Andie took a few steps back, then sprinted up the nearest skyscraper. It was time to get to work. She kicked off a window near the top of the building, giving her an extra bump of height before she started plummeting down towards the electric green dream smoke pluming out of her patient.
The smoke enveloped Andie as soon as she hit. Electricity crackled and coursed throughout it, firing off like synapses in a big cloudy web of invisible neurons. Finally, three seconds after she should have hit the ground - or at least the bench her patient was resting on - the smoke cleared. Andie was now over half a dozen miles in the air, hurtling towards a smallish cube shaped city. Like most mindscapes, it floated in a void surrounded by a sky of dream smoke, though the currents running through this one’s sky seemed unusually hyper. As for the mindscape itself, it was puzzle like in form. Each side of the cube was shaped into a constantly moving five-by-five sliding puzzle, though the cube itself would frequently rotate Rubik’s style. Constant lights blared out, and the architectural style was aggressively rectangular. Almost like it stood in defiance to the very idea of more natural looking shapes.
Andie took a deep breath and let the wind pass across her face and rustle her hair. The air smelled of chemicals and mint, like an over zealous air freshener. It was sharp and artificial but, strangely, not unpleasant. The whole thing was very relaxing for Andie. Sure, the rush of the sky passing her by was loud, and the ground was approaching with an outright distressing speed, but Andie liked it. Maybe she was just weird, but it made her happy when the outside world was as loud and as busy as her brain. It always felt so lonely when reality was slower than her - like she was stuck driving a race car in a traffic jam.
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All the noise helped her think, and since she had just a little under four minutes ‘til she landed, there was more than enough time to think about lots of things. Like where her powers came from. They’d just sort of… showed up one day, same as Cedric and Dyllan’s. Maybe she’d always had them, and they just took a while to discover. Maybe someone or something gave them to her. She just didn’t know, and there wasn’t anybody she could ask - was there? If there were any dreamwalkers aside from Andie and her friends, they were certainly keeping their powers secret. Which was why she was reluctant to talk about dreamwalker stuff within earshot of anyone outside her little team. Andie’s questions about magic mind-punching abilities would almost certainly end with either her accidentally unveiling a secret society, or being locked up in an asylum. There was no third option. Well, no. She could also wind up starting a religion. Or just get ignored.
Ah, well. It didn’t matter. Nobody really cared about superheroes’ origin stories. Spider-man would still be the best thing to come out of Marvel, even if he’d just woken up one day with spider powers. The whole radioactive arachnid was superfluous. What really mattered was what he did with his power. What Andie would do with her power.
Help people.