There wasn't a time in Steph's life where she hadn't had strange dreams. While her days were filled with the humdrum monotony of school and homework, her nights were a carnival of colour and adventure. Lucid dreams came easy for her, though she only tended to take the reins on her REM sojourns when the scenarios her mind spun for her veered off into territory she wasn't keen on exploring. But in recent years, sleeping, let alone dreaming, was becoming increasingly difficult. Insomnia was plaguing her more and more often, and her dreams were coming fewer and farther between.
Despite the scarcity of her dreams, however, she had been having reoccurring ones. She'd been dreaming of the Silent Island of Crow. The shared universe that she wrote in with friends, the storylines they were coming up with seemed to becoming more and more complicated with every passing day. The Island was rapidly becoming an obsession for her, to the point that for the past month, almost every dream that she did manage to have had been about the Island.
In tonight's dream, she was seeing things from Ivanova's point of view, rather than just viewing it all from a cinematic camera's perspective. It started off with her in the dark, then wandering out to see if anyone else was up and about, until she trekked down to the Emperor's abode. The sights, the sounds, all of it was as vibrant as real life. The sound of the ass slap the Emperor's pig butler had levelled at her had been uncomfortably realistic. A journey into a strange train station with a living, insectoid train. All of it was so bizarre, and Steph wondered where the dream would lead her next, when all of a sudden she felt herself tip forward, not in the dream, but in the waking world.
She screeched, flailing wildly to try and catch her balance, but it wasn't enough. She crashed down on a surface that was most definitely not her bed. She blinked her eyes open in surprise, shocked to find herself sprawled out across sun baked and sea softened planks of wood, the ocean gently lapping at the dock she was inexplicably on. Beyond where planks met sand, she could make out the blurry shapes of a beach before her (brilliant white sand, not the rocky shores of the beaches in her area), with mountain off in the distance (rocky and bare, not the tree-covered mountain she lived in the shadow of), a forest to her left (deeper and darker than the ones in her neighbourhood), and a storm-wracked plateau off to her right (and there was just straight up nothing like that around where she lived). Despite the strangeness of her surroundings, she knew exactly where she was. After all, she had been dreaming about this place for some time now.
Standing up, she slowly spun in a circle, taking in as much of the scenery as she could, without her glasses, before asking aloud, "Am I on the Silent Island of Crow?!"
Nothing replied beyond the ambient noise of nature.
This had to still be a dream, because there could be no possible way she was standing on the Island! First of all, it was made up, and second of all, even if it was a real place, how the hell could she have gotten there? She'd been dead asleep, dreading the start of classes in the morning, and genuinely considering skipping out for the day, just to not have to deal with the boredom of school.
She looked around, trying to see if there was anything with writing on it (she'd always been able to feel pain in her dreams, so words were always how she was able to tell what was real and what wasn't. Unlike in real life, text in her dreams would never remain static). But aside from the dock she was standing on, and the lighthouse a ways off, there was nothing man-made around her, and so nothing with writing on it. Hoping to find something in the lighthouse that could confirm or deny her sleeping suspicious (because this dream was vivid, even by her standards), she headed off towards it, but didn't make it far before she heard a voice call out to her.
"Here you are! I've looking into the nature of this place, and I think I've got a lead on something."
Steph turned, and strolling up to her was her cat. Who had for sure just spoken to her.
"Misty?!"
"Ugh, you know I hate you calling me that!" Misty said, rolling her eyes, "Do I have to break out my claw- Wait."
Despite being a cat, Misty gave her a very human-like look of concern, and then with a flash of golden light, instead of a small orange house cat standing before her, Steph now found herself eye to eye with an orange sabretooth tiger.
"You aren't Ivanova, are you?!" The giant beast who had looked like Misty a second ago demanded.
"No? My name's Steph?"
"Alright. Okay. Fuck." Not-Misty said, pacing in front of her, clearly agitated about something, "We should get out of here, there's all kinds of shit that could kill you in an instant."
"Lead on, I guess?"
"Ughhhh, it'll take to long with those shitty human legs of yours-"
"HEY!"
"Just- fuck- Just get on?" Not-Misty said, crouching down beside Steph, clearly not happy about this arrangement. Not needing to be told twice, the human scrambled onto the beast's back, and once she felt her passenger was firmly settled, Not-Misty leaped into the air, and promptly took flight.
"Holy shit, you're Misty the Flying Kitty!" Steph laughed.
"It's Mistakelos." The beast grumbled beneath her.
"Which can absolutely be 'Misty' for short!"
Misty sighed, knowing she wouldn't be winning this argument.
