Galarian pansies, a dark blue-purple like dusk on the lake, surround the red picnic blanket. Warm hands pull a bowl of pudding from the woven basket; it's handmade and aged, a stark contrast to the recently-made clothing her mother is wearing. It is a vibrant orange, her favorite color. The moment is soft and fuzzy at the edges. [break][break]

The pudding is sweet and thick but light from the citrus flavors. Ameena doesn't know what she's saying, but it pulls a laugh from her mum's mouth all the same. The scene is familiar only to her conscious mind. This is not a memory. Ameena's most joyous, laidback moments with her mother never involved the expensive silks she was wearing. Mum hated the mass-produced works with inflated price tags, but HE had insisted on her keeping up appearances. What general one step from the peak of his career could fail to provide for his wife? [break][break]

The sunset colors of her silks were the only redeeming quality, the anchor that made her think the dream was a happy one, that while she had few memories of her mum in softer, gentler, inherited clothes, her mind could at least compensate for the fashionable prison uniform by producing it in mum's favorite color. [break][break]

Dream symbols were exhausting to look through. Ameena didn't want to analyze herself. These were the only times she could see her mother, accessing some sort of far-off door. [break][break]

The comfort of the dream is warmer than the sun-bathed picnic blanket beneath them, but all the same, Ameena feels far before she sees it get pulled out from under her. [break][break]

A gunshot.[break][break]

The loudest sound, followed by a louder silence. [break][break]

Ameena looks down and the blanket is blood red. The pansies are bruises on the grass casket that holds her mum. The pudding tastes like rotten flesh in her mouth. She can wipe at it, but her hands are covered in blood. She always covers the gunshot wound, she always presses her hands to her mother's chest like she was about to perform a resuscitation attempt, but the blood gushes through. She always watches. She always touches. She always fails. [break][break]

For all the run-throughs in simulations, for all the rigorous experiments on dreams and psychic influence on the psyche, for all that she had given in her entire researching career, it never mattered when she slept and naturally dreamed. The worst part of playing into the script? She was lucid at that moment. She could never spit the pudding out before the gunshot, could never move her mother out of the way. But once mum was on the ground? Ameena was free, free by the very thing that trapped her, the very force that killed her every day as she pushed herself to chase what could never be caught. [break][break]

She wakes with a start. Her mouth is dry.[break]

d r e a m – M 256[break][break][break]

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The ocean is encompassing. Its waves lap at shores, give life, and stress-test navigation systems on the regular. There is something undeniably powerful about it. It has been the item of praise and adoration and even the source of mythology for longer in human history than Ameena is even familiar with. She has always loved the different moods of the sea, the storms it alone can temper, and the variety of life it can host. [break][break]

The ultra deep sea has not earned its namesake. [break][break]

It is not so encompassing as it is abyssal. Ameena's seen darkness, has been in caves so far beneath the surface that even a flame seems to get swallowed, but this is next-level. The ultra deep sea is not filled with sounds of wingull and children playing and boat horns. It swallows sound, like light; the trench she visited with the head scientist is a gaping mouth that consumes them with an insatiable appetite. His armor is unfeeling, unyielding, but when she asks him how he's holding up, he sounds cool as a cucumber. [break][break]

Ameena sees things. She knows people invent things out of boredom and that the mind will reconstruct reality in a way that makes sense and that the psychological state of mind is heavily impacted by a lack of stimuli even more than an abundance of it. The knowledge cannot save her. She sees images in the darkness, hears voices in the silence so silent she can listen to her heartbeat and not her own thoughts. [break][break]

Hands grab at her from the trench. She twists and shakes, but they are bone-breaking in their grip. She screams. The abyss eats it whole. She turns around to see her partner, but there's no one there. It's just blackness. The red flare she had been holding is gone. She gasps in surprise, looking down, almost swearing she can see the faintest red spot in the great distance as the flare is lost, but she knows, somehow, that it is absolutely not there. [break][break]

Her gasp lets the abyss in. Cold saltwater pours into her mouth, seems to fill into her lungs immediately; she can feel the pressure of their expansion against her ribs, the inky black of the abyss painting her with its sickness. She can't break free of the hands, can't spit out the abyss. She can see nothing, know nothing, but somehow she is aware she is sinking. She can't even reach out a hand for a snowball's chance... [break][break]

When she wakes, she is drenched in the result of her fear. Fear has no place in her mind. As much as the animal part of her brain begs her not to, she knows she must go again, must explore the depths of the deep sea to know what is there and no longer fear what might be.

d r e a m – U 1[break][break][break]

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In the waking world, it was hard enough to remind herself that the RKS was a simulation and couldn't hurt her. In her dreams, however, there was no solace to be found. She believed dreaming to open up the multiverse - while these events were not truly happening to her body, what transpired was certainly something another Ameena was living through. In a manner of thinking. The multiverse complicated understandings of the self in ways that would require several more degrees to properly untangle. [break][break]

