Nocturn Core (Abridged)

I was on a train. Two guys noticed that they both had Swiss Gear backpacks. I showed them mine, and they laughed when they saw I had one, too. I realized one of the guys was Eric Weller.

“Eric?” I blinked. He pointed at himself as if to make sure I was talking to him.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be Eric. Who are you supposed to be?” The phrasing of his question was bizarre. I replied in a manner that struck it down.

“I’m Josh.”

“Oh! Right!” Awkward silence followed. We got off the train and came to a room with strangely shaped windows… It was painted purple throughout. I thought about how much I wanted to realize I was dreaming. Then, confused by the origins of the thought, I looked around. I was dreaming! I grabbed Eric by the shoulders.

“Dude, we’re in a dream. What do you feel like doing?”

“I dunno…”

“Neither do I! Let’s fly!” I threw him out the window forcibly and jumped out after him. He didn’t know how to fly, so he just tumbled toward the rugged mountain valleys below us. I swooped down and pointed a finger at him to levitate his body in the air.

“What are you doing?!” he cried, waving his arms.

“Try moving. Float up.” As I spoke, he drifted upward. He panicked when he couldn’t change directions, however, and I had to bring him down with my magic finger. “You’re bad at this…” I brought him down to a boat on the side of a mountain. I gave my intent to summon Nicole, and voila! There she was, standing on the deck. She looked around, then at me. “Welcome to my dream,” I said. “Is it really you, or are you just ‘supposed to be’ Nicole?” Eric didn’t seem pleased by my teasing question.

“I’m me…” Nicole said. “So hold on, we’re dreaming?”

“Yes. I saw a portal while I was flying around. Let’s go into it!” Nicole agreed, so we flew up to a purple vortex in the sky. Darkness spiraled into it as it seemed to spin. We were both sucked in. Hopefully, dream Eric didn’t starve in the middle of nowhere – we left him behind. The vortex filled my vision.

I had a false awakening. I sat up in bed, staring down at my hand. My arm was incredibly long – at least five feet – and each of my fingers branched off into two. I felt like I was going cross-eyed. I couldn’t focus on anything properly. After a while, things stabilized, and my hand was normal.

“I guess we’re not dreaming,” I told Nicole.

I was a priest in a medieval town. I explained a game the townspeople liked to play to Nicole. One person would hide behind a wall and chuck explosives into the crowd. Meanwhile, a turtle shell was thrown back and forth between the bomber and representatives of the populace. I went over to an area divided into cubes of space with open ceilings. There were supposed to be portals to other worlds here, but I disabled them. Once I was behind the wall, I made a screeching sound recognized as the start of the bomber game. I lobbed a bomb into an unsuspecting group of people on the other side. The turtle shell came flying over the wall, and I sent it back with a mighty punch. I’m glad my knuckles didn’t break. Every now and then as the shell bounced between both sides, one of us slipped – usually me. The score was 5-2 before long. I knew I had to catch up. I used bombs to propel the turtle shell further and further away from the wall, theoretically decreasing the likelihood that it would land near someone who was paying attention. It always managed to come back. Once, the explosion itself seemed to fling the shell at my face… I wasn’t sure how that made any physical sense. The score was 6-2… One more point to the enemy would mean their victory.

I hovered in the air, flinging the shell with ease back at the public representatives. I started floating higher and couldn’t get myself to go back down. Eventually, I couldn’t reach the shell to prevent it from dropping into my small room. As it fell behind the wall, an announcer said that the gateways to the other worlds had been reopened. Her voice was somewhat robotic, but very different from Symphony’s. Glowing, purple pits appeared on the floor of the cube rooms below me. I descended to the ground near an apple tree and started walking around. Someone thought I was really a priest and tried to give me their confession.

“I’m just roleplaying,” I explained. He left me alone. Steve (from my second semester of physics) showed me this disgusting candy that was apparently too dangerous to keep in your mouth for more than ten minutes. It came as half of a sucker with the inside hollowed out. A toxic, pink dye coated the inside. Within seconds, it turned your entire mouth pink with the toxin. I refused to try it.