Their flight didn't last long, and soon enough they were passing over a desolate, storm-wracked and thorny vine-choked landscape that Steph had only seen in her imagination - the Dark East. Not even bothering to slow down, Misty tipped into a steep dive, the ground rushing up at them, a patch even darker than the landscape around it growing closer with ever second. Into this dark patch Misty dove, entering into Ivanova's subterranean domain. She took a few twists and turns here and there, clearly knowing where she was going (though Steph couldn't see much beyond the gloom - she doubted she would have been able to even if she had been wearing her glasses), before finally coming in for a landing. After a moment of nothingness, a room bloomed into being around them as sconces burst into flame along the walls around them. From what Steph could make out, it looked like some kind of vampire queen's Gothic bedroom.
"This is one of your- her guest rooms, and there's clothes and whatever in there," Misty said, nodding her head over at an ornate armoire against the far wall, "Get dressed and then meet me outside. There's some fuckery going on, and if you're anything like the person I know, you're going to want answers."
Without even a backwards glance, Misty walked out of the open door, using her tail to pull it closed behind her.
Steph couldn't help the short bark of laughter that escaped her.
"A hundred times the size, but the attitude is the same!"
But still, this Misty had been right: she wanted answers. And the sooner Steph got dressed, the sooner she would get them.
Among the clothes and toiletry stashed away, Steph had managed to find a pair of glasses that were her exact prescription. Decked out in the most casual articles of the goth clothing that had been available in the guest room, Steph exited, finding Misty waiting for her, lounging sphinx-like a little bit away from the door.
"Follow me," Misty said, standing and stretching her front paws out and yawning widely, displaying her impressively large saber teeth, "We need to get you somewhere safe."
"Safe?! Isn't it safe in here?!"
"For the you that lives here, it is," Misty explained with an eye roll, "Ever since coming to this Island, demons have been cropping up like vermin in this place. None of them have been strong enough to be anything more than a momentary bit of amusement for Ivanova, but you don't look like you'd be able to put a dent in even the weakest of them. No offence."
"Oh none taken." Steph muttered, highly offended.
She glanced around the hall Misty was leading them down, taking in the strange construction. At first glance, it looked like the hallway of some kind of medieval castle, a torch-lit stone hall lined with heavy doors, but taking a more deliberate look at the details revealed all kinds of fun little surprises. The bricks used in this place were clearly from different location, wildly different colours and materials, most stone but some were metal or other materials, plain or etched with strange, eldritch designs. Some of the doors were typical wooden dungeon doors, but others looked like they'd been pulled directly out of submarines or space ships. The torches, too, seemed to be a mix of standard bundles of flammable material burning orange, strange metal constructs holding blue or green flickering lights that violently crashed against the bars of their enclosures as they passed by, or artificial white lights that were probably pillaged from construction sites. Despite the mishmash of building materials, there was a strange sort of cohesion to it all that Steph found appealing.
"So if you're done insulting me, maybe you can tell me what's going on?" She asked after a few moment's silence. In front of her, Misty huffed out a short laugh, and then stopped before a very sci-fi looking door. She touched a strange symbol on it with one of her massive paws, and the door momentarily lit up before sliding open. Nodding for Steph to follow her, Misty entered the room.
The interior of the room looked like something out of a 1950's science fiction movie, absolutely jam packed with strange apparatuses that she couldn't even begin to guess what their uses were. In the furthest corner of it stood something that looked like a shark diving cage and a Faraday cage gave birth to a high Gothic monstrosity, with a very Star Trek looking control panel facing it.
"I have some theories I want to test first, if you'll indulge me?" Misty said, motioning towards the strange cage.
"You testing how well I'll microwave or something?"
Misty laughed at that, saying, "No, if you're anything like the person I know, then you wouldn't be able to handle the heat. I just need to get some readings off you, you won't be harmed."
Steph eyed the menacing cage standing there in all it's wrought iron glory, and sighed. Either she was having the most immersive dream of her entire life, actually in some kind of other dimension, or the stresses of her day to day had finally driven her over the edge. In any case, if going along with the delusion would get her answers, then what was the harm in that? That she could die? Oh no, then she wouldn't be able to go to school at all! What a shame!
Without a backwards glance, Steph marched up to the cage, opened the door, then sat on the chair inside.
At the control panel outside, Misty gave a nod of her head and a half dozen glowing golden hands appeared in the air around her, before scattering across the panel to do who knew what.
"Try to relax," She told Steph, "This is probably going to feel very weird."
