Sorry for taking so long with this one. I actually finished it awhile ago, but I haven't been on my laptop to upload in awhile. As I'm sure many of you know, a game called GTA IV just came out, and I can't tear myself away. Anyways, this was written almost entirely in one long session from 12:00-3:00 one morning, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's rife with spelling errors and overall pretty bizarre.

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It was a lot like being taken by the blue-suited man, dreaming aboard the hovercraft as it slid across the surface of the ocea

It was a lot like being taken by the blue-suited man, dreaming aboard the hovercraft as it slid across the surface of the ocean. Unlike that stasis, though, I couldn't tell when I was dreaming- obviously, I would know when I woke up, but while I was experiencing it my mind had me convinced that all the strange sensations shooting through my nerves were just stimuli of the events transpiring around me.

I felt warmth on my back, the engine in reality, but in my dreamscape when I managed to spin myself around, there was a fire, shooting from the mouth of what looked like some combination of an Angler fish's teeth stuck on the mouth of a gulper eel, and a large bear with a hunched back, walking on its hind legs. The whole thing had a black, hardened crust that pointed into horns all over its body, but at some points it was chipped away, revealing tender red flesh that exuded a minor yet malevolent glow.

Its eyes were black and shiny, and seemed to shift constantly, taking in the nothingness in which we floated. They protruded from its head in a way that made it seem as if its creator had stuck them on as an afterthought.

In the dream, we were both instantly moved into a dark pit, and though I recognize that my imagination transported us both in the middle of it all, it seemed as if we had been in the pit the whole time while I was asleep.

The pit floor was a good 30 feet below the surface of wherever we were, and it was rough, suggesting that if it hadn't been used much. To my left I saw a table with what appeared to be weapons, though in the large space of the pit, I couldn't be entirely sure. If I ran straight to the table, the monster, which was facing me, could easily kill me with a quick attack to his immediate right.

It lumbered slowly towards me as I determined how best to go about evading the beast, when I saw a small bit of the crusty black skin chipped off on the top of his shoulder. We both looked quizzically at his shoulder, where a bit of bright red liquid was spilling through the small hole and dripping down his shoulder. I was almost as astounded at what I saw floating behind the monster.

Unlike the monster, which seemed to have needless limbs stuck on here and there, the floating thing seemed almost simplistic. It was humanoid, but it wasn't human. It was like a robot, with a shiny gray sheen, and out of its back sprouted angelic wings. It was wearing human clothes, and somehow, without anyone telling me, I knew it was Alyx. It was just one of those things that you automatically have knowledge of in your dreams.

It was holding a small white bar in its hand, pointed at the monster-thing's shoulder. I wasn't sure what was going on, so I ran as fast as I could towards the table, praying that one of the objects was a self-pinching apparatus so I could wake up.

Reach it took a while. The ground wasn't wet, yet I couldn't get any traction on it. As fast as I run, my feet just sort of slid over the ground for most of it, propelling me towards my target very slowly.

When I finally reached the table, I was pleasantly surprised. Each of the objects looked capable of single-handedly fighting a thermo-nuclear war. I reached for one of the smaller ones, a crossbow that fired some sort of capsule, or maybe simply propelled the ammunition with so much force that they needn't be sharpened.

As I was leveling the crossbow-device with the fish-bear monster, it turned from its fight with robo-Alyx and ran towards me with frightening speed. My instincts kicked in and I fired a shot that, had it been a normal crossobow round would have soared through the monster's large open mouth and pierced the back of its throat. However, around halfway towards reaching its target, the bolt disappeared in a small puff of smoke.

I thought I would surely be gored by one of the monster's tusk-like teeth, when suddenly, where the bolt had been appeared a swordfish, flying point-first towards the fish monster. The swordfish connected, pinching a part of the monster's open mouth flap to the back of its mouth. It stopped for a moment before pulling the swordfish out. Its eyes spun around, looking for robo-Alyx before throwing it like a javelin at her. It caught her in the forearm and continued through the wall of the pit, trapping her there, then turned back to me.

As it advanced menacingly, I looked back at the table. There weren't anymore crossbow bolts, so I picked up a thing that looked like a rocket launcher. The barrel was wide enough to launch a watermelon, and when I lifted it up I found it was too heavy for me to sensibly wield.

"Hey!" I shouted at Robo-Alyx, who was still pinned to the wall, trying desperately to free herself. Her head turned to face me, and her arm reached towards the gun. I thought at first that she expected me to lug it over to her, an idea I wasn't too keen on. Then her arm shot out of its socket, the hand open. It clamped down on the gun then the whole thing jerked backwards toward her on a thin metal cable. She shouldered the gun with relative ease and didn't hesitate in firing.

My eyesight went neon green, and everything became hot again. Then it turned cold. That was when I woke up, slightly startled. The engine had ceased running and already was cooling. I was about to ask Alyx why we were stopped when she put a hand over my mouth to silence me.

We were nearly surrounded by Combine Scanners. They had somehow managed to miss us and were floating over the water, flashing their lights into the depths of the ocean. The coast was just ahead, and the City 32 rebels hadn't started their attack, judging from the pervading silence all around.

Alyx took her hand from my mouth and reached down, pulling a small piece of driftwood that had washed into the hovercraft from the floor. Moving slowly, she turned around in her seat on her knees, so that her head stuck out of the top of the hovercraft. It was still dark, but the night was beginning to fade now, so she threw the piece of wood as smoothly as it could. She pulled her Assault Rifle into her arms and aimed down at the driftwood. I did the same.

The scanners quickly moved to the driftwood and did what they did best: scanning. We opened fired at he same time, and after a short few bursts of fire, the parts of a good 10 scanners at least were slowly sinking through the water.

It seemed suspicious that the scanners had been there, and Alyx seemed to think so too, as I could see her thinking deeply as she fired the hovercraft up. Someone could have betrayed us again, and that would mean we'd have a handful of Combine in a few minutes if the Cardiff wasn't attacked before then.

It was a short drive from the coast to the nearest rebel hide-out, and much of the scenery here was quaint. In some few pockets of nothingness, it was almost as if the Combine had never even attacked. There was always something though, a man with a headcrab grafted to his face and his guts spilling out, or a little block of houses full of holes from Combine mortars.

We were driving through a large grassy field, a few sheep sprinkled about and a partially torn-down barn when the hovercraft suddenly began to slow. I thought at first that we were running out of gas, or that the engine had failed. But when the sky began to turn dark, despite the coming morning, and a distinct lack of noise at all from Alyx confirmed to me what was occurring.