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Dreamscape: Worlds Apart

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Chapter II: Reality Dawns

"A dream once shared aside now cast, Of sweet delusion long since passed."

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The darkness hesitantly receded, lifting slowly like a heavy autumn fog. Luna opened her eyes just a crack, harsh morning sunlight blinding her until she quickly closed them again with a drawn out groan of protest.

"Celestia, lower it." She grumbled aloud, "Thine sun is painful to Our eyes..."

The lunar princess rolled over onto her side, turning her back to the intrusive dawn and lifting a wing to shade herself from its heat. Five more minutes was all she desired. Would those few meagre moments of respite have been too much to ask?

When the shade never came, however, Luna's eyes shot wide open. She flexed the muscles in her back, realisation breaking upon her like a heavy crashing wave, shocking her into full wakefulness. She had no wings!

And was that polished hardwood flooring she felt beneath her?

Luna was quickly sitting bolt upright, eyes adjusting fully to the sunlight streaming in through a window adorned with undrawn blinds. Caught somewhere between her subconscious thoughts and the waking world, her mind was struggling to get up to speed with everything.

Human form... she realised as she brought her hands up for closer inspection, the familiar porcelain-skinned appendages and their associated digits flexing and wiggling as she willed them to. It was a surprise to Luna that she'd not woken up as an alicorn. But she had grown somewhat accustomed to the human shape she presently held, having worn it many times before in the Dreamscape.

The Dreamscape...

And in that instance, everything seemed to click back into place. Memories surged back to her in an almost overwhelming torrent, leaving her breath short and her chest tight. Thankfully, the instances returned in something vaguely resembling an order, allowing her to piece them together to a degree.

She could recall punching through the aether with her magic.

The distressing conversation she'd held with Graeme, and his unfortunately strong reaction to it.

The moment when the very fabric of the Dreamscape had ruptured, tearing the small world asunder...

Wherever she currently was, wherever the bursting bubble had deigned to deposit her, it certainly wasn't a world of fantasy and dream. It was some form of reality. It simply had to be. When a dream ended, the dreamer - or dreamers, in this case - would wake up, as they always did.

Right?

Luna's head began to ache.

A wheeze of snore-filled slumber pulled Luna from her reverie and back into sync the world around her. She carefully rose to her feet, noting away the odd sensation of actually standing on only two legs for later consideration - novel that it wasn't merely a dream - and cast her gaze over to a bed next to the wall on the far side of the room.

It was Graeme, sprawled across his bed sheets with a leg hanging free, one arm above his head, drooling with indignity into the white fabric of his pillowcase.

Typical. Luna thought. I get the floor. He gets the bed.

Finding that walking was much simpler than she'd anticipated - perhaps her experiences in the Dreamscape had lent themselves to that end? - Luna moved over to Graeme as he slept.

She gave the man a stern prod in the chest, "Wake up, Graeme."

All he did was swat idly at her hand and roll all the way over onto his side, leaving his back to the princess of the night, not once opening his eyes or otherwise acknowledging her presence.

Luna sighed with a heavy frown.

"Wake up!" a finger jabbed at him harshly right between the shoulder blades.

A low, groggy grumble escaped Graeme as he rolled back over, eyelids heavy and unyielding as he slowly sat upright, both legs shifting to dangle over the side of his mattress, "I'm up, I'm up." He rubbed his eyes with balled fists, clearing away the sleep and forcing them to co-operate, "Man, what a dream... If I could never see Luna again..."

The distinct sound of a bare foot tapping impatiently against wood drew his focus forwards. Looking straight ahead, right before his eyes hung a generous décolletage, framed by crossed arms, fingers rapping petulantly at the bicep of the other arm. Graeme forced his eyes lower, to the source of the tapping. Exposed feet, small and delicate, with surprisingly dainty, well-pedicured nails. Was that purple nail varnish? One foot tapped in clear agitation at the floorboards underfoot.

Finally, Graeme looked up. Long, flowing midnight hair; deep cyan eyes that regarded him with something between displeasure and annoyance; pale porcelain skin that seemed a taint bestowed by a silvery lunar touch...

"Luna?!" Graeme all but reeled back onto his bed, the back of his head impacting almost painfully the plasterboard wall that managed to get in his way. A small part of his brain registered gratitude at the fact he'd moved his bed away from the outer brick wall only a few days earlier, or that would've been an extremely painful collision with something much more structurally sound.

For her part, the lunar princess seemed almost entirely unmoved by his surprise, or his collision with the wall. There was a fleeting moment of concern which seemed to flicker through her eyes, but it was briskly swept aside the instant it became obvious Graeme wasn't actually injured.

The impatient expression returned.

She was miffed.

"Yes."

Graeme simply blinked, looking from side to side to make sure he was actually where he'd expected to be, "Why are you in my room?"

