Starry Day

Disclaimer: NSFW.

Content/Kink Warnings: Alcohol, Ambiguously Platonic-Or-Romantic Dynamics, Anal, Double Penetration, Drug Use/Debatable Drug Abuse (kinda all of them), Hallucinations, Loneliness, Magic, Magic Sex, Nightmares, Oral, Penis Transfiguration, Sex With Strangers, Social Isolation, Straight Girls Kissing Straight Girls (performatively), Striptease, Transformation, Urban Fantasy, Violence

Notice: It's not necessarily required reading for the story, as hopefully most of the important stuff will be picked up along the way even by people going in blind, but for the full and complete experience, I suggest you check out Star's lore here, if only to skim it for a rough comprehension of the world before jumping in. Or don't, up to you!

Setting inspired by Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City.

If Starling Thatcher could physically be hung over, she remarked inwardly as the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling above her slowly drifted back into cohesive focus, she may very well be dead right now.

Smacking her lips against her morning breath, Star at last pushed herself up, allowing the several brightly-coloured weighted blankets to slip free from her shoulders and the glowing crystals slowly rotating around her head to drift once again into their usual upright position, currently pulsing with a muted brown tone to reflect her bleary fatigue. She’d be lying if she said she could entirely remember the events of the night prior, but the familiar feeling of the dull molly come-down leaking down the back of her brain made her groan, shaking her head to clear it and glancing around for her phone. 

Star’s apartment was a bit of a mess, though that was hardly anything new. Clothes, not all of them her own, were strewn in heaped piles in the corners of the room, with each old set having been kicked to the side to accumulate there as the time came to quickly doff yet another outfit, as was her way whenever she brought company home, which was as often as she possibly could. Furniture of mismatching styles and eras, all upcycled and refurbished after having been rescued from bohemian thrift stores or dumpsters, lined the single-room space  along the walls, covered in half-full cosmetic products and half-melted candles. Some of said candles were still trailing smoke up to waft around in spirals in front of her variegated band posters, the corners of all of which had been torn and ruined by many thumbtacks and many moves. Eventually, Star’s eyes located the red leather pants that she must have been wearing the prior night, draped over the green suede armchair in the corner, studded belt still strung through its hoops and her phone still poking out of the back pocket. 

Yawning softly, Star simply waved her wrist impatiently at the phone, causing it to sprout small boot-footed legs and begin to struggle and wriggle its way out of the pocket. It hadn’t sprouted arms to go along with the legs, Star noted with amusement, so its gradual traversal down from the armchair, across the floor, and up into her awaiting hand, could hardly be said to be graceful, but she planted a grateful peck against its screen nonetheless, causing it to let out a triumphant series of beeps before returning to normal in her grip.

10:30 in the morning? Star’s eyes narrowed in disapproval as she checked the time, Damn, I’m up early…

Snooooooooooooooooore…

The sudden sound of nearby, throaty rumbling made Star jump a bit, head whipping to the side. Adjusting her sleep-askew sunglasses to sit properly on her face at last, she finally took note of the broad-shouldered man laying beside her in bed, blankets fallen away enough to show off his well-cut physique, muscle fibers visible and pulsing rhythmically beneath his olive, mole-spackled skin with every sonorous breath. One of his arms was tucked up under his floppy-haired head in lieu of a second pillow, whilst Star noted with some amusement that his other hand yet remained clasped firmly and affirmatively around her upper thigh. Upon a touch of further snooping beneath the covers, she confirmed with a smile that they were, in fact, both naked, save for a full but drying-out condom that was still wrapped around his flaccid cock, evidently having been used just before passing out from exhaustion too soon to take it off and toss it away.

“Uh… Colin?” Star began, a touch uncertainly, searching her hazy memory from the party the night before, “Cameron…? Calvin? Fuck me, it was something like that, yea?”

Whatever his name was, the man did not stir at the sound of her voice, his mouth only dropping open slightly to deepen his snoring, a small bead of drool slipping free from his lower lip and trailing down his cheek and bicep to the mattress. Star just smiled and rolled her eyes, already sensing the depth of his dreaming and leaning back down to inspect him further. She could remember clearly enough that she’d gone to another party at Tess’s place the night prior, but as they tended to, things started to get gradually fuzzier after she’d arrived, once the drinks started flowing and the pants started dropping. She had a vague memory of spying this gentleman from across the dance floor, inexperienced stiffness in his movements and flatteringly tight fit in the crotch region of his casual slacks, but all cohesion cut off after that. Still, though, as she began to take note of the particular saltiness left over in her morning breath, as well as a familiar rewarding soreness in her rear, she could generally piece the rest together. Deft, delicate fingers parted the wavy black hair in front of his temples, and Star gingerly held her bedmate’s head in her hands, taking a peek into his dreams out of sheer, errant curiosity.

It was all Star could do to keep from bursting out laughing at the sight of him seated on a Pharaoh’s throne that was also a jet ski, looking powerful and jewel-adorned, while Karen Gillan and Rouge the Bat curled up in sexy secretarial outfits in his lap and fawned over his Bionicle collection. Star just rolled her eyes and stopped peeking, stooping down and planting a tender kiss to his sleeping lips. At the farewell kiss, the man promptly turned into a cloud of bubbles, which she then blew on to usher them out the nearby window, sending him off to wake up in his own bed somewhere else in the city. It looked like a beautiful day, at least as far as they went in the city.

With a gentle wave goodbye, Star Thatcher, Whymsite dream sorceress and Vox Phantasmatum of Charlicton, Maricadia, finally got her ass out of bed. 

“Oh, jeez,” she tutted under her breath as she checked her phone again, finally taking note of the string of notifications awaiting her as she headed towards her shower. Most of what was there was largely unimportant, acquaintances and strangers alike tagging her in posts and photos of the prior night’s debauchery, all of which she either reposted or quickly dismissed. Eventually, she narrowed the onslaught down to two remaining messages, one of which she was much more excited to see flash across her screen than the other. 

—

Tess (9:41 Today): Yoooo, get home alright an all last night? Some peeps from OOT comin in today who couldn’t be here yesterday, was thinking second verse, same as the first. Still got all the stuff laid out after all, u in? Same time! 

—

Luis (6:20 Today): Gonna need you to come into BP Hold asap. Might be an assignment, scouts are out now, something going on in the area. Text me back when you get this.

—

Star groaned aloud as she tapped into her messages app, staring annoyedly at the message from Luis, her handler within the Orbis Elinvar, as she stepped into her tub shower and turned the water on. The stream bubbled out awkwardly for a few seconds, before the water began to resolve and constitute itself into the liquid form of a tall, muscular man, features amorphous and ever-flowing as the continuing shower stream reconstituted all the water the figure lost down the drain. Star relaxed softly against the form, enjoying the warm sensation as her shower worshipfully pressed itself against her body, caressing its liquid hands down her back and the length of her arms, gingerly cleaning her of the remnants of last night’s sex-sweat. 

She messaged Tess back first, eagerly accepting the invitation to a second party later that night - two such ados in a row was hardly an unprecedented occurrence with their city’s preeminent hostess, and it wasn’t as though Star had anything else planned for that night, save perhaps perusing the night for some similar fun elsewhere, so that worked out. After getting a heart-react response from Tess, she begrudgingly flipped back over to Luis’s message and sent him a thumbs-up, prompting her shower to reach up and massage some tension from her shoulders, an action that elicited a small hiss of delight from her as she leant back against the towering, adonis-like elemental.

She hadn’t known, of course, that her shower would decide to do this for her today, just like she hadn’t really known that her phone would sprout legs and waddle its way over to her, or that it would be bubbles that her bedmate turned into in order to be whisked away. But such things just happened around her, just as much unprompted as they ever were intentional, and she’d been going with the flow for far too long at this point to really be surprised anymore.

“Yo, you mind texting my boss that I’m not gonna be able to come in today?” she asked cheekily as she was just about finished washing off, handing her phone off to the water-man, “Should be chill, he can just put somebody else on my delivery route, this ain’t the first time.”

Ignoring the hesitation and clear uncertainty with which her shower accepted her phone, visually having some difficulty with both manipulating a touchscreen and not immediately waterlogging and ruining the device, Star simply hopped out and returned to the main room of her apartment. The sludgy, tired brown of her Rhoadi crystals was finally giving way to a more typical peppy indigo hue, beginning to orbit around her head in a more lively, excitable rhythm. Giving a little gleeful heel-twirl of her own to dry herself off in a spray of sparkles, Star flung open her front door and stepped out to breathe in the day.

The past few days of gloomy rain had finally broken overnight, keeping the brickwork and asphalt of the buildings and streets just damp enough to fill the air with pleasant petrichor beneath the clear-skied sun. Star sighed in contentment and gave her back a good popping stretch, glancing around at the familiar nearby rooftops and cheekily waving down at the busy pedestrians going by on the streets below, still very much naked herself. Star’s apartment was a bit of a bulbous brick-and-mortar growth in the corner of the roof of a tall industrial building, just nearby to a low-churning generator and exhaust chimneys that were a lot less active in the summer than they were in colder months. There wasn’t actually any rooftop access to or from the building below, as it was an active office space, and with the fact that it happened to be the tallest building for a good few miles in all directions, Star found herself completely private up in the sky. The fire escape being the only way for most people to actually get to the place kept the rent price at least relatively low, making it an almost ideal living spot for someone with her, well, natural advantages.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Star smiled, hopping up onto the ledge to watch how the sun danced across the waters of the Hillsborough River in the distance, the great concrete tapestry of the greatest city in the entire fuckin’ world in between, “Rise and fuckin’ shine!”

It was getting into late September, now, but summer weather tended to run long in the city, helped out by the fact that it was basically an island directly in the hot weather channels of the east coast. Finishing her basking in the sun, Star ducked back into her apartment to find that her bed had already made itself while she hadn’t been looking, and had even been kind enough to lay out a fresh set of clothes for her, tailored to the day’s weather. Overtop a healthy base of a flirty magenta bra and panties went a tight-fitting white button-down with black stripes tracing down it, which Star happily buttoned a fair few buttons too low, and a pair of black denim minishorts that she was happy to confirm with a glance over her shoulder left quite little to the imagination in the back. A click of her heels caused a pair of three-inch-pump motorcycle heel boots to appear over her feet, and after a moment of consideration, a second click sent threads of latticing elastic and sheer mesh snaking up her toned legs to form tastefully-distressed tights to tie the whole thing together. After plucking her slightly-damp phone back up from the floor of her shower, Star was just about to head out the door when a small glimmer caught her eye from her pillow. 

“...what the…” she found herself murmuring as she tilted her head for a better look, her crystals flashing to a sudden, perplexed amber. Star tended to prefer her accessories eclectically bohemian; her wrists adorned with beads and corded bracelets, raw leather choker fastened around her neck, a pair of crescent moons tangling daintily from her ears. What charms and trinkets she toted tended to be small objects of fascination, or perhaps the occasional found tchotchke that she herself had plucked off the street and fastened a chain to. Star was certainly overt, in many ways, but she had never trended towards the gaudy, at least she tried her best not to. 

And yet, resting on her pillow and glimmering in the sunbeam streaking in from the nearby window, prepared for her just the same as her clothes, selected with care for her by the power of the city itself, was a large golden heart pendant on a small string. Star cocked her brows at the oddity, scooping it up and raising the brilliantly reflective gold to her eye. It looked like something a too-wealthy man with no sense of his partner’s tastes might halfheartedly get his wife for Valentine’s Day, but Star had no such partner, and it wasn’t as though she had any sort of date lined up for the day. Sleeping around was one thing, but Star had never given much time or thought to the pursuit of romance or its aesthetics, so why would the city give her something like this, on today of all days?

