Gremlins Under My Bed

The Gremlin's Plight

The soft knock sounded on the door, and seemed to reverberate on the tense air.

"Honey, are you all right?" My mother's concerned voice filtered into the room.

"I'm fine mom," I replied, as sleepily as I could manage, "I just had a bad dream."

"Are you sure, is there anything you would like me to do?" my mom pressed.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just want some sleep. Goodnight."

"Goodnight," replied my mom, and her softly padding footsteps gradually receded down the hall.

I glared at the gremlin, who had wisely held his tongue during that ordeal. "You!" I rasped.  "You have some explaining to do, and it better be good otherwise I'm throwing you out that window!"

"Well," the gremlin began with a squeak.  "I will try to put this simply.  I am not from your world, but from a world parallel to your own."  

I stared at the creature, unable to fathom what he was suggesting.  "There are other worlds, how did you get here?" 

"There are thousands of other worlds, perhaps more, parallel to one another.  We have not tried to find them all, but we have learned from the ones that we have found.  To answer your second question, I will tell you a story."

"A long time ago our people fought against great rebellion.  The war lasted for a few years and culminated in an incredible battle.  Many of our people died.  We prevailed, but the leader of the rebellion, Grimson, was never found.  We expected him to return, and our expectations were met several weeks ago."

"Though we had prepared, we became complacent; we thought we had more time.  We were not ready for his return.  Key defenses were overrun, and now Grimson is preparing to assault our capital.  However, as soon as we heard news of Grimson's attacks, our leaders sent a team to retrieve a powerful device which will disable Grimson's army.  But somehow Grimson knew of our plans.  He sabotaged our ship.  We were caught in limbo, between worlds, sometimes in our world, sometimes in this one, before finally crash-landing here a week ago."

My eyes continuously grew wider as the gremlin spun his tale.  Though it was short it explained a lot of what was happening for the last few weeks.  "So you were responsible for all of my weird dreams?  And what about the random things missing or out of place?  And the egg in my dresser!?  That was gross.  Why would you do that?"

The gremlin didn't seem sure of his answer, "Well, not all of these things was our doing ma'am, being lost inbetween worlds cause a lot of us a lot of strife.  Sometimes things would appear in our ship when we were in one world, and disappear when we were in the other.  Sometimes we would use them, like that fancy cube you had.  We would have solved it, but we only had a few minutes with it, and it's much harder for us to turn the sections.  The egg I think came from our world."

"What about my dreams?"  I asked, "My nightmares.  Did you cause those too?"  

"That I don't rightly know."  The gremlin replied.  "I haven't been sleeping well myself, but that's for entirely different reasons."  The gremlin chuckled halfheartedly.  "It's possible that our shifting between worlds caused some sort of disturbance here, which affected your dreams.  Such a thing is not common, but it could happen."

I sat back and thought.  Here was the answer to all of the things which had been happening to me over the past several weeks.  All of the dreams that I had been having, all of the things that had been misplaced, all of the stress I had been having, because these gremlins had been stuck between their world and mine.  It didn't make sense, but at least I wasn't crazy.

"Wait.  You asked for my help, what can I do?"

"We need your help because our ship is broken -- we need materials to repair it.  Can you help us find what we need?"