Chosen One Protective Services

The nightmares were worse, this time, and repetitive. Over and over again, he'd dream of himself awake in the hayloft at home, but paralyzed. And over and over again, the tree strider's young would work their way through the window of the barn, and crawl through the hay towards him. Sometimes they would reach him, and he would watch them eating him. There was no pain, and that made it worse, somehow. They'd pull his organs out, like Terathon had ripped organs out of the grach days ago.

But throughout the repeated horror, Rusty started to put things together. Started to realize that he could move the dreams along, give them new directions to go. He could tease them on to other subjects, once he realized that he was dreaming. And he did, over and over again.

Total recall is helping me, here, he thought. He would have loved to have talked about it with Roz, but Roz was nowhere to be seen. He tried visualizing words, tried to work magic in his sleep, but the letters kept changing on him. And when he got two or three together, he found he couldn't read them.

I need to make a new spell when I'm awake again.

Then the dreams shifted. There were baby tree striders, but they were on fire. Rusty felt himself get warmer and warmer, felt the sweat pour off him, felt himself burn. He screamed a few times, but it was muffled like underwater voices.

“He's pretty bad,” a woman said. “I don't expect he'll make it.” she had a southern accent, sounded young, too.

“I'm not going to die here,” he tried to reassure her. “The fire spiders can't kill me.”

“What in god's name does that mean?” she asked back, but then the words rattled around and distorted in his dreams, and the barn doors blew off as goats ran in shrieking “GOD'S NAME? DOES THAT MEAN!”

From there things only got weirder.

Eventually, the fire faded. And Rusty fell into darkness. It was soothing, in its own way.

It took him a few moments after he woke, to realize that this wasn't another dream. Rusty opened his eyes, to try and figure out where he'd ended up.

He was in a stone-walled room. There was a window, with streaky, bubbly glass and metal bars crossing it. The ceiling had cross beams, and there was a lit fireplace across from the bed.

The bed? Yes, he stirred and felt soggy sheets shift around him. He was worried for a second, but one whiff told him it was sweat, not pee. It was a comfortable bed, and he settled into it, felt the mattress crunch beneath him. It was stuffed with straw, he thought. Rusty was quite familiar with that, thanks to long nights in the hayloft back home.

“Daddy-o, that was a rough trip,” Roz said, leaning over him and staring down in concern, when he blinked. Looking down, just like the elf, had.

“The elf,” Rusty said, and tried to remember. He remembered the elves, green-haired and pointy-eared and tall, their faces unmoving as they spoke in his head. Their leader had told him to follow them, back to Terathon. He'd asked questions while he'd followed, but they'd given no answers. And he'd fallen farther and farther behind, his head pounding and his stomach churning, until he'd collapsed. Then one had come back and picked him up, but he'd lost consciousness shortly after that.

“Yeah,” Roz said. “So what were you dreaming about?”

“You couldn't see it?” Rusty asked. “But you're in my head. That doesn't make sense.”

“I think I'm in a different part of your brain then the dreams are,” Roz said. “I don't know. Have we read anything about how brains work? Or eavesdropped on any doctors?”

Rusty concentrated, tried to recall. “I don't think so.”

“This might be worth learning. With your memory rune, and all. Okay, looks like the elves brought us here, or brought us to people who brought us here, because this doesn't look too elfy.”

“They didn't look exactly elfy either,” Rusty commented, looking around. There was a door on the wall opposite the window. It was big, wooden, and bound with metal strips. “It looks like a picture from that book on castles that I borrowed when I was seven.”

“Okay,” Roz said, pacing around the bed, moving around a high-backed wooden chair. “We're among friends. Otherwise we'd be dead. Can you move?”

“Maybe.” Rusty sat up, and immediately regretted it. His head swam and lurched... but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been, back during his trip in the tree strider cocoon. His back was oddly free of injury, and that surprised him. There were a few sensitive spots, but no real pain. Rusty looked down south of his waistline and found that he was wearing a cloth diaper of sorts, heavy reinforced cloth. The reason why was obvious when he felt inside it, and he shuddered, wiped his hand on the sheets before trying to stand up.

He was shaky, but he managed. The door had a strange handle on it, three pronged and made to turn with something like a keyhole above it. The handle turned a little in his grasp, but the door didn't move, no matter which way it went. He looked through the hole and saw a stone hallway outside. This one was lit by a soft, green light, unlike the flickering firelight that illuminated his room. But there was nothing to see, and after a minute or two of watching, Rusty felt his legs starting to ache. Still a little weak, he thought, and he went back and sat on the bed.

The window rattled, and Rusty glanced up, saw raindrops sliding down the bleary glass. It was high up on the wall, a little too high to reach, and Rusty didn't trust his legs enough to try pulling the chair up and peeking.

So he sat, and listened to the rain, and replayed his time in Elythia. He reviewed the memories carefully, especially his time in the cocoon. That was difficult. Re-living that meant going back to the time when he was feverish, and going through all of that, again.

Which reminded him. “I need something to make these nightmares suck less, or they're going to drive me nuts,” he told Roz. “Can I mess with those?”

“Well, you've got the rune for memories, not dreams. But... what if you didn't remember the nightmares?”

“I mean, I'd still go through them,” Rusty said, rubbing his face. He was thirsty, and there wasn't any water around that he could see. “So I'd still suffer.”

“But what if you forgot them a microsecond after they happened?” Roz said. “I don't know much about brains, but that should reduce the stress on your noggin, right?”

