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Chapter 8 - Slip-N-Let-Reality-Slide
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When I heard about lucid dreaming for the first time, I was shocked that it was news to other people.
"What do you mean you don't just gain control mid-dream?" It wasn't literally what I'd said incredulously in class, but it was close.
I was about seventeen or so, and I was starting to refocus on college prospects with the same sort of fever-dream energy and stubbornness that characterized my dive into Scene. It was in my highschool psychology 101 class, and we had a section on dreams.
The class looked at me like I had grown a third eye.
"What?" I had asked, as the teacher got a huge shit-eating grin. Remembering them was a haphazard affair, sure. As part of the coursework, Teach had us write a dream journal to encourage remembering our dreams.
"There's a lot of ways that people manage to realize they're dreaming mid-dream, and then use that to take over," Teach had said, politically taking control of the classroom. Saving face wasn't really a thing I did, so I didn't really care, but he continued anyway. "Your way is just… unique"
He was doing damage control, so I just shrugged and let it go, sitting back down to pretend to skim over the few entries in my dream journal that I had written as part of the exercises.
At least I wasn't that one kid who tried to compare teachers to babysitters and accidentally used the words "overpaid" and "teacher" in-sequence. It was clear he meant something else, but when he realized what he'd said, his face went as red as a stoplight.
After I had turned sixteen or so, I had consumed an insane amount of online media, discovered TVtropes, and started getting annoyed at bullshit in things marketed toward edgy goth girls. Black Veil Brides? Five Finger Death Punch? Give me a break. That shit had no fucking soul. You can feel the empty pandering. Metallica selling out had more soul.
"Don't you notice when your dreams are stupid? Ooh big scary monster that your arm loses power on when you punch it! Isn't that incredibly stupid?!?" I was more vulgar back then, and instead of stupid I'd used a synonym.
The teacher had just chuckled!
Chuckled!
Don't get me started on comics and anime and their treatment of women characters. This whole situation of being turned into my 14 year old edgysona reopened those wounds about the digimon anime's treatment of its girl characters. I was still mad over what canon Tamers did to Ruki.
Being a goth girl in an upper-middle class texas school district where everyone called other guys gay and the drop of a had, and girls that kissed each other were "best" friends… Yeah I should have known better. That other people were even more moronic than I thought.
At least I didn't attach to Ender's Game as a key part of my psyche like some of the nerds did. An entire narrative and story that bends over backwards to make the main character guiltless in the murdering of an entire species, while reinforcing that genes make up the soul while dressing it up with endless reasoning why it had to be done.
What does a fourteen year old who notices enough of that, decides Orson Scott Card was a hack, and then decided to one-up him while being informed by Digimon, Bleach, and shit do? At fourteen I decided no, that was the coward's way out.
I'd make a character that will kill everyone! One who doesn't feel guilty about it! What a great idea! It had come to me while I was using a plastic knife (that did no damage) to "cut" my veins. I was probably listening to MCR on my ipod nano at the time too.
Anyway, sitting in that class, it just further cemented my personal complexes. I was self-introspective enough to realize that I wasn't like the other girls. I'd always figured that was because they didn't subscribe to the church of Sweeney Todd. Being convinced you weren't a lesbian (like half your friends came out as) and also not exactly finding boys or horses that exciting did wonders.
Being able to ignore other humans by retreating to sitting next to my best friend Courtney while playing Disgaea on my PSP on the bus in the mornings and after-school was a load-bearing part of my psyche during those last years of highschool.
~~~
The storm had failed to delete me.
Whenever I'd held out my arms, they would go numb for a second, a fuzzy feeling like television static. Then, a moment later the feeling would go away, and I could pass. There wasn't really any pain. Whether that was because of the masochism bits in the character sheet, I didn't think about.
By the time I had actually made it to the center of the storm, it had gone from being a reasonable amount of increasing levels of darkness, into the kind that blanketed everything else. Whoever had locked the giant-ass pillar down hadn't wanted it to move or be accessible.
The keyblade had started to glow, so I grabbed it, and pointed it directly at the center column. A door inside had opened up, and for lack of a better phrase, the pillar or elevator had detached itself from the "digital" earth it had been locked to. I didn't see much, except for the crater, when the tower re-emerged. Whatever had been done to the pillar, it was more solid than what Tamers portrayed.
When I managed to open the gate again and call Mia and Meikitmon, they bounded toward us. Travel through the elevator was pretty easy - just run into the light and hope for the best.
If I thought too much about it, I would notice that the digital world wasn't really digital at all. More like a fantasy world with digital aesthetic. Even the teenager version of me noticed that there was a lot in common with Digimon and, say, Kingdom Hearts or Chronicles of Narnia.
When I hopped into the light like Meikitmon and Mia had, a thought occurred.
