I woke up from a nightmare,
One I sense I’ve had before
Me and some friends are will workers, wizards you’d say.  Not the Harry Potter type but workers in deadly seriousness.  We had just met with success in some endeavor or another,  and are walking past a graveyard.  We’re joking and laughing. 

Our youngest member is skipping and playing with her dog which looks almost like a wolf. My perspective shifts from the me character to the most powerful of us.

He knows this graveyard.  It is no mere collection of interesting architecture and moldering bodies.  It is a prison.  For horrors beyond imagination.  But for some reason pieces of the fence are down.  The prisoners must be working on it from the inside, causes pieces of the heavy wrought iron fence to crumble or disappear entire.

  I am speaking. Warning everyone that this place is dangerous.  But I can tell they are unimpressed.  They nod but cannot understand.  The young woman and her dog disappear. 

The dog is running deep into the cemetery.  She chases. Towards the mausoleum.  If they cross it’s threshold they will be trapped forever.  Being chased forever by whatever they fear the most.  I tear off after her.

  Running as fast as my tired body can.  Forcing myself to draw on my reserves.  Burning the pilot light of my magic out to pour on speed.  I pull the girl back before she crosses the fatal threshold.

Terror and fatigue pumping through me.  My future burned away.  My magic may come back but it may not.  For now, I am merely human.  Weak as I have not been in a long time.  The dog plays out its fate in front of us.  It hits the threshold.  It goes wild in panic.  Whining and with eyes rolling in panic it runs back to the group. 

My perspective shifts.  I am back in the me.  But the things I learned in the elder are not accessible.  I am a passenger only.  I watch this poor animal lose its mind again and again and again.  The elder makes it back with my darling impetuous daughter.

That’s quite enough of this.  I expend a bit of power.  Freeing the dog from the embrace of the curse.  Unfortunately,  death was the only way.  But in interfering with the prisons magic, I freed a nightmare. 

As the passenger I know this.  But as the driver, I’m just pleased that my daughter won’t see her childhood pet tortured.

The elder looks at me exhausted and in horror.  He explains that he is retiring.  He does not explain why.  We leave and find our way to an abandoned hotel we have used before. I sense something different, something off.

Everything proceeds normally until I find the elder explaining to thin air that we are all cursed. That if he’s going out he going to rekindle his pilot light.

He has a mini blowtorch and is pressing it to the skin of his wiry exposed arm.  He looks like John Constantine, comic book version.  His skin begins to bubble and he laughs.

I get out of there before he notices me.  I go and find my family.  They are eating a meal.  Perfectly normal,  their backs to me.

  I go around the table and see that they have cut open my brother and are cutting and eating raw bits off of him.  He is still alive.  But they have cut out his tongue and eyes.  My wife grins bloody bits of meat stuck in her teeth.  She gestures for me to join them.  I run.

Normally, the dream gets worse and worse until I figure out how to defeat the ghost.  But not this time,  this time I wake. 

I’m in Seattle. Another dreamscape but I don’t notice.  That dream proceeds normally.  Some laughs, some friends. 
Then I wake.  For real?  But I am unsettled.  It feels unreal. 
I stand up, go to the bathroom then go back to bed. 

I wake, again? This time for real hopefully

It started a standard dream. I and my team were spies, we had gotten away from a facility with the documents we needed and were in the getaway stage.

We were on THE HIGHWAY. It is an outdoor dreamscape that is mainly a bizarre maze like freeway system of interlocking overpasses, underpasses, byways, access roads, and sections cordoned off for construction. Those sections under construction are always abandoned, full of large gravel piles and murky holes filled with dirty water.

We had exited the main Highway and were laying low in a construction area. One of our team, a mother figure, had been poisoned with a drug that both upped her aggression and made her highly susceptible to suggestion. Another member, a younger woman, and the mother figures lover was taking care of her.

We pieced together the documents. It showed that a arcology project, a refuge from the complexity of the world may be on the verge of descending into chaos through crime or if pushed the other way, there was evidence of a charismatic leader that was rising in the ranks. Which may lead a group seeking mental refuge into a full on Cult of personality.

