Pretzel didn't dream. She didn't sleep either, not the way other people did. From what she'd observed of Amy, normal people seemed to actually lose consciousness when they slept. Just— blacking out. Every night. As if that was a perfectly ordinary thing. It was bizarre.

For Pretzel, sleep was more of a… meditative state, Amy would call it. Pretzel called it "deliberately ignoring everything because the world is very loud and bright and annoying and I do not want to deal with it". Same thing, really. She didn't need to do it often; one perk of being fueled by negative energy was that she could refill her stores just by being around people, and Empire City certainly had those in abundance. She "slept" frequently anyway, because again, the world was loud and noisy, and Whip was even louder and noisier, and her best chance of getting away from those things was pretending they did not exist.

But even Pretzel got bored of lying around ignoring her brother sometimes, and when that happened she had found a good alternative: dreaming. Not her own dreams; she didn't have those. Other people's dreams.

She'd started doing it a few nights after she and Whip arrived at Amy's apartment. Since the others preferred to waste the hours after sundown sleeping for some reason (why would you choose to sleep at night, when it was actually nice to be awake?), Pretzel had been left with plenty of time to herself. Naturally she spent it experimenting with dark magic.

Her memories had been slowly trickling back since she first opened her eyes in Apotos. At first it had just been impressions, a feeling of "this is dangerous" or "this is familiar", but after seeing… seeing her true form, in that alternate reality, the memories had started returning more clearly. She wished they wouldn't. There still weren't many, yet; a glimpse of a ruined city, a vision of swimming alongside some now extinct sea monster, an impression of lava on her scales. But each little snippet of memory only brought her closer and closer to that thing. That monster.

The actual, solid memories came back slowly, but her instincts seemed to return much faster. When she'd first woken up she'd seen strange auras around people, which at the time she'd foolishly assumed was a normal thing everyone saw. Amy had eventually explained to her that—shockingly—most people don't automatically detect how much Light and Dark everyone else has in them.

Other things that most people couldn't do but Pretzel could included such delights as manipulating shadows, sapping energy, and causing depression. That had been a fun one to discover. Amy liked to say that no power was inherently evil and that anything had the potential to be used for good, but Pretzel had a hard time seeing what positive benefit there could be to making someone lose all interest in life. Maybe if they ever got attacked by a serial killer she could just make them really, really sad. Helpful.

Still, regardless of what she personally thought of her evil witch powers, Pretzel had made up her mind to protect the five-maybe-six people she could at all say were her friends from the highly dangerous creature they insisted was also a friend, and if Pretzel wanted to do that she'd have to figure out how to actually use her spooky witch powers. So. She practiced.

She hadn't meant to snoop on Amy's dreams. It just sort of happened. And she'd apologized, even though she told Sonic Amy would probably prefer not to know that Pretzel could snoop on her dreams at any time (and she'd been right, judging by the queasy look on Amy's face). But she'd apologized anyway, like a good little creature of darkness, and then she'd set to work learning what exactly she'd done and how to do it again.

One of her few almost-pleasant memories of before the Incident was a vague recollection of the time she'd spent in the core (with Light Gaia, though thankfully it wasn't in the memory). She'd always assumed she'd spent that whole time sleeping—actual sleeping, not meditative ignoring sleeping—, but as it turned out she'd occasionally woken from her coma to mess with people's minds. Or just spy on people's minds? It was hard to tell from the snippet, but she seemed to be in the habit of visiting people's nightmares. Or giving people nightmares? Even darkness incarnate had hobbies, apparently.

Present day Pretzel hadn't expected to have the same global reach as Dark Gaia had, but apparently space didn't matter much in the dreamworld (Maginaryworld, Sonic had told her, whatever that meant). So while Amy and Whip slept and went outside and made friends like boring normal people, Pretzel used her dark magic powers to watch the dreams of people around the world like channels on an exceptionally surreal TV. Except to change channels on this TV, you had to walk to the channel you wanted, which was unlike any actual TV Pretzel had yet encountered.

