Nocturn Core (Abridged)

I went to the doctor’s office with my mom. Our doctor was an interesting woman with a voice and a personality like a man’s… Deep down, though, she still had that motherly instinct. She had a terrible habit of smoking in the hospital, which a blond nurse kept coming into the room to ask her to stop doing in front of us. It made no difference to her. The doctor explained that she only checked teeth on the first visit, so she had us each open our mouths and show her our teeth for three seconds. Once that was done, she took off her rubber gloves and shrugged.

“That’s it. See you next time.” Before we could leave, however, a white-haired man with glasses came into the room. He smiled faintly when he made eye contact with me.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to step in as this boy’s doctor starting next week,” he said. Our manly woman doctor put her hands on her hips.

“What? Why?”

“I think I understand why he’s here… Would that be alright?”

“Well, sure… As long as he’s fine with it, too.” Everyone looked at me.

“I don’t see why not…” I said. In truth, I just wanted to get away from this doctor’s smoke. Now that all of that was settled, we were able to leave the doctor’s office. I overheard my new doctor whispering something to the woman after we exited the room.

The dream jumped. We returned to the doctor’s office sometime later. My doctor was late, so the woman doctor took me into her room anyway. I noticed she wasn’t smoking… That was a good sign. She checked our teeth again, but she was a little more thorough this time. She paid particular attention to my teeth, and I thought that meant they weren’t doing so well, but she smiled after each of the three rounds of inspection. She only had one complaint.

“Try not to go so hard on your front teeth,” she said. “They’re in pain.”

“His teeth are in pain…?” my mom wondered in amazement. I understood what the doctor meant, but there was no way I could explain it to my mom. She lacked the experience to assimilate it. The doctor asked about my life and studies, so I explained my academic interests and lucid dreaming practice.

“I also work at an airport,” she said after I mentioned studying electrical engineering. “My job is to assess risks and input danger zones in the airport mapping system. We isolate areas with cones and what have you, then put the danger point in as a user under the protection platform with a timer for removal.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a pretty complicated job sometimes, but I enjoy it.”

“That’s so good of you!” my mom complimented. “You’re keeping people safe at the airport.”

“Yeah,” I added, “and most people at the airport probably don’t think about…” My mom interrupted me, but I let her finish. Neither of us really listened to what she had to say. It’s not that we didn’t care, but it literally could not be anything important – we both understood this as a fact.

“Go ahead,” the manly woman doctor urged me after my mom was done speaking.

“Well, as I was saying, most people at the airport probably don’t think of it as dangerous. The ones who are terrified of airports are either scared of the people or the planes, and the people who don’t have that fear see airports as a fairly safe place. Without people like you, that wouldn’t be possible.” The doctor smiled. I almost expected her to give me a fist pump. The door to the room opened, and in walked my new doctor. I noticed he wore a white sword on his hip, but I didn’t say anything about it. The woman doctor started smoking again, and I covered my mouth and nose so I wouldn’t get a headache. Smoke gives me serious headaches…

“Oh? Are you smoking again?” my doctor asked. “When we met last week, you said you were going to stop that dirty habit…”

“It’s not me, it’s…” She trailed off as a red portal appeared behind my doctor. He drew his sword.

“It’s her!” A fancy, red car appeared beneath the huge portal. It drove out of the building and down the street. I saw it long enough to notice a woman with pale skin and fried, blond hair in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were as black as the night. Both doctors rushed to the front of the building, and I hesitantly followed them. My mom came along to tell me not to wander around the doctor’s office.

“We’ve got to do something…” the woman doctor said in a hoarse, choking voice.

“Well, that’s what he’s for, isn’t it?”

The dream jumped. I was in the basement of a store in the Imperial City of Tamriel. A bunch of women with bizarre, neon hair colors lurched around the building naked like zombies. I cut through their bodies with Apheri, and they dissolved into black shadows. I felt that this was all part of Oblivion. I wondered why there were still NPCs here, thinking that I’d deleted the mod that implemented them. I supposed their zombie-like behavior was the result of null dialog and a lack of AI presets; they didn’t know how to behave, so they just wandered around aimlessly. Anyway, once I destroyed most of these, I saw a girl sitting with her legs crossed on a rounded ledge built into the corner of the room. She was wearing a shirt, frilled black skirt. Her hands rested at her sides until I approached. Then she looked up at me and screeched. It was the woman who came through the portal at the doctor’s office! I saw her name for a brief moment – Lusark Decidies or something like that. Her black eyes seemed to suck me in, but then she transformed into a bloody heart. Her membranes attached themselves to the floor and the ceiling, suspending this pulsating lump of organic material in the air. I slashed across it, and she howled again as her blood shot out into the room. She transformed into a web of needles next. The area around her became a fireplace. There was some kind of weird, razor-sharp curtain attached to the mantle. When I rotated a wheel on the base of the mantle, this curtain was moved in line with the woman’s needle web. The whole time, electricity was shooting out of the walls at her for some unexplained reason. I heard voices talking in the back of my head.

“That final boss was boring,” one guy said.

“No way! The lightning was really cool.” I continued cranking the curtain wheel. The woman groaned at the pain. She shot needles at me, but I didn’t care. I was pretty sure I could survive if I just killed her quickly.

“You know, a lot of people compare her to Lady Gaga, but I don’t see the similarity.”

“What? She’s Lady Gaga’s oversoul. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t think so…” I kept cranking the wheel, and the curtain got stuck on the corner for a bit. When I got it through, it started going toward the wall. If I could get it all the way to the wall, I would rip out all of her energy – I just knew this instinctively.

“She doesn’t try to stop you from finishing?” I asked the voices. The curtain was almost to the end.

“Sure she does.” A hand reached out of the web of needles, grabbing the curtain and crushing it. She was much more powerful than me; even turning the wheel at full force, I couldn’t keep her from jerking the curtain back. I put some more effort into it, but it was no use. I was losing. I heard the door of my room open and felt my physical body roll over. What would my roommate think if he saw me turning an invisible wheel in bed? I woke up.