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I was solving a mysterious and unusual case. It was really dark, whole the town was seemingly overnight. I knocked to door of some house and after a while an asian woman in early twenties opened and let me in. We were sitting in a dark room, the only light that came inside was from a street lamp. We talked for a while about that strange case. I told her that every clue led me to her house. After I gathered all information I could, I left her alone and went to the streets.

Then I found myself in some old storage and industrial buildings. I felt that I was in grave danger, being chased by someone or something. I escaped, running through dark corridoors, rooms, alleys and then through sewers I got to subway station and escaped. Later I found myself in that buildings again, but this time I knew exactly where to escape.

Next night after solving the whole case I went to a chinese noodle stand and talked with chinese man. I told him that I'm leaving the city in search of a crystal katana sword. The man was surprised that I knew ultimate secret and asked who told me about it. After a while of consideration I said "MoonMan". Then he gave me a beautiful white flower that had blue glow inside it. I quietly said the name of that asian girl I met when solving the case, said that I might stay for some time and went to her. I gave her the flower and said "I know that this flower can't surpass your beauty, but take it." Then I said that I'm staying in the city and asked if she'd go on a date with me. She was silent, after a while she said that she has troubles speaking. I said that she should call me and say whether she want's to meet with me or not, then I went away.

I found myself in some old barracks, it was really dark. There was a really huge, open cistern down to the bottom of earth, full of muck. There was a platform with crystal sword, glowing with blue light. I decided to not risk it and leave the room. I opened door and saw that chinese noodle seller. He was really scared. I couldn't move - something was holding my arm. I turned back and saw a huge, white skinned humanoid with circular maw full of teeth in the middle of it's head, with two small eyes above it. The monster lacked left hand. I tried to free myself and scare it with roaring, but when it didn't worked I just punched it in the maw.

Everything became dark. I saw a text saying "The monster disappeared. No one knows how it was able to get through 890 345 600* metres of solid rock."

*The number can be inaccurate, but it's close I think.

Background

I'd known about lucid dreaming for a long time, but it took longer for me to experience it, and it was essentially spontaneously. I'd found I could accidentally go through a WILD-like trance when struggling to fall asleep after waking up early. The dreams would start off at a distance, like a television screen, and then become 'real', often as dream chains that I had some conscious influence over. Sometimes they were fragmented (e.g. being frozen in darkness, having very blurry vision, or the only sensation being the feeling of flying very fast), but now and then the clarity and reality of the scenes I experienced would blow me away. Still, I was unable to stabilise them. A few days ago I discovered that spoken commands like 'increase lucidity' could turn a vague fragment into a full-fledged visual scene, which was encouraging.

Waking Myself Up From A Burglary Dream

I'd told myself that I would write up any dreams I'd have that night and post them to DV for my first entry, so it's only fitting that I ended up having my first (semi-)lucid nightmare. After waking up in the morning and went back to sleep, I had a dream where I was sitting around a table with a few people, including, I think, a family friend. I was concerned about an exam that was coming up. I was worried that a question about acid-base chemistry was going to come up; something involving a base in ammonia, and I was sure that it was some other substance than the ammonia itself - NaBH4 or NH4OH. But the exam was cancelled because of an outbreak of 'parainfluenza', and this news was accompanied by the image of a woman with sore-looking yellow eyes. Since it was cancelled, I could rest easy and go to sleep.

This led into another dream where I was at home in the night, looking down the stairs so that I could see an area near the front door. I heard noises near the front door and looked closer. There was a fairly short man standing there. I thought it was my father - though I wasn't expecting to see him - so I called out to him. Rather than respond in kind, he shushed me, and I realised that it was an intruder. More of these intruders came through, so I retreated into a nearby empty room. At this point I began to suspect something was off. I thought I might be dreaming, but if so I wanted to wake up, so I could be sure and not have to worry about the intruders anymore. This wish suddenly ended the dream. It was replaced by text filling my field of view, being read off by a calm male voiceover. It said something along the lines of, "Welcome to your lucid dream. Wake up now or wake up dead in two weeks." At the time I think I had enough critical faculties to not be sure if this was right, but I realised I was in sleep paralysis and I really wanted to get out of it. I found that, surprisingly, I could slightly move my body with great effort. With what felt like a lot of willpower, I forced myself to move and woke up.

There wasn't any lingering feeling of terror, which is my usual criterion for a nightmare, but I think this fit the bill, if only because it made me realise that a semi-lucid dream could still be unpleasant.