"Your room? So, you've also concluded that this isn't the Dreamscape?"

Graeme looked around. Bed. Computer. Substantial-if-barely-used wardrobe space. The sights, the sounds, the scents. It felt like his home.

"Seems real to me."

Luna took another glance around the place. Mostly it was unfamiliar. But then, the desk, the computer, the items around the home-based workstation... They triggered a spark within her memory, and she realised it was a scene she'd lain witness to before; a recollection Graeme had given to her a fair few months earlier, when he'd still been unsure that the alicorn princess of the night had been anything more than a figment of his imagination.

It all fell into place.

"Oh."

The next words to leave Luna's lips were in no tongue that Graeme recognised. But the emotion behind them - the pent up frustration and anger - translated into something he could understand. An expletive so heartfelt, he was sure that the very room around him seemed almost to quake..

Silence fell.

"Wow..." Graeme broke it with barely a whisper.

Luna seemed completely deflated all of a sudden, as if just getting the words out had drained her of all energy, "Sorry." She muttered.

"What happened...?"

"You must have burst the bubble."

It wasn't meant as an accusation. Luna was careful to keep her voice even and measured. It wasn't Graeme's fault, she reminded herself. There was no way he could have known what would happen, and there had certainly been very little he could've done about his reaction. Luna had centuries of experience to fall back upon; Graeme had not.

But despite her best efforts, her statement had been so bluntly matter-of-fact that Graeme felt the familiar pang of guilt swell within him regardless.

"Oh... Sorry."

"What's done is done." Luna assured with a dismissive wave of her hand, although there was a terse edge to her words that led Graeme to suspect she wasn't feeling quite as indifferent as she'd tried to make it sound, "Let us only hope that We are able to return home."

It took a moment or two for the words to fully sink in, leaving Graeme dumbfounded for a moment or two. Luna could all but hear the wheels turning in his head as his thoughts tried to keep pace. But soon she saw that the penny had dropped.

"Your horn." He seemed to register the appendage's absence, "No magic?"

Luna let out a hefty breath, "This world appears to be a magic sink," she explained, "rather than a well like Equestria."

Indeed, it was one of the first things she'd subconsciously noted about the place. In Equestria, magic was everywhere. It permeated everything, inanimate or living, to some degree. Her home was a well insofar as there was ambient magic everywhere; magic that could be called upon at a moment's notice, and wielded to the will of any mind sufficiently disciplined to do so.

"I... I have no idea what that means." Graeme confessed, sounding unsure of himself, and feeling as if he was missing something that should have been obvious.

Luna rolled her eyes, realising she'd have to delve into the very basics if she wanted to make him understand, "Equestria is filled with magic. So much so that it overflows into life itself." The lunar princess couldn't think of a single living creature on her planet that wasn't in some way imbued with or able to manipulate magic to at least some degree, "Here, it appears to be the other way around."

The latter point was a surprising revelation to Graeme, "So, we have magic here?"

"Some." Luna nodded, rubbing her chin thoughtfully and sitting herself down on the edge of Graeme's mattress as she mused, "Or we wouldn't have been able to connect as we did in the first place. And I can feel it. But the wider world draws it out of me. I can feel it dampening my powers."

It was a subtle sensation that she'd picked up around the human during their time together in the Dreamscape. It wasn't as if he'd been a complete void - rather, an empty cup, able to be filled, just without the means to naturally do so - but Luna had gleaned fairly quickly that his people were not wielders of magic.

Now, immersed completely within this alien environment, Luna was hard-pushed to draw on any ambient magic at all. She could sense it, like a distant sound or a faint scent upon the breeze, but at the same time she was acutely aware of the lack of it, and the way the world was actually trying to draw on her magic.

It was disconcerting, to say the least.

The strongest magical energies that she could feel seemed to be tied up in the life on this world. A part of her could feel it in the trees outside, the grass and the flowers. She could intuit animals nearby, weaker still than the flora, but more prevalent than the inanimate background.

"Will you have enough magic to get back?" Graeme's words derailed Luna's thoughts. She turned to regard him when she felt his weight settle down across the other side of the mattress, causing it to shift beneath her.

Without the means to focus her magic directly through her horn, Luna had to admit she had her doubts. There were other ways to gather and focus magic without it, ways which she would have to consider carefully if she were to ever return home. But she also knew that such considerations were secondary to other concerns. Most notably, the actual mechanism by which she could return.

"If we can recreate the bubble," and she was reasonably sure they could - it had been Graeme who'd created the Dreamscape in the first place, after all. It must be doable, "with an adequate anchor in Equestria, it ought to be possible." She paused, then added, "Hypothetically."

"Okay." Graeme nodded slowly, understanding that she at least had some idea how they should proceed. This was honestly way out of his area of expertise, "So, what do we do?"

"Tonight, we dream."

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Chapter II: Reality Dawns