The horror of that theory was full force as the white hands of god plucked her from the ship. She had been here before, had watched Xenon get pulled out with the most monotone voice and unmoved expression. [break][break]

Maybe that had cemented it in her mind more than the terrifying presence of hands removed from a body, so giant they dwarfed even the ship, so powerful they crushed your lungs with the lightest touch. As one held her loosely and she felt the restriction of her ribs, she realized that no, the lack of panic had not been the more traumatizing part. The hands were the sum total horror of the simulation and the dream. [break][break]

She could breathe in her dream despite the vacuum of space. Her voice was completely lost. She screamed, screamed until she could feel the redness of her throat. Her lungs deflated under the exertion and she felt, painfully, how they failed to expand in the hand's grip. She couldn't scream anymore, nor breathe, nor beg. [break][break]

The unknown can be scary, but she fears what summons such hands far less than the immediate and impending death. She doesn't want to know what it feels like, and she never does - the hand didn't grab her in the RKS run this event originates from - but she gets just a little closer to feeling her light go out each time she revisits the dream. This time, she counts down and gets further than before. Her parting thought in this visit is that her chest is so crushed, she swears the walls of her deflated lungs are touching.

d r e a m – R 6[break][break][break]

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Smoke hangs in the air like a confession that can't be taken back. Trench warfare was a dated method, but she had ordered her Sergeant's orthworm to make such a ground formation for them as they circled the insurgents. Galar was home to a few terror organizations, but while the intel stated as such, she had a feeling this was less about insurgency and more about a group of radically progressive politically-active youth who wanted the monarchy to be dismantled for greater and better things. [break][break]

The distinct lack of military training or weaponry gave it away, along with the fact that group had made no demands and had no insignias, as one might expect terror organizations to have. But more than that, they were in a country-side home instead of taking cover somewhere more defensible. [break][break]

The situation is a play on the destruction of a village, though the scenario has shifted to be smaller and more personable. Instead of combing the streets for political radicals, she stands in a trench before a house. It's not a decision she would normally make, but in the dream, it seems quite rational despite the lack of projectile weapons or snipers. There's no reason not to charge forward, no reason not to just appear with a teleport. [break][break]

Her Sergeant generates a smokescreen with his tentacruel. Ameena walks through it, unencumbered by the smoke. Her other soldiers create a ruckus in the expanse between the house and the trench, drawing fire. It's obvious something is traveling through the smoke, but the insurgents or politically active youth or whatever they are do not fire on it. There's nearly a mile to traverse, but Ameena stands before the house in just a minute. [break][break]

The smoke sits on her tongue like a secret. The door to the house is unlocked. She can hear screaming upstairs in a language she doesn't understand and yet, all the same, she knows they are cursing the government and promising to kill her soldiers. [break][break]

She feels removed from her body, watching from a third person perspective, unfeeling as she sees herself walk up the stairs with her sword drawn. It's ceremonial. She has guns, several, and a knife, and draws nothing but the sword. She has pokemon to fight this fight for her. She has Espathra to teleport her directly into the house ages ago but made no move to release her; she had Munna to put them all to sleep for an execution, but never released her. [break][break]

It would be a true dream if it were just a power fantasy. It would be a true nightmare if it were just the separation of mind and body, the powerlessness of it. This one is neither. [break][break]

The faces of the youth always change. She knows she must have seen these faces in passing, that the mind cannot construct expressions well enough to design its own people, but she never knows a single one. They come at her haphazardly, streaked in dirt and tears and anger. She strikes them down with her sword with practiced ease. They never lay a hand on her. They always fall to slaughter like miltank. Every time she goes through the dream - with a different strategy, with a different team, with a different setting - she always wins the fight effortlessly, without emotion, without active thought. [break][break]

She wakes and writes down every conceivable detail on top of letting Musharna consume it; eventually, she will understand this one, which is so perplexing. Is it a nightmare, the feeling of being a puppet on a string? Is it a dream, the unstoppable force that she is? Is her mind asking her to work through her military experience, though the scenario is never similar enough to a mission to truly reflect it? She always wakes to the scent of smoke.

d r e a m – G 13[break][break][break]

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An ocean of sunlight bathed the rocks, lighting it with wide swathes of orange like ripe fruit. The ground was warm. It promised to hold her like a grandparent. By all means, it should have been enjoyable to fall into the earth despite the dust of the excavation crew and the uncomfortable tools of the archaeologists, but neither of those factors were the detractor.[break][break]