Video Game Fragments

I was watching a boy playing a FPS game, switching between my view of him and a view inside the video game itself. He was clearing a large building with many corridors similar to a hospital - of what enemy I don't know - and then went up a curved staircase, which had many offices running alongside it, arranged in a staircase fashion themselves. The general aesthetic was wood and blue light. By entering this area he went into a sort of mini-game where he blitzed through the offices at high speed, which also involved strips of light flashing on his mousemat very fast. I thought it involved predicting the lights, but when I asked he told me that it was actually a very fast memory game, which observation seemed to confirm.

I thought about the idea of being sleep-deprived from addiction to virtual reality. I imagined a person distracting themselves from their tiredness by immersing themselves more into it. I have a dream in which I see scenes from an online FPS game called Xibalba, which I think actually represent a place within one level. Bizarrely, I also pondered the merits of a religion that worships the electron transition in one type of molecule (containing nitrogen!) versus a rival religion that worships another.

I was in school. I felt really ill and wanted to get back home quicker. I went to my head teacher and gave her a note from parents that I'll have to get out quicker this day. She was hesitating if she should let me go or not, but in the end I went out of classroom. I met our religion teacher and told him that I won't be able to conduct the lesson. I went downstairs to cloakroom and heard an alarm - everyone was escaping the school.

Next day I felt better and went to school. On a lesson with my head teacher we were analyzing a text of some unknown author. She said "From the text we can see that the author had a terrible writing style and gigantic ego."

Mazikeen's picking up a crow for me, telling it that it's not going to get out of our deal. There's always an excuse.

"What excuse?" says the crow. "I'm not trying anything. I'm just pointing out I've got mouths to feed."

Many people do. But she counts the children in the nest, six of them. She initially seems not to care, saying something about distributing its belongings; but then she says something about giving them time to "grow into it." The crow's got one more year.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A group of people sitting around a round table, while I'm standing. There's a woman who is composed of three women superimposed over each other, two living, one dead and decayed but still conscious due to her connection to the other two. I'm speaking to one of the living ones, Lily, the one who belongs to this reality, and offering a way to separate her from the other two. She has doubts. The other two are in favor of it. They ultimately agree.

Later, I'm reading an account of the deaths of that group who'd been sitting around the table, a kind of organization I'd led. I'd made a deal on behalf of those three women, and to hold up my end of the deal, I was away for a long time; I think of this as abandoning that group. There was a fire. I'm reading a note to the effect that the group itself will reappear in some form or another, but the people I'd abandoned are dead.

I'm seeking a book, something that I think of as 'a way out.' To retrieve it I'm drifting through a cloud of abstracts that sometimes resolve themselves into words floating in the cloud. They're dream images, illusions, but grasping the illusionary versions of this book will gradually lead me to the real thing. But they're difficult to capture - it's like trying to scoop up something small floating on water, if you're not careful the water will carry it right out of your hand again. It takes patience and deliberation and allowing the words to drift into my grasp.

I take hold of one word, feeling the substance of it. This changes the images that are drifting around me - now they're closer to the subject of that word, closer to what I'm seeking, and many of them are in the form of books rather than individual words. I repeat this process, releasing the word I had a hold of and reaching for the first relevant image that drifts into my grasp, and every time I repeat this process there are less individual words and more books, and the images displayed on the covers of the books become more and more relevant.

Now many of the books show images of a demonic face, which is heading in the right direction, but which also has drawn attention. A man I'm familiar with begins speaking with me, a demon or something close enough - I've forgotten the content of this one-sided conversation except that it was about that book I'm searching for. Our surroundings have gotten more solid by this point, and as I move through the cloud I find wooden steps under my feet.

I come up the steps into a room full of books piled haphazardly on wooden tables. There's a young human woman here looking through the books - long dark hair, blue jeans and white t-shirt, I recognize her as someone who has a history with that demon I've been speaking with. Her name's Dawn. Their interactions are familiar but antagonistic - she once struggled with him and lost, though I'm not sure she's realized she's lost yet. In any case, she came to him to search for something, but she failed and became trapped in a dream. It seems she's still searching for whatever it is. I find that sad to watch. She looks at the demon as he climbs up the stairs behind me - or I assume she does; I haven't seen him, he's just a voice to me, but she's looking right through me and to the place I believe he would be. In annoyance at his presence, she moves to another stack of books, further away. The demon sounds amused as he calls to her.

