Dreams rarely made sense at the best of times, though perhaps inhaling all that Chinese takeout just a few hours earlier and then sneaking back downstairs for a secret second helping of the leftovers was not exactly helping Riley's mind in trying to create anything even borderline coherant.
Of course, as far as the girl could see in her snoozing state standing in the mouth of a giant plastic T-Rex statue talking with former US President Ronald Raegan who seemed to be wearing biker gear about the best way to take instagram pictures of your cats complete with a powerpoint style presentation on the topic via an old school chalkboard was a completely ordinary and logical situation to be in. Nothing wrong here at all.
Riley's attention was briefly taken off the various crudely chalked in depictions of cats, complete with annotations about just what angle to shoot from and what filters to use to the view outside the T-Rex statue's mouth. There were literally flying bicycles. Bicyles with wings, majestically soaring over a picturesque glittering bay catching the thermals as they migrated south.
Yup. That second helping was probably a bad idea.
A pale girl whose long, flowing clothes seem to fade into nothingness at the ends wanders into this dream. She watches the dream with clear disgust written on her face. "I think it's time for a little redecorating of this 'dream.'" She mutters to herself, and calls forth her friends. The first of these is an early 19th century ship of the line flying on what can only be described as a trailing cloud of tea.
Redcoats in that ship disbark with manacles ready, seeking out civilians to 'impress' into service. These targets include Riley and Reagan. At the same time, the ship fires its cannons at the infrastructure, the rhythm and melody of their strikes matching 'Brittannia Rules the Waves.'
From the other end an animated ICBM lands, it has a human face for some reason. The face of Stalin, and it begins to head towards the giant plastic dinosaur, breathing out billowing radioactive smoke that takes on the form of a mushroom cloud.
And then another dreamer shows up.
A black-haired Japanese girl in a pink dress wanders over towards the bay. Kotomi has taken to wandering through dreams in search of Nightmares to defend against. She's starting to get a feeling for that kind of thing, and it seems she got here just in time!
She looks around, trying to see if there's any other dreamers already present, and does a double-take when she sees Icela. "Oh, jeez, not again!" she says. She stomps over in Icela's direction, and calls out, "HEY YOU!"
"You know what Mr Raegan? I think this is a dream that's gotten all kinds of screwed up."
Riley looked to her hand for a moment, staring intently down at it until she felt the chill of cold metal in it. She was now, seemingly magically and completely out of thin air, holding an ice cold soft drink can. She turned it over, looking at the thing, seemingly caring very little about the Stalinissile careening over her head as she looked at the writing on it.
It was clearly labelled as "Not giving a f*ck juice". "Yup. We're in a dream." she confirmed to the former president, before cracking it open and chugging down the entire thing in one go, tossing it out of the T-Rex's mouth. "Yeah a buncha redcoats and Stalin's Soviet love hammer. Wow brain, you're getting sloppy. Where's the soul wrenching yet character relevant backstory trauma? Or sh*t, Cthulhu. I'd settle for Cthulhu. You're going to have to do waaaaay better than that. What is this, late nights on the History Channel?."
She shook her head, trying to conjure up a version of the US old prototype "star wars" missile defence system to laser the missile out of the air before it hit.
Icela sighs deeply when Kotomi shows up, turning her way. "Can you go bother someone else? I'm trying to do something here, in case you hadn't noticed." She answers the dream defender in a tone that clearly indicates that she's pretty sure knows the answer and won't like it. The redcoats redirect their attention that way, putting themselves in between Eidolon and Defender.
The Missile does get blasted by the lasers, though it's sturdy enough that doesn't slow it down much. "You'll need to try harder than that, Tovarisch!" It shouts, before roaring with a force that generates a massive shockwave, the thrust of which focused on the star wars system and Riley.
Kotomi rolls her eyes at Icela. "Yeah, well ... I ... uh ..." Her voice catches in her throat. She does not have any justice speech ready. She doesn't even know how to make a justice speech! This is the worst case scenario!
She just sighs. "Fine, whatever," she says, thrusting a hand into the sky and feeling incredibly self-conscious. "Dream Power, wake up wait no that's a bad idea!" Her face starts going red. "Dream power ... uh ..." The redcoats are advancing! "... I mean ... Dream Power ... oh forget it!"
She's surrounded by a swirl of lavender light. When it clears, he's wearing a white magical girl costume with black and lavender highlights, plus a few star and butterfly emblems. "Dreamy ... S-Starburst!" exclaims Dream Defender Kotomi as she fires a burst of white stars with lavender highlights at the advancing redcoats!
