In Dream World in its entirety ©Jae-Ho Yoon, English Text TokyoPop
Over the two-lane road, gray clouds bunched into a plush cushion. The air cooled enough to raise goosebumps along Jace's arms in spite of her hoodie. The sunlight of the morning faded from memory, like a lost child of happier days.
Saturday morning, US Highway 285 South . . .
Following Rob's bright red taillight higher up the mountain pass, Jace leaned into a sharp turn. Her sport bike hummed, apparently reveling, as she usually did, in the workout of a winding road. The day darkened, bringing the musty smell of damp on the wind that whistled around her helmet. The helmet was the only bit of gear that might protect her from the weather; her jacket and chaps rode rolled up, snug, and useless in the space beneath her seat.
She tried to signal to her boyfriend to pull over, but he did not acknowledge her. A year ago, Rob would have initiated a break so they could don bad weather gear. He would have fallen back and made sure she didn't lose control of her bike on one of the loose gravel pullouts. He might even have sneaked a kiss or two before insisting she put her helmet back on.
He would not have revved the engine, sped up, and vanished around the next curve.
The mountainside obscured him and his reptile-green bike. Jace downshifted and twisted the throttle. Her bike raced out of the turn, its tires flirting with the wrong side of the double yellow lines. She loved to ride fast, but not when the sky threatened to dump half an ocean on her. The wind picked up. With a weak rumble of distant thunder, it began to rain.
"Rob!" Jace shouted. Her helmet trapped the sound of her voice, briefly steaming up her visor. Rain splattered the other side. Her lightweight hoodie offered minimal protection, her jeans none at all. Rob had to be getting just as wet, but he didn't slow.
He was still angry with her, then. Jace flinched under the marbles-falling-down-stairs rattle of cold, high-country rain. Choosing to keep up rather than give Rob bragging rights whenever he did decide to stop, Jace fed the bike more fuel and watched the needle of her speedometer inch past one-ten. One-fifteen.
One-twenty, and Rob entered a turn a full thirty seconds before she did. He pulled so far ahead that she lost sight of him more often around successive curves. She didn't care. The icy downpour had washed all the fun out of the ride, and all the warmth from her heart.
Rob should just end their relationship if he no longer felt anything for her, Jace thought gloomily. He was a coward for not doing it, or worse.
Darkness descended, faster and thicker than she had ever seen, and it seemed to crawl into the corners of her eyes. She glanced in her mirrors. Shadows danced there, too, made deeper by the frost-bright headlights of the cars behind her. Cold light. Cold rain. Cold shadows.
Jace frowned. When she blinked, the shadows fled, a trick of the weather. She should break things off with Rob herself, right now. He wouldn't even notice. He'd raced off and left her on rides before, a total jerk move that he pulled out whenever they had a fight; once he'd had enough of riding or the rain, he'd head for home, expecting her to make her own way like an abandoned dog. If she turned around right now, she'd beat him there. Then she could pack some of her things and be gone before he got back.
Yeah. That would be best.
Decision made, Jace set her sights on the next exit ramp, her thumb sliding toward her turn signal automatically. She was sick of taking the blame for Rob's problems. Such as his increasingly loud threats that one of them would have to get a second job to make ends meet when he was the one racking up three-hundred-dollar bar tabs every week. Or his complaints about her lack of housekeeping, when he was the slob junking up their apartment. Or, which hurt most of all, his anger over her refusal to give him a blowjob before he signed online for a night of gaming rather than a night of play with her. She'd made that mistake too often lately, and hated how he pushed her aside without reciprocating. Unwanted. Undesirable. Unworthy of the same good feelings he thought were a right.
Enough. She'd had enough.
All of these thoughts coalesced in a flash. Jace had been thinking them for weeks, really, though they'd been unconnected and confused by leftover feelings for Rob. She'd been thinking them ever since that stupid fight they'd had about blonde-haired, blue-eyed, flirty-hipped, beer-swigging Nikki, and how much time Rob spent with her, at work, the gym, the bar, while he expected his girlfriend, Jace, to stay home and clean up after him . . .
Unaware of her thoughts, Rob shot past the exit she planned to take, and then decided the little electric car in front of him wasn't going fast enough. He pulled his bike hard left at the start of a blind curve, nearly touching the asphalt with his knee, and whipped across the double yellow lines in a swirl of rain.
Shadows gushed from the cracks in the road. They bubbled like lava in the dark, steaming like fresh tar. A horn blared – not from the small electric, but from an eighteen-wheeler. The urgent, deep-throated sound throbbed in Jace's ears, her bones, her belly. Rob had no time, no space, in which to react. His sport bike collided with the semi's front grille.
Metal and plastic crumpled. Fluid, some clear, some not, sprayed into the air. It sounded like an entire zoo screaming.