The rock giant above her with a righteous boulder between its paws was the problem. Ameena couldn't move. The first strike had crushed her ribs and tucked her body into the ground much like how a key slotted into its keyhole. If she had had the strength, the will, the state of mind, she could have tried to peel herself from the Ameena-shaped depression. Her only saving grace was that this revisit of the RKS scenario had not left her with anxiety or animal terror. [break][break]

Instead, a deep apathy filled her stomach like cement. The giant, Regirock, beeped and tossed the rock down with no further fanfare. She couldn't even be bothered to close her eyes.

d r e a m – R 8[break][break][break]

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Her childhood blanket was a patchwork, something tattered with unintentionally visible stitches, unfashionably heavy, filled with patches seemingly unintentionally. It looked like a collection of excess fabric from other projects. Many were cheap. It was not suitable for anyone in the Abadi clan. It did not complement their family crest nor the long series of badges and photographed ceremonies that filled every Abadi household. [break][break]

Ameena always felt the need to apologize when she held it. Her mom would keep it in Ameena's bedroom, folded up and hidden at the bottom of her toy chest in a room kept military-clean. Her father would never be caught rustling through toys, would never debase himself by looking for what he considered to be scraps, to be lesser, utter rubbish. Ameena had to be careful when she took it out, had to be sure her father wouldn't see it. She wanted its comfort. She feared the punishment of such weakness. It smelled entirely of her mother in a house that was fiercely sterile, abusively scrubbed of fingerprints and human touch until it was indistinguishable from any other wall or door or window or table. [break][break]

... [break][break]

Espathra, her first partner - a Flittle, she used to be - lurches in the way of the bullet, her psychic senses giving her enough forewarning to know the trajectory but her wounds forbidding any faster or stronger action than moving in front of it. [break][break]

Blood is hot. There is nothing surgical about any of it. Ameena can never get used to its heat, the immediate reminder that it has come from a working body, even if the body is wrung out before the blood finishes landing. Espathra, like a fabric napkin, folds and crumples before her, falling at her feet. The blood covers her face like war paint befitting an army she isn't fighting for. [break][break]

Ameena falls to her side, already knowing from the lack of mental presence from the Espathra that she is gone, utterly gone. She is limp. She is deflated. She is wrapped around Ameena's hands as the soldier the daughter the trainer the saved, undeserving but saved holds her cautiously. Ameena shakes her, lightly, to confirm the bird draped over her bruised hands is treacherously soft. The weight is, bizarrely, comforting. Ameena wishes she was underneath her, wishes she was buried beneath - buried with - her partner, wishes she didn't have to hide this. She feels the need to apologize.[break][break]

d r e a m – G 16[break][break][break]

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His Skarmory stays put, her Kirlia ignores them. [break][break]

Their dance this time takes them into the alley, out of the dark streets and into something darker. She does play coy this time. He laughs, that husky, smokey sound brushing against her like an actual touch. He gets her to a wall, talking about the law. The look on her face doesn't quite sell surprise. After all, she had measured her steps back to that wall, had darted her gaze around him as if she would make a break for it, just so he'll step even closer and trap her in. [break][break]

He says something about taking things the easy way. She says something about making things worth his while if he'll make it even easier for her and avoid the jail time altogether. The negotiation always ends with,[break][break]

"Atta girl. See, I can be damn reasonable, and if ya didn't throw a fuckin' net on me..."

d r e a m – J 4[break][break][break]

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She clasps her hands over her mum's chest and holds the wound down like a feral dog. Blood gushes around her fingers. It boils her skin. She screams. She presses harder. Her arms ache. Her mum's chest collapses like a cave-in. The bones in her hands feel like orthworms. Her lung are shredded like rebel war flags. The blanket is a casket. She does not let go. [break][break]

She does not let go. [break][break]

She does not let go. [break][break]

She does not let go. [break][break]

She does not let go. [break][break]

She does not let go. [break][break]

d r e a m – M 296[break][break][break]

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This time, she's in a test tube. [break][break]

She sees a dozen people sleeping, hooked up to a mist concoction of her own design, dreaming. She beats on the glass to break it. She can see from the readings by each set that their heart rates are all plummeting. The concoction, it's wrong. It's killing. It's convinced the mind its dying and the body is listening. [break][break]

She cries out for her pokemon to stop it. They cannot hear her. She cannot be heard. [break][break]

Flat line. Twelve of them. [break][break]

She watches as their brain activity fights, fights, and fails. It's not even that the people lying in the beds are so important - though they are, most of them - but that they have encountered so many otherworldly elements that their value was utterly wasted in this study, in this laying-the-groundwork experiment. That she's burned a solid route towards navigating the dream realm, where she could navigate to one where these people were alive. Where she would be safe. Because she certainly gave up all protections the second her admins passed. [break][break]

And the tube around her doesn't even suffocate her. She will be alive when the others come looking.

d r e a m – S 2[break][break][break]

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