Project Pegasus

V 1.1 Chapter 12: A New Beginning, a New Goal.

What is sleep? There's this common belief that when asleep, the brain shuts off, the body lies down and nothing happens. But that's really not what's happening. Instead, scientists believe that sleep, is in fact, sewing our memories together. When you sleep, your brain will extract from experiences the gist of what happened. It extracts the gist and kind of forgets all those details that are not so important. It will discover the rules of our lives. It will take a large number of experiences and take them all together and figure out what the rules are that explains how our worlds work. And dreaming, in fact, is probably part of this entire process.

***

"Where am I?" Suspended in a world full of flashing lights, a number of rectangular screens floated around, showing events very familiar to me. "Are these..."

"These are all your memories, Hiiro."

A sound coming from a woman resounded throughout the place, speaking with a seductive voice. Soon, a silhouette of a girl appeared in front of me, slowly gaining its color and form.

"Hello, Hiiro~"

It was Lucie.

As we toured the place, she explained what was happening. A person's dreams also contained their own memories. This is the reason why people sometimes have dreams about their past. Using Lucie's ability to tap into these dreams, she could use my memories to ascertain if I was telling the truth.

We stopped in front of a particular screen, showing a recent memory of before I died. "Let's go inside, Hiiro~," she chuckled.

As she touched it with her hands, the screen sucked us inside.

Just after entering, we saw a man standing while looking at his hands forming a fist; it was the 'me' of the past.

"Hoho," Lucie giggled. "You're actually quite handsome in your human form."

As the man shouted, the place was suddenly filled with blinding lights mixed with a deafening sound coming from the sky.

It was the same plane that killed me... Or so I thought.

Mere seconds before it crashed into "me," "I" suddenly vanished into thin air. Lucie and I soon followed. The next scene brought the two of us in a forest.

"Wait... a minute, the plane did not crash into me?"

We observed the man panicking and running all around the place.

"Hiiro, you look kinda funny here," she chuckled. Covering my eyes with my hands, I was too embarrassed to look at myself. "Let's go, Hiiro. He, or you, are going somewhere."

We followed the man until we reached a village.

"No way."

The two of us were standing right in front of a village. Suddenly, there was a huge explosion coming from inside. Curious, the man entered the village. In the middle, there was a woman wearing a robe, casting elemental magic and necromancy in every direction.

"That girl is Lady Marina, Emily's mother," Lucie spoke in a serious tone.

Looking around, I couldn't believe everything that was happening.

Dead bodies of necromancers were scattered all over the place. Those who were still alive tended to the injured while evacuating. "It seems Lady Marina is buying time for them to escape."

Emily's mother was fighting humans wearing military uniforms, its design seemed to be a modernized version of German clothing used in World War II back on earth, and they even carried firearms of high caliber.