Chase thought after experiencing Echo’s first attempt at a dreamscape and communicating audibly that he’d become pretty inoculated to weird shit happening to his senses. He’d reaffirmed this belief when Echo had briefly shown him their entire life from birth to presented packaged as a single, overwhelming barrage of sensory input, half of which humans didn’t even have the required organs or perception to parse. He thought by now he would be an old hand when something bizarre and incomprehensible assaulted his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. A single second in wherever the white flash had dragged them beyond the barrier proved Chase dead wrong.
The experience almost defied his mind’s ability to put things into words. It wasn’t just the somewhat familiar if still strange sensations of synesthesia that his time with Echo had been so full of, it was the experience of, for a brief moment, literally becoming the color cerulean. Followed rapidly by different parts of his body shifting to disparate substances and concepts while Chase remained absolutely, uncomfortably aware of each one and how they were changing moment to moment. His esophagus had apparently decided to become peanut butter, which provoked a brief moment of panic before his lower back took over breathing because it wanted the smell of fresh cut grass. His left ear was nearly crushed and freezing from experiencing the sensation of the ocean’s abyssal zone, while his ribcage was tuning in to a violin concerto being performed by his spleen.
Through all of this, Chase could somehow recognize Jess and the others, all sprawled out in a small clearing surrounded by a stormwall of the northern lights. He wasn’t sure what sense had fed him that information, as his eyes were bouncing between tasting caesar dressing and being the note e-flat on the tuba. Chase suspected that Echo was trying to act as some kind of stabilizer for him, and his suspicions were confirmed several agonizing minutes later as his body parts returned from their various explorations to their normal function.
Chase pulled himself onto his hands and knees, panting. He was all for new experiences, but they really ought to be parcelled out over a longer period of time and consented to beforehand. Still, it was downright refreshing to see with his actual eyes that his friends were all here, albeit in various states of catatonia from their own sensory exploration and overload. He crawled over to Jess, putting his hand on her neck to check her pulse just in case. A literal spark passed between them at his touch, and she let out a low groan as her eyes fluttered open and found his own.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.” Chase said softly, and Jess gave a small half-wince, half-smile.
“What the hell was all that?” She asked, her voice reedy and weak. She looked down at herself and began patting random points on her body, likely where she had experienced the weirdest sensory diversions.
“Best I can tell, it’s something like how the parasites naturally experience the universe.” Chase replied. “This one was worse than anything Echo or Bright ever did to me, though.”
Her eyes found his again, full of concern. “Bright did something like this to you? When? Through the illusionary clone that Echo made?”
“No,” Chase frowned as his memories reshuffled themselves. “After that. We’ve been together the whole time since breaking the machine, right?” She gave a slow nod, and Chase’s frown grew deeper. “I remember getting captured by Bright, being taken to what must have been their own dreamscape. They… well, let’s just say there was some enhanced interrogation.”
Jess’s lips drew into a thin line. “Torture.”
“It definitely wasn’t fun, that’s for sure. Why did I forget about that? More importantly, how did I forget about that?” Chase shuddered. “I certainly want to forget some of those sensations now, but I get the feeling any memory editing wasn’t done as a favor to me.”
“More alien, eldritch mysteries.” Jess shook her head. “And I’m sure the answer to this one will lead us to ten more questions. It’s the cycle we’ve fallen into.”
Chase shook his head as he stood up and extended a hand to help Jess. “We really need to negotiate a pay raise. Private investigations like this aren’t cheap!”
Jess rolled her eyes as she took his hand and slowly climbed to her feet. “We just need an adorable animal companion and we can turn it into a children’s TV show and live off the royalties.”
“We’ve got Echo.”
“Echo is not an animal! And they don’t even have a physical body.”
“Bah, that just saves on the animation budget! They can be as adorable as the children watching imagine them to be!”
“You’re impossible.” Jess said fondly. “Let’s see if we can get the others awake, no reason for them to keep suffering sensory overload.” Chase nodded and they set to work, a spark jumping from them to the others as they touched each of them on the neck. After much groaning and processing, the group reassembled at the center of the clearing.