“...probably nothing,” she muttered out loud half-convincingly, slipping it over her head and taking a quick glance at herself in the mirror. She had to admit, overt and bulky though it might be, it did flatter her chest quite nicely, hanging about three inches below her clavicle, “I guess it’s just pretty…”

She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t noticed the fact that the heart seemed to be uncannily cold against her skin, even for metal. But really, stranger things had already happened to her that morning, so she simply shook her head to rally herself again, grabbed her essentials and stuffed them into her pockets, and took off out the door. Her earbuds were already kicking up the first beats of Fitz and the Tantrums’ I Just Wanna Shine, and a smile crept across her features once again as she dashed across the rooftop, got one high-booted leg up on the ledge, and launched herself off into the air.

The glorious few seconds of falling tasted as sweet as candy as the familiar pavement rushed up to greet her, before her wings shot out through the slits in the back of her shirt and sent her soaring with a powerful beat, manifesting themselves from the backpiece tattoo that they were normally constrained within. Letting out a whooping holler of exhilaration, Star adjusted her sunglasses against the glare, crystals shimmering with an exhilarant gold, and the Vox Phantasmatum took flight into her city once again.

~~~

She wasn’t going to look. If she looked, she was going to laugh, and she knew she shouldn’t laugh, so she just wasn’t going to look.

She looked.

“PPpfffffffhaha!” Star burst out in an infectious giggle, clutching her arms around her belly and spinning her stiff roller-chair around in amusement. 

“And just what is so amusing this time?” the grumbly voice of Nosir Wyndran responded to her outburst, the stocky Turkish-Canadian man folding his own arms in thinly-veiled contempt as he sat across from her at the dark conference table.

“It’s the tattoo on your face!” Star exclaimed, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye as her crystals danced in a delighted pink glow, “Whenever you scowl at me like that, the crow’s feet by your eyes really bunch it up, and it makes some of the lines look like a smiley face emoji!”

Quite ironically, this revelation only made Nosir’s scowl of disapproval deepen, causing the effect on his tattoo to become even more pronounced, which only made Star holler with gleeful laughter all over again. As the wizardly Dean of the local Society of the Weird chapter, the entire right side of his body was adorned with intricate arcane tattooing, reaching from the peak of his mostly-shaved head all the way down his face and neck, reaching to lets its edges peek out from beneath the finely-starched burgundy suitjacket. He had yet to take off, Star couldn’t help but note, despite it easily being 25 degrees here in the innermost meeting room of Brooke Point Hold, meeting-place of the Orbis Elinvar.

“You could at least pretend to grasp the severity of the situation,” Nosir muttered, shaking his head and turning away.

“Of what situation?” Star kicked her head back and rolled her eyes, flopping her heeled boots casually up onto the lip of the ornate office table and plucking a fidget spinner out of thin air to begin fiddling with idly, “I just got here, ya know. Nobody’s actually explained to me what’s goin’ on yet, I just know that it’s got Luis’s man-braid in a knot somethin’ fierce.”

“That’s quite possibly more concerning,” the man frowned, orange eyes flashing to the side to regard her again out of his peripheral, “You are, for all intents and purposes, the sole delegate of the Dreaming we have here in the city, at least the only one who’s supposed to be here at any given time. It’s quite extremely concerning how every time an issue crops up that stems directly from supernatural interference bleeding through from your realm, that you are somehow consistently one of the last people to hear about it.”

“...well, it’s not like I can see everything that happens in the Dreaming…” Star huffed, puffing out her cheeks in annoyance as the toy in her hands morphed into a stressball of subtle resemblance to a cartoon caricature of Nosir’s tattooed head, “And I wouldn’t keep myself that tapped-in even if I could. There’s almost nine million people who live in this city, and that’s just countin’ folks who live here on the waking world side ‘a things. Not even you could keep all that straight on a night-to-night basis, and you know it.”

Nosir got a look in his eyes that warned that he was about to retort further, but he was quickly silenced by the sound of the nearby double-doors pushing open at last, giving way to a rather haggard-looking Luis Navarro, clutching a data drive in his hand and looking as though he was running a little behind on sleep. Star sent a friendly wave over to the broad Costa Rican man, which he returned hastily, making his way to the front of the table where the projector machine stood ready to present.

“Sorry I’m so late, after sounding so urgent,” Luis said with a sigh, plugging his drive into the projector and allowing it to sputter to life, “So, Nosir, did you fill in the Vox about the situation?”

Nosir just frowned and looked away at that, prompting Star to glibly pipe up, “Nah, he’s just been starin’ daggers at me the whole time. What’s up, exactly? I know the George Coles Day Parade is downtown today, is this about the mimes again? I told the mimes to stop pullin’ parts off of one another in front of the kids, what more do ya want me to do?”

“No, no,” Luis sighed again, rubbing the ridge of his nose with his fingers, “The mimes are… fine, ay, carajo… no, this is something new.”

As he spoke, disquietedly adjusting the collar of his anachronistically-cheerful red Hawiian shirt, the projector finally warmed up enough to begin casting its image on the far wall of the conference room, across from the double-doors through which the big man had entered. The image was the front page of a newspaper, which Star recognized quickly as the student newspaper of the University of Maricadia, the main campus of which was in the city - not too far from her apartment, actually. The headline, in big bold impact font at the top, read ‘COLLEDGE HALL STUDENT STRIKE ENTERS SECOND WEEK - INQUIRIES STILL MET WITH SILENCE’

Luis and Nosir both pointedly turned to Star, who idly began inspecting the attached black-and-white image on the article after the words and letters of the body started to blur and shift around in her vision. Colledge Hall was a student housing complex just across the street from the main campus, she recalled from her misbegotten three months of trying out university before promptly dropping out. The building looked about the same as she remembered it looking, based on the attached image, but she couldn’t exactly say she’d been in there much in her day - Haviland and Callbeck Halls had been the party capitols of student life there, since they were the halls situated furthest from the campus, so those had been where she’d spent most of her time. 

“They’re calling it a student strike,” Luis finally explained, clearly not seeing as much recognition in Star’s eyes as he was perhaps expecting, “Because nobody’s really sure what else it could be. But no authoritative body has reported receiving any lists of demands. The entire residency of this hall, almost five hundred students living in campus dorm rooms, has gone completely silent for the past week and a half. Nobody in or out, all the doors and exits are sealed up. Texts and messages from friends or family on the inside are going unanswered. Hell, nobody can even see in through the windows.”

“I mean… definitely sounds like Orbis business,” Star nodded along slowly, “Y’know, innocents in peril, supernatural fuckery that needs some champions thrown at it to hit it until it dies, sure, sure. But what makes ya think it’s got anything to do with the Dreaming? It ain’t exactly flashy, it sounds more like Limbo stuff, maybe the Hells.”

“Around 9 in the evening last night,” Nosir picked up with a huff, “The Society of the Weird received what we can only refer to as a… distress call. In the form of… well, a young man in a sporting mascot costume bursting through the front doors of our office, screaming at the top of his lungs to alert the Vox Phantasmatum towards the university, before collapsing into a heap and proclaiming in an entirely different voice that he’d just been possessed.”

Star blinked, suddenly thoughtful, her crystals abruptly blinking into a concerned indigo, “A mascot costume, like…”

“The university’s mascot, yes. A… gopher, is it? By the name of–”

“Galdric,” Star pursed her lips, launching herself to her feet and stepping up to the projector, “When the kid shouted, did it sound… sleazy, to you? And a little bit sloshed, maybe?”

Nosir didn’t even need to respond to that; his orange eyes widening in a somewhat satisfying pout of surprise told Star all she needed to know.

Galdric, she thought, thinking back to the last time she’d seen that drunken, perverted little dream spirit prancing around the Dreaming and making a nuisance of himself, I suppose it has been a little while since I heard from him… and a while since a last time the Northumberland nymphs came to complain to me about his behaviour… if he’s been trapped somehow, by something at the university, it must have just taken him this long to gather enough strength to sound the alarm via one of his costumes in the waking world…

“So you see,” Nosir’s voice piping up once again brought Star out of her thoughts, causing her to scowl over her shoulder at his upturned chin, “It’s your mess, Thatcher, the Dreaming side of this city is your responsibility, after all. Time to be an adult and clean it up.”

“Fuck off, Nosir,” Star wheeled around on her heel to face the wizard, ‘The least ya could do is say what you fuckin’ mean with your chest, man! If you’re tryna say this is my fault, just fuckin’ out with it, already!”

Nosir’s eyes widened all of a sudden, arcana sparking in bright orange light in his palm as he slapped something out of the air in between them, evidently dispelling some magical effect that Star hadn’t even been aware she was hurling at him in her outburst, not that she particularly cared. At some point, evidently, her wings had unfurled themselves once again, with multi-pupilled and kaleidoscoping eyes erratically opening and closing in between her feathers to glare and leer and see at him. 

“Control yourself, damn it all!” Nosir cursed under his breath, skin beginning to crystallize as he protected himself against the waves of raw phantasmogoria began to wash over him, Dreaming beginning to press against the barrier to the waking world all around them, “This is precisely the problem with you, you have no sense of the discipline or responsibility that your station holds! This city would be better off if I–”

Thooooooom!

“Gah!” Star yelped in surprise as a sudden concussive blast of energy sent her stumbling a few feet to the right, wings quickly disappearing into a swarm of monarch butterflies so as to not get smacked against the wall as her back found it. Nosir had been knocked back too, it appeared, though he seemed to have gotten the worse of it, having been pushed back a good 20 feet and fallen ass over teakettle, to the point that Star could only see his sensible loafers flailing awkwardly in the air over the ridge of the table, before he righted himself and pushed himself up with a scowl.

Luis was noticeably larger than he had been a few moments ago, his former stocky five-ten frame now looming over the cramped meeting room at a solid eight and a half feet, with muscles that had been respectable before now as thick and sinewy as underwater data cables. All he’d done was assume his altered form, but the sheer air and energy displacement from his rapid growth had been enough to send the pair of them sprawling.

“Enough,” Luis’s deepened voice growled, the newfound pure gold of his eyes making it difficult to tell who he was looking at, expression stern and impatient, “This is a briefing meeting, not a playground spat. And the meeting, as I see it, is finished. Dean Wyndran, your attendance and insight has been appreciated, you may now leave. I shall finish directing the Vox Phantasmatum from here. Is that copacetic?”

Nosir, to his credit, only let his aggravated scowl remain on his face for a single breath longer, before he stiffened up his expression and posture, fixed the collar of his suit-jacket, bowed slightly in respect to the towering Luis, and made his exit through the double-doors to the far wall. Luis just sighed, shaking his head, and promptly relaxed his form once again, slowly shrinking down to his natural size and flicking off the projector. He met Star’s gaze as his eyes returned to normal, his glare softening as he did so, prompting Star to laugh aloud merrily and stride forward to clap him lightly on the shoulder.

“Way to steal the show, big guy!” she whooped, “I dare say, you had that ass scared for a split second there, I think!”

“As if,” Luis shook his head solemnly and ran a hand through his thick-braided hair, “Out of the three people who were in this room, we all know I am by far the least threatening. I just… apologize, for him. His attendance was a necessity, as he was the one who brought this issue to us here at the Orbis, but I understand that he’s…”

“...a bit of a room-killer?” Star finished, and Luis just grunted his assent, before reaching over to plant a meaty hand assuringly on her shoulder.

“...not particularly aware of how important to this city you and your gifts are,” he finished kindly, giving her a broad, and affable smile, before his expression withered once again, “A sentiment that… many of my colleagues and superiors here in the Orbis Elinvar are unfortunately more closely aligned with than my own.”

“Being why I’m the only sucker you called here about this mess,” Star rolled her eyes, crystals flicking to an irritated ruby as she broke away from Luis’s touch, folding her arms impetuously and leaning back against the wall.

“You’re the most knowledgeable person in the entire province, probably even country, about the Dreaming,” Luis shook his head, pulling up a chair to sit down a short distance across from her, causing her to be looking down at him from where she stood, “Not to mention the most innately gifted sorceress we have the contact information of, and that’s of any nature or persuasion. There was nobody else to call. I’m sorry that you feel singled out, but we would really appreciate your help, Star.”

Star’s tensed shoulders drooped slightly at her old friend’s pleading tone, stooping her chin downwards so as to meet his eyes over the top of her sunglasses.

“Yeah, yeah, I mean, of course I’m gonna go,” she muttered at last, rolling her eyes, “Even if it’s not Dreaming stuff specifically, Galdric’s one of mine. If he’s in some shit, I’ll bail him outta it. We’re only like a ten-minute flight from the place, I’ll scope it out after I get some lunch…”

Luis’s eyes lit up at that, a well-humored smile spreading across his broad features once again that Star, for all her desire to continue to appear pouty, couldn’t help but mirror. As she met the big man’s gaze once again, though, and the silence between them dragged on just a hair too long, she couldn’t help but notice that his cheeks had grown ever-so-slightly rosy, and that his gaze was drifting somewhat lower than her eyeline.

“...a-ahem…” Luis spluttered after a few seconds, finally realizing he’d been caught after Star’s expression had taken on a mischievous, self-satisfied simper, “Ah, you… you look good, today… did you have… plans, or…?”

“Nothing more than the usual,” Star laughed at his obvious embarrassment, leaning forward slightly so as to increase his view straight down her cleavage, “Why? Were you fixin’ to meet up for more… off-the-clock team-building exercises?”

Luis, evidently, couldn’t think of a very good response to that, based on how many times in the span of five seconds his mouth noiselessly opened and closed, eyes flickering up and down at a rate that almost made her fear he’d get dizzy.

“Hah, okay, easy, big guy,” she finally relented, giving up her mischievous eyebrow-wiggling in trade for striding over and punching Luis good-naturedly on the shoulder once again, “You weren’t a bad hookup, but I get the feelin’ we both know that if we take it any further than that, it’s gonna become somethin’ more than that, and I don’t think either ‘a us really wants it to be more than that, so we really gotta head this one off at the pass. Pinky promise to not make it weird, yeah?”

Luis blinked as Star extended a pinky towards him, other hand assertively on her hip and smirking down at him.

“It’s… not that I disagree,” he began with a longsuffering smirk of his own, eyeing the proffered pinky, “But I wasn’t the one who sent you the string of indecent selfies in the dead of night two nights ago, you know.”

“Did I do that? I don’t remember doing that,” Star lied through her teeth, smile widening as the bright, naughty magenta of her crystals betrayed her, “My phone musta done that on its own. You know, it’s always trying to get me dates, disobedient little bugger.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Luis responded sardonically, but obediently slipped his pinky into hers and ratified the proffered pinky promise. Her brilliant ploy having been successful, Star quickly flitted a fragment of her consciousness into his through the connection of their fingers, sneaking a glance at the mental folder so conveniently labeled ‘Star Wet Dreams’, filing away the information for later use, and promptly breaking off the connection before he ever had the chance to feel it happen. Letting out a small hum of satisfaction at her success, Star turned towards the door to leave, intimately aware of how Luis’s eyes remained fixed on her backside with every clicking, subtle-hip-swaying step.

“Oh, by the way,” she suddenly realized, spinning on a heel and glancing down, holding up the golden heart pendant that had so perplexed her that morning, “What do you think of this thing, since you were just lookin’ so intently at it? Think it suits me?”

“Oh, I… suppose?” Luis blinked, surprised, “I’m not sure, really, I wouldn’t have thought about it. Do you not think it does?”

Star just hummed, staring down at the shiny thing around her neck once again. It was still cold to the touch, colder than it should have been, being pressed against her body heat for over an hour now, but it was slightly warmer than it had been.

Star twirled it around curiously between her fingers for just a moment more, before shrugging, waving a hasty goodbye to Luis, and departing, taking to the skies once again and soaring off in the direction of the University of Maricadia’s main campus. 