For whatever reason Pretzel's dreamwalking always started in a cave. A small cave, dark and strangely cozy. Its walls were decorated by glowing crystals, each connected to a different sleeping mind. It didn't matter where the dreamer was relative to her body in the physical world; Egypt or Antartica, every mind was equidistant from her dreamspace, as if the cave was at the exact center of the earth. The core.

Each night Pretzel walked the perimeter of the cave, testing the crystals and politely keeping from peaking at their innermost thoughts and desires (Sonic had said something about privacy, though Pretzel didn't see how it mattered; it wasn't like she cared who was in love with their neighbor or cheated on their math exam or was currently planning a murder), until she found a particularly nasty nightmare. Or until she got bored or Amy told her to go do something else. Just like regular TV, really.

This morning's offerings included a nightmare about someone's house getting flooded and also they didn't have any clothes, a nightmare about someone's town burning down and also they didn't have any clothes, and a nightmare about someone's house getting buried in a landslide and also they did have clothes, which was terrible for some reason. A lot of natural disasters. That was odd. These people didn't even live remotely near each other.

Pretzel frowned, leaving behind the clothes-bad guy (now he was having a pleasant dream of spending time with his friends overseas, blech) to seek out another source of negative energy. She brushed past several more pleasant dreams, careful not to touch them, before finally zeroing in on a nasty tangle of fear and misery. There. She didn't really need to be cautious—no one in a nightmare that bad was likely to notice as small a presence as herself—but she slowed down nonetheless. She circled the mind a bit, satisfying herself that the dreamer wasn't about to wake up any time soon, then took a breath and dove into the dream.

A storm. Rain lashed immaterially against her fur, and thunder crashed overhead. A massive tidal wave—or was it a monster? It kept changing, the way dreams often did—roared above her, threatening to drown the entire village. The dreamer, a tiny monkey, was curled up on his bed (probably couldn't move, the way these dreams usually went), sobbing as the wave crashed towards him.

Pretzel sighed and flicked her tail, concentrating on the spiky terror radiating off the monkey. Carefully she pulled on his negative emotions. Even though they made her stronger, she'd discovered she couldn't actually just remove negative emotions, at least not without a much rougher (and potentially damaging) touch. And she certainly couldn't give positive emotions; that was Whip's area of expertise, not hers. So instead she focused on rearranging what was already there, smoothing terror into worry and grief into a gentler melancholy. She couldn't make someone happy, but she could make them calmer.

As the monkey's sobs eased into sniffles, the tidal wave dissipated into a pleasant, gentle mist. For good measure Pretzel tugged a bit on the dream world, making the sun rise and casting a rainbow through the droplets. People liked rainbows, right? The monkey blinked, still sniffling, then uncurled and smiled. Easily pleased, this one. He ran out to play in the droplets, giggling and calling for his family (who appeared out of nowhere, as was the way with dreams).

"It's not real, idiot," Pretzel muttered, watching them frolic.

Honestly. How was it that no one (or mostly no one, that one fox had been weird and frankly terrifying and Pretzel had made a point to avoid her dreams since) ever seemed to realize they were in a dream? It wasn't like they ever made any sense. Well, whatever. The monkey was happy. Her work here was done.

Pretzel shook her head and dipped out of the dream, heading for the next nightmare. That had to be… what, five nightmares about natural disasters tonight? Normally there was a little more variety, especially with dreamers as far apart and unrelated as these. She frowned. It was forming a pattern, and that could only mean bad things. Maybe she should have paid more attention to the news on TV last night instead of fighting with Whip over the remote.

Speaking of which… Whip would probably be coming to pester her soon. If she wanted to visit one more dream, she needed to get moving.

