When Jenny opened her eyes, she was lying in a field of grass and felt a breeze of summer wind on her face. Her hair-antenna was out, beeping and spinning around in circles. When she looked around to find what triggered it, she saw that the world around her did not resemble her own. The sky above was purple instead of blue, and it was populated by large, floating islands everywhere she looked.
At least there was one familiar sight left: a pair of moons in the sky. Just like the ones from her own world, including the damage she'd recently caused to one of them.
Jenny stood up and turned to the next strange phenomenon. A chest, looking completely out of place in the middle of this meadow. It was right next to her when she woke up, as if someone had put it there specifically for her to open.
Curiously, Jenny did exactly that and found that the chest opened with no key. Inside were just two items: a wooden sword and a hooded cape. Jenny's eyes sparkled in excitement, and she immediately put the cape around her shoulders, finding that it fit her perfectly.
All of this could only mean one thing, and if the night before hadn't already convinced her, this certainly did: Jenny was having another dream. After all, the last thing she remembered was plugging herself in and going into hibernation, just like last time.
A happy Jenny snoozed the alarm on her head and strode across the meadow, ready to take on a dream-quest and explore this dream-world.
And before she knew it, she came across a fantastical little creature chained to a rock, stripped of all his belongings and in dire need of help. Naturally, Jenny freed him and gained a dream-companion: a floating sock puppet called Top Moments.
Following his rescue, the creature proclaimed that he was forever indebted to her, and so he followed her on her adventure, telling her all she wanted to know about the world.
Still, Jenny couldn't stop thinking about the fact that she was dreaming, even though she wasn't supposed to be capable of it. The world around her looked so realistic, she was starting to wonder if it was even a dream at all.
Jenny was lost in thought as she walked.
"What's wrong?" her sock puppet companion asked. "You look troubled…"
Jenny looked back at Top Moments. Hard not to, because he was floating in front of her face now. She stared at him for a bit with an inquisitive expression before speaking up.
"Are you… real?"
"What? I… think so."
He looked taken aback by her question, floating backwards a bit and checking himself out to see if he wasn't going transparent or anything.
"Why?"
Jenny looked at the beautifully alien, purple sky and raised her arm until the palm of her hand blocked the sun.
"I'm not… from here," she said, then turned to her floating companion with her hand still in the air. "And I don't know how I got here."
Top Moments looked at her like he was deep in thought.
"Do you not remember coming here?"
Jenny shook her head.
"Well, what's it like where you're from?" he asked her.
Jenny looked around. Everything she saw was either strange or incredible.
"Unremarkable," she said. "My world's just a ball."
Top Moments frowned.
"But what's in it?"
A smile formed on Jenny's face.
"Lots of people!" she said excitedly.
Jenny held up four fingers.
"Four of them are my friends!"
Top Moments once again looked at her with a frown.
"You are making it sound like that is a lot."
"It is to me… I had none at the start of this year," Jenny responded.
They walked as they talked, and as they reached a river, Jenny started floating in the air, like her companion.
"I'm not human," Jenny said.
Top Moments looked at her like he was trying to find any clues to suggest she was something else.
"You look human," he said.
Jenny nodded.
"They created me! Isn't that impressive?" she said.
Top Moments still looked at her like he was doing before.
"I don't even know how I work," Jenny went on.
"Are you made of metal on the inside?" he asked her.
It was only recently that Jenny was treated to a peek at her own insides with Dark Jenny's presumably faithful replication of her arm. Among the expected bits, such as carbon fiber parts and high-voltage wires, there were also strange materials she didn't recognize, even to this day.
To preserve her sanity, Jenny tried to avoid considering what technology bordering on black magic powered her insides.
"I don't really know," Jenny lied to avoid the question.
She looked back at her sock puppet-looking companion.
"What are you made of?" she asked him.
He looked like there wasn't a whole lot going on inside his body, like a jellyfish. Yet he was intelligent, and he talked.
"I don't know, either" he answered as he flew in a spiral.
They stopped when they reached a point high enough for Jenny to see that they, too, were on a floating island all along. A tiny one, in comparison to the one up ahead. The colossal rock which defied the laws of gravity looked inhabited, even from this distance. Buildings of all sorts covered the island, and there was a massive city at its center, running all the way up to the top, which looked like it was made of marble.
"That's the mainland," Top Moments explained.
"Have you been?" Jenny asked in excitement.
"Once or twice," he answered.
An excited Jenny closed her eyes and bawled up her fists.
"Let's go! I wanna see!"
Top Moments floated closer to her.
"Unfortunately, airships don't stop here. Can you fly all the way?"
