I’m inside an odd pyramid-shaped building, with an upper story that wraps around the room like an old theater. There isn’t any way to get there that I can tell, but I still see some people up there walking around regardless. The building seems to be used for school classes, as there are students with notebooks and pencils scattered throughout the room, seemingly split up to work on small group projects. That said, there is one group who is very out of place, that being a group of girls from my old church who are all dressed as Amish people and walking around the room interrupting everyone. Predictably, Terra seems to be leading them, followed closed by Bethany, Taryn, Cheryl (who’s one of Zoe’s cousins,) Gretchen, some freckled chick I forgot the name of, and finally Diana, who doesn’t seem to be giving it her all and keeps looking around the room nervously.

I scoff at them. What a bunch of idiots, thinking that they’re going to get converts like that… just wandering around and yelling in people’s faces…

“Excuse me, ma’am,” a man says, “Are you with those girls? They’re disrupting my class.”

I turn to the voice to see it’s the Hispanic man who oversaw my detention. “No. I have no idea who those people are,” I answer.

He groans as he watches Terra slam her hands on someone’s table and start babbling on again. “Will you help me with something? There’s an active shooter on campus, and we need to get these blinds closed over the windows.”

“Sure thing. Happy to help out,” I agree.

He nods and heads out the door. I follow. He starts closing blinds on the right side of the building, so I do the left. Now that I’m outside, I see that I’m on a college campus that I’ve been to with my parents a few times for music concerts, although I don’t remember which one specifically. I go along the side of the building, closing the blinds… when I’m halfway around, I peer in the window to see that things in the class are going normally. Nobody seems to suspect anything is wrong…

Suddenly, something hits me. The man said that there’s an active shooter on campus. Why the hell does nobody seem concerned about this? Actually, why the hell am I closing the blinds, anyway? What good is that going to do?

With this realization, I feel a shift in the atmosphere… I have officially gained lucidity within the dream. I quickly walk around, observing the area. There are people running around everywhere, who I somehow didn’t notice before… they’re all running and screaming in a panic. But what’s strange is that none of them are running the same direction… they’re just scrambling totally at random, nobody having a clue where the threat is.

I dodge and push my way through them, making my way across the walkway to the concert hall, and then past that on the left side. And that’s when I see it… the “active shooter” description, as it turns out, is a grave understatement of what’s really going on. There is a massive tank rolling over the stairs and walkways, similar in size to the one that Zoe piloted, but with its treads all at the bottom and the vehicle itself oriented far more vertically, like a moving tower. Out of the top, missiles are firing out and bombarding the nearby buildings into rubble. And through a window in the front, I see Moloch, taking the form of “Luke” from Pavia’s palace to make sure I recognize him. Out of instinct, I summon my Persona into the dream, my armor and sword appearing on me immediately. Moloch looks totally relaxed and is leaning against the side of the opening with a smirk on his face.

“Hehe… wanna try taking me on all by yourself?” he taunts. Although he’s many yards away from me still, I can hear him as easily as if he were standing right in front of me.

“What I want is for you to get out of my head!” I growl at him.

“Trust me, I have no pleasure being inside your head. This place is such a dumpster fire that even I’m a little freaked out by what goes on in here.”

“Haha, what a fucking comedian. So, does this mean you’re back in town?”

“Nah, not yet. I’ve decided I’m going to hunt down that bitch once and for all for wasting my time. I know that your team’s been training pretty hard. Better make it a good fight when I come back. Nothing is more frustratingly pointless than an easy win. Which is what our last meeting would’ve been had you not used hax to get away.”

“You broke into my mind again just to tell me that?” I question.

“No, of course not! I broke into your mind to torture you!” He winks at me, and then the missiles coming out of the top of his tower all start heading directly towards me without any warning.

Seeing no alternative, I turn and book it in the opposite direction. The missiles land at my heels, knocking me down face first into the pavement. I can feel burns all over my back and legs… I suppose that’s the downside of being in a lucid state. I jump back up to my feet, ignoring the screaming coming from the nerves in my legs, and sprint towards the fountain in front of me, intent on not letting any more missiles hit me.

