That night Ryan slipped into his hypnogogic state even quicker than the previous night. He didn’t even really need to use his breath to anchor his thoughts this time either. It was like the book had said. There was him, and there was his thoughts. He was not his thoughts. He was the seat of consciousness that observed those thoughts. Once he began to internalize that concept, it was easy to focus on the observer, and not what it was observing. He experienced a strange feeling of disorientation, as if he were rotating around with his head as the axis. It was dizzying but also pleasurable, like a roller coaster ride. A primal fear that wanted to simultaneously crush him in its grip and liberate him from needing to be in control. He spun around and around, faster and faster until—

  He stood atop a large staircase, leading down towards a beach at night. He smelt the salt in the air. Heard the waves crashing against the shore. Saw the dark infinity of the ocean splayed out before him. Felt the rough wet stone on his feet, and the cold metal bar of the railing on his hand. He felt compelled to continue down the steps. To get to that shore. To get to the ocean.

  He sunk his foot into the sand at the bottom and then he was standing in the hallway of his school. Something about the abruptness of it tugged at his mind. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which said:

  This is NOT a dream.

  Then he folded it to put it away—but remembered to read it twice. He unfolded the paper and read it again:

  ?!h$ !$ И0? Δ dЯ3λM.

  The words were scrambled and weird, and the more he looked at them the more he realized they didn’t say what he expected them to say. This was a dream. He was in a dream. He was aware of that fact. He was… Lucid. A sense of elation and something akin to panic gripped at his chest, like if he held too tightly to this sensation it would all fall apart. He chose to continue down the hallway and see where this dream would lead him. He noticed, once more, that with each step he took the lights would flicker, and there would be a hum in his chest. The hum reminded him of the way the orb would vibrate when he rolled it between his fingers. Especially when he thought about certain things. Like Minerva. Or his father.

  He came upon the same door as the previous night, the fabled Janitor’s closet, the room of gloom and broom. He thought he could hear the sound of cracking glass coming through the door. He leaned his ear up against it to see if he could hear more clearly.

  “This isn’t the way,” a voice said. With a start he turned to see Lisa standing beside him, leaned up against the wall next to the door.

  “Lisa? How are you here?” he asked.

  “I’m not here, genius. This is a dream. If anything, I’m whatever part of your Anima you project onto Lisa.”

  “Right, thanks for the lesson in Jungian Psychology…me. What do you mean this isn’t the way?”

  “You’re dreaming. This is just showing you the way. You need to project yourself over here to fix it.”

  “Fix what?” Ryan asked, confused. Lisa just rolled her eyes, walked behind him, and gave him a shove. Ryan fell right through the door, and then through the floor, and back around again, his feet seemingly anchored in place, until he flipped up out of his dream and out of his body as well.

  “What the hell…” he said in confused bewilderment. He was floating perhaps a meter away from his body, which lay motionless in his bed. He tried to move further away, but there was a pull at his abdomen that got exponentially stronger the further away he tried to move. He looked over and noticed the book by TetraLex was glowing slightly where the Concentrated Firmament was touching it. “What the hell?” he repeated even more perplexedly. Then that pull became too much, snapped like a stretched rubber band, and he was suddenly looking at the ceiling in his room, back where he’d started.

  He shot up and looked over at the book, but it wasn’t glowing. The orb had rolled over to it, but there was no magical interaction. Just to be sure he cracked it open, but there was still nothing but gibberish therein.

  He tried to get back into a meditative state after that, to repeat the experience, but his heart was racing too much, as was his mind, and he was eventually only able to succumb to a deep slumber, where he dreamt of normal, random, epic, and boring things. Like he usually did most nights.

  Ryan woke up groggily to the sound of his alarm, waving his hand over it to silence it before turning over and smashing his face back into his pillow. His mind was still fuzzy and half invested in whatever dream he’d been engrossed in only moments before. He felt like he could slip right back into it if he could just let go, but his mind wasn’t having it, and a moment later he rolled back over, resting his arm across his eyes and letting out a groan.

  “Wake up Ryan, or you’re going to be late!” he heard his mother calling from downstairs. “Again!” she added as a needless addendum. He let out another groan and flipped off his covers, and sliding his legs off the bed.

  “I’m up!” he called out. “I’m up.” He said a second time, to himself. Ryan rubbed the dream salts out of his eyes with his knuckles and then, finally, opened them up to the world. Only then, when he spotted the Book and the Orb, did he remember the events of the night before. He really did it! He had skipped past a whole section of the Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming method and jumped straight to projection. He could still feel the sensation of it, even now.

  “Lucy is going to be so jealous,” he said. “I bet Derek will be too, but he won’t show it. I can’t wait to tell them.” Speaking of Derek, he remembered their project from the previous evening and picked up his PerSpectives, sliding them onto his head. As expected, he had system messages awaiting him.

  Hidden Quest:

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Lucid Dreaming (1) Complete

  Reward: ???

  1.5x CP Boost

  And after he closed that one:

  New Achievement!

  Astral Projection (1)

  You’ve managed to slip your soul out of your body!

  This is a rare and exciting achievement. You should be proud!

  Reward: ???

  Platinum Trophy

  550 XP

  Ryan’s eyes went wide as his experience filled up multiple times as he leveled up again, again, AND again, all the way to level 6, granting him yet another achievement.

  New Achievement!

  Let’s Go Shopping!

  You’ve Unlocked the Shop Icon in your HUD, gaining access to the exclusive online store.

  (Try not to spend your CP all in one place!)