Jenny smiled and floated into the air, spreading her arms and legs and pitching her body perpendicular to the ground like a flying squirrel. Then, she gave her companion a reassuring smile.
"Wanna hop on?"
♦
Jenny flew towards the mainland at cruising speed, taking in the sights around her as she went. She held her hood up with her hand, with Top Moments on the inside, lying in her neck.
Jenny admired the incredibly diverse islands as they came by. They were so diverse, it made Jenny feel like she was inside a video game. She'd seen one covered in snow, another in an enormous jungle and even one with a volcano.
Still, none of them looked anything like what she saw in her first dream: the strange city with the theater. Jenny had a gut feeling it had to exist here somewhere. The problem was the environment. It was located inside a cavern, so she had no idea which island might contain it, if any at all.
When she got closer to the mainland, she flew by one of the airships Top Moments mentioned before. It looked like it was supposed to be in the water instead of the air, resembling a classic tall ship from her own world. Jenny felt tempted to get closer to take a better look but avoided doing so due to her habit of staying away from airplanes in her own world. Even from a distance, she saw moving rudders coming from below the deck, manned by large, otherworldly creatures she couldn't see very well. Jenny wondered how the ship worked, and how the rudders were making it move through the air.
♦
"It's the pilots, as far as I know. They keep the ships afloat with their magic," Top Moments explained as they strolled through the market on the mainland near the airport.
Even foreign countries in her own world weren't as strange as this. The market was full of items, foods and creatures she'd never seen before. The mysterious species on the rudders of the airship was just the start, Jenny realized. Perhaps half of the people here were human, and the other half were a mixture of all sorts of fantastical species.
Just now, Top Moments talked about magic existing in this world. Arguably, Tatters' powers could be classified as magic, so maybe her world shared more with this one than she thought.
"Does everyone in this world have magic?" Jenny asked.
Top Moments looked at her, then he looked at all the different creatures at the market.
"The line between what is magic and what isn't, is blurry here," Top Moments explained. "In the dreamlands, anything can exist."
"Anything? It doesn't look that special," Jenny replied, observing the world around her.
For a world where anything can exist, it sure looked like an amalgamation of her world's most common fantasy tropes.
Top Moments explained: "According to legend, dreamers from a world beyond come here when they sleep. They paint this world according to their fantasy, take with them whatever they want and leave it behind when they go."
Jenny looked at the world around her and wondered if she was a dreamer, too. Perhaps she'd already affected the world simply by coming here, painting over it with her personal brush.
"Perhaps people from 'Ball' all dream of the same things," Top Moments continued.
Jenny looked at him in confusion and processed the new name of her world.
"Hungry?" Top Moments asked her as he circled around her head.
Food stands had caught Jenny's attention ever since they reached that section of the market, although she didn't recognize a single item.
"Never…" Jenny said with a wry face.
"Fascinating…" Top Moments replied.
Jenny didn't have the ability to taste which food was good or bad. She could smell, and she smelled a lot of things right now, but it was just a lot of saturated information to her. Jenny looked at Top Moments and wondered the same thing about him.
"You don't look like you eat, either," Jenny said.
"Correct, madam," he replied. "I smoke."
That surprised her. Smoking for sustenance?
"Like, cigarettes?" Jenny asked.
"Like cigarettes, yes."
Jenny wondered if he was "hungry", then, given how long he was chained up on that island.
"Now, as you know, everything was taken from me, making me penniless," he said, floating in front of her upside down. "Logic dictates you are, too."
This world… the dreamlands didn't feel nearly as modern as her own world, and so Jenny wondered what kind of currency was used here. She could see people making transactions around her using coins. Everything was digital where she was from, so yes, she was penniless here.
"You wanna buy cigarettes?" Jenny asked him.
"Well, I— clearly I can't… And let it be known that I would never ask to borrow money even if you had any," he said, "but there are other ways…"
Jenny looked at him with a questioning face, expecting him to just tell her what he wanted. Top Moments floated towards the side of Jenny's head and whispered into her ear.
"Crime."
Jenny perked up at the word.
"No! You can't steal cigarettes!" she yelled at him before covering her mouth and seeing the looks she'd gotten from bystanders.
She pulled her hood further over her head to cover her face, although that just served to make her more suspicious.
"I know now not to tell you next time if I wanted to do that!" he told her in a reprimanding tone. "IF I wanted to do that…"
Jenny scowled at him.
"I'm an ally of justice! You wanna do crime!" she whispered.
Top Moments looked at Jenny for a moment, visibly annoyed, and processed this new information about Jenny's moral compass.
