New Dream Adventures of Raven Knight

10/30/13

Puppet Master
I am in a dungeon of some kind. I am making my way through passages and tunnels of stone. I am thinking of it like a dungeon from one of the Legend of Zelda games. I see I am there with Link. We continue into a larger chamber where we are immediately attacked by some strange creatures. They look sort of like spiders, but they only have four legs. They kind of jump around the room. They are all about the size of wolves. They come at us as soon as we enter the room. Link starts fending them off with his sword and shield but he seems to be holding back. He says he doesn't want to kill them if he can avoid it because they aren't acting of their own free will. He says normally they are quite peaceful. I think stunning them would be a good plan. I use the song spell Battery by Metallica to summon some lightning, but I focus to keep it at a lower power. Sparks fly through the room and knock the strange creatures unconscious. Link checks on one of them to be sure it is alive. He nods at me and starts to continue to the next passage. I tell him to wait, I will charge his shield with electricity so he can knock enemies unconscious with it. I do that using Battery by Metallica again. We encounter a few more of the strange creatures in the hallway but Link knocks them unconscious with his electrified shield. We enter a large cavern now. It extends to unknown depths below us. I look down into the blackness and it looks bottomless. There is a winding path that leads across the room. The ceiling is far above us, almost hidden in the darkness. Fires around the edge of the chamber keep the chamber lit. I briefly wonder how anyone got to those torches to keep them lit but I don't spend much time on that before I see something on the other side of the room. It looks like a huge and creepy doll of some kind.

It looks like one of those evil clowns like Pennywise from the book It or something similar. The clown doll is alive, and it is holding puppet strings that are hanging down into the darkness below. Even though they don't appear to be connected to anything I figure those are what the thing is using to control the strange creatures in the dungeon and who knows what else it is controlling. There are armed guards standing along the narrow passage, blocking the way. Link says they are acting of their own free will… he knows that because they were enemies before the Puppet Master showed up. So we make our way along the narrow path. One of the guards lunges at me. I time it just right to grab hold of him and push him off the edge of the pathway into the darkness below. Link shoves another one off with his shield. I actually jump over Link and grab the next guard before he can react and I push him off of the passage as well. The Puppet Master is getting angry, saying he has to do everything himself. But he doesn't do it himself. Instead he summons forth a lot of strange creatures. Many of them are like the ones in the passages, others look sort of like ewoks with white fur.

Link says they are being controlled by the Puppet Master… but how do we set them free? I tell him I am sure all we have to do is cut the Puppet Master's strings. He looks past the army arrayed against us and at the strings hanging from the creepy clown doll. He sarcastically asks if that is all we have to do… clearly he doesn't think it will be that easy. How do we get past the guards without killing them? They are all innocent. I am thinking of Prototype, so I use moves from Prototype. I jump. But I don't just jump, I crouch and charge up a large jump. I then glide right over the Puppet Master's pawns. I form my right arm into a blade and slice through all the strings on the one side. Link is just staring at me now as if he can't believe what I just did. The Puppet Master screams in rage and about half of the army blocking Link just looks disoriented. Before he can attack me I do another charged jump and cut through the strings on the other side. Now all of his slaves are disoriented and none of them interfere with Link as he passes through them. Link says the only way to kill the Puppet Master is to destroy the gem on his forehead. I look up and see there is a red gem there that is glowing. Link says only the sword of light can do it. I have my doubts that the gem can hold up to my Prototype sword, but I decide to play along. I take hold of Link and charge a jump, getting us out of the way just before one of the clown's huge hands crashes down in an attempt to crush us. When we are high enough Link jumps off of me and drives his sword into the red gem. Red sparks fly and the gem shatters. The Puppet Master collapses to the ground with Link still standing on top. The former slaves of the Puppet Master are still a bit disoriented, but they seem to be regaining their senses. The spider creatures are dispersing. Some of the white ewoks are coming towards Link and me. They are talking to us. One of them says he does not know how to thank us for freeing them from the Puppet Master's control. Link isn't listening to them. He asks how I did that. I ask what he is talking about as I transform my blade back into a human arm. He points at me and says that. I tell him it's a long story and I'm sure I don't have time to tell it. I am right about that, and Link has barely begun to ask me more questions when I wake up.

Note: My ability to WILD has really gone down the crapper lately. On the other side, the number of FAs I have that turn into lucid dreams has gone way up. I guess I'm just greedy and I want it all! My plans for this night were to go back to a Legend of Zelda dream MoSh had a ways back and also to find out who it was I released that dark energy entity to last night. The other thing I wanted to do was open that locked book. I have a feeling there are a lot of answers in it if I could just remember to open it!

I was in my car. I was driving down a road. It was snowy out, and I was thinking I didn't have much experience driving in the snow. I was being very careful. I was there to meet MoSh. I was going to pick him up. Then there was a place we were going to explore. An ice cavern, like the one in the video game Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past. I drove up a winding hill, sure my car would get stuck, but it didn't. I pulled up in front of MoSh's house and got out of the car. I went up to the front door and knocked. MoSh came to the door. He looked at me strangely. I told him I was there so we could go see the cavern that is like the Legend of Zelda. He said that was cool. He followed me out to my car and we both got in.