~~~

As much as flying delighted her, the simple pleasure of the wind beating against her face and alighting beneath her wings being one of many carnal pleasures she simply couldn’t seem to get enough of, Star also liked to spend a little time on the streets, when she had the time to. It became easy, after a while in the air, to confuse the little specks on the ground for less than the people they truly were, so she was happy to set down a couple of street blocks away from her destination and walk the rest of the way. Besides, there was an épicerie between here and there that she remembered from her school days; Cosmo’s was just about the only place you could get a half-decent bacon-egg-and-cheese in the district of Brackley, and her rumbling stomach was beginning to remind her that the only things she’d ingested in the past twelve-or-so hours was cheap liquor, sperm, and probably enough soft drugs to take down a small elephant.

Star’s crystals danced in a cheery green glow as she strolled down the sidewalk of the bustling University Avenue, taking a deep breath and catching the familiar scent of youthful hope curling around crushing existential dread that told her the university was just around the corner. The U-Maricadia main campus was situated around the northwestern edge of Brackley, before the student-culture melting pot of academia and nighttime venues gave way to the hardier, warehouse-riddled and old-generation immigrant neighborhoods of Rustico beyond. It was a blessing that she found herself this far into the northern part of town today; the stuffy agents and salarymen mostly kept themselves restricted to the more financially impressive central district of Charlotte, towards the south, and those types were never as much fun to be around when the veil was as thin as it was today.

Star’s smile widened as her soft scarlet eyes glimmered, her sight piercing the veil and allowing the Dreaming to bleed into sight around her. It wasn’t quite so dramatic a change as it would be to physically traverse the Dreaming, of course, that side of reality was rather irreconcilably different to the waking world, but its effects bled through the veil much more than most knew - especially here in Charlicton, Maricadia, where the very existence of a certain Whymsite sorceress brought the entire city much closer in touch with the Dreaming than anywhere else. 

On the other side of the street, a little girl clutching a large crochet wolf in one hand and a dripping ice cream cone in the other was wailing to her parents that they “hadn’t gotten ‘Nex’ any ice cream”, and how that was hardly fair. Star giggled a bit behind her hand as the small wolf glanced over its shoulder at her, sharing a wink with the Vox Phantasmatum, and Star dutifully pressed a bit of starry whimsy into the parents’ minds with a flick of her fingers, causing them to at last acquiesce and return to the ice cream parlour.

A young man stood uncomfortably at a bus stop that Star walked past, clearly fidgety and dysphoric in the bright pink t-shirt and makeup that a remarkably uninsightful parent or guardian must have dressed him in for school. Star smiled and blew him a kiss and a wink behind his back, causing the appalling getup to expand and morph around him into a tasteful red hoodie and black jeans, and his unsightly girlish bra underneath obediently expanded and morphed itself into a well-fitting binder. 

A sharp shout of a patrolman nearby startled a shark-mouth-masked youth into dropping his can of spraypaint, halfway through tagging some slogan or sign onto a nearby brick wall, taking off in the other direction as the portly officer waddled his way into an attempt to make chase. Star rolled her eyes and simply flicked her wrist at the affair, allowing the graffiti to peel itself off the wall and hogtie the hollering policeman amongst its knotted, messy lines, allowing its creator to make their escape over a nearby diamond-gridded fence and away.

These dreams didn’t need her to exist, of course. But it was the right and privilege of Star Thatcher, Vox Phantasmatum, to show them how good it felt to be real.

It seemed like a slow midday at Cosmo’s, the small corner store just across from the street where the brick buildings and well-maintained pathways of the campus began, as Star pushed her way through the humble glass door. The interior was pretty much as she remembered it from her brief stint as a student, with rows of snack foods and essentials lined up on freestanding shelving beneath low-hanging fluorescent lighting. There was a gawky young man behind the deli counter with a hard-of-hearing badge displayed on his lapel, so Star simply mimed the drinking of a coffee and the eating of a sandwich to him, followed by a thumbs-up that he graciously returned before turning and setting to work. 

“Star, mon cher!” a husky, friendly, thickly-Francophonic voice rang out from a nearby shelf, just above Star’s eyeline, “Welcome, bienvenue!”

“Bonjour, Cos,” Star turned up with a smile, greeting the épicerie’s real owner in all his sleek feline glory, “Been a while since I made time! You been livin’ good?”

“Ah, is tough to complain,” Cosmo said with a yawn, stretching himself out on the shelf before settling back down, yellow eyes turned down to meet Star’s as she reached up to pet him, stroking his sleek black fur in a familiar rhythm that made him purr, “The students, you know, they love a shop cat like me, is a novelty! They come, they get coffee, they pet, they scratch… sometimes they buy kitty treats from my own store just to give them to me! Ahh… is a good racket, you know.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Star laughed, retrieving her hot coffee and breakfast sandwich from the deli boy as he held them out to her. She took a sip and a bite, let out a nigh-orgasmic groan of delight as the final, faintest echoes of her morning fatigue left her, and promptly waved her hand over the change-filled tip jar on the counter, causing every coin therein to morph and graduate one value higher. 

“Alors, what brings you to my humble shop today?” Cosmo inquired, leaping off of his high perch and down to the deli counter, dismissing his employee to the back room with a respectful nod of his feline head, “Or, if I may venture a guess, are you here about that business with those students holed up in that hall?”

Star blinked, halfway through a sip of her coffee, as she glanced up to study the black cat’s expression.

“You know about it, then?” she eventually asked, wrapping up her sandwich for later and polishing off her coffee.

“You know, I hear things, I see things,” Cosmo shrugs, “The students and teachers who come here, they gossip. That, and as well, you are not the first one to come here this morning in suspicion of that place, you know.”

“I’m not?” Star cocked her head, crystals sparking to a deep, inquisitive blue, “I thought I was the only idiot the Orbis called.”

“Well, this young man, he didn’t seem like Orbis. Didn’t carry himself that way… he did seem local, though, maybe you know him. Dark skin, white hair, plenty of ink… had a bit of a golden aspect to him, if you’re familiar?”

Star blinked, taking an inadvertent second exhale as her heart skipped a beat in surprise, sending her momentarily coughing, causing Cosmo to cock his head at her curiously as she quickly righted herself. Her crystals, which had abruptly taken on a surprised hue of orange, gradually shifted to a soft pink, which she quite deliberately chose to not put a word to in her mind.

“Yeah,” she finally mustered, “Yeah, I know him. Just… surprised he’s here, ha… was this recent? Would he still be…”

“Couldn’t have been more than une demi-heure ago,” Cosmo replied gruffly, yellow eyes flashing with amusement at Star’s sudden befuddlement, “He’s probably still–”

Without so much as hearing another word out of the cat’s mouth, Star was hastily dancing her way between the shelves and back out the door, suddenly aware of a newfound warmth that was pressing against her chest, pulsing softly and mimicking the beating of her own heart.

