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Jack of All Dreams
Jackle stepped through the paraloop portal and into the nightopia. It was a chaotic mess tonight, and he loved it. This dreamer could jump dreamscapes from one to the other at the speed of thought, and tonight she was in rare form. From the looks of things, she’d already jumped from one setting to another several times. Debris from the previous nightopias had followed her like leaves following a whirlwind. All of them unnoticed by the dreamer herself, as they didn’t directly affect her current focus.
The trickster nightmaren found a stray, floating table and flopped on it like a cat stretching out in the sun. Her current dreamscape was that of a two-story shopping mall common area. Jackle’s table floated up near the ceiling, where the skylights showed it was dark outside. Other floating and out-of-place objects included a few school desks, a cash register, a bicycle, some old NES games, various imported action figures, and many, many colored pencils.
“Ah. One of those nights, I see.”
Down on the main floor, the dreamer in question turned from a canvas the size of a classroom whiteboard. Her gaze angrily swept the mall, searching for the source of the voice. Some giggling girls walked by, paused by the huge canvas, and then burst into laughter and kept walking. A blue hedgehog was drawn on it, poorly.
The dreamer let out a roar of frustration, grabbed a bucket from the floor, dragged it through the mall’s side-fountain, and threw it at the canvas. Instead of water, white paint dribbled down, and the canvas actually became the whiteboard Jackle had previously likened it to.
Guess I’d better tread lighter, he thought.
The dreamer’s pencil became a marker and she made a circle on the board, then crisscrossed lines to indicate a facial direction.
Jackle rolled off the table and dropped to the railing of the mall’s second floor. From there, he hung upside down and continued to watch. A retractable eraser, shaped like a mechanical pencil floated past him. He smirked and nudged it toward the dreamer. She would want it in a moment, he was sure.
“Then you add eyes like so,” she muttered, “and hat about here…”
Beside her, various browser windows opened like popup advertisements. Each one had a render of a character from her favorite game. All were similar, but none were quite like the one she was trying to draw.
“No, the mouth needs to be different. And I want the eyes to convey more emotion. There’s no point in getting the rest of the posture right if it won’t say what I want.”
Double images, then triple images of the dreamer’s arm movements sped over the whiteboard until a full drawing, complete with color had emerged.
“There. Now I just need to add the parody slogan…” She gestured and the whiteboard became a jumbotron-sized touchscreen. Graphic editing software opened, and she maneuvered a few tools to create a near duplicate of an existing store name and slogan, then altered them to the intended pun.
The same girls from before walked by. This time one of them was being played by Clawz. The cat grinned evilly, but the dreamer never seemed to notice he was a nightmaren, not a dream-NPC. He opened his mouth and said, “That trace looks awful. My original drawing is so much better.”
One of the phantom dream girls next to him echoed a similar sentiment, then so did the other. Beside each of them, a new pop-up window appeared with art that, as far as Jackle could tell, looked like crayon squiggles. They all “oo”-ed and “ah”-ed over each other’s works, then continued laughing at the dreamer.
“FUCK,” she shouted, “YOU!”
Behind her, the whiteboard bled into black fog. Clawz and the phantom girls shrank back into a developing crowd of nameless and faceless mall patrons, all laughing and pointing.
Tentacle hair sprouted from the dreamer’s head, and long, black tentacle arms with neon scrawl all over them erupted from her back. She screamed in rage and lashed out with the extra appendages, swiping at any of the spectators she could reach. They all seemed to shirk back just before she could strike them, though. Growing angrier by the second, the dreamer willed herself bigger, her form becoming monstrous, until she filled the whole height of the mall.
“FIGHT ME!” she roared.
But the silly dream phantoms laughed all the more and vanished into mist. Clawz, as well, was gone.
“COWARDS! FIGHT ME!”
The dreamer flung her multiple limbs around, destroying the dreamscape. Behind her, the completed piece of art rose from the dark fog, size now proportionate to her. Reala had replaced the subject matter of the original art, and was -like the girls- smirking and laughing at the monstrous dreamer.
The dreamer screamed with rage and reached clawed hands out to tear the artwork to shreds. As it fell in strips, like wallpaper that had lost its tac, the dreamscape began to crumble. This world, too, was dying.
Jackle flipped down off of the railings and tried to locate something he could use to follow this dreamer to her next dreamscape. Any lesser nightmaren would have been at a loss, but this wasn’t Jackle’s first rodeo with this dreamer. He found a messenger bag floating past. It was covered in sharpie-drawings of cartoon and video game characters. All were rather well done.
“You’ll do for an anchor,” he said, and snatched the bag out of the quickly dissipating air.