She glances at the "star wars" system, which wasn't there a moment ago!? She looks around and sees Riley. "Oh!" she says. "You're ... Is this your dream? You're lucid dreaming!?" There's clear wonder in her expression.
Riley and her conjured point defence system were quickly engulfed by a maelstromn of thick, choking black and orange nuclear fire. The girl didn't even have time to answer Kotomi's question before the weapon hit but the girl didn't seem even remotely phased as it came in.
It took a while, perhaps a good thirty seconds for the flames and dust to settle but when they finally did they revealed that there was not exactly much left of the T-Rex, and instead of a random kid, there was a figure wearing what looked like futuristic green power armour, half crouched on a knee and surrounded by a shimmering blue energy shield made up of tesselated hexagons.
"Something like that, yeah." She said, as she stood back up and ignited a crackling two pronged energy sword of a sort.
Of course, that whole thing would have looked far more impressive if this "Master Chief" wasn't still barely five feet tall and had Riley's voice, but, hey. What can you do?
"You're not very good at this, are you? Isn't there supposed to be a passionate speech about how I am wrong and I need to stop being so mean and terrible around now?" Icela answers Kotomi with an eyeroll, even as the redcoats get flung aside. The ship changes its tune to God Save the Queen, and every note is a cannonball aimed at Kotomi.
The Stalin-missile grows two small mushroom clouds out of its sides, each about as big as Riley, and approaches the dreaming prism keeper, throwing forwards one of those mushroom clouds like it's a fist and this is a rising uppercut, trying to throw Riley backwards. "Lucid dreamers are the worst." Icela mutters to herself, "They make things so much more complicated than they need to be."
Dream Defender Kotomi's eyes go wide at the explosion around Riley! "Whoa!" She's clearly relieved when she comes out of the smoke alive ... in ... she has no idea what kind of costume that is.
But she has more important things to worry about. "Sh-shut up!" she shouts at Icela; good at insults, or indeed speaking in general, she clearly ain't. She jumps into the air to avoid the cannonball fire, and ... stays there. "B-Butterfly, um, Blaster!" she calls out, shooting glowing lavender butterflies out at the ship.
She glides sideways through he air towards Riley, circle-strafing the ship. "Okay, um, I'm, I'm Dream Defender Kotomi!" she calls out. "That girl is Icela, she's ... an ... eidolon? Apparently? She likes sending Nightmares after people! I mean, Nightmares as in monsters in the dream-world! Which ... okay obviously you know this is a dream already, but yeah!"
Riley didn't say anything in reply, instead just turning her head, Kotomi's distorted reflection staring right back at the dream defender. In truth, the girl in the somewhat recognisable FPS game icon's armour was about to say something, likely about not knowing what on earth was going on and how she shouldn't have grabbed that second helping of Chinese chicken, (let alone the spring rolls) but instead she took a pretty good smack right from the Cold War, knocking her flying backwards.
She recovered quickly though, landing and sliding back on her feet leaving a furrow in the now dried and charred ground as she pulled out an almost comically large laser cannon of some sorts, again, seemingly out of thin air much the same as the earlier can and took aim at the missile, firing it from her shoulder as if it were some sort of missile launcher.
"I don't like doing this. I would much prefer to get my hands dirty myself." Icela answers Kotomi calmly, standing back and watching the chaos unfold. "And it's Ephemeral Eidolon Icela. I'm a spirit of vengeance." She doesn't seem to be too pleased with how things are going, however. The cold war missile takes a big hit from the laser, and falls over to the ground, crippled in its motion. Suddenly, neon letting appears above its head. 'Doomsday in 5.00 seconds' with the number counting down rapidly.
The butterlies crash into the ship's sails, and it starts to lose its ability to maintain height, slowly but surely careening towards the white house. Even as it descends, it keeps firing its cannons, switching the melody to 'Jerusalem' as the cannons on one side fire at Riley and the cannons on the other fire at Kotomi.
Kotomi, incorrectly satisfied both that the girl in armor seems to have got the message and that she's managed to disable the missile, focuses all her attention on the ship. She flies through the air, avoiding the cannon fire for the most part -- though she does let out a yelp as one grazes her side. "Okay, jeez!" she exclaims. "We'd better deal with this fast! W-whatever you can do, better, uh, make it big!"
White stars and lavender butterflies swirl around her hands, and she waves them in a double spiral. "TWINKLING NIGHT!" she calls out, thrusting her hands forward, and fires a great big laser, blasting at the side of the ship with the intention of knocking it off-course from hitting the White House!
"doomsday in 5 seconds" certainly didn't sound like a good thing! Popular shooter character or not, she couldn't think of anything in her arsenal that could stop a damn *nuke*. She nonetheless legged it away as fast as she could and crouched down, activating the same shield as before!