Then, I hear a girl’s voice calling for me… “Ashley! We’re here to help!” I skid to a halt to see three girls; one with medium brown hair and glasses who looks really nervous, one who’s Hispanic and remarkably thin, and a freckly blonde with huge pigtails who's also wearing glasses. They seem to be about my age, but I don’t know any of them, though they look vaguely familiar.

They run up next to me, and the brown-haired one quickly pulls out a sort of remote and presses a button, wincing in preparation of something. A force field appears around the four of us, and the next volley of missiles explodes outside of it, leaving us unharmed.

The force field goes away, and the blonde girl wastes no time grabbing my hand. “Come on! I know a safe place!” she urges me. I nod in agreement and we all run away from the fountain, through a sitting area in between a large building that’s mostly glass, down a hill across a rough road, and down a flight of stairs, until we reach a peaceful area. There is a tall building that is next to a large pond with two parallel bridges crossing over it.

The girls lead me to the water, and the three of them lower me into it, the blonde girl holding my head and the other two carrying me by my arms. As soon as I make contact with the water, the burn scars on my legs and back start burning, making me grunt in pain.

“Don’t be afraid… it’ll be better soon,” the Hispanic girl tells me soothingly. The blonde one then pinches my nose and totally submerges me in the water, washing all of the soot out of my face and hair. She lifts me up again, and I find that all the pain from the injuries I had are gone… and curiously, I am no longer in my Persona outfit either. I’m simply wearing a white sleeveless shirt and basketball shorts.

“Thank you so much,” I say to the girls. “I feel like… nothing ever happened,” I say. I twist my body around to look at my legs to see them totally unscarred and unblemished.

“She’s really excited to meet you,” the blonde girl says cryptically.

I look at their faces, which are all smiling. “Who is ‘she’?”

The one with glasses points to the other side of the pond. I see a tall woman with long, wild-looking hair, and a minimalist outfit consisting of a short, plain skirt and a short white top that shows her torso area. She’s holding a handgun in either hand, and though her back is turned to me, I feel an extremely strong feeling of power exuding from her, a mixture of deep respect and intimidation that I almost never feel towards another human…

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“Ashley? Is everything okay?” I hear Zoe’s voice say pleadingly.

I open my eyes to find that it’s morning, and Zoe is crouched over my bed, looking concerned.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I reassure her.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Zoe questions.

“No, not a nightmare. Though my dream was… unusual.”

I sit up and rub my eyes. “What time is it?”

“It’s just after six,” she answers, yawning.

“Okay, good. Still some time before we meet for breakfast, then.” Since we’re not exactly, you know, going to church anymore, my family has gotten into the habit of doing a Bible study over breakfast on Sunday morning.

“Yeah, still some time,” Zoe says sleepily. Her head lowers into my lap, and her eyes slowly close… Zoe’s not much of a morning person, you could say. I start running my fingers through her hair as she always likes, causing her to smile and hum happily.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

So Moloch infiltrated my dreams yet again… I didn’t realize he could do that from across the country. It seems like I should tell Lucy about this, since it is a Moloch event, but… somehow this dream seems too… personal to tell anyone else. Also, that woman at the very end… although I only glimpsed her, the sight left a very strong impression on me. Whoever she was, she feels very important… a part of me thinks that Lucy herself manifested in my dream, but I’ve never seen her before, so I’d have no way of knowing what she looks like. Whoever it is, I somehow feel very humbled by all of that…

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I’m back in that awful jungle… all my limbs are held by the vines… I’m screaming, trying desperately to tear myself free of them… I see someone walking in front of me. It’s that Dark Trooper lady… out of desperation I cry out for her, asking her to help… she pauses for a moment, but then shakes her head and walks away…

No… no… this can’t happen… I’m crying, this is the worst I’ve ever felt… the vines are creeping closer to me… they’re going to take off my clothes… please someone else… please…

And then, the most amazing thing happens… out of the foliage, someone new appears, who I quickly recognize to be my mother. She’s just how I remember from my faint recollections as a little girl, except she’s wearing the outfit I wear with my Persona, the red dress and fur coat, which I suddenly realize is the same one Eleanor wore in that poster. In her hands is a large hammer with a blade on the end, which she swings through the air effortlessly to cut down the vines. I collapse to the floor, breathing deeply. In an instant all the fear I felt saps away, and I know somehow that I’m totally safe.