The world went dark. Jackle didn’t mind. He liked the dark. Normally he would use it to jump-scare someone, but not tonight. This was the dark of changing gears. To disrupt it would be to disrupt the next dreamscape’s birth.
A new nightopia was born under his feet, thanks to the anchor item. It looked like a social hall.
“Boring,” he grumbled. “Entertain me more.”
People began filling the room. They had all colors of hair, in outlandish and outdated styles. Eclectic clothing mingled with costumes and props of musical instruments. A DJ in a top-hat with neon dreadlocks and a flashy white suit appeared at one end of the room with blasting speakers. He grinned at Jackle and tipped his hat with a wink. Dividers appeared in the long room to section off areas. Bright and colorful lights accompanied the music in the main area, but the dreamer wasn’t here. Why create all this strange scene to not even enter it?
While flying was more often convenient, Jackle wasn’t beyond walking when he was curious about something. He wound through the crowd at what he could only figure was a convention for some kind of rock-music-themed fandom. At the far corner, the lights were normalized and tables were arranged in neat rows. An artist alley? Jackle had encountered a few of those in his time.
Ah, here’s our girl…
The dreamer was back to normal, though dressed in a colorful apron behind a large table displaying her art on various mediums, from stickers, to shirts, to canvas bags, to earrings, to badges, to even a few mugs. As Jackle watched, the dreamer pulled even more custom-art-ed items out from boxes and arranged them on the table.
He snagged a glass of fizzy blue liquid from a passing dream-NPC’s tray and hopped up to sit on a table across and down the alley to watch what would happen here.
An older woman, dressed modestly considering the occasion, and surrounded by a gaggle of costumed convention-goers, was making her way down the path. At every table she would stop, say some words, purchase something, and then move on. At no point was she loud enough for Jackle to hear over the ambient music until she arrived at the dreamer’s table. At that point, all other audio in the dream dulled to background lull, and the woman’s became much louder.
“I see you’ve used the official show’s art for your merchandise,” the woman said.
“Oh! Nono,” the dreamer said, turning shades of red, but smiling, “I worked hours on making duplicates freehand! I tried really hard to make them look as close to the real-deal as possible, because I can’t stand it when people over-stylize their fanart. I liked the original show the way it was. If I’m going to buy fan-merch of it, I’d like it to look like the show I liked. So that’s what I make.”
The woman sniffed, chose an inexpensive item, and asked to check out.
The dreamer spluttered. “You’re the creator! You don’t need to pay! It’s yours! I’m honored you like it!”
The older woman grimaced. “I’m glad the series continues to inspire. Creators deserve to be paid for their work.” She held a few flimsy dollar bills out across the table. Jackle could practically taste the woman’s pity and disdain.
The dreamer’s countenance dropped through the floor. She was clearly crushed. The simple comment had smacked her in the face like an insult. But she bowed her thanks to the older woman, accepted the small payment, and held-strong until the woman had exited the artist alley.
The DJ strode down the alley, sipping a pink fizzy drink. He had glow-bracelets on every limb and a few strung together around his neck and around his white tophat.
“Good day?” he asked, smiling and with a nod to the cashbox the dreamer was just closing.
Her head never came up to acknowledge the intruder. Like Clawz and Reala before, she didn’t even realize he was infringing upon her dream.
“I wanna go home…” the dreamer mumbled. Tears slipped down her face. “How come the better you get at something, the worse people treat it?”
The smiling DJ faltered. “Er… well, that’s because-”
But the dreamer turned and ran before the silly maestro had time to impart any wisdom.
Jackle shook his head and said, “Newb. Never encountered this kind before?”
Balan turned, surprised and curious. Apparently, he hadn’t noticed Jackle before. He opened his mouth to say something, but Jackle waved him off.
“Get lost, probie. Leave this to the big kids.” Jackle walked over, scooped a trio of pins off the table and dropped them in the previously-absconded-with messenger bag.
Around them, cracks appeared in the reality. The dreamer had left the dreamscape and it was now turning in on itself while she constructed a new one.
Jackle leapt up on the table when the floor broke to reveal darkness below. Then up onto a piece of wall-divider. Balan wasn’t as quick and fell with a comical “WHOA-OA-OA-AHHH!” through the dark and out of the dream. Just before the dream completely dissolved, Jackle whipped a giant playing card out of thin air and perched himself on it like it was a flying carpet.
The old dreamscape faded and a new one came into existence.
“Like I said,” he chuckled to no one in particular, “rare form, tonight.”