“I’ll see if I can catch up to him!” she called over her shoulder, the hanging bell clanging in protest as she opened the épicerie’s glass door a touch too hard, shooting the talking cat an amicable wave farewell before dashing off across the street towards the sprawling campus of the university.

“Wait, I think you forgot to pa–” Cosmo’s parting yowl was cut off by the door swinging closed, and Star was taking flight again before she could even bother registering it. 

Lachlan’s here.

Star’s pendant was finally beginning to warm up.

~~~

Colledge Hall wasn’t particularly hard to find, even with her limited memory of how the university campus dormitories were laid out. Star could practically taste the place by the time she was even halfway there, as though there was some dump nearby that was offgassing rancid fumes into the air. 

The place was suffocated in nightmare.

Star’s expression soured as she looked down and across the street at the tall brick dormitory, having flown up to assume a vantage point on a nearby science hall and garner a lay of the land. On the outside, in the waking world, it looked much like it had been described in the newsletter clipping Luis had shown off - ominous and quiet, with no lights visible in any of the windows, either from curtains being drawn or from a sheer, suffocating absence that seemed to permeate the place to the naked eye. To someone capable of seeing the Dreaming side of things, though, the place was embroiled in a scintillating miasma of iridescent sludge, a tornado of loose umbra and faint wailing making it difficult to even see the brickwork through the haze. Occasionally, the tarlike exterior would manifest a limp, desperate appendage, a hand or claw that would reach out and grasp desperately at the nearby buildings or trees, only to be pulled back inside of the mass by an unseen force.

And there he was, tugging at the sealed front door, stubborn as a mule. Lachlan Strate was little more than a white speck from Star’s elevated eyeline at the moment, but she still watched in adoring amusement as he tugged at the handle, walked over to the nearest window to try to peer inside, return to the door to try the handle again, try and fail to break the window, and so on, and so on. 

I could watch this aaaallll day, Star thought, humming softly as her crystals sparkled rosy and delighted, Buuuuuuut, it’s probably high time I go save him from himself. Before he breaks a nail, really.

Unfurling her wings and diving off the science centre, Star crossed the distance with a single soaring glide, touching down with a quiet grace about twenty feet behind the door to Colledge Hall, which Lachlan was back to studying, dark-skinned hand pressed up against the glass and face close, as if studying the composition of the material. His attire was elegant in its simplicity as it ever was, a loose and threadbare muscle top with a logo of a local indie band to show off his heavily-tattooed arms atop a pair of baggy white cargo pants. His hair, pristine white locs pulled into a messy tie at the back, was a little more disheveled than it usually was, though how hard he’d been trying that pesky door might have something to do with that.

After about twenty seconds of having gone completely unnoticed behind him, even to the point where she was standing only three feet away, Star eventually rolled her eyes, leaned into his ear, and whispered “Boo.”

Star burst out into a cackle as she was forced to suddenly duck to avoid a brilliant flash of golden light, launching herself backwards to evade a second bolt of energy that singed the square of concrete where she’d been standing with a holy flare. Her voice had come out like a nightmarish growl, beyond her intentions, and it was only after Lachlan’s wild-eyed expression found her in his whip-around and his hands had begun glowing with another prepared attack that he finally recognized her, standing down and mouth dropping agape.

“STAR!?” Lachlan exclaimed, golden eyes wide with shock and horror, “My fuckin’ God, don’t sneak up on me like that! You tryin’ to give a man a heart attack, today!?”

“Lachie, your faaaaace, ahahahaaaaa!” Star guffawed aloud, one shaky finger raised to point at Lachlan whilst the rest of her doubled over in laughter, “I was barely even sneaking! What were you even doing, caressing the door!? After all that rough treatment, ya think you’re gonna, what, rizz it into opening!? Haaaaaah…”

Lachlan’s expression gradually slackened, taking on a longsuffering half-frown as he rolled his eyes and folded his arms over his chest, patiently waiting for her to finish.

“...you about done?” he finally asked, after Star had successfully righted herself and wiped a small tear away from the corner of her eye, her crystals positively waltzing in a gleeful lilac.

“Yeh… yea, I’m done…” she wheezed out, before grinning wide, lurching forward, and wrapping her arms around her oldest friend in a tight hug, “I haven’t seen you in so long! I mean, would it kill ya to text me a little more often, dude? What the hell’s it been, not since the…”

“...not since the Dracula impersonator,” Lachlan eventually acquiesced, Star’s bubbly joy clearly making quick work of his affect of discontentment as he chuckled, sighed, and returned her tight embrace, “Yeah, I know. I’ve been busy, you know how it is. You stayin’ fresh, livin’ good?”

“So the eyewitness accounts tell me, but I can rarely remember the morning after,” Star cracked, “I used to see you all the time at those kinds ‘a parties, bein’ all responsible and makin’ sure the rest of us never got too wild. Where have you been, man?”

“Ah, well, you know, Star…” Lachlan sighed and ran a hand over his white locs, smoothing down some of the frizz, “Life’s a lot fuller for me, these days. Same as it is for us all, really. I got people and places to look after down in Crapaud. The soup kitchen, the library…”

“Yeah…” Star murmured, finally breaking off the embrace but leaving one hand on Lachlan’s arm, meeting his gaze, “I’ve been hearing about that bullshit ‘urban expansion’ crap they’ve been pushin’ down your end. I did offer to come help ya with that, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lachlan sighed with a nod, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly with his other hand before placing it atop Star’s and squeezing softly, “But you got your hands full with all the Dreaming stuff, right? What’s the magic folks’s word for you, the uh… Vox of Phantoms, something like that?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Star nodded along, “But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t come help out! I’m literally one call away, Lachie. Most of the time. When I’m sober enough to pick up my phone, anyway.”

“Right, right,” he smiled, squeezing her hand again, “Well, I got my fights, you got yours. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I made time to see ya, shit’s just been hell down on the south side.”

Star just sighed and shrugged, seeing the futility in pressing any further and relenting, stepping away and glancing off to the side. Lachlan Strate was easily Star’s oldest and most consistent friend and confidant in the city, with the pair of them having attended the same middle school no more than a ten-minute subway ride from where they now stood together. They’d been inseparable for a time, practically glued together at the hip even as they both awoke to their own supernatural natures and potentials, but that sort of thing became a lot more difficult after Star dropped out of their high school to see to her duties as the Vox Phantasmatum, whilst Lachlan had remained. They’d never completely fallen out of touch, and they weren’t so distant as perhaps they had been back in those earliest days after her dropping-out, but Star could never quite help the feeling that they were only going to drift further apart as life carried on. Lachlan had been becoming more and more reticent with calling her down to help out whenever trouble stirred in his part of the city, and with her increasing list of both professional and social obligations, it had been a few months by this point since the last time they’d done more than the occasional catching-up call or text.

She’d never let on to him how much that ate away at her, every morning she woke up and didn’t see a text from him, asking her to come hang, watch a movie, smoke some weed, or skip rocks into the strait. No matter how long ago those days were. She’d never let that on, and she certainly wasn’t about to start now. 

“Well,” Star quickly redirected, seeing her crystals beginning to fade into a glum dark grey and eager to distract both Lachlan and herself from that fact, “What brings ya all the way up to my neck ‘a the woods, in that case?”

“Ah…” Lachlan looked away and winced, almost looking just as awkward as she felt all of a sudden, “One of the girls at the library has a friend who lives in this building, goin’ to school here for… anthropology, I think? Anyway, if you’re here, then you probably know what’s been up with this place the last couple weeks… I’m tryin’ to figure out a way in, but it’s like this place is completely cut off…”

“One of the girls, eh~?” Star teased, poking a jokingly accusatory finger into the divot in his well-muscled chest, “Ooh, big hero, you are, you dog. How’s Haddie, by the way?”

“For one thing,” Lachlan smirked and caught her wrist with his hand, pulling her in to stare witheringly down at her, “Library girl’s name is Priya, and she is very much gay. And for another thing… Haddie and I have been over. Like, that’s last year news, Star.”

“Wha– serious!?” Star exclaimed, smacking the taller man on the shoulder in appallment, “How did I not hear about this? I follow you on Instagram, man! Hell, I think I still follow her on Instagram by association! People are supposed to post about this kinda thing! What the hell even happened between you two?”

“Ah, it’s nothing,” Lachlan shook his head, “Nothing worth talkin’ about, anyway. Besides, there’s work that’s gotta be done here and now, and if you’re here, I’m bettin’ the Dreaming’s got something to do with it?”

Star could hardly say she was satisfied with that less-than-elegant dismissal, but she could tell by his familiar expression of… patient impatience, she’d call it, that she wasn’t going to be getting any further up that hill right now. 

“Yeah, it’s some Dreaming stuff,” she finally nodded begrudgingly, “Whole place is being suffocated in a nightmare of some kind, I dunno. We’ll have to see when we get in.”

“And… how do you propose we get in?” Lachlan asked, cocking his head to one side, “I’ve thrown just about everything I’ve got at this, even tried teleportin’ in, no dice. Place doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Well…” Star sighed, wincing at what she knew she was about to say, “I think I can get us in, but… I’d have to take you to the other side.”

Lachlan’s face fell into a wince to mirror her own, tossing his head back with a soft groan, “Agh… I was worried you were gonna say that.”

“Why do you hate being in the Dreaming so much!?” Star exclaimed, throwing her hands up at the frustrating, but hardly new, reticence from her friend, “Every time I bring other people to the Dreaming, they love it there! It’s literally the place where dreams come true! Any dreams!”

“I just… it doesn’t feel real enough to me,” Lachlan sighed, before holding up his hands in surrender, “But look, I’m not complainin’. If you got a way to get us in through the Dreaming, I’m game. Sorry, Star. I’ll focus up.”

With that, Lachlan let his hands fall limply to his sides, bowing his head and closing his eyes in preparation for the familiar transition. Star just sighed, biting her lower lip in a sudden, soft compunction, and stepped forward to stand just in front of him.

Star was on the taller side of women, standing at five foot eleven even when she wasn’t sporting three-inch pumps on her boots, and even then, she had to reach up a little bit to brush a few unruly white locs out of Lachlan’s face, pressing two fingers to his temple with her left hand and two fingers to her own temple with her right. His lips parted softly as he exhaled, clearly attempting to force himself to relax beneath her touch, which made something soft and small inside of her hurt, for some reason. Tearing her scarlet gaze away from his lips and their general proximity, she just took a deep breath, steadied her footing, and pressed her fingers inside. Past parting flesh and concrete matter, she touched the thing that was Lachlan, somewhere that biology gave way to wonder and a brilliant, golden light that made her feel warmer than she’d ever felt before.

“Dream with me,” she murmured, and then they were somewhere else. 

Even for Star, the first few moments upon transitioning from the waking world into Dreaming were always a little bit of a rush. It wasn’t as though the terrain around them changed, they were still standing on a set of concrete steps leading up to a brick student dorm building, and yet they both suddenly found themselves stumbling a few steps to the side, Lachlan’s hand shooting out to grab Star and steady her. 

Like a hypnic jerk, Star recalled Luis describing it to her one time, the first time a mission had given her cause to bring him to Dreaming, But one that doesn’t really end with you bolt upright, because there is no ‘upright’ to get to, so you just… need a few seconds to get used to it.

“Goddamn,” Lachlan groaned, rubbing his head and squatting down a bit to steady himself, before looking around and widening his eyes in shock and awe, “Goddamn…”

“Steady, Lachie,” Star chuckled and knelt down beside him, patting his back in a comforting gesture that was only half-mocking at most, “Ya haven’t hurled since the apple pie I baked ya for your sweet sixteen, don’t go breakin’ your streak now.”

“Oh, great,” Lachlan groaned in good humour, seeming to slowly stabilize beneath her touch, “Remind me of that, now, just what I needed to settle my stomach, thanks so much.”

Star just cracked a smile and batted at his shoulder affectionately, stepping away from him as he collected himself and glancing off into the fullness of the realm in which they now stood. The sky of the Dreaming, a collage of shifting violets, greens and scarlets, was awash with stars. Some were around the size of normal stars, others you couldn’t even cover completely by holding your hand up against them, and every single one of them was shooting. Trails of cosmic dust, music notes, glitter and rainbows, and everything else that made children smile, were falling and dissipating to the “earth” below, fizzling out and turning into a shared mist like those spring rains that never quite make it to the ground. The moon, for there was no sun in the sky, was larger than the moon had ever seemed in the waking world, and seemed to be sitting behind the stars, rather than sharing the sky with them. Star gave it a friendly wave; it had been a few weeks since she’d spoken to it, she realized, perhaps she’d pay a closer visit later that day.

“Well, heya, kiddoes!” the science centre that Star had been perched on across the street hollered genially, bouncing up and down with excitement as a waterfall of uranium-green liquid began to pour out of its chimneys and form a pond, “Are you ready to learn about pyrolysis?”

A chorus of ‘yay!s’ and ‘hooray!s’ suddenly erupted from all around, as a parade of garden gnomes suddenly began to push themselves out of nearby bushes and hedges, each adorned with their own little porcelain backpack, each of them racing to be the first one through the doors of the science centre. At one point, the shoving and scrambling became a little too roughhouse-y for one poor little grey-bearded and dunce-capped gnome, who was accidentally trampled to the point that the lower half of his body was crushed into powder. Naturally, he started screaming bloody murder at that, but none of the other gnomes paid him any attention, casually walking past or over him and through the doors of the science centre, chatting amongst themselves about their favourite subjects and whatnot.

Star and Lachlan just stood there, the latter seemingly utterly immobile with dumbfoundedness, whilst the former just regarded his reaction with a thinly-veiled amusement. 

“...my dreams are nothing like this,” Lachlan muttered, shaking his head and turning to Star at a merciful break in the screaming.

“You dream?” Star asked, tilting her head, “I’ve never been able to find your dreams. I was beginning to think you just didn’t.”