“Mom, you saved me!” I cry out in relief.

She beams down at me, and then crouches to my level, and takes me into her arms. “Anja… you’ve grown up quite a lot.”

“Mom… I miss you so much!” I howl, as I start crying into her uncontrollably.

“I miss you too, Anja” she tells me calmly. “But this visit is a gift. And I’m so proud of who you’re growing up into. You’ve awakened a great power within you… great enough to accomplish anything you set your mind to.”

Her words sort of wash over me, not really registering… I cry from happiness for a while longer, but then I stop and just enjoy the pure ecstasy I feel. If this moment went on for an eternity, that would just be alright…

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I wake up feeling dazed and disoriented. I feel like I want to go back to sleep, but it’s too bright in the room. We must’ve stayed up really late last night, telling jokes, swapping weird stories… I’m in Lily’s bed, which makes sense since that’s where I was sitting. I must’ve just passed out unexpectedly, and the others decided not to disturb me. I look around the room, to see that I wasn’t the only one; Lily just fell asleep in the chair she was sitting in, next to her computer. Anja doesn’t seem to be around… I jump off the bed to find where she went.

She’s in the living room, on the couch. She must’ve fallen asleep last and left to find the nearest comfortable place to lay down. She’s awake already, she’s sitting up and I can hear a faint sniffling sound. Maybe being in a different town is messing with her allergies.

“Morning, Anja,” I greet her, plopping onto the couch next to her. “You alright?”

“Yeah… I’m alright,” Anja says. “I just had a dream that… shook me up emotionally.”

“Uh oh. You mean a nightmare?”

“Well, it started like that. I was back in that…” she briefly glances around the room to make sure we’re the only ones up. “I was in that palace… that one Ashley and I went to that we told you about. I was tied up with vines again, and I was really scared… but then, my mom appeared and saved me from them… I was so happy to see her.”

“Wow, that’s really lucky,” I observe. The mention of her mom reminds me of yesterday when we went and looked around in her room. That gives me an idea… “It’s almost like… remember how Lily was talking about your mom’s room being haunted? Well maybe, it’s not a bad spirit, and it’s your mom’s ghost in there… and she came to your dream to save you from having a nightmare?”

“It’s more likely that seeing a picture of her, combined with thinking about her, put her in my mind in a way that made me dream about her,” Anja counters. “Dreams are basically ways for our subconscious to store our memories of the day, so it makes sense that it was about stuff I was thinking about yesterday.”

“Oh. Yeah, that could be it too,” I admit.

Anja shakes her head. “Don’t let Lily string you on with this supernatural stuff. For months, all she’s talked about has been aliens this, Agartha that, new world order this, government psi-ops that… she seriously needs to get a better hobby.”

“Uh… what’s ‘Agartha?’” I ask.

“Oh, it’s this magical land inside the Earth, which is a utopia where giants live or North Koreans or something, I don’t know, it’s different every time she talks about it.”

“Ohhh, right. That’s where Hitler went after WWII was over,” I say, remembering something she said yesterday.

“No it is not!” Anja barks at me. “It’s not real! Inside the Earth is a bunch of shifting tectonic plates and a core of intensely hot magma. Please don’t start believing in this bullshit too, Nova.”

“I’m not, calm down,” I defend myself. “Although to be fair, we know now that some supernatural stuff exists, with the Metaverse and all that.”

“Huh? Oh, fine. I guess so,” Anja says, looking annoyed that I said that.

“Okay, sorry,” I say, trying to get her to calm down. “I won’t bring it up again, I promise.”

“That’s not a problem. I’m sure she will at least once more before we leave,” Anja disparages. “Well, whatever… I’m gonna be in the bathroom for a while.” Without any further explanation, she gets up from the couch and leaves to use the bathroom near the kitchen.

I feel uneasy sitting on the couch by myself after that… I don’t really know what to think. I guess Anja and Lily don’t get along that well.

Lily comes into the room shortly after Anja leaves.

“Good morning,” I tell her.

“Yeah. Morning,” she responds. She kinda sounds annoyed.