Pretzel sought out the nearest tangle of dark energy. This one was less raw terror and more lingering unease. One of the more subtle nightmares, then. Probably not a natural disaster. She hesitated just a moment on the bounds of the mind, feeling an unexplained sense of trepidation. The dreamer influencing her, maybe. She dove in anyway.

It was blinding. Pretzel blinked, squinting against the illusory sunlight. They were in a coastal city of white buildings—Apotos, Pretzel recognized with surprise. It looked just like it had when she'd last seen it, on the run with Sonic and Shadow. Bright and eerily empty.

She found the dreamer easily, a small red wolf standing in the middle of the street, staring around at the empty city. Oh. Pretzel's stomach dropped. She recognized this person. She'd seen him in Apotos when she first woke up. Normally she wouldn't be so careless as to visit the mind of someone familiar, but she'd been preoccupied and hadn't thought to check. Well, she was here now. Hopefully he wouldn't notice her. (Hopefully his nightmare wasn't about her.)

"Baba?" The wolf called, his voice echoing in the empty streets. "Where are you?"

He perked his ears, listening for a response, and Pretzel found herself straining to listen as well. She mentally scolded herself. Hadn't she been the one griping about how easily people were taken in by their dreams just a few moments ago?

Something moved nearby. A teal wolf stepped into view, walking towards his son with a wide smile. The red wolf lit up with relief. He ran forward, throwing his arms around his father in a hug. The teal wolf wrapped his arms around his son, but the gesture was clearly awkward and artificial, and his smile was more fangs than warmth. She could feel the dreamer's unease growing. The dream would shift into a nightmare in a moment unless Pretzel found a way to soothe it. The father would turn into a monster, or die on the spot, or suddenly reject his son for no good reason. She'd seen such nightmares before.

So why did her own unease only grow?

Carefully Pretzel reached for the dreamer's tangled negative emotions to see if she could soothe them, but she flinched back at the unexpected severity of his fear and— hate? What was that directed towards? His father? No, that wasn't it. What was—

The father's eyes didn't have pupils.

Panic seized Pretzel's chest. No no no no, she'd made a mistake, she shouldn't be here, this was— this was—

The father burned. The wolf scrambled back, screaming, and from the ashes rose— it. Light Gaia, turned monstrous by the dreamer's terror, a flaming beast, smiling in a cruel echo of the father's expression a moment before. The flames rose and rose, the red wolf wailing in terror, and Pretzel couldn't move, because Light Gaia was there, looming over her, burning and burning and—

Looking right at her.

Her, not the dreamer.

The creature lunged, and Pretzel jerked back, out of the dream and into the waking world. Her heart thundered painfully in her chest, and she gasped for breath. Her wings trembled.

Of course people would have nightmares about Light Gaia. The Gaia Incident, as they called it, was fresh in everyone's minds. Pretzel had stumbled into one such nightmare before, and made a point to avoid them afterwards. Walking into that one without first checking had been a stupid mistake. But that— it had looked at her. Her. No one had ever noticed her presence in a dream before except Whip, and that couldn't have been Whip.

Pretzel?

For a horrible moment Pretzel thought it was Whip trying to talk to her. He was the last one she wanted to see right now. Not when that burning still echoed in her mind. But her panic eased when she recognized the presence for what it was. Sonic. She could handle Sonic.

Ever since Sonic (a known idiot) volunteered himself to hold onto a sizable chunk of Pretzel and Whip's respective energies while they learned to not be monsters, he'd had some sort of magic psychic hotline to both of them, similar to what Pretzel and Whip (unfortunately) had with each other. Whip wasn't aware of this. Pretzel very much was. It was handy for the many, many times Sonic didn't have a communicator and Amy needed to get in contact with him, but less handy when Pretzel wanted to pretend to be asleep so she didn't have to talk to anyone.

You alright? Sonic asked.

I was doing a lot better before you woke me up, Pretzel grumbled. She could feel Sonic's amusement, mixed with justified skepticism. He knew as well as she did that she didn't actually sleep.

