Andie breathed heavily and slowly, as brilliant orange flames gathered around her neck and reformed her scarf. She was exhausted, something she didn’t recall ever being while dreamwalking - until now of course. It seemed her new powers had a catch. Then again, emotional exhaustion was a real thing, so maybe this was just the first time she’d used up enough power to tire her dreamwalker form out. Or maybe this wasn’t the first time at all. Andie’s memory did have a tendency to ping-pong between “photographic” and “more holes than a sieve made of swiss cheese”.

Wait. Something was up. The last two awakenings, the Nightmare had been beaten and the mindscape cleaned out, the whole mindscape had pulled itself back together in a new shape - shortly followed by the Dream… taking shape. Uh oh. Andie’s eyes darted around her mindscape. Bits and pieces of her Nightmare were everywhere, but she couldn’t find her Dream anywhere.

A flash of movement caught Andie’s attention, shortly followed by the feeling of her Dream’s sword slam into her chest and knock her flying. Okay, no, that wasn’t completely true. She’d seen her Dream’s sword slam into her chest and knock her flying, what she’d felt was more like a light tap from a pool noodle. She hadn’t felt anything at all last time. Andie found it unlikely her defenses were weakening, and even more unlikely that the damn thing was only now getting serious, so she decided to just chalk it up to the consistently inconsistent rules that dreamwalkers and mindscapes played by. Cedric even had a whole spiel about how expectations dictated outcomes with emotional mass. If his hypothesis was to be believed, every human was basically omnipotent in emotional space, and the rules were formed where expectations intersected or conflicted.

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In other words, when you were dreamwalking, what made sense was more important than what was logically consistent. And what “made sense” to Andie, was that her Dream was about to be put back in its damn place - because for something that was made out of her love for heroes, it sure as hell wasn’t acting very heroic.