“I…” Lachlan began, before trailing off uncertainly, expression unreadable. Star eventually rolled her eyes and waved her hand dismissively at him, before reaching up and plucking two similarly-sized stars out of the sky and tossing them into the street at the injured gnome, where they grew into the two wheels of a gnome-sized wheelchair that he was able to hoist himself onto.

“Thank you, Miss Thatcher!” he called with a grateful wave, before collecting his scattered belongings and rolling his way into the science centre to join his peers. A loud ‘gulp’ sound came from the building, before it seemed to sigh in contentment and lean back, a massive facemask wrapping itself around the front face of the building before it began to gently snore. 

If Lachlan weren’t here, Star might have laughed at that. But he was, and Star couldn’t keep herself from noticing the obvious discomfort in the twinge of his brow, or the way that the cool, sweet-smelling mist that curled up all around them seemed to be deliberately shying away from his presence.

It didn’t feel right for Lachlan to be the reason that Star wasn’t laughing. She did not like that one bit.

“Right then… anyway…” Lachlan strained out, jerkily turning on a heel and staring back up at the Dreaming reflection of Colledge Hall, “So, you think you can get us in from this side?”

“Should do, yup,” Star nodded, taking a second to examine the sight for herself again as well. Now that they were fully on the side of Dreaming, she could see that it looked much like it had before, when the sight was only bleeding through the thin veil into the waking world. Now, though, the vortex of suffocating black sludge extended high into the sky, splashing against an invisible dome below the stars and raining in thin, droplet-like globules down all around them in a radius. Star’s eyes followed a single droplet as it landed onto the sidewalk in front of them, splatting softly, only to then reconstitute itself into a slug, inch itself onto the nearby grass, and begin burrowing downwards.

On the ground level, the sludge was cascading upwards in front of the door, perhaps just a few inches out from the wall. Star reached out to try to touch it, only for an ichor-black hand to shoot out from the mass and slap her hand aside, causing her to recoil with a yelp.

“NOBODY!” a chorus of voices sounded out from somewhere within, overlapping tones and genders and accents, muffled as though screamed from the inside of a filled water balloon, “THERE WILL NEVER BE ANYONE ELSE HERE! NOBODY!”

“Yeesh… feisty little nightmare…” Star grumbled, shaking out her stinging hand.

Lachlan frowned and stepped forwards, gingerly taking her hand in his and cupping his other hand over top of it. The long, cascading tapestries of tattoos down his arms pulsed for a single instant with golden, radiant light, and the pain subsided immediately.

“Is this one of the kinds of nightmares that are… alive?” he asked curiously, leaning forward to observe the door, “Like… dream spirits, you call ‘em?”

“Hard to say, but I doubt it,” Star shook her head, “Usually, when something like this happens, it’s just a garden-variety human nightmare gone fuckin’ haywire. We’ll learn more once we get in there, but we probably just gotta wake some poor sucker up.”

Lachlan just hummed, dutifully stepping back as Star stepped forwards again. Adjusting her sunglasses, and her crystals morphing into a brilliant, determined crimson, she reached her hand out towards the sludge wall again.

“I am the Vox Phantasmatum ‘a Charlicton, fuckin’ Maricadia,” she toned, gritting her teeth as she felt her hand come up against a resistant force, pushing through, “And you will grant me entrance… you fuckin’ piece ‘a– AGH-!”

CLANG!

Having put so much of her own bodyweight into pressing forwards against the resistance, Star hadn’t been altogether prepared for all the force pressing backwards against her to suddenly give out, the sludgy wall parting and the door swinging open, causing her to suddenly lurch forwards and flip over onto her back, legs sprawling out above her and her feet eventually ending up next to her head on either side.

Lachlan was doing a very bad job of pretending not to laugh, and a really good job of pretending not to notice the shortness of Star’s shorts, now that her ass was basically pointed up in the air directly at him. Both of these facts pissed her off a little bit, she couldn’t help but realize.

“That worked out,” he chuckled softly under his breath as Star gradually righted herself, dusting herself off as the doors swung shut again behind them.

“Don’t mention it!” Star inserted peppiness into her voice, hoping he wasn’t quite familiar enough anymore with the colours of her crystals to place the vibrant pink they had taken on as the flustered frustration that it was. Lachlan laughed at something in her expression anyway, though, causing her to retaliate by swatting at his stomach with her backhand, which of course only made the fluster deepen as heat began to rise in her ears.

Come on, for fuck’s sake… she nursed her pride internally, The least he could do is pretend that he still… ugh… fuck… damn it…

Slapping her cheeks to clear her head, and pointedly ignoring the cocked-brow look that she received from Lachlan for doing so, Star glanced around at their newfound surroundings to get a lay of the land. For all intents and purposes, what was now around them looked like a fairly standard, non-Dreaming school dorm hall entranceway, with a small common area lined up with chairs and coffee tables off to one side and a wall of cubby-hole mailboxes to the other. To the far end of the red-carpeted room was an elevator with an Out-Of-Order sign taped to it, at set of four vending machines, three of which also had an Out-Of-Order sign taped to them, and a small door with a symbol for stairs on a blue placard nailed beside it.

“Are we… back in the real world?” Lachlan wondered aloud, reaching up to a small IKEA painting on a nearby wall and feeling at it, as though trying to determine how solid it felt, “It seems normal in here. Not as… y’know.”

“No, this is still the Dreaming,” Star shook her head, stepping ahead and peering into the corners of the room, finding the tell-tale small spaces and corners where the edges began to blur, “It’s just that we’re inside of someone’s nightmare, now. This building is the backdrop of it, so it looks more or less how they know it looks, though there’s prolly some differences.”

“How did this nightmare get this out of hand?” Lachlan asked, frowning over at her, “And how did what’s happening in somebody’s nightmare, like… affect the real world so badly? I know it’s not the first time something like this has happened, but…”

Star just shrugged, “Veil’s especially thin right now, it kinda comes and goes in cycles. All kinds ‘a things can happen, right now. All we gotta do is find whoever’s havin’ this nightmare and snap ‘em out of it, a little jostle should do the trick. What I’m worried about is–”

“Oh. My. Gosh. Like, literally, I’m so serious, I cannot even with you right now.”

Star and Lachlan’s heads whipped over to the left, where a staticky and distorted voice echoed out from a darkened hallway. The sound was comparable to how the voice from the nightmare had sounded from the outside - a sludgy and curdled noise, a chorus of unplaceable voices, even when laced with the bizarrely vapid and dismissive tone that it was taking on. In the quiet, now that they were alert, Star could vaguely make out the sound of shuddering footsteps accompanying the droning words, seeming to shamble closer down the dark hallway, despite nothing quite coming into visibility quite yet. 

The footsteps seemed to be varied and overlapping as well, though Star couldn’t quite tell if that was just a universal effect of the noise of whatever was approaching, or if it meant there was more than one thing coming.

“God, the professors here are, like, such duds,” the voice or voices intoned again, closer than before and causing Star’s hackles rise as though she was hearing nails on a chalkboard, “Hey, are you coming to the football game tonight? Why not, you have somewhere else to be?”

Casting a sideward glance at Star, Lachlan firmed up his stance and made a ball with his hands, eyes flashing gold and tattoos pulsing with radiant light momentarily. As his fingers parted, a small orb of light remained in his palm, which he held aloft for a moment before releasing it, prompting it to float lazily forward and down the dark hallway, illuminating what was within. 

They looked like students. Save for the fact that none of them had anything more than a gaping black void where their faces ought to have been.

“EEEEW, STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU FREAK!” the phantasmagorical chorus cried out in an asymphonic wail, the not-students all shrinking and shying away from the light, devolving into nonverbal shrieking for a single, paralyzing moment before their faces all turned as one to lock onto Lachlan and Star.

“EYES UP!” Lachlan shouted as they all began to charge. 

“Shit!” Star cursed aloud, watching as the darkened hallway suddenly broke open like a burst pipe, a deluge of the faceless creatures crawling and scrambling over one another to try to get to the common area in which Star and Lachlan stood. Ironically, the evident animalistic frenzy was causing a bit of a bottleneck, though a handful still broke through and began surging forwards, clambering and lunging over furniture, void-hole faces hunched forwards and dripping with the same black ichor that had been surrounding the building outside. 

The golden light that surrounded her told Star that Lachlan had activated his aura. And despite it all, she smiled at the warm, comforting sensation of proximity that she hadn’t felt in so very long. 

“Eat this!” she screamed exuberantly, wild grin on her face and crystals glimmering a bold and brilliant amethyst, as she extended her arm towards the oncoming creatures. The flesh and bone of her extended arm peeled themselves back in a visceral corkscrew, like a potato being peeled in a single spiralling streak, and a deluge of absolute darkness blasted forth out of her arm like a fire hydrant, covering the six creatures closest to her. Their wails of thrallic wrath were replaced with muffled squeals of terror as the darkness enveloped them like cloaks, the very same darkness that inhabits the closets and the undersides of the beds of children at night, and they were unmade beneath it. The darkness splashed to the ground and dispersed, leaving nothing behind of the creatures it had enveloped, and Star’s arm reconstituted itself at her side as she glanced around wildly for an idea of what to do next.

“Just to check in,” Lachlan’s voice cried out from the side, a flash of golden light indicating that he’d just smited a lineup of his own void-faced assailants, before turning to Star, “These aren’t actual students we’re killing, right!?”

“The only real people on this side are us and whoever’s dreamin’ all this up!” Star shouted back, flicking her wrist and causing cartoon ‘ACME’  anvils to manifest in the air above a few more of the creatures, only to promptly fall and crush them, “These are prolly just specters, refractions ‘a the other people who live in this building. Killin’ these fuckin’ things is prolly actually savin’ ‘em in the waking world!”

“I’d really love a little bit more assurance than ‘prolly’...” Lachlan grumbled, but he reached to the side and yanked a stalk of bamboo out of a nearby plant pot all the same. Lachlan’s fighting style had always been improvisational, in the way of weapons; the city of Charlicton had a way of providing him with what he needed as he needed it. Star had seen him fighting with everything from fire axes to street signs to loose bricks and rebar before, all to roughly equivalent effect. In this case, the sturdy stalk of bamboo twirled in his hands like a quarterstaff, fending off a few lurching attacks from a few of the oncoming creatures before cracking them across the faceless heads, smiting and unmaking them into cinders on the wind where they stood.

“Just stay in your room, you little weirdo!” the screeching mass of bodies clogging up the entrance cried out as it suddenly gave out, the slow trickle of oncoming creatures suddenly evolving into a cascading glut. 

“Shit, that’s too many!” Lachlan cried out dashing to the side and grabbing Star by the arm, “Come on, we gotta go! The stairs, hurry!”

Star hissed and started to follow behind, but Lachlan’s jerking touch had come at a slightly inopportune moment, just as she was about to invoke the dreams of the drowning so as to hopefully push back the oncoming wave with a miniature tsunami of her own. Misdirected, the magical energy inside of her rebounded, and she could suddenly feel a familiar rising sensation in her chest as something was about to spring forth.

“Surge!” she shouted back towards Lachlan, whose eyes widened, quickly taking cover behind a nearby couch as the wave of screeching creatures drew closer by the second. Star took a deep breath and closed her eyes, surrendering to the sensation welling up inside her, and allowed the dreams within her to use her body as a conduit to emerge.

Sorcerers were different from other forms of spellcasters, at least by the officialized lexicon, in that the magic potentiality of sorcerers was innate to their physiology in some way -  usually coming from a magically potent lineage, or coming into contact with something that imbued one with powers beyond the usual mortal ken. In most such people, the act of controlling their arcana was of utmost importance to learn, as wild surges of uncontrolled and unrestrained power could often have devastating, unpredictable consequences.

That was a kind of self-control that Star had always struggled to motivate herself towards. In all things, but in her magic most importantly. There was a familiar giddiness in the feeling of surrendering to her wild surges, of the exciting unknown about to erupt, and she couldn’t help but let out an exuberant giggle as the stars began to dance in front of her eyes.

Star had absolutely no idea what was about to happen, and she welcomed that with open fucking arms.

The surge took her like an explosive force in all directions, a bright red gas that smelled cherry-blossom-sweet suddenly erupting out of her pores all around her body, filling the entire room with a rapidly-thickening scarlet haze. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the haze began to coalesce into shapes, hardening into place into dozens or hundreds of little red heart symbols floating in midair. 

The hearts suddenly sprouted stalks, which then sprouted bows into which they nocked themselves like arrows. And then the bows began to grow stubby little arms, which grew stubby little diaper-clad torsoes, which then grew wide-eyed cherub heads and tiny little wings, and the air around them was suddenly swarmed by a platoon of little baby cupids.

“Get ‘em, boys!” One of the cupids suddenly screamed, revealing about three rows of serrated teeth, and on command, the cherubs let out a ferocious battle cry and began to lay into the swath of void-headed creatures beneath them, felling them one by one with volley after folly of heart-tipped arrows that moreso ripped holes through their bodies than punctured them.

And then, just as quickly as the surge had overtaken Star, it was over. The bodies of the creatures were disintegrating into sludge on the ground, and the cupids in the air above her began to slowly turn back into mist and dissipate. The final cupid turned to Star with a giant, many-toothed grin, sent her an adorable wink that she was more than happy to return, and promptly popped into a handful of heart-shaped flower petals that drifted slowly to the floor.

Star just breathed in a contented sigh at that, her eyes drifting shut as she savoured the last little tingles of the surge as they faded from her body. Her whole body felt warm, but her heart was practically blazing, and her smile was brighter than the sky for it.

“Well, on the scale of them that I’ve seen…” Lachlan’s voice pulled her out of her reverie, opening her eyes to see him emerging from his hiding spot and fussing with one of his white locs, the end of which had apparently been clipped off by an arrow that had barely missed him, “...one of your more useful surges, to date, I think? Better than the time you made it rain chocolate milk for a week and a half, anyway.”

