Chapter 6: Finally!
I skip down the street, cheery and bubbly, not needing a reason. My disguise fools the dumb-dumb humans as always, except Dib who doesn't matter cuz no one listens to smart kids around here. I forget what I'm supposed to be doing, but whatever. Hopping and bouncing, I laugh and snort and turn cartwheels.
Huh. The house isn't where it's supposed to be. Was I going home? Probably? Yay! I can't find home so I don't gotta work!
I keep skipping down the street, chase a squirrel, catch the squirrel, pretend to nom the squirrel, and splort with laughter when it attacks me with tiny razor claws. I'm not that much bigger than the squirrel, but I'm made of metal. I let the frantic thing go, leap to catch a bird out of the air, and stare into its eyes. It has no idea what's happening, and stares back like its brain is off. Laughing, I set it down.
Huh. Seriously, where's the house? The whole street seems wrong. I check my high-capacity data uplink, and there's no signal. I might get the whole day off!
Except… that's Dib's house right there. And that's the house with the laser hole in the roof from when I got a little random chasing away those kids.
The base really should be here.
Then I see the bird again. It's twice as big as a minute ago. And glowing bright green. And there's the squirrel. It's holding a little sword now.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh.
I'm dreaming again.
Uh oh...
I'm DREAMING again!
Don't let on. Pretend it's real. The squirrel is totally normal holding a sword. Birds that color make sooooooo much sense in this neighborhood!
But… I'm still lost. I'm not sure how to wake myself up. And pretending this is real but knowing it's not could get suuuuuuper boring after a while.
Ya know what?
Forget this!
If the dream eats my feet, or drowns me in chainsaws, or turns the ground into poo, it'll be fiiiiiiiiiiiine…
Cuz I'll wake up sooner or later.
No consequences! Except pain! But the pain isn't real! Or at least, it won't be when I wake up!
Concentrating hard, I will myself to soar straight up into the sky. A heavy fog flows in out of nowhere, trying to keep me lost. Laughing, I sweep one hand from left to right, and a vast stretch of the fog blows aside. It tries to flow back in, way faster than makes sense, but I cackle with glee as I sweep it back with another swing. I catch a glimpse of Zim's base… but I also see a puppy! Running from a big freak'n fantasy wolf with glowing teeth.
This is tooooootally a trap!
Bring it on, evil dreams!
I dive through the mists, deploying a hyperbizmogrifier beam from my left shoulder and activating omniphasic targeting. My left hand sweeps out and I squeal in anticipation. I sense that all the mist, fog, and cloud in the whole world has briefly ceased to exist. The fabric of reality groans and growls, hatred beginning to focus on me. The dream is mad.
It's fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.
My blast annihilates the evil wolf monster thing in a puff of silvery smoke that quickly implodes into a tiny nugget of nuclear pasta. I land smoothly, next to the puppy, and as I scoop it up, I focus all my fun and joy upon it. The little critter grows even cuter, its hair getting fluffier, its eyes bigger, and its gratitude effervescent enough to match my own fun. With an outpouring of will, I manifest a translucent bubble of adamantine crystalline nanoglass around the puppy, which should be able to protect it from what's about to happen.
The sky turns red. Blood falls in a heavy rain. Black lightning streaks down, blasting houses to burning rubble. Tornadoes of blue fire stretch across the horizon. A gigantic Zim face replaces the sun, screaming for me to get back to work.
Fun.
This. Will. Be. FUN.
A thousand SIRs rise up out of the ground, but my will pushes back. All the threats manifest from the same direction, unable to appear behind me or to either side.
"Bring… it… ON!"
I activate Duty Mode, and the SIRs charge.
Storms of missiles and micro-torpedoes streak in, while my own arsenal responds with a hundred times the firepower I have in the real world. I manifest a lightsaber in my right hand and a circular shield of solar plasma in my left, all of its output radiating away from me. Explosions fill my vision, and I up the output of my sensors, piercing the debris and fire. My lightsaber deflects a storm of lasers, which rip up the earth, streaking across the sky, and bisect SIRs en masse. Bits of robot fly in a zillion directions, but so far none of the pieces belong to me.
The puppy bounces around behind me, happy in its invincible bubble.
The earth screams, and the dream fights harder. Huge Irken war machines manifest, with artillery cannons long as bridges and launching shells bigger than hippos. One launches actual hippos which is somehow scarier. I soar into the air toward the storm of fire, slashing and blasting and corkscrewing around the worst of the devastation, destroying the first wave of shells and then drawing fire in a new direction. My ammo reserves are limitless, and a storm of rockets go down the barrels of the huge enemy cannons, detonating their magazines in spectacular columns of mushrooming black smoke.
Titanic monsters burst up out of the earth, bristling with crackling energy, brandishing claws and spikes bigger than houses. Their mountainous forms are covered in Blorchian Slaughter Rats, which are launched through the air by the thousand every time the giganto baddies swing their tremendous limbs.
My lightsaber slashes in an endless sequence of whirling arcs and figure eights, my solar shield ignites everything that comes close, and with a tremendous outpouring of enthusiastic intensity, my missile storms start to go nuclear.
Space-time warps and twists, and the dream's rage continues to build and build. I knew from the start there could be no victory, but this is so… dang… FUN!
A Slaughtering Rat Person, fully on fire but deranged beyond description, shoots past me, and my foot comes away in its mouth. I twist and dive, dodging five more swings from kaiju that just keep getting bigger and faster. Half of my missile batteries rip away, an erupting volcano shatters my shield with a direct hit, and a hippo clips me as it launches into orbit, breaking my back and ripping off my other foot. The endless blood rain turns green and becomes ruinously acidic.
Laughing in the purest freedom, I swing my left hand, blasting back the rain, and when a sheet of black lightning blows off that hand, I hurl my lightsaber to free up my remaining hand. Lightning converges on the weapon, which glows ever brighter, until at last the extreme energy density collapses into a black hole. Lightning and acid blood spiral into the growing singularity, and I dive toward the nearest kaiju thing. It's grown so big I can't even gauge the distance, with my targeting failing and power generators on the fritz. Straining till my left eye shorts out, I manifest a relativistic kinetic drive as a jetpack and aim straight for the monster's head. It opens its cavernous mouth wide, and a whole Ripper Battlecruiser could have fit in there no problem.
Time to wake up!
I activate my relativistic drive, the dream world turns to brilliant light…
And I'm standing in Zim's base, stirring a vat of sock soup.
Zim stares at me from across the room, wide-eyed.
Most of my weaponry is deployed. But the house still exists, so I probably didn't actually fire any of it.
My smile feels like it could stretch from wall to wall.
Retracting my armaments and focusing on stirring, I let out a satisfied sigh.
Finally!
Author's note:
Huzzah for another subconscious triumph! Even with my dream striving to punish me with all the power of the universe, I was actually lucid and able to fight back. Such a fun first for me. In the dream, I was myself, so the details of the weapons and powers I employed were somewhat different (though the flying, shield, and lightsaber were the same), but I think I captured the scale and insanity of the experience with a very GIR flare.
I was super sick when I had this dream. A throat so sore it had been waking me multiple times a night for several nights, with my tonsils so massive you could easily see them from across the room with my mouth closed. But when I woke from this dream, I had slept through the whole night. Double victory!