Origin - Nine - Rending Nightmare

Crafting a nightmare was... easy.

Perhaps uncomfortably easy.

Actually, nothing had ever come to Alice as naturally as this. All of her skills before becoming a magical girl, as mundane as they had been, took a while to practice and perfect, if she ever bothered perfecting them in the first place.

She wasn’t lazy, but there was a lot of ‘good enough’ in her life when it came to little things.

In any case, diving into Marcia’s nightmares felt less like exploring a new skill, or learning a new trick with magic (which she had been doing frequently as of late) but more like... walking. It was something she’d been doing for years, that she did without having to think about how she was doing it.

“Whoa,” Alice said as she pulled out of the dream.

Marcia was still on her bed. Alice was still in her room. A glance at the digital clock on her nightstand suggested that no more than a minute had passed since she’d tried to dive into Marcia’s dreams.

The experience was strange, though. She reached over to her desk and pulled out her seat, then she sat herself on it, elbows on her knees as she stared at the sleeping succubus.

Diving into Marcia’s dreams had been a little like walking, sure, or perhaps more like walking into her own imagination?

Alice was having a hard time conceptualising what she’d just done. The worst part was that the entire time, she was wholly conscious of her real body. It might have been easier to manage if she had split apart, or had her consciousness float away from herself... or something.

“This is both too hard and too easy,” Alice complained to Dream Charter.

ALL DREAMS ARE YOURS. IT IS YOUR DOMAIN THROUGH WHICH YOU ARE BOTH EMPOWERED AND IN TURN IT IS POWERED BY YOU. YOUR EASE IS NORMAL. THE GREATEST SORCERER OF THE NINE PITS OF HELL ITSELF WOULD WEEP AT THE SKILL WITH WHICH YOU DIVE INTO THE UNREALITY OF THE DREAM.

“That’s nice, but it doesn’t simplify things.”

She leaned back into her chair, one hand idly toying with the lapels of her school jacket while she thought.

She could shape dreams, and nightmares, as she saw fit. That much was clear.

It was as if she had just picked up a paintbrush for the first time ever and had discovered that she had the skill of a master. Several masters. Anything she imagined, she could create in the dreamscape with perfect clarity, every stroke a purposeful insight.

Alice knew she was being overly dramatic. She had brought Marcia here exactly for this, to test the range and power of her ability, but she had imagined herself--at best--being able to place her voice into Marcia’s mind. Not... this.

What if she pushed too hard? What if she crafted, with a few idle moment’s thoughts, a dream reality that was as real to the dreamer as reality itself was to her? Could she do that? She felt that she could, and easily.

What if she created an inescapable fortress of nightmares? What if she built a labyrinth where every one of a dreamer’s worst fears were unravelled to them, one after the other?

She could do it. She could do it with ease she felt.

She didn’t want to do that, however. Not to Marcia, even if the succubus had been something of a pain in the rear.

No, what she was looking for was a way to send a message. She shifted a little, searching her room for ideas, then she leaned way to the side and picked up her backpack. Alice was going to test this more empirically.

She opened a notebook to a random page, then plucked a pen from her desk and wrote a simple message before closing the notepad up. She tossed it onto the desk next to her, then closed her eyes. Keeping them open was possible, but for now she wanted them shut as she worked her magic.

Marcia was dreaming about... intercourse, again, because she was a one-dimensional, one-track mind sort of person.

Alice sighed and wiped the dream away with a stray thought. In its place, she conjured a plain room. White walls, a simple desk. Marcia was in the room, and Alice felt Marcia’s consciousness poking at it.

The demoness’ imagination, her dreaming mind, tried to summon up people to populate the room, tried to turn the desk into a bed and the walls into flowery curtains, but her dreaming mind struck Alice’s will like a feather trying to move an anvil and accomplished nothing.

Alice then summoned her notebook onto the desk, and with a tiny bit of her will, directed Marcia towards the notebook, making it an item of curiosity, something that Marcia wanted to have and to open.

Marcia, the dreaming mind of Marcia whose self-image was at once the girl Alice knew, but also a demon with long wings and less clothes with a sharply-tipped tail, ambled across the blank room and picked the notebook up.

She opened it, and read from the pages within. Then she lowered the notebook and seemed confused as she looked around the room. Her dreaming mind tried to create more, more people, more items, it tried to change the location, but Alice prevented it all.

And with a snap of her fingers, she woke Marcia up.

Alice blinked, then took in the form of Marcia on her bed, eyes fluttering before she looked around herself. “Huh?” Marcia asked.

“Sleep well?” Alice asked.

“I suppose? That felt... did you try to cast a sleeping spell on me?”

“Try?” Alice asked. “I think I succeeded. You snore.”

Marcia snorted, then kicked her legs off the side of Alice’s bed and sat on the edge. “Alright... I think I remember a dream I had, but it was weird. Was that you?”

“What was the dream of?”