“Why, thank you, Lachie,” Star teasingly giggled at the slightly rattled expression on his face, reaching up with a sparkle in her fingers to regrow the severed hair, stroking his cheek for a moment with her hand, “You good? No stray hits?”

“I’m all good,” he nodded, “What about you? Any sudden, inexplicable feelings for me?”

Star balked for a second, her hand pulling back into a fist against her chest, suddenly defensive, “Uh… what?”

Lachlan blinked, tilting his head at her, “...you know, they were little cupids. Love arrow? First person you see, that kind of thing?”

“Ohhhhhhhh,” Star breathed a sudden sigh of recognition and relief, her crystals twinkling a slightly treacherous pink as she recovered from the sudden skipped beat, “Nah, no stray hits here. Hah, I mean, can you imagine, though?”

Lachlan just gave a noncommittal chuckle and wave of his hand at that, before promptly turning to survey the surrounding room, making sure it was safe. Star really wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, so she quite purposely decided to make absolutely nothing of it. 

“Sooooo…” she eventually continued, hopping forwards after a slightly-too-long silence, “Upstairs, then? Still gotta find that dreamer, ha…”

“Right,” Lachlan quickly agreed, expression unreadable as he turned and opened the door to the stairs, “Stay behind me, okay? Every chance we run into more of those things as we look around, and I’m a lot better at tankin’ hits than you are.”

Star just laughed and gave a little mock-salute to his official-sounding tone, which he rolled his eyes and humouringly returned, before the pair of them started up the stairs and began their well-oiled sweep of the rest of Colledge Hall.

The many cookie-cutter floors of the dormitory blew past as Star and Lachlan cleared them out one by one, each taking turns covering for the other’s downtime between castings and attacks, the pair of them falling into a rhythm that Star remembered from their earliest days, sharing an almost nostalgic smile with her old friend even as a streaking blade of golden light sheared off the arms of an encroaching void-head and a wisp of dream-fire incinerated a line of three more behind it. The creatures were still numerous, but their mass and accumulation never came close to touching the onslaught that the common area on the ground floor had been, with the most that ever came at them at once after that being five or six, which was easy enough for the pair of them to handle. 

“They seem to be clustering around social areas,” Lachlan remarked, stooping down to a felled void-head body and pulling free the pool cue that he had traded his bamboo staff for at some point, “Highest density around the kitchenettes and study spaces, have you noticed that?”

“Eh, only now that you mention it?” Star shrugged, tapping her boots against a countertop to get off some gunk she’d gotten on them from kicking a head in, “Seems pretty clear from what they keep yammerin’ and screamin’ about that the other students are a primary focus of the nightmare, makes sense they’d be hangin’ out around those spaces. We just gotta find the source.”

It was three more floors up from there, the second-to-highest floor of the entire dorm hall, that they finally found what they were looking for. Whilst every door to every room had been pretty unremarkable so far, perhaps the occasional one having a sparkly custom nameplate or the odd sock on a handle, the fixtures around the door to room 604 were clearly not common decorations. 

“Safe to assume this is it,” Star hummed, leaning down to inspect the thick, padlocked chains wrapping around and securing the door in place, all seemingly made of and dripping with the familiar black sludge that was characteristic of this nightmare at this point, “Not sure why, but I guess the dreamer is locked up in their room. Weird.”

“How is that weird?” Lachlan asked, hefting his pool cue over his shoulder and regarding her curiously, “If the halls outside were being stalked by these things, and I wasn’t who ‘n’ what I am, I’d probably hole myself up in my room too.”

“Yeah, but this is a nightmare,” Star waved her arms in a sweeping gesture, “When’s the last time you hid from a monster in a nightmare and it didn’t find you anyway? Senses of security aren’t native to shit like this. If the source dreamer is locked up in there, it’s because whatever’s in there is even worse than bein’ out here with the fuckin’ creeps.”

The white-haired man sighed, dragging a tired hand down his face, “...right, of course… well, you want to do the honours, or should I?”

Star just shrugged, smiled, and politely bowed to the side, gesturing for him to have his way. After firming up his expression for a few moments, Lachlan hoisted his pool cue aloft, let out a cry of exertion and determination, and brought it down on the chains. 

Sssshhiiiiing!

In a golden flare, the pool cue seemed to cleave through the heavy chains, as though it was a sword and the chains had all the density of cheap soap. They crumbled and fell away, the nails driving them into the walls seeming to fall limp and crumble into dust alongside them as their function was disrupted so entirely. In a fluid motion, Lachlan flung open the door, making to charge forth before promptly slipping and falling flat on his back with a dull thud, as a sudden wave of tarlike ichor spewed forth from the room.

“Augh, damn it, fuck, this shit’s nasty!” Lachlan cried out, wiping his sullied hands on his pants and making to stand again, the liquid pooling out from the room and growing an increasingly-large puddle around him. 

It must have been at least two feet high in there, Star thought as she gingerly helped her friend to his feet, staring into the room curiously, Guess that tears it, this is definitely where the stuff is coming from…

As much as they might have been expecting a fight, there was nothing that stepped forth from within the room to meet them. No deluge of the void-head students, or any other worse horrors. After a few anticlimactic seconds, Star and Lachlan just exchanged a glance and shrugged, before Star led the way into the room, Lachlan trailing a few steps behind and nursing his bruised tailbone with a slight wince. 

Room 604 was barren, even by typical student accommodation standards. The walls were completely vacant, save for a single poster of a map of the university campus, which Star recognized as being the same poster they’d been passing out to freshmen at first-year orientation for years. No belongings stood on any of the bookshelves or sills, except for textbooks for various first-year classes and a lonely baby cactus that sat unceremoniously as the only thing other than the lamp on the humble bedside table. The only thing that would indicate that a human being with a personality might even live here was a small, humble woven tapestry of Ganesha, the Hindu god of wisdom and beginnings, which hung from a single nail in the back of the door they had entered through.

Well, there was that, and there was the clear outline of a huddled figure under the simple white sheeting of the wood-framed bed. 

“Should we…?” Lachlan asked hesitantly, gesturing to the mass beneath the blankets and glancing back towards Star. She just shrugged, prompting Lachlan to roll his eyes and mutter something inscrutable under his breath, and gently lift the covers off of the form. 

The young woman under the covers was half-translucent and weeping, her body taking on a gray hue as she squeezed globules of black tar out from her eyes, letting them fall into her lap and slowly dribble downwards, the rivulets soiling the top sheet of the bed and eventually finding their way to the floor. Lachlan’s expression of hardened determination faltered the instant he laid eyes on her, reaching a hand up to try to touch her shoulder, only for his hand to pass right through her semitransparent body.

“What the…” Lachlan whispered, glancing back up between Star and back to the girl on the bed, who had yet to so much as flinch in acknowledgement of their presence. With a tight frown, Star glanced back at the woven hanging on the back of the door, clocked the red bindi dot between the young woman’s brows, and was suddenly much more aware than she had been of the odd phrases that the void-faced creatures in the halls had been shrieking.

“Mmmmph! Mm-mmmphmmph! Strrrmmmph!”

The sound of a muffled voice crying out broke Star free of her troubled thoughts, causing both her and Lachlan to glance around the room, attempting to pinpoint the source of the noise. After a few moments of confusion, Star eventually realized that it seemed to be coming from the girl on the bed, even though it didn’t look as though she herself was the one making the sound. She was huddled up in a semi-fetal position on the bed, forcing Star to lean in close to get a good look, and–

“Oh, fuck!” Star exclaimed, sudden recollection shooting through her as she reached a hand out and into the girl’s huddled-up lap, grabbing onto something solid and fuzzy that was clutched tightly in her grey, translucent hands, and giving it a firm pull.

POP!

“Aw, bejeezus–”

SMACK!

With a pop not unlike the sound of a sealed jar being prised open, Star at last extricated the small, jersey-clad form of Galdric the Gopher from the girl’s suffocating grasp, the resultant force sending him flying out of her hands and crashing into the far wall, leaving a small cracked indent at his impact point before slouching painfully down to the top of the chest of drawers below it.

“Aw, jeeze, toots,” Galdric groaned, fuzzy tail twitching in annoyance as he gingerly righted himself, dusting himself off, “Ya coulda at least put down a crashpad or somethin’. What took ya so long, anyway!?”

“Honestly, I… kinda forgot you were here, too,” Star rolled her eyes and folded her hands over her stomach, “But, suppose I’m here at all because you sounded the alarm to Nosir, so… good on ya there, I guess. Oh, Galdric, this is Lachlan, Lachlan, Galdric.”

“Uh… hi,” Lachlan gave an adorably confused little wave.

“Charmed,” the dream spirit spat back, dripping with sarcasm, “Well, what are ya waitin’ for, wake the lass up and get us all the hell outta here! It’s been weeks since I had a good drink, stuck in here with her!”

“Yeeeah, would do, but…” Star pointedly reached over and waved her hand through the body of the girl on the bed, “She’s not quite as solid to the rest of us as she is to you. The ol’ shake-em-violently-and-scream-at-them-to-wake-up trick doesn’t seem likely to work, this time.”

“No shit? Aw, shit,” Galdric groaned into his paws, shaking his head in dismay.

A few seconds of generally unimpressed silence passed between the three of them, Star’s expression furrowing at Galdric and her crystals droning into an unenthused tawny, before Lachlan turned his attention back to the girl.

“Do we know… who she is, at all?” he asked, glancing over at Galdric, “You were… with her, I mean, you know who she is?”

Galdric just shrugged, “Eugh, think her name’s… Raj-somethin’? Raj, uh… Rajesh, no, that’s not… Rajani! Yeah, her name’s Rajani! I remember her signin’ that on some forms in here.”

“And… who is she to you, that you did end up stuck in here with her?” Lachlan pressed.

“Ah, I mean, she’s nobody important,” Galdric shook his head and chittered his buck teeth in frustration a bit, “She just bought one ‘a my stuffed toys from the student shop on her first day, that’s why I was in here! She’s one ‘a the international ones, y’know, a freshman broad comin’ from abroad. She fell asleep cozyin’ up to me, which I didn’t mind at first, but then she started cryin’ and slobberin’ and shit, and it started to get real weird for me, and I was just about to hop outta that body when she fell asleep, and then I got stuck in this fuckin’ nightmare with her! I got no clue why this nightmare got tough enough to keep me restrained, she’s just a girl!”

Star felt a soft, familiar pang in her chest at that, glancing back around the barren room. There was a closet off to the side with empty hangars pushed off to one side, and a single small blue suitcase sat open on the floor, a few sets of clothes within that hadn’t even been taken out to hang yet. As her gaze returned to Lachlan’s, she saw the same look reflected in his golden eyes, and she sighed and shook her head. 

“‘Stay in your room, you weirdo’,” Lachlan muttered dully, quoting the shrieking howls of the faceless students outside. Even though he was only saying it demonstratively, Star was grateful that she was the only one who seemed to notice Rajani’s translucent form flinch slightly at the words, before returning to crying silently on her bed.

“She’s lonely,” Star sighed, folding her arms and leaning awkwardly against a nearby blank wall, glancing to the side so as to not meet either of the gazes that turned to her, “Hell, and she’s right to be. New city, probably bigger than anywhere she’s ever been before. New country, new people, other side of the fuckin’ planet from anything she knows or gives a shit about. Charlicton ain’t a great place for people without any friends.”

“So she shut herself up in her room,” Lachlan muttered, shaking his head ruefully, “I mean, some of the things those things outside were saying…”

“If it’s any consolation, those were probably things she’s afraid people would say to her, rather than shit that’s been said,” Star shrugged, “They didn’t have their faces, she didn’t know them. Dream logic. Just puppets to keep screamin’ her worst fears and insecurities through the door at her, keepin’ her locked up in here and cut off from the rest of the world.”

Star’s hands dropped to her sides as she jerkily walked over to the window, hiding her eyes from Lachlan and Galdric as she stared out at the sprawling cityscape of Charlicton, Maricadia. Even though they were in the Dreaming, the city looked through this window as it did in reality, all a part of the nightmare - grey buildings and distant skyscrapers, looming like spires or knives driven into the earth from this far away. 

Star could see her apartment from here, however distantly. Top of the tallest building in Brackley, far above the streets and people below. 

“She’s alone,” Star finished with a murmur, “And that’s the scariest shit in the world, sometimes.”

A long beat of silence fell in the room, with not even Galdric seeming to find words to pipe up and shatter it, the sudden stillness creeping up on the back of Star’s shoulders like the cold. It was only when she heard the creaking of the bed from behind her, indicating that Lachlan was sitting down next to the girl, that she dared to quickly push her sunglasses up on her face and wipe away the thin-beaded tears that had begun to bubble up there.

“How do we… help her?” Lachlan asked, “How do we make her realize she’s not…”

“Only remedy for what she’s got is time,” Galdric shook his head and folded his arms, “This ain’t special, every international kid probably gets this crap, she just had the wrong nightmare about it at the wrong time. All’s for us to do is wake her up.”

“He’s right,” Star nodded, whipping around and plastering a cheery, friendly smile over her face, turning to her friend, “Well, Lachie? You were… always best at helping folks like that.”

Lachlan blinked back at her, expression aback, before he glanced to the side. It seemed that even just the action of sitting down beside her on the bed had made the translucent girl’s tears stop, though her eyes were still squeezed firmly shut. Lachlan scooched himself over, tattoos beginning to flare with their pleasant golden radiance as he gently leant his head to the side, wordlessly resting his temple against hers. Before Star’s eyes, she could see Rajani’s body become more solid, more firm, beneath his gentle touch, and the girl’s tight posture slowly began to relax, formerly tense shoulders beginning to heave with raspy breaths.

“You’ve been afraid long enough, Rajani,” Lachlan murmured, leaning more of his glowingly radiant body against her and reaching over to take one of her hands in his own, “It’s time to wake up.”

As the two’s palms connected, Star watched as Rajani’s fingers delicately and unconsciously curled themselves up around Lachlan’s hand, the girl finally seeming to relax beneath the warmth of the white-haired man’s light. As her head leaned back against his, the tension in her shut eyes laxened softly, and they all watched as she slowly shifted, stirred, and…

…was gone.

And Star was thankful for the sudden distraction of the nightmare landscape beginning to collapse around them, so as to keep Lachlan from wondering what the burning, effulgent green of her crystals might mean.

