On this beautiful night, Helena, the Goth girl with tired red eyes thirsty for sleep, ghost-pale skin, and thick black hair, spent her time reading fantasy novels in her old apartment with peeling walls.
She was reading that novel aloud as if reciting a holy book of some sort, pacing back and forth, trying to stimulate herself to immerse in that novel's repetitive premise.
Dragons, fairies, the handsome prince, the Middle Ages... all archetypes that distinguish fantasy novels.
She stood before a drawing on the wall of a dragon breathing fire onto a village, reading it aloud, swaying her body back and forth with the last page of this third novel she had read this day.
She slammed it shut at the final full stop, straightened her posture, smiled, then took a device resembling a meter. She slipped her arm into one of its straps, made sure she was wearing the necklace of one of her favorite characters from one of the novels around her neck, then lay on the bed, hugged the device tightly, and recited her improvised incantation:
"Oh faithful guardians of imagination's light,
Pull me now towards the sky's height.
To where there is no time nor space,
To a kingdom lost, a forgotten place.
Oh Imagination that knows no bound,
Extend the bridge, take me to eternal ground.
Take my being... I accept humans no more,
And carry the soul to the Fantasy Kingdom and Images' shore."
She fell asleep repeating a single phrase.
"Oh Kingdom of Fantasy, pull me in."
Helena focused, despite her fatigue, on her consciousness exiting reality just as a hair is pulled from dough. The sounds outside faded, eyes grew heavy, and the attempt to open them in reality shifted into the dream world.
Helena wandered in her lucid dream which manifested in the form of her room. She looked at the meter she had brought with her into her dream; it registered strange symbols. They were numbers in this world. The reading was:
75+6i Ontometers[1]
It is a number within the set of complex numbers, which are the numbers that distinguish the reality of dreams, unlike stable reality whose value is around 100 Ontometers.
She took her book, tore it, and stuck its pages vertically on the wall, then recited:
"Kingdom of Fantasy..."
Repeatedly. She pressed her palms together in a pleading posture and crossed her eyes. Those pages turned into a portal. She inserted the device's sensor into it, and it recorded a value:
75.1+10i+36.9j+36.5k Ontometers
"I succeeded."
She maintained the crossing of her eyes and entered...
A vast fantasy city with huge buildings of strange architecture. That palace and its neighboring structures rose in a strange spatial geometry. There were several disguised dreamers from various countries of TERRAVASTA and their egregores and tulpas which they created with the power of their belief...
Helena did not change her form when entering these collective dream worlds as the majority do. Although this world is a dream within a dream, it is very stable compared to the fogginess and errors of ordinary dreams; in fact, sometimes its sensation is more realistic than reality.
She focused and created an imaginary tulpa of a communication device:
"Delaney, where are you guys?"
"You were late falling asleep so we thought you wouldn't come... We are waiting for you near the Imaginers' Guild south of King FableKeeper's palace. Just hurry..."
The communication device evaporated before Delaney finished her speech. Helena's Egrinoric Energy—which is the energy of belief that creates a tulpa and Egregore from dream matter—was of levelD-9[2]
Meaning it was weak and unstable.
Helena hurried towards the group consisting of Delaney, who took the form of a white angel with wings around its head and two on its back, and Rory. He was a young man but chose the form of a Goth girl with short black hair hiding his eyes, lips engulfed in blackness, and a frail body, but his voice, despite his appearance, was masculine; he didn't want to change it. Rory was a dream walker, meaning he spends days sleeping, raising his level until he became level B-3
Helena had never met these two people in reality and never knew their appearance in real life; they were actually from different countries, but the shared sense of adventure made them meet here.
Rory said:
"Haven't you gotten bored of this avatar, Helena?"
"I told you this isn't an avatar, but my real form."
"I don't believe it. You aren't a Futanari[3], I'm sure of that. Futanaris are evil, and you are softer than a biscuit."
" If you don't shut up, I'll shove my penis up your ass. "
" I'm sorry "
" Where should we go? "
"We continue expanding the world from where we left off. It's a safe zone. Helena, do you have a weapon?"
"Look at this."
From her wondrous bag, she took out a sword as tall as herself, then unsheathed it. It was a katana sword two meters long.
"Hhh, this sword is made only for show; it's not practical. Luckily, the enemies aren't that difficult."
Rory snapped his fingers, the place turned black, and they transported to insanely vast lands with purple grass and huge white rocks. In the horizon, roughly, was a massive tornado reaching thousands of kilometers in height but without stormy winds. They made their way towards it.
On the way, they fought with some creatures like geese and little girls carrying swords, transparent black dogs whose bones could be seen under their glassy skin, and raven birds gathered in the form of a giant monster. This was the hardest one; they had to kill every single bird separately...