At least the psychic hotline thing didn't give them full unrestricted access to each other's thoughts and feelings; usually it was just what they wanted to project. But the nightmare had caught her off guard, and now she had to deal with concerned Sonic, who was at least less persistent than concerned Amy. Not that that was saying much.

She knew Sonic would keep needling her about this, so she added, It was just a dream. Caught me off guard.

What was it about?

Pretzel winced as she remembered the nightmare. That was a can of worms she did not want to open right now. It wasn't my dream, she deflected.

Should she mention the wolf kid? No. Her excuse for entering people's nightmares was that she did it to ease the nightmare aspect, and she didn't snoop around in their mind outside of that limited dream space. It was a small act of penance for centuries of Dark Gaia causing those very same nightmares. Sharing the details of someone else's dream seemed like it would be a breach of that privacy thing Sonic told her about.

Are you at the space station yet? She asked.

Ugh, no, Sonic grumbled, mild concern shifting into annoyance. This elevator has to be the slowest thing in the world.

Doubt Tails agrees.

In response Pretzel received a brief image of Tails clutching a sic-sac and looking miserable. She grinned.

He keeps giving me concerned looks whenever I talk to you. Sonic sounded both frustrated and amused. I'm pretty sure he thinks I have brain damage.

You probably do, Pretzel pointed out. He'd certainly hit his head plenty of times since she'd met him, and she'd known him for all of two months. Maybe he's onto something. Most people don't have voices in their head, from what I've heard.

And most people try to avoid having nightmares, Sonic rebutted, his tone that particular mix of concern and exasperation everyone liked to use on Pretzel lately. Drat. She'd hoped they'd gotten off that subject. Have you ever considered, I dunno, not actively seeking out the worst dreams possible?

I get bored and Amy said I need to stay close to the apartment at night. She didn't get why that was a rule. Did Amy really think Pretzel was going to get mugged in a dark alley? She was Dark Gaia; nighttime was her domain. If anything, Amy should be worried about everyone else. Besides, it's a good way to practice with my powers, and you keep saying I need to get used to them.

Yes, yes, I get the dreamwalking thing. Sonic paused, then amended, Well. I sort of get the dreamwalking thing. What I don't get is why it has to be nightmares specifically.

Good dreams are boring. Pretzel made sure to project her eye roll, so he could feel the full force of her disdain. And if I did walk in a good dream, it would probably turn into a nightmare anyway. She was pretty sure that was how it worked. Which made her wonder what would happen if Whip started walking in people's dreams. Would he turn nightmares into cotton candy fluff just by being there? Ugh, probably.

Sonic was quiet for a moment, which probably meant she'd said something she shouldn't have. Or that something was happening in the real world that he needed to pay attention to. Or he'd just gotten distracted. It was hard to say sometimes. But she felt concern radiating from his end of the link, which probably meant it was the first thing. Thankfully, she was saved from further conversation when something grabbed Sonic's attention.

We're at the space station, Sonic told her in that distracted way which meant he was also talking to someone out loud. She could feel his mood shifting into something focused and wary, the way it did when a fight was brewing. Eggman'll probably try an ambush. We'll talk later, okay?

If you insist, Pretzel grumbled, determinedly keeping the warm glow of happiness at the "talk later" from carrying over the link. They'd already had enough sappiness between them when he and Tails left on their little space adventure.

Still, something made her maintain the connection a moment longer, feeling the spikes of adrenaline, catching glimpses of a silver elevator and a yellow-furred fox. She felt— something. Some premonition of dread. Maybe it was just the lingering fear of the nightmare, but…

Be careful, she reminded him. Don't go running into any walls.

Sonic laughed, radiating amusement and reassurance. Don't worry. I've got Tails around to keep me from doing anything stupid. His attention snapped to a new threat, and he pulled away from the connection. Pretzel let it drop, leaving her alone in the silence of her own mind. If only she could let her unease go that easily.