Steph nodded, settling back into the surprisingly comfortable chair, watching as a pair of the glowing hands outside floated over to something that looked like a space ship engine from some shitty Star Wars knock off movie from the 1980's. A few knob twists and toggle flips later, and the room was assaulted by a humming sensation that was more felt than heard. Next the interior of the cage was lit up in ultraviolet light, though Steph could swear she could feel wavelengths of light she couldn't see, the humming from the device outside making her teeth rattle together. Beeping started up then, almost like a countdown, and outside, one of the hands floated over to a massive leaver jutting out of the wall, slamming it down.
The sensation that wracked through Steph at that was something her mind could barely categorize. It wasn't pain, wasn't a change in temperature or humidity, not gravity or pressure of any sort, but at the same time it felt like she was being peeled apart at a molecular level, sliced down to micron thin sheaves of paper, rendered down to her most basic components, yet there somehow felt like there was more to herself than there ever was before. She couldn't see or hear or feel anything, but that was only due to the fact that her senses were being inundated with every sensation all at once. It was like going down the drop on a roller coaster while also staring down into an infinity mirror. The experience lasted for the eternity of a fraction of a second, before it all came crashing down around her in an explosion of sound and noise, and everything around her going dark.
"God fucking shit!" She heard Misty exclaim from just outside, and a million miles away, "Hang on, let me get the lights."
Beyond the mesh and bars of the cage, pale gold light bloomed into being as the spectral hands flitted about the room, lighting the decorative sconces that were scattered around the walls. Steph blinked as her sense of self returned to her, hoisting herself up from where she had half fallen out of the chair.
"What the hell was that?" She croaked, her voice as ragged as if she'd spent hours ceaselessly talking, or minutes screaming as loudly as she could manage. She tried to push herself out of the chair, but her limbs were shaking as badly as if she'd just finished hauling around heavy moving boxes with no rest.
"It wasn't a failure, but it wasn't exactly a success either," Misty told her as she scrambled around the room, more hands being conjured to move items that had been blasted back by whatever this device did, "Kind of a segue, but do you know what a GRB Engine is?"
"Goes real boom?"
"Cute. It stands for Gamma-Ray Burst, you know, the most powerful phenomenon in existence? It's when a star collapses in on itself to become a black hole. I've been trying to run some tests on shit that has washed up on the shores of the Island, but nothing I've used has had enough juice to keep up with the readings coming off these things. I thought for sure a GRB Engine would do the trick, but even that wasn't enough."
Steph tried to stand up again, and thankfully this time she didn't feel like she was going to collapse under her own weight. Stepping out of the cage, she asked, "Sounds intense, but what does any of that mean?"
"Are you familiar with the multiverse theory?" Misty shot back.
"Just in a sci-fi kind of way," Steph replied, intrigued by where this non sequitur was going, "That there are infinite realities out there, either nearly identical or wildly different from one another."
"That's not entirely inaccurate. Here, sit your wobbly ass down before you break something." Misty said, motioning towards a loveseat that was wedged in between two haphazardly assembled pieces of equipment. A moment later, one of the glowing hands floated over to her, carrying the most ornate teacup that Steph had ever seen in her life. Inside was a scintillating gold liquid that faintly smelled like some kind of citrus fruit. She took a hesitant sip, and found the beverage to be perfectly warm. It coated her mouth like a balm, and she felt some of the effects plaguing her begin to melt away. Misty sat down in front of her, her massive tail wrapping around her paws while behind her, the hands moved about the room, fixing the damage done.
"This is simplifying it way down, but all of existence is like a shrub, with branches growing out every which way. The closer the branches in this metaphor, the more similar they will be, and the further out, the more different. Keeping on with the plant analogy, all of these branches were grown from the same seed, and so the further from the seed, the less likely or able the branches are to interact with it. This Island? All my readings indicate that it's sitting on pretty much the furthest point away from that seed that you can get, so it shouldn't be able to interact with or be influenced by the seed all. Yet, somehow, that seed dimension holds incredible sway here, tangling things up across more dimensions than should be possible. Revisiting the plant metaphor, but interdimensional nexuses are like tree branches, with smaller branches connected to it, growing smaller and smaller the further out you go. The nexus the Island is sitting on? It's like an infinite number of fractal tree trunks growing and branching out from the same tree. It's a mathematical impossibility, and yet..."
Finishing her drink, and feeling much better for it, Steph frowned, trying to wrap her head around the imagery. "So me being here, the connection from my world to this one, shouldn't be possible because they're so far removed?"
Misty nodded, standing up and beginning to pace. "Just so. The place you come from, the seed, let's call that Reality. The Island is located in a realm that is the antithesis to everything about where you come from, so we'll call here Unreality. They're opposite ends on a magnet, unable to touch, yet somehow, here, they seem to be drawn together. That shouldn't be able to happen without breaking the magnet in this metaphor."
