blinkinglights

A Gandalf/Dumbledore kind of old evil wizard had managed to subdue every magical creature and artifact on modern-day Earth and subdue them utterly. Now everybody and everything was contained in specially-created habitats; frequently, he would address his conquests with magically-charged speeches it was of course pretty much mandatory to listen to, though lots of the rules about the place were unwritten, and you just kind of disappeared if you didn't follow them. Since there were lots of different habitats, sometimes the speeches were in person and sometimes they were over PA or whatever. The habitats were airport and mall kind of sterile places set off from ordinary human cities by minimal forest buffers.

Everyone was totally brainwashed, including myself. Most of us couldn't remember anything about who we'd been or what our powers were, we just kind of lived uneasily with the foremost worry in our lives being staying up on all the gossip about who had disappeared and for what, who was bad and who was not. I was a boy, ex-Jeremy--I don't think I could remember my name--and I enjoyed something of a special status, though I don't think I was really aware of it. I was the very last werewolf, because our overlord had killed them all in the fight to take over the world. Therefore, I enjoyed a somewhat marginal, wandering existence through the complex, skating past the consequences that overshadowed everyone else's lives, due to my value. I didn't know I was a werewolf in the dream because of the brainwashing and had no access to my other form.

I have a very clear image of dancing down the center of a long echoing airport-style throughfare. It's sparsely populated and brightly-lit. Some of the paths branching off from it are warded against trespass with danger signs. The kind of person I am in the dream is unaware of the attention of others. At some point, I wander off to a kind of shopping-lounging corner of the complex. I talk to a few pixies, short elvish people with close-cropped silky hair and tanfreckled skin. They're gossiping furiously. This is kind of a hangout for the washed-up and down-and-out. Packs of attractive, lithe, plainclothed policewomen chatter and pass through at intervals, raking their gazes across the assembled. In retrospect they seem a lot like wolves, too.

The complex has a limping sort of black market. I don't know if I'd even call it that. The overlord doesn't know the specifics of everyone he has under his control--it's not a two-way kind of power, he exerts the dominance but gets no feedback--and things and people that used to be extraordinarily powerful have a way of sifting through the cracks, totally lost without their powers and purpose, becoming society's dregs. I find a strange, diaphanous, flowing, bright-purple translucent scarf kind of thing, really huge but bunchable and foldable. It's lost and unhappy. It's really the Marauder's Map, but it's forgotten everything. People are looking for it, but neither of us really knows that. We talk about stuff I've forgotten as I move through the complex to the nearest unblocked exit. Eventually I decide to keep it with me. It's very lonely and doesn't want to be left behind, but it's coy about it. I wrap it around my fist, once unsatisfactorily, then properly. It makes some wry comments but seems happy that I'm wearing it on something I use to punch others with sometimes.

Together, we clamber over some barricades and out into the sparsely-wooded, windingly-roaded, craggy and cliffy suburbs of the main Complex. I wake up there just after my dream adds in that I am/should be wearing gloves, so that it's plausible for me to walk around with the Map unseen without actively hiding it. Everything was building up to me accidentally thwarting the overlord somehow due to the unique privilege of my position--and probably some expansion into the uniqueness of that privilege besides just "LAST OF UR KIND LOL"--but then I was woken up.