An armored knight towers over me, sword twice as big as my whole body. It comes at me with its giant blade and I dodge it with dancer-like grace. The sword returns but a magical barrier protects me and fire comes out from the tip of my blade, as if it's a witch's wand.

I've been here before, I've seen this before. The fighting, the magic, the dance-fighting… it's all surreal and yet so common. At this point I've noticed small things, like the revolver-like chamber in the sword, the snowflake pattern in the barriers being repeated in my outfit, or how I just know there are people watching beyond the glass.

Eventually the fight turns around in the knight's way, I know how this goes. It attacks me after a minute distraction, causing a scar on my eye but I turn around and defeat it at the end, then bow to the audience.

I wake up in a sweat.

"Goddammit."

My protest is half-assed. I'm used to these dreams. Dreams where I'm fighting monsters and dancing and singing away. They used to be vague but have become more and more detailed every time, especially the one with the knight. Right now I have them once a week and can remember most details when I wake up.

I look at the time.

"Late again."

I have to hurry up.

I brush my teeth quickly; my reflection on the bathroom mirror looks very tired. My eyes are slightly red and dead looking. No scar to be found, of course.

I braid my hair, no time to properly brush it, put some sunscreen because the sun hates me in particular and hurry to the bus stop before I miss it.

Thankfully, I don't. If I'm late I'll get yelled at. I'll probably not lose my job but I don't want to risk it.

Work is, of course, awful.

"Hi, welcome to Mandie's."

I'm a cashier at a fast food joint. It's not the worst job in the world… I could be working the grill. Thankfully I've graduated from that. If I continue like this, maybe I'll become assistant manager in five years. Whoo.

My days consist of getting people's orders, receive money, get yelled at by bitchy older women who think the world revolves around them, dealing with my awful manager who is also a bitchy older woman no better than the customers, take home some burgers with my employee discount, then go home and do it all over again.

It's awful but that's life. I go back home, try to stay awake as long as possible doing college homework, then pass out.

And I get to do it all over again tomorrow, wonderful.

This time I get two dreams in a row. Strange. I can count on my fingers how many times I had two in the same week. Ah, it's the scorpion dream again. This one is my favorite.

There's this giant scorpion in a place that looks like the ruins of a castle. I'm fighting this giant monster but I'm not alone, there are others with me. I can't really see their faces, usually it's just a few blotches of color but at least the different colors make it easy to tell them apart.

There's this shadow woman with a sword, a woman with long golden hair and the red girl. I can't take my eyes off the red girl. Since I can't really see much detail in these dreams, my eyes focus on what calls the most attention. And that's the red girl. She's got a massive scythe and what looks like a long cape or scarf, though I guess it could also be hair. It's very red, as is the red of her outfit and her weapon. She dashes around everywhere and manages to kill the giant scorpion, with everyone's help of course.

I don't really have any friends, even the people at work don't care much for me. So this dream is my favorite because of the sense of unity. There are other dreams with them, just as vague and hard to remember but this one gives me a sense of camaraderie.

Something is different today though, because when I look to the side I can clearly see red girl's face. She's young, probably a teenager, her hair is short and has a unique style, her eyes are big and Silver in color. How strange. Well, everything about these dreams is strange, but her smile is reassuring and friendly. I wish I could smile like that.

I wake up. I don't feel rested. Having two of these dreams in a row won't be good for me. I never rest well with those. I'd like to have some normal dreams please. Or even no dreams; I just want to sleep.

But I finally got to see her face so it wasn't so bad.

Of course now I need to get to work and I have a feeling I'm going to be late.