“Call me a traditionalist,” Chase began. “But I liked the northern lights best when they were a fun night time sight in Canada or Scandinavia. I could sort of tolerate them branching out to snowglobe form, it was novel at the very least. But I gotta say, I do not care for this hurricane phase.”
Tom frowned. “Would it kill you to go three sentences without making a joke?”
Chase paused. “I don’t actually know, and at this point, why take the risk?”
“I do not think it is a hurricane per se.” Ellie said. “Look closer, and remember what happened just before we found ourselves in this place.”
Miles’s eyes widened and locked on to the light ribbon still grasped in Jess’s hand. “But how? It’s right there, we can’t be inside of it as well!”
“Why not?” Kayla scowled. “It’s not like we haven’t been playing fast and loose with the laws of time and causality since this whole mess kicked off. Is this really that much weirder than what we’ve already been through?”
“Yes!” Miles protested. “Maybe? No. I don’t know.”
“You realize you just gave every possible answer to that question, right?”
“Shut up.”
“Ahem.” Ellie brought the bickering pair’s attention away from the brewing argument, actually pronouncing out ahem instead of clearing her throat. “It is clear we are once again in an arena where normal rules do not apply. Chase, is this similar to the dreamscape you spoke of communicating with Echo within?”
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Chase waggled a hand back and forth. “Kinda. That was a lot more low-key, and obviously it was just me and Echo there. Also had a more normal environment, even with Echo’s daring design sensibilities. This is a lot more stark.”
“We’re in the eye of the storm.” Tom mused. “Do you think there’s something else on the other side of the stormwall?”
Ellie raised one shoulder in the most elegant shrug Chase had ever seen. “Perhaps. I was certainly not expecting anything like this to exist on the other side of the glowing barrier.”
“Should - should we try the same thing we did to get through that one?” Miles suggested.
Jess looked down at the light ribbon clutched in her hand, then up to the much thicker, rapidly rotating bands of glowing light surrounding them on all sides. “Somehow I doubt my little ribbon has enough juice to cut through something like that.”
“And with our luck, we’d end up somewhere even more incomprehensible.” Kayla groused. “So what are we supposed to do, just wait and hope it blows over by itself?”
“I think that’s all we can do.” Chase said. “I’ll see if I can contact Echo somehow, since this is like the dreamscape, but they normally would have chimed in by now if they were around. Hopefully they’re okay. Bright must have been just as pissed at Echo as they were at me.”
“I dunno Chase.” Tom drawled. “You’ve got a real talent for pissing people off, and Bright seemed ready to skin you alive.”
“You say the sweetest things!” Chase replied happily. “And nah, skinning me alive is too tame. With Bright at the wheel, it would be much, much worse.” He gave an involuntary shudder. Spines were not meant to be floppy and stomachs and bone shards did not mix.
Chase turned away from the others and faced the swirling stormwall. With such clearly circular and rapid motion, he felt like it should be drowning out everything and battering them with winds, but the air was utterly still, even stale. Just one more ingredient to the simmering eerie stew they’d found themselves in yet again. Still, it was more than he expected when he found out they were due to be targeted. Logically, he’d known the whole time that they would eventually be caught by exhaustion if nothing else, but he still followed his gut. His gut said to spit in the eye of anyone who would try to carve up his identity and turn his friends into husks. He stared into the swirling neon patterns, hoping to prompt that gut into telling him what to do now, because he was thoroughly out of his depth.
He ignored the whispered conversation behind him, narrowing his eyes as he saw something in the storm that didn’t belong. It almost looked like a bird being buffeted by the nonexistent wind, flapping and struggling against the rotation of the storm. As it drew closer, he could make out a long neck, wide wingspan, brown feathers with a black neck. It was coming straight for him. It was a -
“Duck!” Echo’s voice honked from the bird that was clearly a goose. Still, Chase took the suggestion, throwing himself to the ground as the goose almost clipped his head, crash-landing at Tom’s feet with a pitiful honk. Tom stared. Chase stared. Everyone stared.
“...Echo?” Chase asked hesitantly. The goose gave a warbling honk and bobbed its head up and down. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but why are you a goose?”
“Needed to get through the storm. Thought I could fly. Bad idea.” Echo sounded distinctly out of breath, and their voice sounded strained.
