"So, what did NiGHTs say?" asked Will.
"He said we're fools for doing something like this in the middle of a heavily populated town." Claris told them.
"That good, huh?"
"I could teleport us all out in an emergency." said Johannes.
"You can teleport?"
"Well... I can only take four people at a time. And I would need a decent sized take-off and landing strip. I'd probably still make a mess of at least one wall, this room's just too small."
"No more trashing the research room." warned Helen. She was still making last-minute adjustments to the equipment. The REM counter made a whistling noise that rose and fell in pitch as she turned a dial on it, causing the graph to fluctuate.
"Can he protect us?" asked Will.
"Not forever, but he says he needs to investigate what's happening inside Luykas' subconscious. If he can sort it out, there'll be no more need to monitor him. If he doesn't, I get the impression the world's going to end or something."
"Good job I handed in my dissertation this afternoon." said Will.
"Claris and Elliot are better at working with NiGHTs than us, so I'll sit out this time." Helen told them, "Elliot is holding open the gate to Nightopia. When Luykas falls asleep, we follow him in, NiGHTs finds the portal to his dream and takes Elliot in. Its more complicated than usual, so the timing is going to be difficult, but Ness will try and shield our minds as best as possible."
Once Helen was done with the machines, they lay down on the beds and, with the help of the soothing classical music and patterns on the ceiling, they were soon asleep. The landscape of the dream was quite different this time around. Instead of the sunflower field, as peaceful and melancholy as a cemetery, they stood in a corridor of what looked like some kind of laboratory. The way that the gleaming white tiled walls had been cleaned and disinfected suggested that something unpleasant happened here, something that either needed to be hidden or at cleaned up after for hygiene's sake. The doors were thick, with round windows of reinforced glass. There were security cameras everywhere and, for some reason, unusually large waste paper bins. What unnerved Will most were the noises he kept hearing in the distance. They were almost definitely animal noises but he couldn't quite tell what kind of animal. It sounded like a mixture of both, the kind of noise a snake would make if it was also a chicken, or an orang-utan if it was also a bat. Tazmilly University must have a weird science department, he thought to himself.
Five minutes later, an elevator at the far end of the corridor went 'ding' and the door opened. With a graceful bow as though he had performed the most amazing trick in the history of stage magic, NiGHTs flew out. Elliot fell out after him, rubbing his head.
"You should have told me you were in a confined space!" he complained, "I almost got stuck in the wall!"
"I apologise for not being able to predict the dreams of a complete stranger who is psychic and possibly possessed by demons." said Claris.
"Its okay, I need the practice." said NiGHTs, spreading his arms out and spinning down the corridor in a corkscrew pattern. Will ducked out of the way, allowing NiGHTs to land inches away from Luykas and hover above him upside down, staring at him with large round eyes, "Nice dream. Is that noise supposed to be a monkey or a walrus?"
"Um... yes?" replied Luykas, taking a step back. He looked at Will as though he was a foreign tourist desperately trying to get someone to translate for him.
"This is NiGHTs." explained Will, "He's... he's NiGHTs."
"Er... hello. I'm Luykas."
"You're the psychic? Wow." said NiGHTs, tilting his head, "I bet you could do really impressive things in a dream. I mean, everyone can do cool stuff with the power of their minds in a dream but you can do cool stuff with the power of your mind even in the waking world, so you could do EXTRA cool stuff in a dream!"
"Didn't you say we were running out of time?" asked Claris, "Selph, remember..."
"Selph's been here?" asked NiGHTs, looking around, "No, don't answer. I can tell. Your Ideya is already very low. Especially your red Ideya. Nightmaren always go for the red Ideya first. Its what most people use to fight them off. It looks like it hasn't just been drained either. Its malfunctioning. Oh, I didn't mean to call you a coward!" he added suddenly, "I meant your red Ideya is low at the moment. Because it was drained. Not because you're a coward. Your mind isn't faulty either. Its just that the essence of your identity is, well, a little faulty. Also cowardly."
"What is Selph exactly?" asked Claris, desperately trying to get NiGHTs to stay on one track for more than thirty seconds, "You didn't really explain. You just said it was dangerous and it wasn't like the other Nightmaren."
"Like I said, it isn't even of this world." said NiGHTs, "It doesn't properly exist. It hasn't done since the creation of the current version of the world."
"The... current version?"
"In fact, its been several releases since Selph existed at all." said NiGHTs, "He was just an idea. An idea, not an Ideya. Well, I suppose he's a little like an Ideya, if you had a prototype Ideya that didn't work, and made the other ones stop working. But he's not, he's a Nightmaren. The first Nightmaren ever to exist. Long before Wizeman."
"Wizeman's a Nightmaren?" asked Claris.
