lucy admire her figure and clothing. “You thought up the revolver and outfit because it made sense as a magical girl. Perhaps you can’t feel like this dream control stuff is possible without.”
“I can see that, given what we seem to know about your way of thinking,” Vee said, walking up to the friends. “It will take some work for you to really allow the power you hold to flow, but we can work with it.”
“Yet I was able to summon the revolver without the outfit,” Melissa said, a hand rising to her forehead. Her outfit suddenly disappeared, leaving her back in her normal clothes. “It also seems to not like staying on for some… you know what? I’m done trying to figure this out. Thinking too much gives me a headache.”
Melissa quickly turned and left through the door, leaving Lucy, Dragon, and Vee perplexed. The french girl sighed, then allowed herself to giggle. She knew it was rude, but she couldn’t help herself. Dragon just looked at where Melissa had once stood with a frown, ignoring the ever present chill in her dorm.
“Guess there is a story behind that reaction,” Vee stated, looking at its dreamer.
“Not entirely sure. Melli is pretty smart, but she acts like it is a curse,” Dragon explained, placing a hand on her hip as she hung her head. “Possibly something to do with her childhood. Not as traumatic as what her father did but clearly gas had an effect on her. I wish she allowed herself to use her brain more.”
“I just find it cute, but your view on it is very understandable,” Lucy replied, taking a few steps forward before turning back to Dragon. “Melli will be Melli. We ask for help, and she hides behind a wall of snark.”
A sudden ping sounded out around the room, drawing attention to Dragon’s pocket. She reached in and pulled out her phone, a smile on her face as she saw what was on it. A second later Lucy felt hers vibrate in her own pocket and followed Dragon’s lead. Vee watched as she too gained a large smile.
“Can someone explain to me what is going on?” the doll asked.
“Oh, nothing too big,” Lucy replied as she put her phone back into her pocket. “We just found out a certain someone is out of the hospital and currently in the dining hall.”