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When Jade Harley fell asleep, she often dreamed of falling. Tonight was no different.
There was a cloud, or several, combed together into large, billowing cushions, hovering on the waves of the endless-eternal ocean that dominated her thoughts. The sort of watery abyss that never went away, even when she woke up, where grasping, semisolid fingers reached up into the surface of her thoughts. She often dreamed about falling into this immense pile, of bounce-like cumulonimbi that would slow her down just enough that her subsequent impact into the water would be slowed to the point of barely stinging.
When she fell asleep, on the surface of the skyscraper roof she called her home, it was just as lonely as the waking world was. Left with only tomes and a disfunctioning, mechanical dog to raise herself from, she had managed to start a fairly functional garden. There were enough fish around that she could catch them with sufficient regularity to ensure that starvation was never a deliberately present threat, only the faintest spectre on the edges of her subconscious.
Jade Harley had never seen anyone else in her life, awake or asleep. The only times when she saw another living soul, at least one recognizable as sentient, were when she stared in the water and saw her reflection, getting pushed and pulled like taffy against the slight ripples in the otherwise mirror-still water - not that she knew what taffy was, a confection for the prior species.
Jade dreamed about falling, about finally growing her flight feathers and pulling into a nosedive and getting to finally penetrate through that unfathomable, swampy murk, to the place beneath her. Ruins, maybe? Or maybe it was just water all the way down to the planet's core. Sometimes, in her dreams, there was a red glow of molten iron extruding itself from the interior of her brainscape, and sometimes there was just pitch black that far down, color hazed through water refracting light waves into infinite nothing.
When Jade dreamed of falling tonight, she fell into a boat. Not that she had seen a boat before, but she theoretically knew what they were, there was plenty of information about them in the books she had read. Rickety wood, with a single person carrying with them a bag full of fish. Maybe this dream meant she was hungry? She stared at the other person with wide, curious, slightly frightened eyes, her nictitating membranes clicking shut and then opening up again. Blinking in a dream was always particularly odd, the way that a dream made everything feel so slow and powerless.
"Who are you?" She asked. Unlike her, this person possessed a fine array of little, needle-like feathers, but shared her sharp, buck-toothed smile. Their fingers were tipped in pointed claws and moderate webbing, used to push the boat along through the water. They turned to Jade and raised a white eyebrow while a cloud passed through them.
"I could ask you the same thing! Who are you, and why are you in my dream?" They asked, leaning forward, adjusting a pair of broken, taped-up glasses. Jade thought that was awfully sad. She made sure to keep her glasses in peak condition at all times, considering how important they were for her to see with.
Jade looked at the other person and scrunched her lips up. "I think you're in my dream! I dream about falling into these clouds every night, when I go to sleep. First time I've seen a boat though!"
The other person shook their head. "I think I've always dreamed about this boat. Clouds are new though. You get clouds?"
Jade shook her head and laughed. "Not while I'm awake, no. Do you get the ocean?"
The other person laughs back. "Do I ever. Nothing but ocean, all day, every day." They said, quietly looking down at the glass-still water. "Hey. Are you real?"
"Huh?"
"I mean, are you an actual person, like, for real? Or is my head just making something up?" They asked, adjusting their glasses again. Oh, what Jade wished they could do to fix their glasses.
Jade shrugged her shoulders. "I think I'm real! I'm not sure if you are, though. None of the books I've read have told me that people can meet in dreams, so you're probably fake!"
The other person looked at Jade funny. "Really? You've never read any stories where two people talk to each other in their dreams?"
Now it was Jade's turn to look at them funny. ""Story"?"
They both shared incredulous looks for a minute. Then, Jade woke up. The sky was black - apparently, the old people used to be able to see a "moon" and "stars", but Jade had only ever known a pitch black tidepool rippling with cosmic background radiation, little static pixels of color in her vision. She sighed, rolling over on her bedroll, and grabbed her flashlight, shaking it vigorously to build up a charge, and then, as if on instinct, swept it out across the deep blue void at ground-level.
Right. Nothing. As usu-huh? She shook it a couple more times to make sure it had enough charge, so she could stare at it while being sure her eyes weren't deceiving her.
She pointed her flashlight at the small boat, watching it drift towards her.