Horror froze Jace's legs, her fingers, and her brain. What had she seen? Where was Rob? It had happened too fast to comprehend. She couldn't make sense of it.
Rob wasn't dead. He couldn't be. She'd never known anyone who had died.
She had to be dreaming. Please, someone, tell her she was dreaming!
The rain pounded the road. The shadows absorbed it, opening holes into nothing. The mountain shouldered its way into Jace's path, and the exit sailed by. The road twisted to the right. The electric car blended with the renewed gloom, speeding now, seeking safety.
The semi was still coming. Some of its tires jumped over the wreckage of the reptile-green bike, others caught and skidded. The big truck swerved left, and then jackknifed right, blocking both lanes. The horn howled like a terrified animal.
Jace, like Rob, had nowhere to go. Time slowed to an eternity between each breath and made a prisoner of her. The messy, rain-washed grille bore down on her, fitted with a chrome frame of snarling fangs. In slow motion, she yanked her handlebars and felt the bike fishtail sickeningly beneath her. At this speed, the thin film of rainwater on the road formed a slick barrier between the asphalt and her tires. Lights smeared. Shadows crested like ocean waves.
The bike gave a nasty wobble, hesitated, and then threw in the towel. It toppled, taking Jace with it. She slid over the rain and the rocks, her left leg trapped by the sputtering machine.
Her jeans and her sweatshirt shredded, as did her skin, so that her blood flowed hot. Her helmet bounced along the asphalt, knocking black and red kaleidoscopic flecks into her sight.
She barely saw the tilting trailer of the semi swing over her, tires juddering, brakes smoking. It passed like a cloud racing across the sun, like riding through a narrow tunnel that shook and groaned in an earthquake. Jace, dragged by her bike, shot out the other side, impacted the guardrail, and flipped over it.
She was falling. The cliffside rushed by the way the road had rushed beneath her wheels.
The shadows shot over the edge of the cliff, too. They streamed downward like hands reaching to catch her, or like the teeth of the semi's grille frame closing around a tasty snack. Was she hallucinating?
Please let me pass out, she begged in her head. It hurts so much. I'm scared.
I don't want to die.
She was hallucinating. She had to be. There were things in the shadows.
As though in answer to her desperate plea, they coalesced out of the unnatural darkness. Pale things like ghosts with black pits for eyes. Purple things like smoke with starlight for eyes. Tall, slender, cloaked things with skin of ebony. Small lumpy things, each lump encasing a golf ball-sized gem which pulsed like an LED. The things smiled at her. As if in recognition. As if in welcome.
One figure, larger than the rest, hurt her eyes, sable on obsidian, forcefully sucking the last of the light. It felt like a silhouette of something that could be human, helmed, armored, and winged, though it was the size of a building. It appeared below Jace as she fell and fell and fell.
The cloak spread like squid ink in water and the wings unfurled, while a deeper blackness yawned in the silhouette's center. Jace, swooning from the intense pain in her leg, imagined a black hole. She was going to disappear into it. Disappear forever. Is this what death felt like?
A voice of soft twilight and blue-gray clouds sighed out of the silhouette, while Jace's shell-shocked brain tried to classify it as man.
I am Iskia, it said. Pleased to meet you, young master.
"Young what? What are you? What do you want?" she moaned. She had to force the words out, to consciously think about forming them with her numb lips and tongue. It was like speaking through the paralysis of sleep. She couldn't see anything except the dark mass of things, growing fainter by the second as blackness took over.
You can save In Dream World, the voice said. It floated to her through the nothing, soft as willow withies draped in moonlit water. I ask your forgiveness in advance.
For myself, and for –
A/N: Uh, oh, Anne's at it again. I have lots of old stories rattling around in my head, some that I have started here on the site and then later pulled, and others that I have posted but haven't yet finished. Someday, I hope to finish them all and share them with you. But for now, here's something new and silly! Something that I don't care quite so desperately about as I do "The ThunderCats." If you've come this far, I am so glad you did!
So, "In Dream World" is one of the silliest things I've ever read, in a good, unrestrained, sexy way (the main character is horribly misogynistic compared to my American values, but he's likeable anyway, and the barely-contained sex appeal of the girls surrounding him is hilarious). I know I'm not the only fantasy-lover who secretly likes the Character From Our World trope, and that's exactly what "In Dream World" promises . . . but doesn't really deliver. So, I took that idea and ran with it (I'm so sorry, Jae-Ho Yoon!). I've added my OC, Jace, and will loosely follow the original storyline. For anyone familiar with it, you'll see what I've done differently RIGHT AWAY, from name changes to fleshing out the world. I don't believe you need to be a fan of the series to read my story. I truly hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have writing it!
Please review! I hope to receive comments of all kinds - good, bad, and indifferent. I want to know what you think, and I am always open to constructive criticism. :3 Without you guys, I would have no reason to write!
All my love,
Anne