“Did you hear any of that last conversation we had?”

“How could I not?” she says, rummaging around in the back of the TV and unplugging chords. “Anja just doesn’t get why I do this. It’s like she thinks I’m just trying to stir shit up. But it’s not about that; it’s about looking for the truth.”

“Well, I think the problem is that the ‘truth’ you found sounds like insane bullshit,” I tell her bluntly.

She pauses for a moment, looking startled. “Oh, wait. That’s right, you weren’t here last time.” She plops down into the armchair next to me. “Let me explain myself a little more clearly… Okay, so the stuff I put on my blog? I know that most of it is not true. I mean, it’s very interesting stuff, but I get that it’s implausible without an incredible amount of evidence to support it. But I look that stuff up anyway, because every now and then you stumble across a few grains of truth mixed in… like, that stuff I was telling you yesterday? Yeah, I know it’s quite… colorful to imagine the Nazis escaping to Antarctica with advanced technology. But what is true is that many Nazis escaped to Argentina after the end of the war, and it kinda makes you wonder if they were ever planning some kind of comeback.”

“Oh yeah. I think I heard about that Argentina thing once.”

“You see, it’s not about literally all of this weird shit being real. It’s about pushing your understanding of reality and seeing if you can draw parallels to anything you know is real and understand it differently.”

“I mean, I guess that makes sense. I think Anja thinks you’re 100% serious about it, though.”

Lily huffs loudly. “No, she doesn’t. She’s just mad at me about something that happened earlier.”

Like she always does, she glances around the room to make sure nobody else is listening. “It was about her mother, and how she died. I stumbled upon truly dangerous knowledge…”

I gasp. Is she actually gonna be onto something with this…?

“Every now and then, something strange happens to certain people who are either very critical of the government, or know hidden information about it,” Lily explains. “Even if they’re totally healthy, they’ll suddenly start vomiting an unidentifiable black sludge, and die in the hospital soon after. The official cause of death is a ‘rare disease,’ but seemingly nobody can explain what made it happen… And guess what? Anja’s mom is one of the victims of this mysterious ‘virus.’”

“What kind of disease is that?” I question, horrified by the idea. “That’s worse than the plague from the middle ages. I hope it’s not contagious…”

“Oh, that’s the thing. It’s not contagious at all. And given how many people who’ve died from it were whistleblowers or harsh government critics, it could not be a disease at all, but a type of poison used to silence people…”

“And you think they got Anja’s mom with this poison?” I press her. “But didn’t she work for the government? What would be the point of that?”

“Didn’t Anja ever tell you the story? When she died, it was a month before she had a serious shot of becoming the governor. Maybe there was someone in power who didn’t want her to win. Maybe they thought she was too independent from the establishment, and they wouldn’t be able to control her…”

She sighs. “I tried to tell this to Anja, but… she just totally blew up on me. She didn’t want to hear it at all.”

“Well, I can’t blame her for that. I mean, that’s her mom you’re talking about.”

“But I’m only the messenger, why shoot me?” Lily hisses. “I’m not doing this to sensationalize it or anything! I only care about finding out what happened to Anja’s mom, who by the way is also my aunt! I want closure! If there was funny business, I want who did it to be caught and exposed!”

“But you can’t blame her for being sensitive about that,” I argue to defend Anja. “And I mean, the government going around poisoning people? That’s a lot to swallow.”

“Why wouldn’t they? It’s totally legal for the government to kill its own citizens, between the death penalty and the shit police officers get away with in some places. Our government has done far worse things… ever heard of the Philippine-American War? That’s one they don’t teach in schools. Or the Tuskegee Experiments? I mean, the shit they don’t even try to hide is bad enough! The trail of tears, the slave trade, Hawaii, the internment camps, the AIDS crisis…”

“Okay, okay, I get the point!” I plead, getting really freaked out. She just got into this crazed state… it’s really scaring me, I just want to get back to playing video games now.

“I’m just saying man, watch the news, and remember this next time you see something about someone with secret information dying of ‘suicide’ or a mysterious illness involving throwing up black tar.”

“Uh… okay, I will,” I say, trying to end the conversation as quickly as possible. “What do you think we should play now? I’m okay with whatever…”