~~~

The tallest of the skyscrapers dimly visible in the west were just barely beginning to pierce the falling sun when Star and Lachlan returned to the waking world, their shoes finding the concrete of the same sidewalk just outside of Colledge Hall that they had entered the Dreaming from initially. Galdric had said his farewells and sauntered off, evidently going to catch up on… whatever his business really was, Star couldn’t say, but he had been away from it for the better part of two weeks because of this mishap. Before her eyes, a bit of tension that had never left Lachlan’s broad shoulders the entire time they’d been in Dreaming finally laxened, and he gladly let his arms hang loose and wide, seeming to bask in the sunlight of the real as Star stepped back.

“So,” he eventually sighed, turning to Star and gesturing with his head towards the building, now clear of the sludgy infection even to her eyes, “Are all the students who were trapped in there gonna… remember everything?”

Star just shrugged, “Only as much as anybody ever remembers their dreams at their age. Spottily, and temporarily. Even Rajani’s not gonna remember her part in it. They’re prolly gonna be pretty fuckin’ confused, having gone to sleep and wakin’ up two weeks later, but a buncha confused uni kids ain’t our problem anymore.”

“Good, good…” Lachlan mused, considerate, “I guess we can clear out, then. I’d stick around to make sure Priya’s friend is alright, but on the off chance she was one of the ones we killed the nightmare versions of…”

“Yea, maybe let’s not rattle her that bad,” Star laughed, clapping her friend on the shoulder with her hand, “So, uhh… wanna, like… head back to mine, maybe? I’ve still got some beers in my fridge, crack a couple and watch a monster movie? Like old times?”

Lachlan glanced back over at Star’s hopeful expression for a silent moment, an unreadable look entering his eyes, before he suddenly looked away again and sighed with a shake of his head.

“No…” he droned, “No, that… sounds good, it does, but I really gotta get back. I’m technically still on-shift at the library, think I’m starting to push the amount of goodwill I’ve built up, letting my ‘lunch break’ go as long as it has. I better at least get back to help the girls close up.”

Star faltered for a second, the forcedly genial emerald of her crystals momentarily shuddering into a flagging grey-blue, before she redoubled, “Well… oh, yeah! There’s a- a party! Tonight, at Tess’s place, you know Tess! You could come to that, I’m goin’! It’d be fun, you never go out anymore!”

Lachlan just looked at her, a pained solemnity filling his eyes and setting his jaw. His gaze couldn’t seem to meet hers, clearly trying to think of something to say, but as his mouth finally dropped open, he had taken just a single heartbeat too long.

“You don’t have to,” Star sighed, shaking her head and tearing her gaze away from him to stare off and away down the street, “It’s… fine. You’re probably on at the soup kitchen tonight, right? That’s cool too.”

After a few more seconds of clearly fighting for something to say, Lachlan finally seemed to settle on a choked-sounding sigh and a small, “...yeah.”

The wind kicked up a bit around them then, the air becoming slightly cooler as the sun began to dip below the skyline. Unlike her old friend, Star wasn’t having any particular trouble coming up with ways to fill the silence, she just didn’t feel like it. Because the next thing to say would be goodbyes, and she had no idea how long it would be after that before the next hello. It had been three months, last time. Who the hell knew how long it’d be now?

“You can say hi to your friends, from me,” Lachlan was the one to finally breach the sacrosanct stillness, one hand awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck, “Think I’d only get in the way, really, I don’t… really fit in with that crowd, ha… besides, it’s not like you’re hurting for someone to keep you company, right?”

Star blinked at that, glancing back at him in surprise and confusion to find him pointedly gesturing at his upper chest, a concerted and meaningful expression on his face. After taking a few seconds to figure out what he meant, Star finally glanced down at her own chest, and remembered.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “The pendant, you mean?”

“Yeah,” Lachlan laughed softly, “Did somebody special give you that? It looks… pretty.”

“Yeah, the city, I think,” Star shrugged, “This morning. Why do ya ask?”