It occurs to me as I watch her that I've been consciously thinking of this as a dream for some time now. Since it seems she can't see me, I decide to step aside and watch the two of them. I settle down on a white couch out of the way and allow my perspective to change slightly. I can see the demon now, and Dawn's appearance has changed as well, both of them now dressed from the late 1700s, France - their hairstyles and clothes are looking rough, as if they started out with a fine presentation but over time the polished image has fallen apart. He's struck up a conversation, and eventually she says to him, "The doctor warns that (something to do with a slow death), and my minutes are done." She sounds defiantly happy about this, as if it's a kind of victory over the demon.

Had a long non-ld moment where I put together something like a form/report. Making a note of this because at the time of wake I could remember most of it. It was like 1.5 pages long, a coherent text that my dreaming self spent carefully writing down with a pen word by word and not a single thing was illegible or illogical.

I've been following something in the form of a child through a place that reminds me of the Flavian Amphitheatre, though I'm aware this isn't Rome or any other physical place; I'm climbing a spiraling staircase along the outer wall, with the arena far below to my left, and arches to my right looking out onto water, and I've just gone lucid in order to focus on remembering what I'm seeing through those arches. The sky is dazzlingly bright.

As I climb higher, the water is replaced by images of another place. I'm seeing an opera house sometime in the early 20th century, but at impossible angles - I see the audience in their boxes, a row of tables outside the theatre proper, a strip of grass and hedges from the little garden outside the building, all at the same time. The effect is something like looking through a faceted gem or a kaleidoscope, with images from different angles jammed right next to each other. Instead of seeing the walls, I see mirrors reflecting nothing, just bright, shining glass. I spot a man I think of as me, though he looks nothing like me - a young man with white hair, sitting at one of the tables outside the theatre proper and smoking. And as I continue climbing, my perspective moving along the audience, there's a woman in one of the boxes who catches my attention - a young black woman with her hair pulled back tight into a bun, in a pale purple gown. It strikes me as very important that I'm seeing her here in the audience, not on the stage.

I looked around for text in order to get some context, but while I found plenty of writing, it refused to cooperate, even swirling into spiraling shapes before my eyes. I don't normally have trouble reading while dreaming, lucid or not, so I thought of this as being deliberately evasive.

There's this machine. I fed it a small living thing to activate it. Now the screen's showing me several options to choose from, words that don't mean anything to me. The one on the screen at the moment is JEON. Swiping between options, I settle on a word that resembles AERIE written partially with Greek letters. The screen changes to show an image of four clocks. I'm aware I must memorize their appearances quickly, because I won't have another chance.

They're very elaborately designed, beautiful things - solid organic lines mixed with jagged exposed machinery; black wood, black clockwork, gold accents. The first is the simplest - a curving tapered pillar with the word MONUMENT in gold at the base. The others have human faces as ornamentation - the third has a woman's face with eyes closed like a mask and a single arm, arranged in such a way that it gives the impression that she's cradling something.

To the left of the screen, a case appears. It has spaces to fit each of the clocks. At the base of the machine, a slot produces several road maps. Without unfolding them, I can see that several places have been circled.

DILD
7:00am
I'm in a game and I see the enemies shooting their shock rifles towards me. I fire back and try to combo their energy balls before they reach me. Im up higher now in a building and still fighting. I think I become lucid or semi lucid around this point and must wake up shortly after.

I catch the False Awakening. I'm in a house and decide not to do anything fancy but just stay aware of my surroundings and check stuff out. I see a fridge with writing on it and have a look at what it says. It looked like if made sense from a far but as i get closer, I don't think it makes sense. I hear someone in the kitchen and go and check who it is. As I'm about to walking towards the kitchen I think about eating some chocolate. There's shopping bags all over the floor in the entrance and decide to step around them. I see my brother in the kitchen and don't bother worrying about him too much. I look in the fridge and see a cake. I try to get it out but I almost drop it. My brother comes up to help. I forget about the cake and think about something I wanted to do in a lucid dream. I'll try and convince my brother his dreaming. My speaking in lucid dreams as been slurred since starting again and I try to talk. It works no problems this time. I sound pretty clear. I begin to try and work on my brother. I grab him and tell him his dreaming but he tries to walk away and doesn't want to hear it. I tell him to watch what I'm about to do, which was going to be levitating/flying but I never got the chance to do it. [i felt the dream fading multiple times. I didn't stress too much about it and just focus on what I was doing and it bought back the dream clarity]

Dream Fragment:
1. Im with Kayley and. Marleigh. I need to buy a letterbox. I check a few out as there's all diff sizes. It's a factory.

