Happy Birthday, Katsuki! This chapter is for you!

A Third Encounter

The next time we met, things were a lot more... chaotic. Instead of entering a dream after the end of its cycle or leaving on my own, a new connection yanked me from my current task of hunting for molars and bicuspids like a macabre Easter egg hunt and jerked me into a cluster of interconnected dreams, like I was being tossed into a car-wreck, one I had been trying to avoid for most of the night. The abrupt transition was a bit like experiencing vertigo as a dizzy wave of nausea hit me like a maverick from the sensation of being thrown off-balance.

The dream I entered was a mountain this time, nothing particularly special about it except for the fact that you couldn't see the top or the bottom of it- though I still knew it was a mountain somehow. Maybe it was the terrain or the occasional goat that leapt up the sheer cliff-side, but the paths were narrow and the air thin, though I could breath just fine. I had trained myself to change the will of dreams, not the other way around.

"What the hell?!" echoed his irate voice off the cliff-side. I looked down to see Katsuki Bakugou clinging to a tremulous cliff-side, his hands clenched into the rocky handholds without any of the usual harnesses, ropes, or picks that came with rock climbing equipment. His biceps bulged slightly in his sleeveless black shirt from the effort of holding himself up.

"Heya, Sparky. Long time no see," I waved amicably as I stood on the mountain path adjacent from where he was climbing, not surprised in the slightest that Bakugou both recognized me and was the cause of my being pulled here. Thoughts of him had been echoing in my mind from our last two encounters, faint glimmers among the silt of other scattered thoughts and dreams I had absorbed. It must have been something to do with the action movie I had fallen asleep to. The explosions must have sent a flicker of recognition into my subconscious and made processing his thoughts easier. I had called people to my dreams before, sure, but it was unusual for it to be the other way around. Something was up.

"What the hell are you doing here!?"

"I'd like to ask you the same thing. Are you an adrenaline junkie or are you just a really extreme rock-climber?"

Sparks and trickles of smoke leaped from Bakugou's unclenched fists, unable to be contained by his current swell of emotions though it lacked the usual firepower due to how high we were in the atmosphere (most dreamers, while capable of breaking reality, often still found themselves bound to its rules and physics). I guess this really was supposed to be his Quirk and not just an internal defense mechanism. It came too easy to simply be a wish-fulfillment or stress dream side-effect. No wonder he was so arrogant.

"Don't play dumb with me! I know you're not someone I made up. You're someone who's got a Quirk that allows you to wander into other people's heads, aren't you?" he growled intuitively as he continued climbing up the mountain. I froze briefly at his spot-on intuition. Normally, people with mental Quirks were the ones that caught onto that ability, having the best idea of knowing their own mind, so him having caught on so quickly threw me off-balance in more ways than one. The second time was him suddenly charging in with both his hands blasting explosions behind his back to propel him forward, closing in the distance between us at an abrupt pace than waiting for my answer.

"Now is that any way to treat your dream girl?" I smirked, unable to keep my snark in-check as I tactfully avoided the answering his question. I was on-edge and a tad peeved after being pulled away from a job when I had been close to making a breakthrough, especially since this had been the third time his dreams had done this to me. The other times I had managed to unplug myself from the dreams before I was noticed, but apparently I had not done it quickly enough. His dreams were like a gravity well, a star that tried to pull everything into its gravitational orbit.

"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"

"Hey, I was just minding my own business when you called me here. It's not my fault you're-" I fired back before Bakugou moved his hands behind him in a way I assumed that he could propel himself onto the ledge I was standing on. He discovered a second too late that the air simply didn't have enough oxygen to give him enough firepower to blast himself upward. A shared look of horrified realization flitted between us, Bakugou's face going uncharacteristically calm and free of frown lines as he dropped like a stone down the rock wall. My arms stretched way beyond the normal means, instinct taking over as I reached out and grabbed onto his arm and the back of his shirt before he fell too far.

"LET GO OF ME!" he snarled, rocks cutting into my sides as I struggled to pull him up. Despite not feeling any actual weight, it still took a lot of concentration and focused willpower to make my body do what I wanted it to. It was difficult enough to make myself fly, much less holding onto someone else. This had seemed like the simpler option.

"Oh so you want me to let you go off the side of the cliff?" I said through gritted teeth in disbelief, trying to keep myself going over the side with him.

"I don't need your help! I was doing just fine before you came along!" Was he just that stubborn that he wouldn't let someone help him, even if it meant keeping himself from dying, or did he have some sort of plan and believed that he didn't need my help?

"How about this? You let me help you, and I'll tell you everything you want to know," I offered. I figured he had no better nature to appeal to at the moment, so bargaining seemed to be my only way out. I could have dropped him and been done with it, but nope, my Jiminy Cricket conscious wouldn't let me, no matter how much of an asshole Bakugou was being; dreamers were hardly rational. Now I was curious on why I was brought here and wanted to settle things, otherwise this would keep happening. I gave him a strained, wry smile, "Or you know, we can keep doing this and either die or hang here until I either drop you or your alarm goes off. I took a Zzzquil before coming here, so I can do this all day- or night, in this case."

He paused for a moment, his scowl furrowing as if to aggressively contemplate his options. Instead of answering, his free arm went from trying to undo my grip to grabbing onto my arm. His hand was large and strong, though strangely smooth. Using my elbows and knees, I wondered if his fingerprints had long been burned off from the various explosions he made with his hands as I slowly backed up and tugged until he could pull himself up. I let out a breath and wiped my hair back, palming a few strands of hair that had begun to turn black.

"Start talking, Raccoon-Eyes. Who the hell are you? Why do you keep showing up inside my head?" Bakugou snarled, his teeth like the fangs of a cornered predator.

