The Only Game In Town [Adventure]

Lillian took a deep breath in. Goo had been mentoring her and trying to break her habit of breathing here in the dream realm. She knew it wasn't necessary since her body was breathing perfectly fine in reality, but she still felt the need.

With deep concentration, Lillian tried to believe that her hand was actually a knife. Her hand had always been a knife. Fingers were just an illusion her mind had created to pass the time. The knife was all that she had ever known and all that she would ever know.

Lillian opened her eyes and stared down at her knife. Where her wrist was supposed to be, the flesh morphed into a deep mahogany handle and a knife protruded from her wrist.

She experimentally slashed the air as Goo whooped for delight.

"You're a natural at this. You can already replace body parts, and we have barely even begun your training. I mean, look at your hand. It's a knife!"

A terrible dissonance rang in Lillian's head. She tried to hold the two truths at once. The fact that she had made her hand into a knife and that her hand had always been a knife. But they couldn't exist simultaneously, and they collided in her mind, shattering the knife and returning her hand back to what it was supposed to be.

Lillian lowered an angry gaze down at Goo who started shrinking away from her wrath.

Deep in her mind, Lillian knew that Goo was an ant. He had always been a small ant on the inside of her palm. Goo wilted as Lillian's mind forced a new truth into existence. Goo was small and Lillian held him in her grasp.

"What have I said about silence?" Lillian leered down at her captive.

The ant that had once been known as Goo smartly stayed silent.

"That's what I wanted to hear." Lillian cackled as if she was some villain in a two-bit play. And Lillian let herself remember that Goo had been a small man. She couldn't remember what color his eyes were supposed to be though, so she forced herself to remember them as a deep blue.

Goo shuffled away, grumbling quietly about "labor unions" and that "he had rights in the dream realm."

Lillian was pleased with her growth. Time was not the most linear process here in the dream realm, but she was convinced that she had developed her dream powers at an unheard-of speed.

Goo was not strong enough to fight her assertions on reality in a contest of wills, but he had shown her a fatal flaw in her abilities. She listened to much to what her opponents were saying. Goo mentioning that she had turned her arm into a knife instantly broke the illusion that she had always had a knife there. And Lillian could not abide that weakness.

But Lillian felt confident now. She and Goo had been camping out nearby the endless stream that Lillian had walked through when she first arrived in this dream. They did it mostly out of habit. In the dream world there was no need for shelter, food, or water. They were beings of Dream now, and pesky things from reality would never bother them again.

But with the lack of problems from the real world came a new variety of problems exclusive to the dreaming. Nightmares were a fact of life, and they would try to eat you if they could catch you.

Goo had explained that the deal with Dream was that any soul claimed by the god would be one of their little helpers in this dimension of the dreaming. All humans dreamed in this realm and all their dreams were made by people like Lillian, using the power of will that she was now practicing.

But a lot of those people were a little unstable. They would make monsters and let them loose in the world for no reason in particular. Lillian was convinced that Susan was one of these nightmarish beings, created for no purpose other than to cause mayhem in the night.

Goo was nearly useless; he had the mental power of a slug and so they had been hiding near the stream and training Lillian's abilities so that she could venture forth into the realm of the dreaming and become a dream terrorist.

Lillian knew that Dream was the entire realm that she existed in, and that she was an inconsequential bug in their eyes. So, she had devised a plan to get the god's attention. She was going to destroy the land of the dreaming and force the god to let her go back to being alive.

There were a lot of missing steps in the plan, but she had an outline which was pretty good, she felt.

She needed practice, but she hated feeling like she wasn't accomplishing anything. Lillian knew that it wasn't wise, she knew that she was just asking to get destroyed, but she couldn't help but feel the need to go on the offensive.

Lillian called out to Goo and told him to prepare for war. Without skipping a beat, Goo transformed himself into a little knight. His armor gleamed and he rode a squirrel beside Lillian as she prepared herself.

Layers upon layers of armor shimmered around Lillian. She willed the light of the dream world to bend around her and encase her in an impenetrable defense.

Once fully encased she nodded to Goo and the two of them marched away from their little camp beside the stream. They marched towards the large stone blocks that stood like giants in this realm.

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Lillian had accidentally stumbled into a few of them during her early days in the dream realm and believed that they were where the humans dreamed. Inside each stone pillar was a person dreaming.

She had decided that her first bit of terrorism would be to destroy someone's dreams from the inside out. Lillian had also decided not to try this on any of her friends or loved ones in case this did permanent damage to the dreamer.

The dream world was fantastic in an ineffable way. As Lillian walked towards the stone edifices, she looked at the field around her. The field was every field she had ever seen in her lifetime, and every field she had ever imagined. It waved in an imitation of motion without every distorting its image. It was better than reality because it was a field; there were no questions about whether or not it was a plain, or a garden, or any other botanical word. It was simply a field.

Lillian walked up to one of the large stone towers and Goo stood next to her.

"Let me show you how to do it the right way." He said as he placed his hand onto the stone. Last time Lillian had broken through the walls in a painful way; now, she could feel what Goo was doing. Goo was imagining himself becoming a piece of the wall and letting himself slide through.

