I was in either a new hotel room or new apartment. Deciding to explore the floor I was on, I quickly encountered one of the YouTubers/streamers that I occasionally watch. He was stretching in the open gym(?) room surrounded by other guests rooms on all sides. We talked for a bit as if he was annoyed by a fan's presence, he was certainly experienced enough not to show any hint of it. Maybe he was genuinely enjoying the conversation too?
He also let me know that he was here with one of his podcast co-hosts and that he was actively streaming in a room down the hall, which might have not been the safest thing to say to a stranger. Following him to their room might have also not been the safest thing, but I did that too. I said hi to him too. Iron Mouse was on a discord call as we entered. I mainly stayed quiet unless it felt appropriate to talk with the stream going. Eventually I said goodbye and moved on.
At a set of recreational ponds that appeared to be natural, but were probably manmade, I was walking around and decided to pick up a guard tube and rove to help the poor guard sitting while watching the swarm of people in uneven terrain below him. I interacted with a few people while walking around, scanning the zones on either side of my path on the bridge.
As I was talking to a friendly man, the large lifeguard in the stand on top of the hill blew his out of place closing whistle to clear the water. He started to address a family of two parents and an older brother. No toddler sister as there should have been.
Rose, the missing sister, had been gone for multiple hours now according to the family's plea to help in the search to find her.
As the round, large lifeguard kept conversing with them from above in the stand, I along with many others decided to search. The supposedly natural water was almost instantly dried, instantly or just fast enough that I couldn't see the process happen.
The bottom of the former body of water was not flat; although this was an open-air area and certainly no cave, there existed hundreds of natural stone pillars that resembled thin stalagmites.
I, along with a handful of others in the crowd, were the first to arrive at where the gentle, sandy slope gets interrupted by the densely packed, mossy pillars.
More than just one body- along with the somehow still living toddler, there were some vague hints of eroding bones, a couple limbs, and another's head. Weirdly enough though, the pillar obstructed space was also packed with coloring utensils, many colored pencils and some crayons thrown in too.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
In my attempt to approach the unresponsive but breathing child, a being resembling a white, gloved hand sprung onto me without warning. Attempting to seal my mouth as I did my best to make sounds to alert those further behind me in the maze of stone pillars, the hand did not succeed.
I pried the significantly smaller, yet alarmingly proportionately strong existence off of my face, slamming it against an especially jagged looking bit of a stone pillar. A little bit of dust fell from above as a patch of moss slid off with the intentional scraping flesh against its resting place. Doing my best to now restrain the hand that had now begun disassembling it's fingers at will, no doubt to inch their way into my mouth and nose, I grabbed my radio. Changing the channel to one I knew the Twitch streamer, who lived in the room on my floor that I visited earlier, would be on I asked the question I desperately needed an answer to:
"How do I use my aura?"
With that, a miniature Lucario with an iconic dark blue Riley hat and similarly colored cape engaged the white hand in combat. With a short cutscene of firing off Aura Sphere at the palm and some disembodied fingers in front of it, the foe was slain and Rose the toddler was safe.
Even better, somehow we determined that the colored pencils could be used to manifest the missing body parts of the bits of corpses around us. Tracing in the air behind the severed head with a pink pencil from the set revealed that the body itself materialized. Amazingly, the head spontaneously regained functionality as well and a living human was there once more.
Those around me excavated all seemingly mundane coloring utensils as I carried the little one to her family.
...
A following dream on the same night:
My family and I showed up to some kind of school event where we'd need to dress somewhat fancy.
It was already dark out and I needed to weave out of the way of some space over the sidewalk that a tetragnathid spider had claimed; their kin nearby, but more reasonably out of the way were busy eating a wasp.
The sentient hand that seemed to prey on humans from before still felt to be a real threat to me here until we made our way to the line inside. I was scared that it'd be back with a vengeance for the one who stole its hard-earned meal.
With that train of thought, round, decorated tables appeared to our right. Beyond them was a stage that some students would be performing on. I guess all of the girls wearing the same dark blue dress are those who would be performing. Even wearing something that I guess fit in for whatever event this was, I still felt somewhat out of place here. Too many others around me wore lively, dazzling dresses, while I stood still in a dark suit and pants.
My mom was talking to some guy preparing the food mentioned something about how whatever was there was my favorite food, which it was absolutely not, but I remained silent as usual. I was woken up around there.