"My" digivice was real enough, would my dreaming brain—yeah, I know I still wasn't convinced this was real yet. Sue me—my dreaming brain would probably have let me use it to hop out the other side. Though it was the pseudo-rectangular version.
Meet an eldritch enemy from a show you briefly became obsessed with when you first discovered you could watch tv shows for free online. Then learn that they're a raging imbecile. Holding myself back from ranting more at this point was a feat.
If it fed on data, and it was consuming social media… Actually, I should be impressed it was as coherent as that.
The three of us ascended through the pillar, driven by an unseen magnetic force. As we drew closer and closer to the giant orb that had floated int the sky, I forced my thoughts to drift to the digivice that hung around my neck. I grabbed it, now self-conscious that I hadn't lost it by accident yet.
If my digivice was real, and I didn't have any reason to believe it wasn't— unlike the luck I'd had in respawning with time-rewind. Ugh, coma-me had decided to set up the scenario in a very peculiar way, all things considered. Taking the easy way out (death) didn't work.
My digivice should have given close-to-free access to the real world. Hm. My character sheet had said it was "glitched" but when I wrote it I thought it was "cool" and "thematic" for a human-soul that had gone through some ??? thing (I was a very deep-thinking 14 year old) usurped a digimon form from their partner, but other than the vague yet explicitly torturous-for-the-absorbed data -> human soul -> digimon -> data ouroboros.
I didn't really think through the greater implications of having a digivice. If you took Frontier's combination of digimon and instead made a human soul permanently wearing the skin of their partners—Luckily, we hit the top of the tower of light there, and the three of us landed on our feet.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
God, I would go full neutron star if this shit really was real.
In the middle of a pillar of "I can't believe it's not light!" the only thing you can do is go from one bright-ish source to the brighter one. I hesitated. Should I even leave the digital world? Yes, of course I fucking should. Going home, like, physically, would be a good test too.
Even if it wasn't a dream, I had a responsibility to make it back to my husband and kid. Resigning never to return back to the office in Texas, permanently wearing a bandanna and an incredibly sexy fursuit was off the table, at least. God, my coworkers seeing me in the body of my edge-sona. Nope nope nope nopenope. Not happening.
At least I wouldn't have to deal with the endless rat race. Fuck you, taxman and billionaires! I have a KEYBLADE! Get absorbed into the hell-cycle and power my soul, mua-ha-ha-ha!
With only the slightest feeling of unease and glitching sensations and visuals, I managed the hop through. The Definitely not-symbolic-of-a-thought-coalescing-as-I-crossed-a-mental-and-metaphysical threshold. Head and fridge, freezer, shelves and pantry were still heavy with "oh god oh fuck"s that were still starting to morph into some kind of diseased internalized monstrosity.
Kill me.
With hopes high and thick thighs, I landed in a playground. Not sure where I expected us to land, but we stumbled around for a second as the world came into detail again. It was a nice, modern little playground, if the kind that looked fun but were overengineered for safety, including the scratchy and statically-charged plastic tube slides.
Mia grabbed Meikitmon and went down the slide, with her partner playing the part of a dumb stuffed animal. I put my claw on my forehead for a moment and rubbed.
Fuck it, in for a penny in for a pound.
You know how lots of newer slides were built with a minimum amount of friction? This was the kind that caused burns if you don't wear jeans. Turns out, fur does a great job of keeping it from turning into a rug burn. So I slid out of the tube, only barely avoiding Mia by being fast on my feet.
They were giggling as they looked at me. You know what friction plus fur on those slides means?
Poof.
My arm-fuzz was all lifted up like I was about to take a dose from Zeus himself. I, Kaylee didn't care. Nullrenamon goes down slides plenty fast.
So I just laughed along, and reached out my arm to touch Meikitmon, giving her a nice zap, letting all that discharge out. She yelped in surprise.
"Static electricity!" I said, before letting off a laugh.
Fur, bitches.
"Wait a second," I said, turning serious. There wasn't anyone there at the park, despite being pretty central in the city. We were in an innercity park of Japan. That was the home country of all the main characters in the show. Would I meet Ruki? Or gag Ryo?
"Where are we?" Mia asked. "This isn't like my home town…"
Crossing over the portal and coming to the Real world was anticlimactic. Didn't wake up in a hospital bed, or on the side of a road with various brain fluids leaking out or whatever other thing I'd been expecting, at least.
Something was wrong.
"Can you evolve if something happens?" I asked.
"I haven't had anything to eat in a while and Mia still needs a bed to sleep in, it would be tough." Meikitmon declared.
"We'll find a street vendor."
We walked out of the park in silence, those two following my lead despite having no idea where I was going in this dream world. Food was an easy enough goal. I followed my nose to a street over. We got out of the park discreetly enough. No smoke bombs or magical shimmer-step were needed.
It was strange though—very few people were on the streets. Of those who were, they stared, sure. But no one pulled out a phone and took a picture of us. What I had expected—people or older kids holding out their phones and taking pictures? Didn't happen.