We sent our report in and received orders to infiltrate the arcology. We would need to acquire tools inside as their countermeasures were formidable. At least if you are an outsider. The rumor was that criminals internal to the arcology were using it as a smuggling point.

All arcologies on the continent connected through a series of migration tunnels. There are several empty arcologies and on some predefined internal schedule the inhabitants of the arcology would enmass move through the tunnels to a new arcology. This may be to allow members the idea of a change of scenery. I say the idea because all arcology layouts are the same. Eg “It all looks the same but we’re in Delaware now.”

We infiltrated as guests and the casual comradery of the team became a solo mission. I was assigned a room in a corner isolated from other guests. They do personality tests to insure harmony. I made sure to skew the test to show a social but terminally introverted person. Thus giving me the privacy I needed for my work while giving me the access to the areas of the complex and enough privacy to partially mask my movements.

In the arc they use a semisentient AI and a quantum super computer to track the precise movement of each guest and enable gesture control. Like using a smart phone in the 21st century you could capture an image of your surroundings and then use that image as a hologram to decorate or accessorize your rooms.

The first thing I did was crack in and give us wheelmode access this system. It allowed us to copy anything we saw, then use the images to hide behind a sort of portable one way mirror. There were also various monitors and tricks in the coding. Being a spy in this day and age required as much coding and cracking knowledge as it did psychology and take down techniques.

In our introduction we met a variety of people inprocessing and learned some tricks to manipulate the Solid hologram tech in use here. They were preparing for a migration. Part of that process is to have a massive feast. This makes it into a ritual that people look forward to and serves as a safety valve required by a society living in closed conditions.

During the feast there is the sound of a massive storm. Another measure to allow the participants safe outside views is to show a view of the outside sky, stripped of all signs of humanity, like incoming contrails and starship landings. I had injected a subroutine to change the view to rain and thunder to alert me of unauthorized access to the subtunnels.

Using religious ecstacy as an excuse to be excused(people worship or believe in many personal ways in this society), as a result of the storm. I headed to the subtunnels. Once there I saw that the person there was just a lost newb.

The walls here were mostly drab but there is a black tile mosaic on the walls. A large stylized arrow showing the direction of the migration. I hear a large group coming. With urgency and little time I step into a corner and copy the wall. Unfortunately I don’t have time to copy the proper wall to correspond to the beige side wall and the mosaic wall, but it’s dim here hopefully no one will notice.

Right then the standard issue com device issued to all “Arcologists (patent pending)” started chiming a warning of the coming migration. An item hard-coded in the circuits I had not had time to crack. Thankfully the other man’s goes off too so my position will be harder to determine in the echoing room.

The large group arrive. It is the smugglers. I quickly throw up an additional holo, this time a mask of individual squares each depicting one of the hundreds of entertainment channels and rapidly changing through them. Each square does so at a different time structure. Resulting in a mask that both conceals and is disorienting to look at. The smugglers see the poor newb and after making sure he isn’t here apurpose they fire a gun into his temple.

Theirs are the first obvious weapons I’ve seen. It looks like they fire a flechette encased in a paralytic neurotoxin. The hapless man dies in front of me drowning while surrounded by air. I wish I could have helped him but the mission comes first.

Whatever purpose the smugglers had in coming down has been derailed. They filter out leaving a member behind to clean up the mess. As he’s picking up the body he sees the wall I created. Oh, Shit. He’s seen the difference. He walks over to inspect the wall. If he touches it his hand will go through it.

It is a safety measure I couldn’t circumvent. Designed to prevent griefing. That is boxing some poor fool in and walking away leaving him trapped. People are assholes.

As he stands in front he hesitates. I act, snatching the gun from his belt and firing into his belly. He drops like a sack of potatoes. I dismiss the walls then wait for him to die. In these circumstances surety must overcome distaste. I drop an anonymous call for security into the data stream tagging this locale as the scene of a violent incident. I then make my way back to my quarters.

Once out of the subtunnels I dismiss my mask. In my rooms, I lock down then submit my status report. The smugglers look to be moving something to time with the migration and they do not hesitate to kill if there is even a hint of exposure. That indicates Syndicate not a homegrown operation. Professional criminals. I tuck the gun under my bed then go to sleep.

I awake.