Chapter Thirty-Five - A Bit Silly

Dreamer felt... a bit silly.

It was strange, she’d never really bothered feeling that way before.

Sure, she’d made a mistake or two during her long, long, long life, but before when she did something wrong it didn’t really matter. She’d acknowledge it, or she wouldn’t, and then she’d go on doing whatever it was that she felt like doing.

The whole ‘feeling silly’ thing that now happened sometimes--usually when she made some sort of mistake--was entirely new.

Was her exposure to humans and friends and pats changing her? Would she continue to change? Would she wake up from her eternal dream one day only to discover that she was an entirely different Dreamer?

She thought about it...

Nah, she was fine.

She tossed the thought aside and forgot all about it.

She didn’t feel like having to deal with the consequences of her own actions. That was for weak beings that had to deal with causality.

“Okay,” she said to Charlotte as they exited from the plushie shop. None of the plushies that remained were good enough for Abigail. They were all too meaty according to Charlotte. “This is the plan now. We’re going to go even further back in time to before that plushie maker guy went nuts, and we’ll buy a plushie from him then.”

Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. “Couldn’t we have done that from the start?”

“Don’t be silly,” Dreamer said.

She raised her arms above her head and stretched a bit. She didn’t mind being stuck in deep underground tunnels much--there was a certain feel to them that was nice--but she liked being outside more.

Even if outside currently had about twenty Inquisitors with strange hats on and crossbows pointing at them.

“Uh,” Charlotte said. She slowly raised her arms over her head. Was she stretching too?

“Surrender! Drop your weapons and step away from the anomaly!” one of the inquisitors said.

Dreamer glanced back to Charlotte. “Should we do something about them?” she asked.

“If we can find a way to escape, that would certainly help, yeah,” Charlotte said. She lowered her arms a little. “I don’t know if there’s much more for us to do here.”

“Okay,” Dreamer said.

“Drop to your knees!” shouted the Inquisitor with the biggest hat.

Dreamer sighed.

A rift opened in space above her, and she heard the men gasp. From the rift came Dreamer’s hat. It was a nice hat, stolen from the most important inquisitor she had ever met, and modified by Dreamer herself with little tentacles that clung onto other, smaller hats.

She placed the hat onto her head. There were little tentacles on the inside that kept it even, mostly because the hat was about as big as Dreamer’s little body. “No. You get on your knees,” Dreamer ordered.

One of the inquisitors fired.

A tiny tentacle snatched the bolt out of midair, freezing it halfway between Dreamer and the man who’d fired.

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“Why aren’t they listening?” she asked. “My hat’s bigger.”

“I think they have other things in mind,” Charlotte said. “Dreamer, could you tie them all up for us? We should probably get going.”

“Sure,” Dreamer said.

The inquisitors had a lot to say about her tying them up with tentacles pouring out of rifts torn open in reality, but Dreamer didn’t care for their complaining enough to actually pay it any attention. If they weren’t going to play by the rules (in which the person with the most tentacles and biggest hat was the person you listened to) then she didn’t see why she had to listen to them screaming about their rights to not be tentacle-tied.

“Okay, we need to go back into the past now,” Dreamer said.

“We’ll have to travel all the way back home?” Charlotte asked as she stepped past the Inquisitors. She took one of their crossbows, eyed it up, then slung it over her shoulder. Dreamer didn’t comment on the looting. She had her own tentacles going through their pockets and taking all of their coins and snacks. “I don’t think we need to go all the way back. I’ll just grab the TARDIS and pull it closer so that we can get in from here. That way we won’t have to travel all the way over again.”

“That’s... handy,” Charlotte said.

“It’s actually tentacle-y,” Dreamer corrected.

Once they were done with the looting (including all the hats) and the snacking (excluding the inquisitors) Dreamer yoinked the time machine closer. At Charlotte’s suggestion, she placed it in a nearby alleyway so that the inquisitors wouldn’t see it.

“Alright,” Dreamer said as she walked back up to the machine. “How far back do we need to go to see the plushie maker man?”

“About two weeks,” Charlotte said. “Three to be safe.”

Dreamer nodded, Charlotte got into the machine, and then she clawed at time, grabbed a tight hold of it, and pulled herself backwards through it.

It was hard to tell how far back they were going. Time was like a big river, but instead of water there was time, and instead of riverbacks, there was more time, and instead of all the stuff around big rivers, there was the chaotic and unstoppable flow of causality ripping itself apart and recreating itself anew with no concept of when.

Pinpointing ‘three weeks ago’ was pretty tricky.

But Dreamer managed.

She stepped out of time and into the present three week ago.

The little factory village, with all of its workshops and crafter homes was busy and bright. People were moving by on the street, many of them with the slow pace of window shoppers, others carrying cartloads of materials.

Charlotte stumbled out of the TARDIS, looking a bit paler than she had been three weeks from then. “Oh, I’m not going to be getting used to that,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Dreamer said. “We’re in the right time, I think. Now, let’s go buy that plushie. I have a lot of money I looted now!”

***