Neon lights began to flow in lines of color, forming green grids for floors and ceilings with no visible walls anywhere. Vehicles made of black metal and glowing neon blue and amber outlines zipped by, the size of remote-control toys. Electronic beeps and other noises became the new ambient music.
“The Matrix meets Tron? Not bad, kid, not bad. I’ve seen you do better, though,” Jackle mused.
Stick figures made of glowing lines appeared, a new crowd forming. They each wore visors and held peculiar objects in their hands. Just beyond their little stick figure hands, very life-like, but twice as big as they should have been, hands made of neon outlines hovered in thin air. The stick figures were all laughing and making silly gestures with their extra-large VR hands. Jackle had seen dreams similar to this before.
“Wooow, this game is so coooool!” one faceless stick figure said. “I can’t wait to feed my behbeh some new charms!”
“I’m gonna go try the racetrack!” another said.
“I miss the old games,” a third said. “I wanna go back to playing those! Why can’t someone make a fangame of them if the publisher is just gonna let the IP die?”
Jackle looked around. The dreamer was a dozen or so feet away, seated on thin air like she was on a chair. A desk made of neon lines was in front of her and a laptop with lines of neon code held her gaze. She finished typing with a flourish and sat back with a pleasant sigh.
“Done! Who wants to alpha test for me?” She turned to the stick figure groupies, who paused in their discussion.
“What is it?” one asked.
“I made a fan game! Just like we all wanted!” The dreamer hit a button on the laptop and all around them a video game world came to life.
A very stylized version of NiGHTS flew past the crowd and over Jackle’s head, laughing and spinning in a drilldash.
“Oh. We’ve abandoned orthodox art style, I see.” He bobbed his head. “Well, at least the brat looks more like a kid-brat now. It’s not bad. I’m impressed.”
Several stylized nightopians flittered by, making electronic-sounding noises of glee. Jackle snagged one and stuffed it in the messenger bag with the other anchors to help him keep track of the dreamer for later.
He turned back to see the crowd of stick figures all holding controllers in their oversized, virtual-reality hands.
“I just don’t like it,” one whined.
“This is boring,” said another.
“Let’s go try that new Sonic fan-game,” said a third.
One by one each of the stick figures vanished from the dreamscape.
Jackle found his own shoulders sagging. He’d seen enough dreams to know just how much time and effort had gone into all three of the hobbies which had been displayed here, tonight. And they were only three of many this particular dreamer had fostered. He turned back to her, expecting another break down.
Instead, the dreamer was watching the stylized purple dream jester flying through the new empty space of the cyberspace dream. NiGHTS took no notice of either of them, preferring, as usual, to play and have fun.
“How do you enjoy yourself so easily?” the dreamer asked. “And why can’t I?”
NiGHTS laughed and drilldashed away; a fleeting taste of a dream this dreamer wasn’t meant to have tonight.
Jackle sighed. “You care too much, kid.”
It was unclear if the dreamer heard the nightmaren. She stood and walked away.
Jackle strode after.
The neon glows faded and the dreamscape fell into darkness again. Then the darkness slowly dawned into an all-around whiteness. The dreamer started muttering, and laced her fingers behind her back as she walked. Her words became written words that floated by around them. The written words were joined by many more, and suddenly Jackle found that the white all around them were gigantic walls of pages, quickly filling with written words.
The dreamer brought one hand up to gesticulate while she talked. Figures made out of written words danced across the path in front of her, unseen by the dreamer, but very interesting to Jackle. They appeared to be having a sword fight. The more the dreamer talked, the clearer the scene became. They were pirates, on a ship, and fighting over possession of a relic.
The nightmaren was curious to learn more and snagged one of the many pages flittering about the area, as though they were butterflies in a perfectly normal garden. He found the page he was on described an argument between the two main characters. To judge by the progression, it was a misunderstanding and would probably end with apologies and hugs by the end of the chapter. He smirked and shook his head, then stuffed the page in the messenger bag with his other souvenirs.
“Of course. You’re in your element here. No one can hurt,” he looked up and slowed down, “you…”
A stuffed purple rabbit and a night elf had caused the dreamer to pause in her trek. While she hadn’t made eye contact with them, they were clearly discoursing.
Jackle frowned and tried to step closer to hear what the two intruders were saying. They weren’t nightmaren, but they weren’t nameless, faceless, dream NPCs, either. These were specific people from the dreamer’s memories, given dream-form. Phantoms, yes, but more real than the illusion of basic crowds. These two had the potential to develop into second-level nightmaren if someone like The Master invested a little extra dream energy into them.