“This is Echo?” Miles asked incredulously.
“They’re not usually a goose.” Chase replied. “It’s a phase.” As if determined to prove him right, the goose dissolved in a cloud of luminescent purple smoke that began reforming into the basic shape of a human. Slowly it became more refined until the whole group was staring at Echo’s chosen form: a glowing purple figure, long and lithe and dressed in a draping robe. They were androgynous with sharp features and pointed ears, looking for all the world like a fantasy elf had designed a holographic AI in its own image. Their face was unnervingly placid, and Chase supposed that Echo hadn’t quite gotten the hand of human expressions yet.
“It was a quick phase.” Chase said. “Looking good, Echo. I like the purple and the robe, very royal.”
“Thank you!” Echo’s voice had lost its honking quality and now sounded about halfway between Chase’s baritone and Jess’s honeyed alto, with refined pronunciation inspired by Ellie. “You need to get out of here!”
Chase sighed. “We would if we could, buddy. Are you saying we could pass through that storm?” He eyed the swirling lightshow warily. “None of us were feeling that brave earlier.”
“It won’t last much longer.” Echo said, and Chase perked up. Echo dumped cold water on that hope with his next sentence though. “What comes next will be worse.”
“Story of our life.” Kayla groaned. “Lay it on us, Echo. What’s coming?”
“Bright.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured, but why is that so much worse than wasting away here?” Kayla asked.
“This place is Bright’s domain.” Echo revealed. “Like the dreamscape where we met, Chase. Bright has control, they shape everything that happens here. Everything except this storm, since you caused it by breaching their barrier.”
“Wait wait wait.” Chase held up his hands. “We’re in Bright’s version of the dreamscape, okay, I can buy that. But the barrier was theirs too? Were we inside them the whole time?”
Echo looked confused and shrugged. “Yes and no. If you want to think of it that way, you were inside their city before. Now you are inside their house.”
“And we didn’t even bring a housewarming gift.” Chase said.
“Something tells me it wouldn’t help.” Jess replied.
“Do you think if we wrap Chase up, Bright would accept him as a sacrificial gift?” Miles pondered.
“I’m standing right here, you know.”
“And you know Bright best. Would they accept you as a Trojan horse?”
“I don’t think I can swallow all of you and let you out inside their walls. Aren’t we already inside their walls now?”
Ellie turned to Echo, completely ignoring the tangent. “So Bright will soon break down the storm and we will be vulnerable. How can we prepare? What can we do?”
Echo sighed, and the air momentarily tasted like sour cherries. “Bright will likely not strike at you directly for fear of damaging themself in the process. But they will manipulate the environment against you, and if you give in, they will take you as a host. They can see into your memories in this place, and they will use them against you. Your greatest fears will come to life and torment you until you beg for it to stop. And it only will if you let them take you as a host.”
Tom clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white, the exact same shade that Miles’s face took on. Ellie frowned, but on her normally passive face it may as well have been a full-throated scream. Kayla was trying to look defiant, but her anger seemed to be ebbing away as the fear tide came in. Jess and Chase shared a glance, and Chase sighed.
“I guess it’s too late to escape?” Chase asked, and Echo nodded. “Alright then. This is gonna get rough, but I don’t fancy dying today. This is too good of a story not to publish when we get back home, and I’ll be damned if I let some upjumped parasite keep me from my Pulitzer.”
Jess nodded. “My mom’s counting on me.” She briefly brought her left hand to her jacket pocket and pulled out the small borax crystal straw that Chase had given her. “I’m not gonna let her down.”
“Are we really doing this?” Tom asked, and was silenced by twin glares from Chase and Jess. “Alright, alright. I’m sure as hell not gonna quit with the finish line in sight. Coach would kick my ass.”
“Mother and Father would never forgive me if I did not give my all.” Ellie muttered. “I will not let them down now.”
“I just fucking hate bullies, and Bright seems like the worst bully I’ve ever heard of.” Kayla declared.
Miles traced the tattoos on his left arm and gave a firm nod. “I’m ready.”
The stormwall slowly began breaking down, rotating slower and slower, strands of glowing green and blue and purple trailing off into the sky. The six students and one newly semi-corporeal entity faced what came next together.