"Forgive me. Let's take a step back," he said. "You have saved my life, and I will guide you wherever you want to go, if you will have me." He floated back in front of Jenny. "I can demonstrate another way I can serve you."
Jenny wasn't sure if she liked the idea of someone serving her, she didn't save people for that purpose.
Then, Top Moments accelerated in an orbit around Jenny's body, rustling her cape. The next moment, a pouch of coins landed in her hand. Jenny looked at the pouch and checked inside to find the same kinds of coins everyone here was paying with. She looked up and tried to find Top Moments, who had disappeared.
Then down at the pouch again. Did he transform into this pouch of coins? Jenny held it up to her ear.
"Understand?" the pouch spoke in his voice.
"You want me to spend you!?" Jenny anxiously whispered.
The pouch stayed silent for a bit. Jenny tried to imagine what facial expression she was supposed to project onto it.
"I must smoke! You can buy a pack at the stand on your right! This is plenty!"
So, this was his plan… This was like a kid asking strangers to buy alcohol for them. Jenny looked over at the stall he referred to. She could see what looked like packs of cigarettes, similar looking to the ones in her own world. She looked back at pouch-Moments.
"And what then? You're not real money! It's still stealing!" she whisper-yelled.
"You have no idea how normal that is here!" the pouch spoke back.
He sounded desperate, like he was craving it. At this point, Jenny was going to cave and do it…
She remembered when she defaced barf drinker's car. It was fun and it felt good. This did not. That felt more like delivering justice, and Saturn's charms more than dispelled her worries back then. This creature was nothing like that, and she could see right through him.
But if he needed to smoke to survive…
She'd never deny a human being food or water either…
♦
As they walked away from the market, Jenny had a guilty look on her face. Top Moments was smoking his first cigarette as he flew after her. The first cigarette was in his mouth as the rest of the pack floated behind him, revealing his ability to make small objects float with him.
"You didn't buy anything with the rest of the money," he noted.
Jenny remembered how the coins she'd spent on the pack floated out of the merchant's purse and back into the pouch.
"I'll spend real coins if I ever get any," Jenny said, grumpily.
"You will run indefinitely with no fuel?" he asked.
Jenny made a difficult face. She wondered if that even mattered here, if all of this was just a dream.
"No…" she said.
Top Moments looked at her and waited for her to elaborate.
"I'm a robot, I need electricity."
"Ha!" Top Moments exclaimed. "That will be a problem!"
This world didn't strike Jenny as the kind where people had electric devices. It wouldn't matter, anyway. Her charger was proprietary, and an electric outlet wouldn't do anything for her on its own, even if they existed here.
"You run on the fuel of the Great Ones!" Top Moments said as he flew in another circle.
Jenny gave him a surprised look. Given some copper wire and a magnetized rock, she could build her own generator.
"Electricity isn't that special," Jenny said.
"Well, you won't find any here, and I've never witnessed it myself," Top Moments said. "There are accounts of Nyarlathotep harnessing the miracle of electric power back when He still walked among us, and those are myths!"
Jenny gave him a frown. She'd heard that name before in occult fiction back in the real world.
"Do you even believe me, then?"
"I must admit I am having trouble with this one…"
Jenny looked at her own hands, bothered that she had no way of proving that she ran on electricity.
"Do you believe in these 'Great Ones'?"
"On most days."
They stopped just outside the market, at a relatively quiet square. At the center sat a fountain with large statues on top that dominated the scene. Imposing figures, not unlike the kinds of statues of gods in her own world, but these ones looked far from human.
Jenny gave Top Moments a questioning look, as if to ask him if these statues represented the Great Ones from their conversation.
"That's the one," he said.
The statues were based on a pyramid, and the largest statue—the one Top Moments was referring to—was perched at the very top. An otherworldly, alien-looking creature with three legs, digging into the surface of the pyramid with countless digits on each end, looking more like hands than feet. Its two arms, which looked almost identical to its legs, were raised in the air as if receiving something from the cosmos above.
Lastly, its head could best be described as a tentacle that started thick and got thinner as it went on, with a mouth at the bottom, near the torso.
"He made electricity? The one with the… name…" Jenny asked.
"Some say He's so powerful, He cannot be perceived to exist. Others say He walks among us, looks like us, like a shapeshifter," Top Moments explained while flying around the statues, examining them up close. "Fanatics have attributed the accomplishments of almost every significant historical figure to this guy," he said when he reached the statue at the top, "but the statues tend to make Him look like that."
If the pyramids in the dream were as big as the ones in her own world, and the scale of this display was anything to go by, this guy must've been enormous. Jenny had a hard time imagining this titan shapeshifting into a human form.