Rationalizing it away was easy enough. Japan was a very formal culture, but surely their cities had enough strange things going on that no one would bat an eye at a furry with a tail and locks for days? Walking around with an eight year old and the cat-thing in her arms, we wouldn't be an exception.
Still, the shiver in my spine and a gnawing tension in my claws, I found myself licking my teeth. As if itching for a fight. I whisked my arm slightly, and—yep. My keyblade had followed me through the portal.
We were still in dreamland. But the strange feeling of wrongness just didn't want to leave.
The keyblade just levitated roughly around my arm. One day I would figure out how to dismiss it on purpose. It took a few blocks of walking to settle in that we came out in Japan, not downtown Dallas, like I initially thought, based on the city's layout. We walked up on a sushi stand, and right as I grabbed a roll and tossed it to Meikitmon, who gobbled it up without chewing, a man burst out from an alleyway.
"Stop!" he practically shouted. He had the Matric getup. Sunglasses and trenchcoat, looking not unlike agent smith. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead, he had run all the way to us.
"What did he say?" Mia asked, Meikitmon squirming to try and gobble up some more sushi. I grabbed three more and tossed two of them to the little kitmon. The other one, I held up and pulled the bandanna covering my face, and this time, my mouth appeared.
Japanese street sushi was delicious. Who knew?
I turned back to the guy to get a full accounting of him. I was about the same height as him, being slightly taller than the original renamon but not huge.
Huh, I thought.
Mia couldn't understand him but I could. Her speaking drew the man's attention to her and Meikitmon in her arms.
I stared at the man for a moment. Very clearly some kind of government type.
With more time, a computer and fan wiki, I would be able to remember exactly who he was from Tamers. If only we were given an extra moment of time. Unfortunately, reality was starting to set in that this might actually be my world.
There were still some problems with that train of thought, given how scripted everything was, but it was best to eat that bit of facts before they morphed into a bunch of demon bread or something. At any rate, we did "stop" (were already stopped) but I was very sly about managing to nudge Mia and Meikitmon behind me.
"So, we stopped, what now?" I asked, noticing now that my keyblade had, in fact, disappeared when I'd reached out to pick up the sushi. I'd figure that one out later. We needed some breathing room.
"Mia, can you help Meikitmon evolve?" I nudged them.
The guy reached into his jacket. I tensed up, holding the digivice hanging from my neck in one hand and standing further in front of the terrible duo that had gotten me killed once.
"You broke through the Barrier." He said. "How?" He shook his head. "Not only that, but you took your time Realizing. How did you bypass it?"
Government agents like this practiced for these kinds of interactions. Was he stalling for time?
"I had a key," I said. It was actually hard to read his face behind those glasses.
"... A key?" He asked, incredulous.
Definitely stalling. I needed a backup plan, and fast. What had been the trick against this guy in canon?
"Yeah, I have a key. But if you're worried, I'm just trying to get back home."
If he was stalling for time, that meant an attack of some kind was imminent. The digimon lore was pretty consistent. Other than punchy-bro, humans don't fight digimon directly and win.
"Where are you from?" He asked, curt and to the point.
I could will my keyblade in hand and just kill him. Just a single tap and he'd be reaped.
We were still in the semi-public, and there were plenty of eyes watching. I could feel a pair of cameras focused on us. Wherever we had landed in Japan, people just hadn't started using smartphones, I'd guessed.
"Texas," I said, straightforwardly. "America." A shocked look spread across his lower face, then moved into a mix of them crossing his face once I'd finally said it, before finally settling on a kind of resigned disdain.
Would reasoning with the guy work? Probably not. If I remember right, the entirety of his dark ops organization in Tamers was funded based on xenophobic principles and fear of the inevitable future.
"The girl is a friend of mine, also from America," I lied. This guy really, really shouldn't be here. He wasn't the kind of guy that would put himself on the front lines, if I remembered right. The problem with the digimon series is that it really didn't matter if I remembered right anyway. This place ran on narrativium.
Which meant he probably already had his tool to neutralize digimon.
Still, it was best to avoid being too ominous in the real world. Tempting fate sounded a lot of fun but—shit, it was his shift in stance that broke me out of my thoughts. It was best to avoid what had happened when I met the crew of kids.
"She was stuck in the digital world, and I helped her leave." Probably not a lie.
The guy threw his arms down.
"Unfortunately, we can't just let digimon run free."
The real world around us started to get… blurry.
"Meikitmon! No!" Mia cried.
The guy's face shifted from the maintained composure into the kind of smirk had full confidence that he'd just won.
Unfortunately for him, if I remember right, it never worked properly until he recruited the dream team and gave it to one of the chosen kids. Even more unfortunately for him, I was a Reaper.
Existence and struggle is meaningless, accept your fate and all that.
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