As a quasi-second-level nightmaren himself, Jackle didn’t like the idea. And though he inched closer, he still couldn’t make out what the phantom rabbit and night elf were saying. The words that appeared from either of their mouths were in different colors from the dreamer’s standard black text that floated to pages around them. And whatever language they were speaking, the text wasn’t anything Jackle could recognize.
“I don’t remember the words,” the dreamer said, “Only the feeling. They dismissed my work with barely a glance. I wasn’t worth the time to even read the whole thing.”
Jackle startled.
The dreamer reached out and waved her hand as though waving fog away. The phantoms vanished.
“You’re lucid dreaming, now?” Jackle asked.
The dreamer shrugged. “Moments of awareness, I guess. You’ve been following me for a while, now, though. What do you want? Are you here to make fun of my tries, too?”
The dreamer turned angry eyes at him.
Jackle hesitated. The dreamer had entered the edge of her sleep cycle. If pushed one way, she’d wake up surging adrenaline and be awake the rest of the night. If pushed another way, she’d drop back into a deep, dreamless sleep for a little while longer before the cycle would begin again. He had to proceed with caution.
“No matter what I get the urge to do, or to make… No matter how hard I try to make it perfect, or to show people that we as a fandom are capable of great things… No matter how many times I give them my best…” The dreamer clenched her fists at her side. “It’s just…” She lowered her gaze.
Jackle felt sick. “Not good enough.”
Around them, the dreamscape shifted. They were standing in midair, high above a dias with a throne, on an empty island surrounded by ornate curtains and gateways to other worlds. Wizeman the Wicked hovered in front of the throne, towering over a young Jackle, far below them.
“How many times are you going to… You know what, just forget it,” Wizeman sighed. “Just… go do your thing. You’re free to go.”
Below them, younger Jackle turned, dejected, and floated away.
While they watched, Wizeman gestured with one hand and some sparkles peeled off of younger Jackle as he left. The younger maren never noticed, or if he did, he didn’t show it. Wizeman rolled the sparkles between two hands like they were clay. A soft-blue dough formed, shimmering with dream energy. Two of Wizeman’s hands tore the dough and continued to work it, one blob in each hand, until two new nightmaren had been formed – slightly smaller than Jackle.
“I showed them the ropes,” Jackle sighed. “I taught them everything they know.”
The dreamer turned back to him from watching the scene below fade out of existence.
“Not everything I know, but enough that they could get by. Dad loves them the most, though. He could care less what I do.”
The dreamer took his hand. “Is that why you always follow me around through my dreams? In case I finally figure out how to break out of this, so you can, too?”
Jackle laughed in spite of himself, his own signature grin slipping into place for a moment. “I don’t know why I follow you around. I like your chaotic dreams. They change faster than the attention span of a squirrel.”
The dreamer laughed.
“Ya know what, though,” Jackle said. “I’ve been around here enough to know how hard you try.” He held up the messenger bag he’d been carrying around all night and indicated the drawings on it, then dumped out the contents, taking time to examine and flourish a hand at each of them. “I’ve seen a lot of your finished products – sometimes before you even finish them in the waking world. You do good work, kid. Your audience sucks ass, but you do good work. It’s always an interesting time, here.”
The dreamer nodded to him. “What about you? What do you do?”
“Me?” Jackle held a finger to his chin, thinking. “I guess you could say I dabble in this and that?” He drew a hand of playing cards out of his cape. “Want a magic trick?”
The dreamer smiled. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The whole next sleep cycle passed without either of them realizing. Jackle jumped from one silly slight of hand to another, reveling in trying to get the dreamer to figure out how the trick worked before finally explaining it slowly enough that she could understand. In all likelihood, she wouldn’t remember a bit of this the next morning, so he didn’t mind revealing the methods today.
“Clever as I am, though,” he eventually confided, “It doesn’t matter. There’s always a more interesting showman.”
The dreamer shrugged. “I have brand loyalty. You’re the showman I know, now, so I like you better than the others.”
Jackle was honored. “You won’t remember me tomorrow, though. This is just a dream, after all.”
“Well, you’ll have to remind me,” she said. “You have my permission to haunt me until we become friends. Then you can tell me all about your magic tricks and I can tell you all about what I got up to that day.”
Jackle shook his head and laughed. “You realize you have a new interest, like, every day, right?”
The dreamer held up her hands and shrugged, “Hey, you dabble, I’m a Jack-of-all-trades. Literally.”
The nightmaren smirked and put one hand on his hip. “Is that so?” Then extended his other hand for a handshake. “Jackle, Ms. Jack-of-all-trades.”
The dreamer gave an entertained bow and extended her own hand. “Jackie, Mr. Dabbler.”
Jackle grinned his signature grin. This seemed to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.