It only worked partially, the shield buckling under the force of the detonation and throwing the girl, smashing her hard against the rocks. She lay there for a moment, before taking another shaky breath, looking thorugh her now smashed visor at the scene in the distance. Her vision was swimming before her eyes, her body wracked with a pain she had never before felt in her nightmares yet she gathered her thoughts, looking out over the ship and the masses of people closing on, well, it *looked* like the white house, she couldn't exactly be too sure but right now she seriously didn't care. This "dream" had to come to a close right quick.
She looked up to the sky, her vision starting to tunnel yet she could barely make out the shape of a large flight of B2 bombers escorted by F-22s flying straight for the ship and the crowds of redcoats, the girl managing a grin.
The nuke may have devastated the dreamscape, but Riley and Kotomi are fine. Between the giant laser and the bombers, the flying ship of the line is sent off course and crashes into the sea, briefly turning the waters amber from all the tea that was keeping the ship afloat, before the tea disperses. Icela watches the carnage and makes a 'tsk' to herself. "You gotta stop getting in my way." She tells Kotomi, "Or I'll see to it that you won't be able to anymore." And with that said, she walks away.
Kotomi lets out a yelp as the bomb goes off ...!
When the dust settles, there's a small pyramid made of metal. It collapses unceremoniously, revealing Kotomi underneath. "Wow that was close," she mutters.
Her head jerks around when Icela speaks up. "Oh yeah!?" she exclaims. There's another few seconds where she can't find the words. "W-well I'm better at fighting that you are!" she blurts out finally.
She looks around for Riley, and jerks in surprise, hurrying over. "Hey! A-are you all right!?" she says. "Or, no, I mean obviously you're hurt, I-I mean ... I mean ... uh ..."
Riley just stared at Kotomi in silence for a moment, still lying in a heap on the dusty floor and squinting back at Kotomi through her now well and truly shattered visor. "B-brilliant observation there. Gahffu... God damn." She laid her head back down on the ground. She lay there for a bit longer, taking shakey breaths while she slowly seemed to zone out, her eyes staring blankly into the center distance and almost glazing over completely until something hit her.
This was a damn dream.
This was her damn dream! She was still in control! She used the last of her energy to refocus her mind and then... the pain just lifted, fading away to nothing. She flexed her fingers just to check, that sort of hit should have easily paralysed her but nope, this was a *dream*. In reality she was still fast asleep, it was only her mind making this all feel real.
"Yeah. F*ck you too dream. I ain't dying here today." She let out, as she got back to her feet. "You." She pointed to Kotomi, still trying to catch her breath. "You're here but I didn't *put* you here. I didn't put you here, or the missile or the f*ckin' Brits. This is meant to be a lucid dream, usually this just don't happen. The hell is going on?"
Kotomi actually recoils from Riley's outburst! "Uh. I ... w-well ..." She takes a deep breath. "S-sorry, I, I have anxiety, a-and I'm bad at talking. Um."
She looks around the semi-ruined but victorious dreamscape. "Okay, so, I only ... half-understand this myself," she says. "But. Uh. There's ... this entire magical world of dreams. Which ... it's somehow connected to 'normal dreams'? If there's even a difference. And. And. There's monsters called Nightmares, which are different from regular nightmares. They're ruled by a guy called the Nightmare Prince. But there's also good dream-people, too! Like this unicorn girl I know named Ariel."
She jabs her thumb at herself. "I'm a human, though, I just turn into a magical girl with my lucid dreaming and stuff, even though I'm asleep off in Tokyo in Japan," she says. She's sort of jumped to the conclusion that Riley is in America; the parts of the dream when she got her that clearly weren't caused by Icela are more-or-less exactly the way she would have imagined an American's dream to look. "I'm not ... quite sure what's up with that Icela girl, but she did say she's a spirit of vengeance, and all that."
She looks nervous. "Did ... was I making sense there?"
"Yeah that makes about as much sense as anything else has since moving to Japan. Magical girl bullsh*t and now people hopping into dreams. So what, are you in my head somehow? Or, am I in yours?" She looked down at herself, and to her ruined, likely copyright infringing armour. Sighing and shaking her head, she quickly shifted back to her more regular attire, consisting of a red hoodie, jeans, sneakers, and aviator shades that were somewhat too big for the girl's scarred face.
"Y'know, I've had nightmares before. Most of my life in fact but I ain't seen nothing like this before. Can't say I felt it either, it felt real. If this person's a "spirit of vengeance", what I'm wondering is who the hell I pissed off to get 'em after me."