I started the car and drove back down the hill… or actually I did more sliding down the hill. I slid right into a gigantic pothole. The pothole swallowed the entire car. The car fell downward for quite a ways before crashing to the ground. It hit the ground with much less force than I would have expected, though. I asked MoSh if he was ok, he said yeah, no thanks to my driving. I told him it would have helped to have warning of pothole-zilla. We both got out of the car. The car was totaled. The wheels were now completely flat, and the frame was smashed up quite a bit, too. Great… I wondered if this would raise my insurance payments. MoSh and I went through the only way out of the giant pothole that now looked more like a sink hole… That was through a passage to what I felt was north.

MoSh and I entered an interesting room. There were strange statues in the room, and the floor was practically made of ice. I stepped onto it without looking and immediately fell on my ass. MoSh said to be careful, much of these rooms would be slippery. I said I had noticed that. We entered the room, I was more careful this time. I was wishing I had ice skates… that would be easier… and suddenly I did. I somehow explained that to myself by saying my shoes just convert to ice skates when I need them to… wtf? What an excuse to avoid doing a RC! I skated into the room, MoSh followed me. He didn't seem to be slipping around… I wondered why? Maybe he's just more used to walking on ice since he lives in Canada… As I was about to reach the other side of the room, an ice carving in the wall came to life. I instinctively threw a Damage, Inc. fireball at it and it melted away. That seemed to trigger a door in the left side of the room to open. That was the only other exit, so MoSh and I went through it.

MoSh and I entered another room with a floor of ice… and strange jelly fish like creatures that were floating in the air. MoSh knocked them out of the air with a couple quick martial arts moves, they laid lifeless on the ground. MoSh went over to one of them and picked something up. He showed me what he'd found… it was a key. A golden key. I wondered what that was for. MoSh seemed to know. He took it to a locked door on the north side of the room and unlocked the door. He looked back at me as if to ask what I was waiting for. I skated over and joined him in going through the door.

Stairs led down deeper into the dungeon. Fortunately these weren't slippery. MoSh and I emerged in an ice cave at the bottom of the stairs. A cave led away to the south with branches leading off to the east and west. There was a dead end at both of those side tunnels. It seemed we had reached the end of our travels. MoSh headed down the passage. I skated after him, not sure where we were trying to go. MoSh went around the corner to the west. He found a loose panel in the wall and pushed it. I heard a grinding sound as a portion of the wall slid aside. The passage to the east was no longer a dead end. MoSh went over to that new passage and went into it.

This whole thing was seeming more like a level in the Legend of Zelda than I had realized at first. Weird monsters, a maze like dungeon, hidden switches to open hidden passages… Maybe it would help for me to start thinking as if I was playing a game of Zelda. Think like Link… I followed MoSh into the next room, which was an intersection of passages. Exits to the north, south, east, and west. The other three passages were closed. There were four orbs in the center of the room. All of the orbs were glowing red. I noticed each of the doors was a different color. North was blue, south was green, east was yellow, west was red. Ok… this was a puzzle. I went into the center of the room and touched an orb. It changed color and the red door closed. Ok, when all the orbs were the same color, the door of that color would open. This was complicated by the fact each orb affected the orb to the right of it… I fiddled around with them until they were all green. MoSh and I went south.

In the next room it looked much like the previous one. Another ice chamber, a few decorative statues… but there were strange creatures there attacking us. They looked like small demons or gremlins riding on upside down turtle shells… weird… those shells allowed them to maneuver very well on the ice. They were all attacking us, I had to do skating maneuvers I didn't know I was capable of to avoid them. MoSh and I were able to get rid of them with fire spells. And this seemed to just keep going on. More ice chambers, floating jelly fish, hidden passages and keys… It continued until we entered the largest chamber so far…

In the largest chamber there was creature made entirely of ice, or that's what it appeared to be. Made of ice, the ice was carved out in the form of a… um… I'm not sure what. It had a bull's head, the tail and stinger of a scorpion, eight legs, sharp pincers… um… someone had gone ape with the genetic manipulation… The thing had been standing like a statue, but when MoSh and I entered, it attacked us immediately. Throwing its stinger directly at MoSh, who dived to the side to avoid it. MoSh and I fought the thing using fire spells, which seemed to be the only thing that would affect it. The fire spells slowly melted the thing down until there was nothing left but puddles… but there was something left. There was a man standing there, the ice had apparently been formed around him. He was saying the ice king had been using the ice to control him, but now he was free. I wondered if that was true or an excuse… He opened a door in the back of the chamber.

MoSh and I went into the next chamber. There was a sphere of ice in the center on a stand like a giant crystal ball. In the middle of the crystal ball was a woman. I wondered how she had gotten in there. I figured this 'ice king' person had trapped her there. I figured a bit of fire would get her out… but before I could do that, I woke.