Lillian touched the wall and let herself become a piece of it. She was the wall that protected the dreamers, she had stood for eons holding back the tide of things living out here in the dream world. After an amount of time that meant nothing to a wall she slipped through and became herself again.

Within the dream, she saw a haze. Her eyes were struggling to focus on the world around her. Everything was covered in smoke.

Lillian relaxed her shoulders and remembered that this was someone else's dream. Nothing could affect her if she did not want it to.

Her will sharpened into a blade that cut the smoke away from her eyes. Once her vision cleared, Lillian observed the room around her.

The walls of the room were a deep shade of red and there was a hookah sitting on the table in front of two men. One of them was someone that Lillian had never seen before, he was gesturing wildly around himself and laughing like he had just heard the funniest joke of his life. On the other side of the table sat Goo, he was still comically small, and he had to grip the hookah pipe with two hands to keep it from slipping to the ground.

Lillian smacked the pipe out of Goo's hands. She glared down at the diminutive man and let her eyes tell him the story of her disappointment.

She knelt in front of the man she did not recognize. She waved her hands in front of his smoke-filled eyes and asked, "is this your dream?"

The smoke started being dragged away as soon as she asked her question. Lillian could feel a suction start to pull at her as the man's eyes came into focus.

"Where… Who?" Words started forming on his lips, but Lillian focused her will on him. She made the smoke reappear and forced the dream to take the man back. Her question had started waking the man up from this dream, but at least her question had been answered.

Lillian shoved Goo to his feet and asked for him to place a field of silence around her. His abilities at forming illusions far surpassed Lillian's. But she had the skill to make the unimaginable real, so it all evened out.

Silence enveloped Lillian in a warm cocoon as she began to sharpen her ferocious will to a new task. She imagined that the man sitting in front of her was an extension of her own body. She created stories in her mind about how they had been born from the same mother and been conjoined since birth. They were inseparable and wherever she went, he also went.

With a tug, the mental connection fitted into place and Lillian nodded to Goo, signaling that she had accomplished her main goal.

She then stood up and felt sound rush back to her ears. Goo was sitting in a knowing stance. It was the stance he unconsciously went to when he was about to begin lecturing Lillian about different aspects of the dream world. His hands were on his hips and his chest was proudly pushed out. He was excited to share, and Lillian decided not to take that away from him.

"I hope you remember the first time we escaped a dream together." Lillian thought back to when she had chased Goo out of her mother's dream. The little man had run to her kitchen and slammed a pan on himself repeatedly to escape the dream. Lillian nodded in assent.

"Well, to leave a dream you simply have to do something with the full belief that the action you are taking will make you leave the dream."

Lillian liked the dream realm; anything was possible if you simply believed that it would be. She felt so free to do as she wished in here. She certainly longed for reality again, but this freedom would be something she missed after escaping the dream.

Lillian thought back to hitting herself with the pan repeatedly because she had seen Goo do it. It was idiotic. Now that she knew the secret she wondered if Goo simply had brain damage.

With her will sharpened to a point Lillian knew that taking a single step backwards would take her out of this dimension. She believed with her entire heart. And as she stepped backwards the smoky haze of the world faded out of focus until she was staring at a blank wall of stone.

"Where… where am I?" Part of Lillian asked. Lillain recalled that she needed to detach this part of herself and severed the mental link connecting her to the dreamer she had stolen.

"This is what the land of dreams looks like, bucko." Lillian nonchalantly replied.

Lillian looked into the man's grey eyes. He looked much more aware than most people were in their normal dreams. She assumed that the giant towers of stone were something like prisons meant to keep humans inside of them.

"You feel anything wrong with you?" Lillian said while poking him. During her cursory examination, Goo appeared outside of the tower, coughing up lungfuls of smoke. Lillian lightly kicked him on the head. He sat down with an oomph.

Lillian felt that there was nothing seriously wrong with the man, so she imagined that she had become a doctor. A white coat landed on her shoulders and a license appeared in her pocket. A new pair of glasses were pushed further up her nose as she said, "there's nothing wrong with you. You are free to go. Don't hurt yourself out here."

With a wave Lillian gave the man the ability to fly and then pushed him far away. He probably couldn't be hurt by anything in this realm. Worst came to worst, he would probably just wake up if anything attacked him.

Now, Lillian refocused on her main task. These giant stone towers had to be doing something. They were prisons for the dreamers, and hopefully Dream cared a lot about their maintenance.

Lillian imagined a giant tortoise with a hankering for stone clawing its way out of the ground. The giant animal came into reality and looked hungrily at the stone. Lillian nodded to it and the monster's stomach grumbled.

With a smile Lillian watched as it consumed the tower, top to bottom. There was nothing inside of it, but Lilian could feel a small reverberation throughout the world that she had just done something bad.

"How many people do you think there are, Goo?"

"I don't rightly know," Goo said as he stood up from his dazed position on the ground. "Probably a couple hundred thousand?"

"Well then. One down a couple hundred thousand to go."