Jenny flew up to the statue to check out its "face". She couldn't make this up if she tried, was she really dreaming all of this up?
"He looks mean," she said.
"Oh, He's the worst. His presence makes people lose their minds. 'Crawling Chaos', people call Him. Everywhere He goes, rest vanishes," Top Moments said poetically.
Jenny gave him a frown when he flew by. Rest vanishes… like screaming in your sleep?
"I'm paraphrasing a poem. They're all myths, these guys," Top Moments said.
Jenny looked at the other statues and wondered if Dark Jenny would've been considered a "Great One" here. She'd formed a mental image of its original form back when she got the opportunity to examine it with her hands, but that image didn't match any of the statues on the pyramid.
"Are they all Great Ones?" she asked.
"Correct," Top Moments replied.
One of them did in fact look familiar.
"I've met this one…" Jenny said as she floated to one of the smaller statues that looked like a whale.
"You've met a Great One?" Top Moments stopped his orbit around the piece and asked in great surprise.
"In my world," Jenny said as she checked behind the creature's snout, and sure enough, a large eye was present on its back.
"Tell me," Top Moments said.
Jenny looked at the rest of it. The bottom of the creature's body sprouted tentacles that wrapped around the base of the pyramid, like the roots of a tree. She only saw the top in person and wondered if this was what it looked like underneath the water, with its tentacles wrapped around the whole planet.
"He didn't do much except spit water on me like a fountain. I also touched it." Jenny said as she touched its snout with her finger.
"Incredible! The water, what did it feel like?" Top Moments asked excitedly.
Jenny tried to recall, but she simple recalled…
"Nothing. Just water," she explained, "then it left."
She looked at Top Moments to study his reaction. He looked surprised, like Jenny's testimony matched what he already knew. She was starting to wonder if this world was more than just a story her mind was coming up with during her hibernation.
"Your turn," she said with a smirk.
Top Moments floated closer to the statue.
"It's called the Sleeping God. Some say it created the dream, and it has no body here. The sculpture you see here is how it appears in the world of the dreamers, so it must've been described by a dreamer. Everything you just said matches the myth exactly. It grants those who are worthy access to the dreamlands through nightmare fuel. That's the water it spat on you."
He turned to Jenny.
"The water… I can't believe I'd ever say this, but I think you might be a dreamer, Jenny."
Jenny looked down at her own hands.
"So, I'm worthy," she said with a hint of surprise in her voice.
"Don't you know how special that makes you? Dreamers are myths, like the Great Ones. It is said that some have stayed behind to become kings here!"
Jenny folded her arms and made a proud smile, still floating next to the statues.
"You have no idea! Maybe I dreamed you up!"
Top Moments looked back at her, then at his own body.
"Please don't say that," he said as he spun in place.
"It's okay, I won't undream you," she said with a guilty look on her face.
Top Moments didn't respond and just kept spinning himself around.
Jenny looked back at the statue one more time. If all of this was true, then the dreamlands really existed, and weren't just a temporary string of thoughts in her own head.
It all came down to the fact that Jenny's first-ever dream in the dark city happened after her encounter with Mr. Fishy, where it doused her under its fountain and granted her passage, as Top Moments put it. Slowly but surely, the questions she had when she woke up in this world were starting to look pretty answered.
Jenny looked at the other statues. Ten in total, varying in size. The big Nyarlathotep and familiar Sleeping God were the only ones that caught her attention. The others looked very similar to each other, tentacle-y or otherwise horrifying looking.
"Are the others mean, too?" Jenny asked.
Top Moments stopped spinning and looked like he was woken up from some sort of trance. He shook his head and took a second to gather his thoughts.
"The short answer is yes, for most of them," he said, "and the Necronomicon references far more than just these ones here."
Jenny landed on the ground and turned her hair back to normal, then dropped until she lay on her back on the ground, looking at the sky. It was turning slightly orange as the day was coming to an end. Top moments positioned himself next to her.
"You think I'll wake up in my own world if I sleep here?" Jenny asked him.
"That would make sense," he responded.
After that, they spent some time looking at the sky in silence.
Jenny was starting to feel like the dreamlands were something greater than she initially thought, and she wanted to learn more about them. That, and the image of the theater was gnawing at her. The strange city inside the cavern…
Rest vanishes…
Jenny turned her head to look at her companion, and he looked back at her.
"You said you'd follow me anywhere, right?"
"Of course."
Jenny grabbed her wooden sword and pointed it at the sky.
"I wanna go on a quest!"