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“A very dull white room. No one there, and... nothing but a desk and a notebook.” Marcia’s eyes snapped past Alice and she stood. “That one right there, in fact.” She pointed to the 30-page paper notebook behind Alice.

“Mhm,” Alice said. “And what was written in it?”

Marcia frowned. “Dogs are better than cats?” Alice nodded. It had worked. She smiled to herself, pleased with the work so far while Marcia stood and picked up the notebook and leafed through it. “Yeah, it was this one,” Marcia muttered.

Now Alice just had to find out if she could use the same trick on everyone in Hell all at once, which actually presented... several problems. “Do the people in Hell know how to read?”

“Some of us, sure,” Marcia said. “I learned Portuguese... eh, a while ago. I can muddle through a few other human languages too.”

“And what do they speak in Hell?”

“French,” Marcia said.

Alice stared at her while Marcia’s face reddened and she started to sweat.

The demoness then gasped. “Oh, come on! That stupid deal... but it was worth it! Why didn’t you laugh; that was hilarious!”

Alice gave her a deadpan look. “You’re not as funny as you think.”

“I’m perfectly funny!” Marcia defended. “But nah, we have our own language. Languages? There’s dialects and accents between the levels of Hell. Can’t understand what people from the first level are saying half the time. You thinking of having everyone look through a book like this?” She waved the notebook around.

“I was thinking that, but I don’t know if I can... give someone reading comprehension in a dream. I guess so? It should be possible, as much as it might be possible to imagine yourself speaking another language in a dream, I guess. But maybe I should just have everyone hear a voice?”

“That might be simpler. You know that no matter what, the Princes of Hell won’t be keen on leaving you be, especially if you show them to be weak.”

Alice frowned and shifted. “Then what do I do? Just sit back and let them keep coming after me?”

“Oh, that’s not good either. They’ll just keep on escalating things slowly. The bounty on your head will increase over time, especially if you kill some of the snobbish brats who’ll come for you first, and then you’ll end up facing a trickle of stronger and stronger opponents.”

“That... might not be bad for testing my limits,” Alice said. She could face enemies that were only a little stronger each time, growing her own skills as she went.

“Sure,” Marcia said with a languid shrug. “But you’re underestimating how many demons there are. There’s a hell of a lot of us.” She grinned, then made finger-guns at Alice. “Get it?”

Alice got it. She turned her head away, to make sure that Marcia didn’t catch even a hint of the fact that she’d found the joke somewhat funny. “So, I’d end up fighting them piecemeal for a long, long time?”

“An eternity. We’re kinda quick to breed down there. Like rats with more attitude. The lesser races, imps and the like, rarely live longer than a few years, but an imp warren will spew out literally hundreds of fresh-faced fodder a week.”

“They don’t feel like a challenge,” Alice said. The imps she’d seen could be taken down by a determined medium-sized dog or a person with a bat and some willingness to get close. “That other one I fought at the mall though, he had magic.”

“Right,” Marcia said. “But I bet you could take him in a fight.”

“Yes,” Alice said. She was confident that had he not run, she would have defeated him. “So... I should wait before executing this plan?”

“I think you should be ready before executing it. Maybe pick the place where you’ll greet the first responders, because you know there will be a rush of idiots that are going to charge out to meet you first thing.”

“I was thinking I could do that in Hell,” Alice said. “Go down there and meet them head on? If my magic even works down there.”

NEITHER THE BROILING PITS OF HELL NOR THE SHADOWS OF THE DARK ONES THEMSELVES WILL HIDE YOU FROM YOUR OWN POTENTIAL AND POWER.

That more or less confirmed that she could still use magic in Hell, but she wouldn’t want to try anything without testing it first.

“Hmm,” Marcia hummed. She sat back down onto Alice’s bed and kicked her legs out. “Well, you’re supposed to be really strong. All the old prophecies say so, but none of them really quantify it, you know? Like, are you really strong like a prince? Or are you really strong like one of the Nine Kings?”

“What’s the difference?” Alice asked.

“They’re just titles,” Marcia said. “But you need to be strong or cunning or both to get and keep a title in Hell.”

“And what happens when someone fights and kills one of these princes?” Alice asked.

“Oh, it’s not that simple. Come on, it’s Hell. We’ve perfected bureaucracy,” Marcia said. “But... yeah, killing a prince pretty much clears the spot for someone else to take it, and it’s rare that the spot won’t go to the killer. I mean, if it doesn’t, that usually just means the killer’s going to kill the next person to take the spot until the third one gets a clue, you know? Though some princes kill each other, and there’s always the occasional story of revenge and subterfuge and assassinations.”

“Fascinating,” Alice deadpanned. “Sounds like a fun place.”

“Literally Hell,” Marcia said. “I don’t know what you were expecting.”

“That’s fair,” Alice said. She reached into her backpack and pulled out her agenda, then she scrolled through it. “We have a three-day weekend in two weeks,” she said.

Marcia blinked. “Are you serious?”

“I need to test my idea on a bigger group than just one succubus, and like you said, I need to prepare the terrain.”

***