"Pretty much." said NiGHTs, "If he was something completely different to a Nightmaren, we wouldn't be able to fight him. Selph, he's something different again."
"Can we fight him?"
"I don't know. Probably." said NiGHTs, "To be honest, I don't even know what Selph looks like. He went away a long time before I was created. We first-class Nightmaren were only created because Wizeman didn't have access to Selph any more. He didn't need us, back when Selph was there."
"The thing I saw looked like my brother." said Luykas.
"That wasn't him." said NiGHTs, "Like I said, this Nightmaren I've been following isn't that powerful. It was only unusual because it was new, it came from nowhere and it felt wrong. Wizeman doesn't create new Nightmaren very often, it usually takes him a while and he never creates faulty ones. Apart from me, I guess."
"It threw us out really easily."
"No, it took control of ME really easily." said Luykas, his head bowed, "It knew about me. It knew if I saw my brother, I would lose control. I have nightmares about my brother a lot. Nightmares that feel wrong. I think its been watching me for a long time."
"See? Its not even acting like a normal Nightmaren. They never stay in one place for that long." said NiGHTs, "Its broken. I didn't know why, but if its involved in something to do with Selph, it makes sense. Sometimes something in a nightmare gets touched by Selph, just slightly, and it starts going wrong. Much more powerful, but in the wrong way."
"I still don't get what Selph is." said Will.
"He's hard to explain in words that a visitor would understand." said NiGHTs, "He's... sort of like the Nightmaren that all the Nightmaren were made from. The rules about how nightmares work. He's called 'Selph' because he likes to find the dreamer's self, but not their real self, the part of them that takes over when they go 'out of character' in dreams, when their conscience switches off and they start breaking the rules about their identity. That's when nightmares get their worst. In a way, he IS the first nightmare. The others talk about him as though he was a God. Personally, I think he's just faulty."
"A Faulty God?" said Will, scratching his head.
"The problem with him was, he didn't change much from just being an actual nightmare. That's why he was trapped. Dreams are just the first ideas about things. They're the first inspirations. The bit before even the prototypes. A nightmare is just a prototype of something that doesn't work. So when all the dreams and nightmares got rolled back for the first time, Selph went with them."
"You like calling this thing faulty." Claris pointed out.
"It makes me less scared of it." admitted NiGHTs, "If this thing gets out into the world- or worse, into the waking world, it'll just overwrite everything with its own laws. The nightmares won't be just the prototypes any more, they'll be the real thing."
"A waking nightmare." said Luykas, shuddering.
"Don't lose control!" said NiGHTs.
"Stop scaring us then!" said Will.
"Sorry. Force of habit." said NiGHTs, "That, and there's no real way to dress up what I'm saying."
"Let's discuss how we're going to beat this thing." suggested Claris, "I think we should take out that smaller Nightmaren. It sounds like it's important to this Selph, so maybe he can't get free if the smaller one is destroyed."
"I don't want to fight my brother again." said Luykas. The dream was flickering and breaking up slightly into static. They could tell he was losing control. NiGHTs lay a hand on his shoulder and gave him one of this big, wide, unconvincingly innocent smiles of his. His white silk gloved hand radiated a faint aura, one hand red, the other yellow. Courage and hope.
"Its okay, we're not going to hurt your brother." said NiGHTs, "We're going to stop the thing that's rude enough to impersonate him."
"The last time there was something that looked like my brother but wasn't and I had to fight it, it turned out to be my brother."
"And people call me confusing!" commented NiGHTs, turning full circle in the air, "Okay, then we won't attack the Nightmaren until we're definitely sure its not your brother, won't become your brother and wasn't your brother in the past."
"Can you track him down right now?" asked Claris.
"He's not in the dream at the moment." said NiGHTs, "We'll have to lure him in. It'll be difficult. If we can make a big enough disturbance without actually doing anything that would make the dreamer lose control, it might just attract his attention."
"A big disturbance?" asked Luykas.
"Something big and impressive, but still under your control. Use your imagination." said NiGHTs, "Remember, its your dream. You can do what you like."
"I've never really been in control of my dreams."
"Just pretend its the outside world and you're a psychic."
"Um... that's not really how it works... and I don't think it would be good if it did..." he muttered..
"Just in theory, then, if there was something really big and impressive in here, what would it be?"
Luykas thought about this for all of thirty seconds. "How fast can you run?"
"I can fly."
The boy closed his eyes and frowned in concentration. A few seconds later, there was a hideous, deafening noise, a mixture of the roar of a beast and the sound of strained metal parts grating against each other. The noise was preceded by a second noise, like the ticking of a giant clockwork machine that was slowly winding up. Gradually, it became louder, the vibrations making the floor shake.