Lucid Nightmares

Chapter 3

Christian blacked out the moment he and Gwendolyn exited the Nightmare and collapsed onto the Dream Realm floor. His leg felt as if simply tearing it off would get rid of the pain, and his head hurt. He heard Gwendolyn snapping for a medic, heard people shouting and rushing over, before everything went black and silent.

***

Christian awoke with a slight headache, but otherwise way better than before. He also seemed to be on a semi-comfortable bed. He opened his eyes, only to recoil in shock and almost scream.

There was a demon, like, a straight-up demon, examining his wounded leg. It had the head and body of a lion whose mane was a golden brown and flowed as if in water. It also seemed to have goat legs coming out of its mane; five, in the shape of a swirl around its head. It was humanoid enough to be able to wear a dark red robe, which somewhat concealed its giant paws. It noticed Christian wake, and then purred, "It's alright, son. I am here to help."

"'S'e awake?" said Gwendolyn's voice somewhere to Christian's right. She had been sitting in a sofa chair in the corner, scarfing containers of banana pudding with her normal hands and reading a book with her corset-ribbon-hand things.

"Why, yes he is. A bit jumpy, understandably, given my impromptu appearance," the demon chuckled.

Gwendolyn frantically looked for a place to put her current banana pudding container, set it on the floor next to her chair, and walked over, her corset ribbon hands padding the ground as if in an attempt to make her go faster.

"Kid, it's okay. This is Buer, he's fixing you up." Gwendolyn knelt down beside Christian's bed and awkwardly offered him an unopened banana pudding container and a spoon. "I stress eat bitch pudding when I'm... well, stressed."

"You-- WHAT-pudding??" Christian asked. Buer snorted in amusement.

"Bitch pudding. It-- it's banana pudding, just friggin' take it." Gwendolyn thrust the pudding and spoon into Christian's hands.

"She refers to it that way so she sounds more like what you call a 'hard-ass,'" Buer said with a smirk, drawing sigils in the air around Christian's nearly-severed left leg.

"Shut up, you don't know me," Gwendolyn huffed and crossed her arms as she got up and walked back to her chair. "Oh, yeah. Welcome to my dorm, B-T-dubs."

It looked a bit like a Victorian house; everything had ornate patterns either carved or sewn into them, and the fancy furniture was all the same. Christian was lying on a large bed with a canopy over it, with leafy and feathered swirls surrounding a message stitched in the middle:

YOU ARE IN HELL BECAUSE YOU FAILED AT LIFE.

BOO-HOO. GET A JOB, OR, UM... FIND A HUSBAND.

Christian pointed at it quizzically. "Oh, yeah, they have to do that. Apparently they gotta remind you that you're in Hell 'cause you were a piece of crap. It was either there, or carved into my mirror, and I did not wanna look at a 'you failed' message while I'm contouring."

Christian looked back down at Buer, who was finishing up the sigils and peeled them out of the air like stickers on an invisible window and started applying them to Christian's leg. Then, as if zipping up a jacket, he ran a finger across the wound and closed it up.

"Well," Buer said, drawing himself to his full height (around 7 feet tall), "your shell is fixed. I'll be off then."

"Hey, thanks," Christian said to him with a sincere nod, but then paused. "Wait," he said, and Buer stopped at the door and turned around. "Did you just say 'shell?'"