Days of Blood and Roses: A Magical Girl Thriller

Night: Colbie and the Phantom Stab (Dreams)*

Written on 7/5/17 (Camp NaNoWriMo, July 2017 edition).
Colbie Amame (picture reference).
~7,700 words (novelette).

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But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!

—Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Thomas Common),
Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,
VIII: "The Tree on the Hill"

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1

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Colbie Amame missed her cue and slipped out of REM sleep, waking up in her dorm room and looking at the ceiling of her room in blank comprehension. Wondering why she had woken up so early, she reached for her watch next to the lamp atop the credenza and glanced at the glowing dial: 4:20 a.m.

"God, damn it!" Colbie said as it all came back to her, for she had slept through her dream diving cue and had missed meeting with Celia Hearn and Kendra Tellerman by almost an hour, and now she was going to get an earful from them on her arrival. She knew that the time and location for the first dream dive was at a collective dream realm somewhere in the Oriental part of the Phantom Realms at 3:30 a.m., but she still had no idea where Kendra had wanted to take them after they all met up at the first target zone. She'd ask them about it when she arrived, but since the chance of a second dream dive seemed out of the question, she resigned herself to a tongue-lashing, pulled the covers back over herself, and went to sleep.

Now repeating the same starting sequence on the fifth cycle of her dream dive that cycled through the intervals of light sleep and deep sleep to get to REM sleep, her dream-self materialized in her dorm room, lying motionless and dumb upon the bed before rousing in the glow of the nightlight throwing a harsh blue diagonal of light across the walls and part of the ceiling of her room. She looked around and saw the light of one of her lamps atop her dresser drawer glowing red and throwing up a purple circle of light on the ceiling, cut into thirds.

That purple circle of light—cut into thirds—was her dream cue, and upon recognizing it, she broke the subtle trance that all dreams imposed on non-lucid dreamers. She was now in control, and she could pursue her latest fantasy, perhaps attempt another stab at her favorite fantasy in the last few winks of sleep after facing the ire of her friends. She had her guilty pleasures after all, ones that she might let Celia in on later after the storm of her ire had passed.

When she arose from the bed and turned on the other lamp, she squinted as a spectral light flooded the room. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the lighting and then reached for her watch right next to the lamp and put it on and glanced at the dual dials: 4:30 a.m. on one dial, and 45 minutes and counting down the seconds on the other dial.

So she got off the bed and went to the closed door of her room, the door that led to the upstairs hallway and down the staircase in her waking life, but that very door was something more in her dreamworld.

Placing her hand on the knob, she focused on the destination she wanted to reach. Spectral waves blustered through her room, and her locks of hair fluttered and spread wide in the turbulence, and her pajamas fluttered in the blast.

She opened the door into the inky blackness that was her subconscious mind, and stepped into the void—

(with 45 minutes left)

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2

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