“Well, now that that’s been cleared up.” Finnegan smiled, his face turned towards Andie and company, but his eyes tracing a stirring shadow in the cracked concrete below him. “You should probably get going - and fast.”

“What…?” Andie’s facial expression wilted with disappointment. “But… but I just… I’ve been waiting so long for something like this! I still have so much to ask! I… I just need a little more time!”

“Look, kid. You’ll be fine.” A melancholy tint came across Finn’s smile. “Find who you really are and what you really want, then stay true to that. Everything else will come naturally. Not easily, not quickly, but naturally. Nobody is perfect, which means nobody is ‘perfect just the way they are,’ but trying to be somebody else won’t help. You have to be the best you, because there’s only one of those.” He patted Andie on the head. “Really, though, you need to hurry up and leave. You know that feeling you get when you meet an obnoxiously cheerful person while you’re in a bad mood? That feeling where every buried little thought of hate and sorrow just… rushes to the surface?”

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“Not really…” Andie tried her best to force a smile, hoping to replicate the comforting aura emanating from Finnegan. “…but Cedric gets grumpy like that sometimes.”

“Well, I am nothing if not obnoxiously cheerful - and this mindscape is filled with bad mood.” Melancholy flushed out of Finn’s body language, swiftly replaced with a cocky attitude and a shit eating grin. He radiated optimism - optimism that didn’t even flinch as a tide of shadowy goo rose up behind him, swirling and clumping together to form dozens of new Nightmares. “Now, go on. Don’t worry ‘bout little old me, this isn’t my first deep cleaning.”

Andie nodded, then hesitantly followed after Cedric who had already opened a portal out of the mindscape. As soon as she was back in the physical world, she glanced behind her - and for the briefest of moments, she could have sworn she saw a clash of swirling shadow and yellow lighting course throughout the whole plume of dream smoke.