Oh! This girl's a magical girl, too! Or just someone sensitive enough to see and remember magic, either or. Kotomi relaxes, and in a swirl of lavender light, she reverts to her pink dress. "I think we're both in 'another world', basically, not in each other's heads," she says. "Oh! Um, my name's Kotomi Kobana, by the way." It seems that secret identities aren't a problem in the world of dreams. She still seems slightly nervous about Riley, however.
She frowns. "Well, I think if you 'died' in the dream, you'd just wake up, but I don't wanna find out the hard way that I'm wrong, and it still hurts," she says. "Yeah, I don't get why she came after you either." She shrugs. "Like I said. She just ..." She looks away. "She's like the second person I've run into who's this total jerk who attacks people for no reason." She sighs softly. "The first one was this catgirl Nightmare named, uh, Yasumi Yumeji, and she put a spell on me or something that makes me smell 'delicious' to monsters." She hesitates. "I, I mean the ones in Tokyo, not the dream-world."
"I'm Riley." The girl took another moment to take a look around at what was left of the dreamscape, kicking up a little dust with her foot. The girl seemed to have gotten most of her breath back by now, though despite the whole "tough" attitude she didn't exactly look completely unshaken by the whole ordeal as she wiped a stray lock of blonde hair off her sweating brow and out of her eyes with a slightly shaking hand.
"I've died in dreams before, but, that was different." She admitted. "This though, this is bad. I gotta watch my ass even when I'm trying to sleep now? First things in the real world trying to kill me and my friends and now they're going all Freddy god damn Krueger."
Kotomi giggles nervously. "Uh. Yeah, uh ..." She shrugs. "It ... might be a good idea to get in touch with Ariel-san," she says. "She ... I think she goes to Seishou Public School? If you're in Tokyo. Um, I go to Verone Academy by the way. She'll ... probably have a better idea of how to explain this than me." She shrugs, still looking nervous. "I've, I've been meaning to talk to her anyway, she was there when Yumeji-san attacked me and ... I ... still haven't gotten the full story," she says, her voice going very quiet.
"Seishou? Yeah, I go there. That makes it easier I guess. Who is she? I can't say the name rings a bell." She thought for a second more, idly picking up a rock. She started to toss it up in the air and catch it in her hand as though it was a baseball as she listened to what Kotomi had to say, pausing at the mention of yet another unknown person. "Who's this Yumeji? Is that the "catgirl" you said about? Look, I'm new to all of this crap, before now the world made sense. Now though?" She threw the rock to the ground. "I'm some damn big damn superhero, who apparently can't even get a decent night's sleep in peace because people want a piece of my ass even here."
Kotomi nods. "Ariel-san is a sort of ... well, all I know is her true form is a unicorn, and she's from the world of dreams," she says. "She knows all about this stuff, I think. And yeah, Y-Yasumi Yumeji is the catgirl."
She still sounds fairly nervous, but she giggles nervously at Riley's comment about being new. "I'll be honest, I'm new to all this, too," she says. "But ... I've definitely had more monsters come after me in Tokyo than Nightmares I've had to fight. I've always been rescued by magical girls, though. And one magical boy."
"A unicorn." Riley flatly repeated, seemingly in disbelief. "Right. Unicorns, catgirls, Freddy Kreuger, superheroes, this is like an episode of some sappy cartoon that's gone off its meds. If this person's from the world of dreams, they must know more though. Seems like we both need to talk to 'em. Trouble is, I don't even know who they are and I'd have thought I'd have noticed a narwal horse walking around Seishou.
She paused to think. "Kind of funny really. The whole unicorn thing that is. I was thinking about it the other day, a horse with a horn's way more normal sounding than a giraffe yet they're this magical weird mythical thing while giraffes sort of, uh, are just giraffes."
Kotomi shrugs uncomfortably. "W-well she can turn into a human," she says softly. "And, um. She's ... still 'humanoid' in her true form ... a-and she's more like a goat than a horse!" That's the one thing she's sure of.
She sighs softly. "Well, um ... I'm gonna head off," she says. "I ... w-well, we're probably ... Well, um, you're definitely gonna be fine, now that you have enough control over the dream to, uh, to 'heal' yourself." She smiles faintly. "So, uh. I'll ... I'll see you later, um, in the waking world!"
"Yeah." She nodded. "Yeah. Well, see ya around I guess." Riley turned to stare off into the distance, looking out upon what was left of her dream before purposely snapping herself out of it, waking up in a cold sweat lying sprawled half hanging off her bed. She jolted up, slumping off sideways onto the floor cussing under her breath and muttering as she just lay there in a heap for a moment, trying to recollect her thoughts "Okay Riley... No more MSG right before passin' out. That was probably a bad idea. Hot damn."