2. Dad must win some money on the horse racers and I ask him about the other week if he had won. He didn't win.

3. Dad fills the dog bowl with tap water.

Side Notes:
Struggling to remember dreams. Woke up at 5:30am and couldn't sleep for an hour+ which probably worked as a WBTB. Took sleeping mask off as I struggled to get back to sleep and it seemed to do the job and woke up with eyes closed without the assistance of the sleeping mask. Pretty happy with the small progress in lucid dream length as they usually last under min. This one felt as if it lasted 3 mins. Mantras for RC upon awakening is paying off.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

As Kang Chi in modern times, I meet Yeo Wool. She remembers me. We're both shocked. I have a false awakening in which I try to tell IRL friend S. about that dream, and then go on to a few IRL-based scenes - trying to find a place to park in NYC, and trying to form words out of a jumble of letters.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the past. Kang Chi and Yeo Wool are meeting up in this hut in the mountains outside of town. They have to separate, and they're being very loudly upset about it. It's just before dawn, and as a 3rd person observer, I'm thinking they must be waking people up in town, they're so loud.

Kang Chi's lying on his back in that town at night, looking up at the full moon. It looks massive, taking up most of my field of vision. He's meant to be meeting Yeo Wool soon and traveling somewhere together, but he's convinced himself she won't come anyway - there's something that's happened between them or something she's involved in that's on his mind, but he's not thinking about it directly. He's talking to himself out loud, convincing himself that she won't come and he should just leave on his own.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Kang Chi's delirious, standing outside somewhere on the edge of that same town and calling for someone he calls brother - not a literal brother. Yeo Wool's trying to get him to move, but as he starts talking like this, she remembers a time in the past when they were in trouble in this same place and Wol Ryung had helped them. He and Kang Chi had called each other brother sometimes - it's partially a reference to being the same species, and partially acknowledging each other as close while sidestepping the complicated family issue. So she realizes that, delirious, Kang Chi's calling Wol Ryung for help. Wol Ryung's dead.

Kang Chi and Yeo Wool are traveling together in a very distant place. Yeo Wool's wearing modern clothes - no one else is. They're surrounded by soldiers carrying spears and a froglike nobleman on horseback - not a human being. The two of them raise daggers to their own throats, threatening to kill themselves rather than let the froglike man capture them alive.

As Kang Chi, I'm outside and looking through a window at Yeo Wool. There's a luna moth on the window.

And then two IRL-based scenes - catching and releasing an insect, and a visit from an IRL sister's friend.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In modern times, Kang Chi's at a studio where they're filming a movie or a show, and a woman is talking to him, sounding very irritated. Without naming any names, she makes it clear there's been rumors going around about someone who works here being viewed as violent, potentially dangerous. Kang Chi's thinking this is about Yeo Wool - she's recently become nonhuman, and the adjustment period can be rough. Which makes this his responsibility. Without specifically naming names, Kang Chi tries to get the woman to confirm that it's Yeo Wool she's talking about. But Yeo Wool's just appeared at the end of the hall, and the woman says to ask her himself and stalks off.

And then an IRL-based scene involving studying Agamemnon.

I'm lying on the ground next to the road beside the IRL swamp near where I grew up. Down the road, a truck reaches the peak of a small hill and then seems to continue rising into the air until it disappears into the sky. I think that's odd and that it must be some odd optical illusion, and I watch to see if it happens again so I can figure out what's causing the illusion. I turn to comment on this to my IRL sister, S.

But I'm distracted when I catch sight of a ball of blue flame hovering nearby in the swamp. I think of this as foxfire. It happens sometimes. I'm thinking about how foxfire works, and how it's usually safe, with some exceptions. The foxfire then turns from blue to the usual red/orange fire in reaction to our presence - that's the exception I was just thinking about. It approaches us, and we have to run to avoid getting burned.

When we get inside, we're no longer me and S., we're two young brothers. I, the older brother, realize that the foxfire's too close behind us, and so when my brother escapes into the inner room, I close the door behind him, allowing the fire to catch me but keeping him safe. When the foxfire catches me, it takes on my form, so that for a moment there are two of us.