“It's worth a shot,” Rusty shrugged. “Okay.”

He closed his eyes, visualized, and mouthed the words.

“I want to forget my nightmares a microsecond after they happen.”

Selective near-instantaneous memory editing upon self!

Committed chakra: 14/42

Nightmare remover granted! Cost 1

Chakra Usage: -1

Remaining free chakra: 27/42

Rusty sighed, as he felt the pressure in his chest ease. He tried to remember his nightmares, and couldn't. Something in the back of his mind relaxed.

And then he tensed up, as footsteps clattered in the hall, and the door rattled. He turned in time to see the three-pronged handle clicking, and then pause, a few inches open. Someone cleared their throat and knocked.

“Hello?” Rusty asked, scooping up some sheets and putting them over his diapered lower half.

“Oh! Y'all are awake?” It was a woman's voice, southern and young. And if he hadn't erased the nightmares of his memories a few seconds ago, he would have recognized it instantly.

“Yeah,” Rusty said. “I'm decent, more or less.”

The door opened, to reveal a girl. Dark-skinned, wearing a blue plaid dress, with gingham bows. She was tall, a little plump, and if he was any judge of it, she had a few years on him. Her hair was curly and short, and she stared at him with open curiosity. “I'm Alice Jackson, sir. Who are you?”

“Rusty. Rusty Colfax.” Rusty stared at her. “You're from Earth, too?”

Her brilliant white smile gleamed in the firelight. “Yes sir. From Atlanta, Georgia. Whereabouts do you call home?”

“Epitome, Texas. It's uh, west of Dallas a ways.” That wasn't exactly where he was from, but the place he was from didn't have a proper name. Epitome was close enough to count as the nearest settlement.

“Well I'm mighty happy to meet you, Mister Colfax.”

“I'm... I'm twelve, and you look like you're older than... please don't call me mister,” Rusty said, remembering at the last moment that you were never supposed to tell a lady that she was old. “I'm sorry, I just woke up,” he said.

“You got nothing to apologize for. Um... You said your name was Russell?”

“I said it was Rusty, but yeah, it's actually Russell. Please call me Rusty.”

“Rusty. All right. Well Rusty, Miss Jadar said she felt you workin', figured you was up. How you feeling?”

“Thirsty. Not as hungry as I thought I would,” Rusty titled his head. There was an aftertaste in the back of his throat, and it matched the last time the wizard had given him oatmeal to eat. “Have you been feeding me?”

“We all have,” Alice said. Then she frowned. “Well, not Gunther, he said it was beneath him. But me and Janice and Ken been taking turns.”

“Thanks. Um...” he glanced down at the sheets covering his waist. “So you've been... changing...”

He looked up in time to catch her looking away and flushing. “We been taking care of you,” Alice said. “Never you mind that. You can handle things from now on.”

“Okay. Okay, thanks,” he said, feeling his face burn a bit, and it was his turn to look away. “Do you have some place I can clean up?”

She did, as a matter of fact. And she helped him out of bed, and walked him down the halls.

The place was all long, cramped hallways, with nearly-identical doors every ten to twenty-feet. There were no signs or labels, and only a few times did he pass open doors. The ones he did showed rectangular rooms, identical to the one he woke in, but unfurnished. The fireplaces were chimneys with a hole in the floor, no place to put wood, and no metal fireguards. The patterned stone that he trod upon was cold against his feet, and he shivered as he went.

“Your clothes were really torn up,” Alice told him, as she led him around the corner of an intersection, and stopped in front of the first double door he'd seen. Steam oozed out of the cracks, and the warmth felt so, so good against his mostly-bare flesh. “So you'll need new clothing. I'll go talk with the mummers. They'll drop them off outside the bath, so you take your time and they'll be here soon.”

A warm bath sounded so, so very good. And the doors opened to reveal a bubbling pool in the center of a stone room full of benches. Rusty nodded his thanks, slipped into the room, closed the doors behind him and peeled off his diaper before tossing it into a corner and sinking into the water. It was a little too hot at first, and he hissed as he forced himself under all at once, but after a couple dozen excruciating seconds, it became bearable.

Rusty did his best to scrub himself clean with his hands, and managed. Some exploration showed that the large basin had inflow and outgoing pipes, and once the worst of his mess was gone, he put his lips to one of the inflow pipes and gulped a couple of drinks of hot water. It tasted clean, and he was just too thirsty to wait for something more civilized. He stopped after a few drinks, though, then swam lazily around the bath to try and get his muscles stretched out.

“I wonder what mummers are?” Roz asked, passing by him in a lazy backstroke as Rusty blinked. “Are there dadders, too?”

Rusty slapped water at him, and shut his eyes to find Roz grinning. “Ain't got no body, Russ. Can't splash me.”

“You've got me,” Rusty said, finally feeling relaxed enough to sit in a shallow spot, and lean against the wall of the basin. “And I've got a ton of questions, but not for you.”

“Yeah,” Roz said. “So how many of those people Alice mentioned are chosen ones, I wonder?”

Rusty bit his lip, and stared at the dripping, tiled walls.

There were some questions he wasn't sure he wanted answered. “He said he THOUGHT I was the chosen one. There's a difference. I'm sure there's a good explanation for everything.”

“I hope so. But just in case, Rusty, we gotta be careful. You know?”

Rusty's mind flashed back to the dead kid whose clothes and rune he'd taken. “Yeah,” he said, and that was that. He lay back and he soaked, and sweated, and he just was for a while. And that was enough.