  Reward: One Silver Store Token

  Ryan wasn’t above getting side-tracked by things and focused in on the last reward.

  Store Tokens

  A Token can be exchanged for any one item matching the store categories of Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Adamantium.

  Ryan wanted to go shopping, like really wanted to check out that store, but another, less joking and more insistent call from his mother got him back on track. There was something else he noticed once he’d closed all the windows. The status of Helios was showing that it had 40/50 HP remaining.

  “Helios, how were you able to determine if I’d completed the Hidden Quest if the dream tracking software is disabled?”

  New Task

  Breakfast for Brainpower

  Objective: Eat breakfast before you get to school.

  Reward: 10CP

  Ryan growled, but he really was pressed for time, so he put the headset aside for the time being so he could get dressed, brush his teeth, and grab some toast. He had planned to leave the PerSpectives at home, but he really wanted to get that device to answer his question, so before he left, he continued his new habit of putting the orb in his pocket and the goggles on his head.

  “You’re not really going to wear that, are you?” His mom scrutinized the mismatched nature of Ryan’s outfit as he backed his way through the front door. He mumbled something incoherent with a slice of toast halfway in his mouth and waved a merry goodbye. He still left about ten minutes later than he should have, so the odds of catching up to Derek were rather slim. He rushed himself anyway.

  “Helios, do you remember what I saw during my lucid dream?” Ryan asked after pulling the toast from his mouth. He kept a corner of the crust in his hand, knowing if he finished it the task would complete itself. This time, instead of the typical response Ryan was coming to expect, something odd happened. A system message box seemed to flicker in and out of existence several times. He was pretty sure it had the expected statement, but it was flashing so quickly he couldn’t actually read it. And then the flashing stopped, and Helios’ status changed.

  Helios

  System AI

  HP: 30/50

  “What was that?” Ryan pondered. “So, you were going to lie,” he continued musing out loud, “realized you would lose health… So you stopped yourself, but were also still compelled to throw out the lie anyway, and I’m guessing that created an almost infinite loop. Probably at some point you realized you were stuck so you just decided to skip to the consequence and deduct the HP from yourself? Derek’ll definitely love this.” Ryan continued on to school, thinking of other ways to trip up the System AI.

  He was right that he had missed Derek, though he did get there in time to see Mr. Peterson pulling out of the driveway in his stylish hover car. That family was pretty well off. Derek’s dad worked as a technician for the District’s Information Systems Department. His mom worked at the local hospital as a nurse. They made about five times more than the minimum wage that would qualify them for basic income. They probably paid more in taxes than Ryan’s mom got from the government to take care of their basic needs.

  Ryan waved to the older man as he drove off to work. He thought about the night before and that feeling of pride. What he wouldn’t give, sometimes, to have had that type of relationship his whole life. It made him so angry to think about. So sad. So lonely. He kicked a rock into a bush, let out a breath, and kept walking. The system, seeming to notice a need for distraction, initiated another guided movement tutorial, more focused on evasive movements as it generated various illusions for him to avoid. As he neared the school, he told Helios to keep the perspectives in camouflage mode until he said otherwise and slid them deep into his backpack.

  School was a large, square, red-bricked building with three stories. Two wings stretched out on either side, a milling area in front of large steps leading into the building. The inside had a combination communal area/food court that was popular on the wetter days. Today was overcast but the drizzle from the previous night had petered out, so kids were still milling around outside when Ryan arrived. He Ryan made his way through the crowd towards the spot he usually met his friends, an old maple tree with a picnic table. Derek sat on the table reading a paperback novel while Lisa, as usual, was absorbed in another of her vids, on the bench below him.

  “What is it this time?” Ryan asked Derek, nodding towards Lisa’s tablet while climbing up to take a seat next to him.

  “Would you believe there was another event?” Derek said. “This time they didn’t close it in time, and something came through.”

  “What do you mean something came through,” Ryan said. “Nothing has come through one of those since…” he trailed off. “What was it that came through?”

  “It was a hand,” Lisa said, holding up her tablet for Ryan to see. On it was a blurred image of what, possibly, could have been interpreted as a hand, cut off at the wrist. It was rushing past some cars, looking to be almost three times their size.

  “That the only image you got?” Ryan asked skeptically.

  “There was a complete media blackout after that happened,” she said defensively. “I saw it live last night, but all the feeds have been scrubbed since then, this one made it onto a forum and spread so much they didn’t bother taking it down.”

  Ryan made as if to reply when the chime sounded, indicating it was time to head to class. They tabled the discussion for break and headed inside the building. As Ryan walked down the crowded hallway he was reminded of his dream. This time, the lights didn’t flicker with each step, but he did feel a certain familiar vibration from inside his pocket. The orb was pulsating, he could tell, not with light, but with some kind of energy, and the pulse was getting stronger as he walked down the hall towards class, which happened to be near the Janitor’s closet from his dream.

  “Hey, uh, Ryan? What are you doing?” Derek cut into Ryan’s thoughts. He realized he’d been standing in front of the closet door, staring at the doorknob.

  “Sorry, I completely zoned out there,” he said, shaking his head. “C’mon, we’ll be late for class.” They headed to their lockers, right outside their home room, and stowed their jackets and bookbags inside, extracting only the text required for the first hour.”

  “I can’t believe they’re making us read Catcher in the Rye,” Derek complained.

  “It’s classic literature,” Lisa said as they headed into the classroom, Ryan just behind. He took another glance down the hall towards the closet door, then headed in after them, performing his new ritual of reading the note in his pocket as he entered the new location.