"The maybe it's not a solid bar, but an ouroboros?" Steph suggested.
Misty stopped her pacing, staring hard at her while hissing, "What?!"
"You know, the snake eating it's tail? A symbol of cycles repeating themselves and shit?"
"Oh I'm well aware," Misty said, beginning her pacing again, but this time looking haunted as her eyes darted back and force, clearly combing through her mental library, "Fuck, what if that's it?!"
Steph watched Misty pace for a few moments more, watched her grow more agitated with every lap, before finally exclaiming, "You wanna share with the class?!"
Misty gave a roar at that, finally settling back down to sit in front of Steph, asking, "Your world has a culture that believes in something called Ragnarök, right?" At Steph's nod, Misty continued, "The end of the world when the serpent lets go of its own tail. As with pretty much everything I've been telling you, that's another metaphor, one that has cropped up across countless different cultures in all of existence. The mouth and the tail of the serpent belong to the same thing, but they serve very different functions: one a cork, and the other a portal. When brought together, they're in balance, but separated? Existence comes undone. Reality and Unreality, this close together? The Silent Island of Crow is sitting on the tail, in the jaws of the snake."
"Okay, cool metaphor, but does that mean that the end of the world is about to come to pass or something? Is 2012 the year it for real comes crumbling down?"
"What year is it for you?" Misty demanded.
"2003. So are my days numbered?"
"Technically everyone and everything's days are numbered, but to what you're really implying, then no, doom for you isn't on the imminent horizon. There's still going to be billions of years before the end of everything comes rolling around. No, I think this little revelation is going to have more weight for me than it is for you."
Steph gave a short laugh of disbelief, throwing her hands up in the air, saying, "So what, I'm just supposed to sit on that information for the rest of my life, that everything's coming to an end?"
Rolling her eyes, Misty replied, "Don't be so fucking dramatic. I'm betting, due to the incompatible nature of these two realms, all this will stop being a thing you experienced and instead be remembered as a weird dream you had one time. Even before the revelations I just dropped on you, I'm betting you already knew about the inevitable heat death of the universe that'll happen long after your world is nothing but cosmic dust, so nothing's really changed for you. There's still the rest of your life to live out, all your friends and family back where you belong. Sure, there's going to be hardships in your life, but there's hardships in EVERYONE'S lives! You just stop being a whiny little shit about it all and put one foot in front of the other!"
"I guess I know an alternate version of you, back in Reality or whatever," Steph said as she threw herself deeper into the loveseat, "Cuz this is exactly how I imagined you would be like, if you could talk."
"Oh, so perfect, then?" Misty shot back with a smirk.
"Shut the fuck up." Steph replied, but she smiled despite herself.
Around the pair of them, the floating hands had almost completely restored the room to the way it was when they'd first entered it, and Steph found herself impressed by their efficiency.
"So what now? Am I stuck here, or is there a way for me to get back to where I belong, since nothing I learned here will matter at all." She asked.
"It does matter," Misty countered, "Even if it's just temporary knowledge to you, it's something that may end up helping a lot of people in the long run, including yourself. There's all kinds of prophecies and shit about what you helped me find, so I'm going to head out in search of them. And from the readings I got off that machine before it blew, it looks like whatever had you and Ivanova swapped around is just temporary. A day pass, I guess you could say. This time tomorrow, and you'll be waking up in your own bed."
"And what am I supposed to do now? Just dick around in this room for a day because I'm apparently too weak to do anything else?" Steph asked.
"I can give you a tour, if it'll stop your whining," Misty told her, but there was some fondness laced under the snark, "It's the least I can do for all the help you gave me."
Steph came to, lying on her side and staring at the wall beside her bed, the noises of her brother getting up for school just audible through the walls separating their bedrooms. She tried to hang on to the strange details of the dream she'd been having just before she awoke, but beyond the vague notion of giving someone who looked a lot like her a map to a train station, she couldn't remember a thing.
She sat up, and a disgruntled "mrrp!" chased the remnants of her dream from her mind.
"Sorry Misty. At least you still get to sleep in after I get up!" She said, patting the cat curled up in the crook of her knee.
The cat in question gave a huge yawn and stretch, before sighing in contentment and snuggling back down in bed. Carefully pulling herself out of the blankets as to not disturb the sleeping beast, Steph got up to get ready for the day, eagerly awaiting her computer class where she could breeze through the project for the day and get back to writing of Ivanova's adventures on the Silent Island of Crow.
The End