Cedric glanced over at the holographic, icy purple radar that was tracking the location of Andie’s Nightmare. According to Andie, she’d broken into Dyllan’s Nightmare by ripping a hole into it, and Dyllan had gotten into Cedric’s by getting eaten. Both of them had come up with these plans by just “listening to their gut.” Unfortunately, Cedric’s gut rarely gave him more than a noncommittal shrug or a vague sense of impending doom.

So, as usual, Cedric would have to reason out what most people intuited. What were the common threads between Andie and Dyllan’s “invasions”? Physical contact with the Nightmare was all Cedric could think of, but just touching them didn’t seem to be enough. Was an intention to intrude required? Probably, but there had to be more or Andie would have entered when she first started digging away at Dyllan’s Nightmare.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

What else did the two successes have in common? Depth. Dyllan was swallowed, Andie dug, but both got down to the Nightmare’s core. So you needed to make contact with the Nightmare’s core - its “heart” - with the intention of entering.

That, or Cedric was over thinking this, and all you needed to do was believe hard enough in whatever tactic you were using. Fortunately, Cedric could pretty easily meet both conditions at once. He’d likely never know which hypothesis was correct that way, but he wasn’t keen on the idea of using one of his best friends as a lab rat. Especially not for as petty a reason as simple curiosity.

Cedric caught sight of Andie’s Nightmare… and her Dream, which was in hot pursuit. It seems he’d finally caught up with his quarry.