“Sorry.” Cedric spoke to Andie, but his eyes were warily scanning his surroundings. “I couldn’t figure out a way to warn you about the drone without drawing the Nightmare’s attention.”
“Fair enough.” Andie waved her hands in front of Cedric’s face trying to draw more than just half of his attention. “But what if I’d fallen?”
“I ran some tests.” Cedric blatantly ignored Andie’s attempts at winning his focus. “There would have been plenty of time for you to stir up the dream smoke to make a portal out, and my drone could create an auditory illusion to inform you of this.”
“Okay, so -”
“BUT!” Cedric’s eyes narrowed, as he finally made full eye contact with Andie. “My experiments also revealed that making a portal out of the mindscape doesn’t actually take us out of the mindscape. It just takes us back to the spot where we entered the mindscape. We’re trapped here.”
“So?” A smirk spread across Andie’s face, aggressive yet friendly. “It’s not like we were going to leave until we’d saved Dyllan. In a sense, we were already trapped. Win or die, those were our choices from the start. Now what’s the plan?”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“…do you remember how dreamwalkers are immune to the powers of other dreamwalkers?”
“Yeah.” Andie nodded. “That’s why we couldn’t permanently injure our shadows, right?”
“Right.” Cedric clenched his right hand into a fist and shot an accusatory glare at no one in particular. “Well, my shadow decided to test a theory of his own while I was scouting. Without permission. I can now confirm that we cannot influence this mindscape to the degree we can alter those of a non-dreamwalker. Presumably, this means Dyllan’s Nightmare holds the same immunity to our power that his shadow did.”
“Does. His shadow does. Don’t talk about Dyllan like he’s dead.” Andie paused, noticing that her face had shifted into a scowl. She shook it off. “Anyway, if our dreamwalker powers carry over to our mindscape, there’s a good chance that Dyllan is aware of our presence to some degree.”
Cedric arched an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, Dyllan’s body is probably still asleep, and I doubt his dreamwalker form returned to his dreams.” Andie grinned. “So he must be in here somewhere, right?”
“Huh. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.”