Fragmentary memory for a bit. Next clear scene - I'm Satan, using that older brother's form and talking to the younger brother. The kid's fully aware that I'm not his real brother. I've just now been able to return to earth after being sealed away for a long time, and I'm curious about all the new things here. I'm looking at an instrument in the kid's room; I'm mentally comparing it to a harp, but it's a stringed instrument that lies flat on the ground when you play it, like a koto. It's something kids are required to learn in school, so the kid's not very interested in it, but I fiddle around with it until I get the hang of it - it really is a lot like a harp, just turned on its side - and I improvise a pretty little tune. I'm vaguely hoping the kid will get the idea that the instrument can be used for more than just the dull melodies he learns in school, but he doesn't seem interested - it's a dull instrument to him, and that is that. I then go and look through his movies, picking up one written in a pictographic alphabet - birds, reeds. I recognize it as Arabic, and I'm delighted by the changes in this form of writing since I've been gone. The movie involves the issue of unity and diversity - people questioning whether it's better to preserve the cultures of individual tribes or to think of themselves as a single nation, and whether it's possible to do both.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a small fishing village. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking of everyone here as an analogue for someone else in the distant past or another world or something along those lines. There are two in particular who I think of as analogues for "the prince" and "the Judas figure." At the moment, the prince's girlfriend (who doesn't appear to have an analogue, or at least I wasn't thinking about one for her) is talking to the Judas figure, trying to convince him to give her a ride somewhere, but not wanting to tell him why she needs that ride - the prince is involved somehow. She names somewhere else nearby as her destination instead, but he's not fooled at all. He suggests she just tell him where she really wants to go, it'll save time for both of them. As he's saying this, I as a disembodied observer am focusing on a long, thin scar slanting to the right, down the back of the woman's neck.

False awakening, during which I tried to write down that dream on my skin, for lack of anything else to write on.

I'm standing outside my IRL local library with two women. One of them needs to get something from inside the building, without getting caught. There's only one person inside to avoid being seen by, that and hiding her face from the cameras, so it seems fairly simple, but she's still worried, and she's standing around working out various plans. This seems to be something she intends to do on her own, she's not asking either of us for help, and the other woman with us is just waiting impatiently off to the side, but it seems to me this would go a lot easier and faster if I just went ahead and took care of it myself. After all, unlike her, I don't show up on video, and it'll be much easier for me to avoid that person inside - they're mostly walking around the main area near the door, so I'll just go around to the side of the building instead and walk through the wall.

The section of wall I phased through comes out in the fantasy section, off in the corner of the library and out of sight. I'm looking around at the fantasy books, and thinking about how I used to eat this stuff up, and about how much more difficult it is for me to get lost in a book now. I'm aware that the quality of the books hasn't changed, it's my own mindset - but I somehow feel sure that if I look at one of these books, now I'll find one I can get absorbed in. I pick one up and flip through. The paragraph I'm looking at now involves characters named Maedhros and Fingon - I recognize the names from Tolkien, and I note this as odd, since this isn't a Tolkien book. These aren't meant to be the same characters either; the author seems to have just stolen the names for his own characters.

The dream scene changes to a scene from that book. One character is explaining three weapons to another, and he's making a big deal out of a knife that secretly contains some kind of poison. He says there are two options with this - a whole dose inside will kill instantly, but "a thousand light touches... well, depends on how you define death." The scene changes; he's meeting a small group of people in a forest, one of them a queen, and they're coming to some agreement. He secretly places small doses from that poison in each of their drinks, which will give him some power over them - to his mind, this is simply making sure that they don't back out of the deal they've made. After they drink, they instantly realize what's happened and regret making this deal, but it's too late now.

Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

Lucid #194: Bold Talk

I have a false awakening where I really need to pee and I head into a darkened restroom with urinals along the wall. It looks like something that you’d find in the lobby of a nice hotel or a fancy restaurant. I remember that I fell asleep at home, so this all seems really odd, but when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

I start using the urinal for a bit when it occurs to me that I might be dreaming. Everything feels oddly realistic, so I stop, suddenly afraid that I’m wetting the bed. There’s a single sink in this restroom with a mirror over it. I walk up to the mirror and see my bleary-eyed self staring back. I bring up my hand for a nose pinch and so does my double. When I breathe right through my pinched fingers, I’m finally sure that this is a dream.

I walk out through the restroom door into a sports stadium that seems to be made up of a bunch of crisscrossed steel girders. On the outside of the stadium I can see huge red letters that are backward (from my perspective) and seem to spell out something like “B E A R S”. I look closer and now the letters are oriented to face me and spell “M E T S”.

Taking a glass door leading outside brings me to a large, covered pavilion filled with DCs standing around chatting and holding fountain drinks. I decide that I want another crack at Task of the Year, so I try to take command: “Listen up everyone!” They all stop what they’re doing and turn to face me. “You will all help me do task of the year.”

I get this sudden feeling of paranoia and add, “And none of you will attack me!” Agh, shut up, man, nobody’s thinking of attacking you! The DCs return to going about their business and walk past me, the pavilion area quickly thinning out until there are just a handful of people in there beside me. I start trying to work a magic lamp summon for the Aladdin Task of the Year but the dream collapses before I have any success.

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.