Chapter Thirty-Six - Sleeping

"She's sleeping," Alice said. She didn't necessarily need to keep her voice low, but she did so anyway, out of respect for the girl tucked into the mattress just a few metres away.

Vasilisa didn't seem ready to sleep, but warm food and half an hour of quiet, mundane small talk about unimportant things had seen her yawning more and more. Alice imagined that she was still on the end of a long adrenaline crash, and of a longer day.

Biology overcame whatever resistance she had against sleeping. She was warmed by the fire, her belly was full of bland but filling food, and there hadn't been anything dangerous around her for a couple of hours.

Eventually, Vasilisa had slumped, and Crystal carefully carried her over to the mattress. The girl had awakened with a start, but only after Crystal had laid a blanket on her. She stared around in confusion, but then fell back asleep.

Which was exactly what Alice wanted.

"I'd hope so. She had a long day," Crystal said.

"No, you don't understand," Alice said. "I want to dip into her dreams for a moment."

"Oh. That's... a bit rude, isn't it?"

"We need to find out what she knows. Including what she doesn't know that she knows," Alice said. "The only way to do that will be to slip into her subconscious, and we can't do that while she's awake. Not easily, in any case."

Crystal pouted. "We could ask her more questions," she suggested.

Alice hesitated before shaking her head.

This kind of thing often came up in their group. Not just between her and Crystal, but between most of the magical girls. They each grew relatively comfortable using their own powers relatively quickly, and that soon turned into wanting to use their abilities to fix problems across a wide spectrum.

When all one had was the ability to summon magic hammers, they started to see nails all over.

It took them all some time to break out of that thinking, and even then it wasn't always easy. Screaming Bioplague had something of an in-joke going where she'd propose to fix all of her problems with a plague of some sort.

It was funny, but it also came from a very real place and time when she tried to do just that.

Alice thought she was better with her darkness and more importantly her dreams. Mostly because her main powers, the ability to render nightmares, was comparatively situational. Her friends could often bring about mass destruction with ease and had to temper their powers to stop that from happening.

Her powers were a little more subtle than something like increasing the gravity in an area a millionfold until light couldn't escape, or turning an area as hot as the surface of a newborn star. "Let me try it," Alice said. "I'll be gentle, I promise."

Crystal didn't like it, Alice could tell, but the girl sighed and made a gesture. Two thin crystalline needles appeared on either end of the mattress Vasilisa was on. They immediately negated any sound in the area. And then more crystals came out of the ground and formed into what was essentially one of those cheap garden chairs usually made of off-white plastic.

Alice smiled her thanks to Crystal and sat down in the chair. It was comfortable enough. "Oh, thank you," she said as Crystal brought her a blanket. She didn't need it. Alice could fall asleep in the time it took her to blink and could awaken just as easily. Still, being tucked in was kind of nice. Crystal cared for her, and Alice appreciated it.

She closed her eyes, and then slept. Her magic reached out at her will and quickly found the nearest sleeping form. Vasilisa was plagued by confusing dreams already. Alice could tell right away that Vasilisa was the type of person who dreamt in images but also in raw feelings.

There were confused flashes of recent events and the emotions that came with those. Eating in a train car, talking to an old lady, sneaking out of Pripyat. Loneliness, more lonelines, fear mixed with excitement and trepidation and then more excitement.

Alice shifted past these. She discovered herself running next to Vasilisa from a group of slavering madmen. They had large guns, they were anger made human, and they wanted Vasilisa. Their intent was clear. Torture and rape and pain and worse, and they were gaining on her. Somehow, this was all happening by a car dealership.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

But then she escaped, and it was back to shuffling through a city, old and abandoned and lonely once more. Hunger, then happiness at finding food. The strange disgust and joy of eating something old and well past its expiry.

Vasilisa's nightmares, Alice realized as she pulled out of them, were all recent things.

She smoothed them over as she thought, giving the girl some time to dream of nothing but calm and happy thoughts. Sitting in an abandoned park, surrounded by flowers and strange tinkling anomalies. There was a factory of some sort nearby in this happy dream, a power plant? Alice wasn't certain, but she wasn't there to investigate this dream, she just wanted time to think.

Vasilisa's nightmares stood out in a few ways. They were all recent, yes, and that might be something that could be explained away. People had more vivid nightmares when the source of their pain and stress was recent, and often these figured in those.

But the recency bias was... off? Alice couldn't quite point out anything specific, but she trusted her gut here.

It wasn't just that the nightmares were of recent events. There was just nothing to draw on previously.

She grasped the peaceful Vasilisa, then hesitated. Crystal would be... very annoyed if she found out about this.

Alice did it anyway.

Together, they dove into a puddle in the grassy fields and into Vasilisa's oldest nightmares, the oldest and most potent.

She found herself in a foreign place. More so than the Eastern European post apocalypse she'd been in. An island, with many homes that were trying their best. The nightmare was fragmented and broken, and not one of clear images and strong emotions.

This was a nightmare of fractal panes of time and torment. Flashes of every sensation wrapped around a core of pain. A betrayal, someone stabbing her in the back.

More, for there was a school and a trip, one that wouldn't end.

More. Powers that weren't normal. Friends that had been friends seven loops ago.

More! She had to find out who was killing her. Why she was dying over and over again. Why she couldn't get away!

MORE! She wasn't just herself anymore. She was so much more. A Magical Girl, but nothing short and easy to encapsulate. She was as good as a dead god made manifest and yet her heart still beat and that beat was the drum by which time itself counted the seconds.

More and--

Alice pulled back carefully and gently. There was no point in yanking herself of Vasilisa's dreaming self from the deeper nightmares. What she'd seen was... enough, in a way. Though it raised more questions than she had hoped to answer.

She brought Vasilisa back to her little field of flowers and inspected the girl again. She had lost someone. It wasn't clear who in this world. Family, friends. She was most of all not sure if she could ever get them back, but she had to try, no? Even if the her who found them wasn't the one who lost them in the first place.

And if she failed? Then she just needed to wipe the board clean and start over.

Alice slipped out of sleep and into full wakefulness.

She was on her side. The chair she'd been on had turned into a bench which was gently rocking back and forth from some ropes above. Someone was playing with her hair.

She sat up and pretended not to hear Crystal's disappointed noise. "Did you find anything?" Crystal asked.

"Yes," Alice said. "I think... I think Vasilisa is Meagan."

Crystal stared at her, then leaned forwards a little to see past Alice. The motion made the swing of the bench shift slightly. "She doesn't look like Meagan," Crystal said. "For one thing, she's not nearly pale enough. And you know, Meagan's shorter. White hair. Usually has a huge witch-y hat?"

"I know that Vasilisa isn't Meagan," Alice said.

"That's literally not what you just said," Crystal pointed out.

"Can't you just fill in the blanks?"

"With what? Magic mumbo-jumbo?"

"Literally yes."

Crystal considered it. "Yeah, okay, I guess. But just in case, care to explain?"

Alice nodded slowly. "I think this is Meagan trying to... do something to herself. And when it inevitably fails, she resets it all from the start. We're stuck in the periphery of a time loop that's completely unravelled. And I have no idea how long it will hold together for."

***