Their weapons were absorbing Egrinoric Energy from those creatures and compressing it into stable coins. These coins were used in creating weapons and objects by using them instead of the person's own weak Egrinoric Energy. The coins' levels ranged from the weak E which the majority drop, to S, which are highly concentrated, very stable coins extracted from an Egregore that many dreamers agreed to create and make strong to create a challenge element. Whoever obtains them becomes capable of creating their own pocket worlds and universes, and legendary weapons afterwards. Up to the legendary SSS, which are absolute coins; it is said that whoever obtains them manipulates the entire explored Fantasy Kingdom. Coins starting from SS require the agreement of at least a billion people to create an Egregore with an average of 100 SS-level coins. That happened once, and it was 9 super days of enjoyable marathon fighting, and the coins were distributed according to the damage each one caused.
These monsters were only of level C. Their difficulty level promoted Helena to level
C-0
Leveling up is easy in the beginning, but in the end, it becomes hell. The highest level in the world currently is the person called "the absoluter," whose level reached
S-9
The group found an abandoned hut, indicating that someone had reached the place before them, so they were struck with a sense of disappointment. Rory entered it cautiously. There was a return bookmark in the hut. Rory destroyed it while laughing because that mark is what enables a person to return to that point after going back to sleep.
Delaney found fresh tire tracks heading towards the cloud tornado.
Rory got annoyed and created an Egregore in the shape of a jet plane with his egrenor, and they fed it with their coins to increase its speed and improve it, and they headed into the heart of the tornado.
Rory said:
"We must do looting before him."
Delaney said with panic:
"Go back, Rory! There is a Hecatyon nearby."
Rory turned around and went back. Delaney said:
"I hope it didn't see us."
The Hecatyons are the original inhabitants of dreams. They are dreams without dreamers, made from the fluctuations of dream matter itself. Unlike humans here, whose ontometrics are characterized by a real value linking them to reality and an imaginary one linking them to the dream world, Hecatyons have only imaginary ontometric values. They are the gods of this place. Their contact with humans means cutting the awakening cord, meaning immediate death. Hecatyons move between kingdoms with total freedom and can rise in their imaginary dimensions to numbers in Hypercomplex number sets above Quaternions, which is the maximum number of dimensions for humans in the dream core.
At a certain distance, Rory dismantled the plane and they fell to the ground to hide. From upon the hill, they began spying on the creature, only to see a horrifying scene... The creature was in the form of a girl in a school uniform; parts of her skin had been flayed until the red meat underneath was exposed. Around her head was a metal frame with metal pieces piercing her skull, and around her body was a visible black aura. But the most horrifying thing was that she was eating a person. The sound of her breath resembled the sound of a fuel-powered engine, and she sometimes emitted a loud sound resembling an electric chainsaw.
Delaney said:
"No, no, no... We must go back and inform the Guild. This is one of the Hecatyons of the Meat Core kingdom."
Helena said:
"Let's wait a little. Just prepare the safety trigger so we can wake up."
That Hecatyon did not notice their presence and continued its path until it suddenly disappeared with a sound resembling an explosion. Rory stood up and said:
"The situation is safe now. It teleported."
"Oh my God, that is terrifying. We must inform the Guild about the loss of one of the players."
Helena said:
"I think it's the owner of the tent. Look, his vehicle is smashed over there."
"Damn it, there are always spoilers of fun. I think out of fear he forgot to pull the safety trigger to wake up, hhhh."
The group continued their way towards the fake tornado which had become like a wall of clouds. After an hour of walking, they arrived. Rory hid a bookmark in the place, then they breached the tornado for a distance of two hundred meters of thick fog, after Helena created a light source with her new, more stable level.
The fog revealed a huge metal door that does not open with ordinary force. They tried to smash it with an attack of imagination power, but it didn't succeed. Helena said:
"We aren't strong enough to open it. I think we have to go back."
Rory replied:
"We'll just look at what's inside."
They decided to squeeze themselves in and try to enter from under the door. Naturally, Helena was the most dangerous person in the group, the person towards whom you should not lift your butt. At first, the professional Rory entered, followed by Helena, and finally Delaney. Suddenly, Helena's device emitted a sound:
"Beep beep"
"The place's ontometry has changed."
"Let me see."
Rory took out a huge guidebook full of bookmarks, read it, and said:
"We are still in the Kingdom of Fantasy, but we have entered a sub-pocket dimension of it. Its ontometry is between that of the King of the Northern Plains' dimension and the Crimson King's dimension... What do you think? Shall we continue our path, perhaps we might find a treasure?"
Everyone agreed.
[1] The unit of measurement for the level of reality in a given place
[2] The letters F, E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS are the base levels, and within each there are 10 sub-levels, starting from 0 to 9.
[3] They are a type of fertility goddesses.