“Yeah, sounds like a plan.” Dyllan glanced toward Cedric, who nodded in agreement. “On three, then?”

“Yup. One…” Andie crouched down and readied herself to pounce. “Twothree!” She leapt into the dream smoke pluming up off the businessman on the ground before them.

Startled by Andie’s sudden liftoff, it took Dyllan a second to process what had just happened and follow after her.

There really was nothing quite like it. The feeling of plunging into another person’s dream smoke. It felt like reality itself was being peeled off your skin… a sensation that should be unpleasant.

But it wasn’t.

It was like cold steel restraints gently melting away, revealing what was underneath. What was important: The strange feeling of warmth people gave off; the feeling they were… alive. That abstract sensation that emanated off of the living; that ineffable difference between resting your hand on a living being, and resting it on plastic or cloth.

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In most places, it was a rare sensation - restricted to the warm hearts of friends, family, and only occasionally found among strangers or acquaintances. Not in a mindscape. In a mindscape it flowed through everything. The air itself pulsed with a rhythm, with a subtle heartbeat. Even things normally so cold and hard like concrete sung a story if you took the time to be quiet and listen.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that mindscapes had no “things” in them. They didn’t even exist, they were just an abstraction. Windows weren’t windows, but symbols. Each car and every signpost was really a memory, a personal quirk, or a belief. Each brick in every building a vital part of who this person is and was, not just rock and mortar stuck together to make shelter.

That’s how Cedric would have described it. Cedric was poetic like that.

Dyllan, however, was not exactly good with words - so all he knew was that it “felt really comforting” and “like meditation, but different.”