Raccoon Eyes?

"I already told you, my name is Rem- or Lucidity, if you prefer a hero name -and I was just making my rounds when you called me here."

"You keep saying that, but I don't recall asking for you or your help."

"Sometimes my delta waves connect well with others, and for whatever reason yours keep calling me back. Call it karmic destiny, kismet, or a future psychologist's drive to help people, I have no idea, but I do know that whatever it is keeps sending me right back to you."

"How do I know you're not a villain or some kid that's trying to mess with me?"

I let out a scoff. "Don't flatter yourself. I was in the middle of a job when your subconscious pulled me here."

"So you think you're better than me?!"

"No, I just don't respond well to angry trolls who think with their-" I bit the inside of my cheek. This was hardly the right thing to say at the moment, but frankly the kid deserved to be taken down a peg or two- or six. Still, I reigned back my temper and sighed, "Look, I just want to be civil. Me fighting you is not going to make either of us happy."

"I don't know. I'm feeling better already." Already I could see the atmosphere shifting around him and his aura, the colors of the dream becoming less hostile but still holding onto some static colors.

"If answering your questions will make you feel better, then I will. It'll make my job go a lot faster, and I can go back to the actual reason why I am here and you can go back to-" I looked over his shoulder and saw the endless mountain path that appeared to be covered in a fog below and no sight to how high the top was. Even with flight powers and no fear of heights, the mountainside looked sheer and intimidating. "-whatever it was you were doing."

"And what exactly is your job? Some sort of Inception bullshit involving stealing information to get into a locked safe?"

"I can't affect your thoughts or free will, if that's what your implying," I said, biting in the inside of my cheek. Damn you, Christopher Nolan. Even if his movies were cinematic masterpieces with their visuals and storytelling, it made my job a whole lot more difficult. "If you'd like to know, it was helping a kid find his lost teeth." Despite what the id factor was for adults, childhood nightmares were some of the most horrifying dreams I've had to encounter. Ever since I received my Quirk, I had encountered vampires, zombie swarms, monster dads, werewolves, witches, just about every kind of monster under the bed and boogieman in the closet. The best deterrent for most of them was a flashlight or creating a ball of light- I had been happy to learn that little trick after wandering into a dream of little girl named Kira who had that ability and now could do it almost effortlessly without using up too much of my energy -but teeth falling out was a hard thing to handle outside of consoling the child with tooth fairy money and summoning a mountain of ice cream with promises of eating as much as they wanted for the rest of their lives.

"My Quirk allows me to enter dreams when I'm asleep, and I try to help people if a nightmare is giving them problems, whether it's kill a monster or realize that there is no monster."

"So can you hurt people by going into a person's dreams to try and kill them?"

"Oh no, I can't physically harm you. I can't even do anything to inhibit free will. Honestly, you give me too much credit. I can make a suggestion or change intent, but that's really more of me reminding the dreamer that they're inside a dream. Once I do that, they become self-aware and take back control. This is a dream. I can't deal lasting damage and you can't deal lasting damage. Everything is still in our own minds."

"So you could give someone the idea to rob a bank by planting it in their head from miles away?"

"Theoretically, yes, but I can't really make anyone do anything. I can only really present the idea, and that's if the dreamer even remembers me. Whether or not the person chooses to act on it, it's still their own choice," I said before stating the real words that he wanted to hear, "In other words, your psyche is safe."

He seemed much more visibly relaxed, though his expression was still cross. I assumed that was what he normally looked like and that it wasn't personal. "Sounds like a pretty useless Quirk."

"True, it does have its drawbacks- like if I over use it, I get insomnia, hence the raccoon eyes," I gestured to the dark designer bags under my eyes I was sporting, "but I can reach long distances if I have a strong enough signal or enough energy. However, I don't really want to become a pro-hero. This is more of a hobby of mine, a side-gig. I just do this because I want to help people. Plus, I can't really control it yet."

"So we're just guinea pigs to you until you learn to control your Quirk?"

"I don't think of anyone that way. Everything is a learning experience for me. If I'm completely honest, my dream is to become a child psychologist and work with the police force with children that have trauma." I had no idea why I was telling him all of this, but for some reason it felt therapeutic, like confessional.

"I didn't ask to hear your life story. I'm here to tell you to stop messing with my head. It's seriously pissing me off!"

"I'm not doing anything. If something happens that you don't like, it's because you dreamed it. I can't affect or change any dreams that aren't my own."

"Whatever. What you're doing is creepy, going into people's dreams like that. Like you're some voyeur who gets their kicks from observing other people's short-comings."

"I'm not here to judge. I'm here to help."

"I don't need your help."

"Your subconscious would beg to differ." I folded my arms and held his narrowed stare for a few seconds before I let out a sigh. "Look if you want to talk, I'll be here to listen. I don't know you in real life, so you don't have to worry about my suddenly intruding on your life or your friends or family, whatever. This is a safe space and I promise to keep all of my interactions confidential."

"And why should I trust you?"

"Because I could have just as easily dropped you or pushed you off this mountain when I had the chance and ended your dream for you by causing you to 'die' and just jump to the next available dream," I explained. "But for whatever reason, your dreams keep calling out to me and I have a feeling they'll continue to do so until something is done about it. Shocking as it is for you to hear, I do have a life outside of all of this and I'd like to get back to it at some point. My life does not revolve around you." Or your ego, I added mentally but I kept that to myself. Rather than wait for his response, I focused my energy and opened a portal, causing a streak of white hair to turn black over one of my horns. "Good luck with your rock-climbing. I hope you make it to the top," I said with a wry smile and climbed in, leaving a stunned Bakugou behind.

Author's Note: References are gravity wells from Star Wars, Inception, and Nightmare on Elm Street.