“Oh, the city gave you that?” Lachlan looked surprised, “Well, I thought– well… I was just gonna say, I didn’t think it was really something you’d… you know.”

“Honestly, I thought the same,” Star chuckled, stepping forward to give him a better look, “But I dunno, maybe it’s growin’ on me.”

Lachlan just hummed inquisitively, absentmindedly reaching out to touch the golden heart pressed up against Star’s chest. As his fingers wrapped around it, though, his eyes shot wide, and he recoiled, seeming surprised all over again.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed, shaking out his hand, “It’s really hot!”

Star snorted abruptly, laughing, “Sure it was the necklace you’re talkin’ about there, or are you just focused on my–”

“No, I– is it heated?” Lachlan shook his head abruptly, “Thing’s like touching a metal pot someone’s cooking with!”

Star blinked in confusion, taking a second to reach up and turn the heart over in her palm. She hadn’t noticed, but it was quite warm at this point, certainly warmer than her body heat should have made it. It didn’t feel unpleasant, though. In fact, as she allowed it to fall back against her chest, she found the warmth spreading over her sternum and throughout her torso to be almost relaxing.

I think I like it, she at last affirmed to herself, Thanks, Charlicton. It’s a nice gift, after all.

The breeze died down as she glanced back up at Lachlan, who had apparently been staring at her, struck silent and wearing yet another one of his unreadable masks. She just shrugged at him, tilting her head curiously, which seemed to be enough to break him out of his thoughts, and he finally sighed.

“I’ll… see if I can catch the next party, yeah?” Lachlan said dully, hands stuffed into his pockets.

“...yeah,” Star nodded halfheartedly, crystals beginning to flicker, “Okay.”

“I… really do gotta get going,” he continued, already seeming to be leaning away, turning his body in the direction of leaving, “Have fun, yeah? I’m sure I’ll see what went down on your socials, in case I miss anything, I… always do. I’ll see you ‘round soon, Star.”

And with that, he was walking away. And Star was watching him walk away. 

At the end of the street, just before the turnoff, Lachlan turned back to her one last time to give her a parting wave. Star put a smile on and returned it enthusiastically, but as he turned away again and vanished around the streetcorner, the smile fell, and her hand returned to hang limply at her side.

“...yeah,” she repeated, her gaze falling to the ground on which he had just been standing, and was no longer, “...okay.”

Somewhere else in the city of Charlicton, Maricadia, there was nothing special about a wall of graffiti, a young man was once again wearing clothes that he didn’t like, and a small stuffed wolf toy did not want any ice cream.

~~~

“Hey, everybody! Look who just showed up!”

A loud, rambunctious cheer lit up the onsetting night as Star was whisked through the doors of Tess MacPharlee’s midtown manor house, the warm air of company and the low thrumming of dance music playing on a nearby stereo bringing a warm, broad smile back to her face at last. There must have been at least three dozen people already there, clearly deep in the night’s festivities already, based on the number of abandoned cans and solo cups that already littered the couches, tables, and surrounding floorspace of what Tess referred to as her ‘gala room’, which was really just an oversized rec room that she hosted all of her citywide-acclaimed parties in.

“Hey, Star!” called a short-haired blond man with a puca-shell necklace and no shirt from a nearby couch, “Long time no see, girl, was about to wonder if you’d show!”

“Ohmygosh, hey, Star!” cried a bubbly-looking pink-haired girl from the refreshments table, “Eeeeeeeee! I can’t believe you’re here!”

“Hey, Star,” a tall, hightopped guy gave her a flirtatious upwards nod as he strode past, seeming to pay more attention to her than to either of the scantily-clad women on his arms, “Good to see ya. Catch you around the dance floor soon.”

Star just smiled and waved at them all, and then at the long string of other people who seemed so very excited to greet her. She exchanged hugs and high-fives, kisses on cheeks and hip-bumps and all the like, before Tess was finally gracious enough to reach in and take her by the arm, guiding her over to the refreshments table with a graceful twirl.

“And here we all were beginning to worry you wouldn’t show!” Tess teased, emerald eyes glittering and diamond earrings sparkling in the technicolour light, “Fashionably late as ever, eh?”

“Yeah, but I think I’m a lot less late than it looks like,” Star laughed in response, punching the hostess lightly on the shoulder and gesturing to the party, “Looks like you all started without me!”

“Oh, come now,” Tess smiled, “You know nothing around here really ever gets started until you show up. You’re our shining star, Star! Which means you gotta catch up!”

With a pointed snap of her fingers, all of a sudden, about eight different hands were reaching towards the two girls, alcoholic refreshments in hand. Seemingly at random, Tess grabbed a salt-rimmed margarita and a bottle of fireball and pressed them into Star’s hands. 

Star hesitated for just a moment, red eyes darting up to meet Tess’s expectant, cloying gaze. The bright blonde hostess’s eyes were practically glowing with excitement as they looked back at her, and as Star slowly glanced around, she saw the same expression reflected back at her almost everywhere she looked.

People looking at her. Like they knew her. Like they liked her. Like they wanted her. Like they loved her. Like they’d never seen her before in their lives, and yet seemed to realize that they needed her more than anything they’d ever needed before.

The people here had stars in their eyes. 

Tess’s hand clasped around Star’s chin, pulling her gaze back.

“Is everything alright?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

Star smiled.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” she asked in return, before knocking back her drinks, and another cheer lit up the world around her.

“There’s my girl!” Tess squealed in delight as Star finished both drinks and tossed their receptacles aside, the glass and bottle exploding into constellation-filled glitter before they ever even hit the ground behind her, “Talk about catching up! Now, what’s your side dish of choice today? We got coke, we got E, we got– ooh, you gotta try these new mushrooms we just got, they’re absolutely killer!”

Star laughed in bubbly glee, the alcohol already beginning to blur the edges of her vision into a euphoric slurry, as she considered for a moment.

“All in good time,” she eventually settled on, “But to start things off, I think I could go for some fuckin’ men.”

“That, I can provide,” Tess proclaimed without missing a beat, clapping her hands three times authoritatively, “Sean! Kai! Declan! Jasper! Get some dick in this woman, pronto!”

A pair of strong hands clasped Star by the shoulders, and she found herself practically hoisted aloft as people she vaguely recognized but couldn’t quite place were suddenly all around her, escorting her through the party and towards a side room, earning whoops, cheers, and wolf whistles from the crowd all around them.

One hand was unbuttoning her shirt, while another felt at her breasts, seeming delightedly transfixed once they found the barbell piercings through her nipples. Her own hand felt around for something to hold onto, eventually found what felt like a stiffening cock, and she dutifully began to stroke it. A firm slap to her ass made her yelp with glee, allowing a second cock to find its way into her mouth whilst the other men began to undress her, peppering her with kisses and caresses and worship the whole way.

The fingers of someone who knew what they were doing pushed themselves gingerly inside of her, and it was right then, moaning softly around a mouthful of cockhead and crystals shimmering with a deep, lustful, ecstatic red, that Star gave up on keeping track of things in chronological order. 

Star throated the tongue of a man who was fucking her down into the mattress, her legs coiled and locked around his hips as he made a show of the force with which he pounded, bedframe creaking and complaining with every thrust. His cock was unfortunately less than impressive, but it was a simple flick of her wrist to fix that, the man’s eyes widening in shock and ecstasy as his cock morphed and reshaped itself into that of an equine, the sudden sensation of so many more pleasured nerve endings making him bottom out inside her immediately. Star was dimly aware of him staring down at his new member with a combination of awe and befuddlement, but practically as soon as he had pulled out, two more women were on their knees in front of him, salivating with awe. Then the next man in line assumed the same position above her in turn, and Star instantly forgot all about him.

Star and Tess twirled in tandem around the stripper pole that someone had set up at some point, clad in neon thighhighs and bicep gloves to tantalize the blacklight, as the dimly-lit crowd hooted and hollered at them to assume poses, or to kiss, or to fuck. Star did a line off Tess’s freckled thigh, and a cheer went up as her head began to buzz, just in time for Tess’s lips to latch around a single pierced nipple, beginning to suckle as her eyes rolled back in her head. The crowd watched in awe as Tess’s expression turned at first to shock, then delight, and then to drunken euphoria as breast milk that tasted suspiciously like Bailey’s Irish Cream flowed into her mouth. After the blonde had drunk her fill, she broke away with a gasp and a wet popping sound, and suddenly the front row was rushing the stage, eager beyond self-control for a taste of their own.

Star stared into the deep brown eyes of the woman she was pressed up against, the pair of them putting on a show of sloppily kissing whilst four men each occupied themselves with one of the spare holes up for grabs between the two. In her eyes, Star saw a dream of a successful career as an architect, a relocation to Paris, and a handsome husband. And then she saw herself appear as the handsome husband disappeared, happily married to this woman that she kissed without even knowing, who had just fallen madly in love with her from the flavour of her saliva alone, without ever speaking so much as a word to one another. When the men came inside them, and Star broke off the kiss to moan, she half-consciously reached into the dream to change it back to the way it had been, though with her wires crossed as they were, the handsome husband now looked distinctly as Star imagined she might look if she had been born male. 

As the party wound down, Star accepted the invitation of a tall, dark-skinned man with angular features and yellowish eyes to continue the fun back at his place, allowing herself to be swept off her feet and messily making out with him as he carried her naked body out to his car, her clothes bundled up in a heap under one of his arms.

His hair was black, not white. And his locs weren’t quite as long or haggard. But he’d do for one night, Star supposed, in the back of her mind. For one more night, she could make do.

The heart on her chest was freezing cold.

~~~

The air was soft and sweet-smelling, this high up above the sprawling, eclectic landscape of the Dreaming. The gentle breeze was cooling, prompting Star to sigh and lean her face into it, gently kicking her feet in midair as she sat perched on the railing above the stars.

In the waking world, the Breadalbane Stellar Observatory was one of the foremost educational science centers in the world, rivalling the likes of Jodrell Bank and FAST in its prevalence, but it really didn’t have anything better to observe the stars with than a big satellite dish and a telescope. In the Dreaming, however, the spiralling stairwell that led up to the viewing platform just kept going up, breaking through the roof and into the clouds, through the atmosphere and above the sea of shooting stars that made up the Dreaming sky.

Star liked to come up here, at the highest point in the city, wings extended just enough to let them rustle in the breeze, sometimes. Whenever it felt like alone and high above the city was the right place for her to be. 

Star groaned dully into her hands, caressing her eyes with the balls of her thumbs as her come-down arrived in force. Tess’s party had been about five hours ago now, with night having fallen in the waking world and the Dreaming below much more populous and active than it had been during the day. The man she’d gone home with had been no less or more satisfying than any of the other men she’d ever gone home with or brought home herself, and she’d been fairly quick to make her excuses and vanish into the Dreaming once they’d both more or less finished with one another. She’d never learned his name, of course, and she didn’t particularly care to feel bad about that; at least, not on top of all the other things that she already had to feel bad about. 

She popped and dry-swallowed a microdose of an upper, just in an attempt to ease and hasten her transition back to alertness, groaning slightly at the sensation of it sliding down her throat. She was fortunate enough to be immune to the likes of withdrawal symptoms and come-down headaches, but all that didn’t do anything to help the throbbing pain she felt in her chest, now that she had nothing more to distract herself from it. 

Stupid, she cursed under her breath, I shouldn’t have even gone. I should have…

A gentle breeze tousled her hair and her wings, and she watched as an errant feather detached itself from her plumage, drifting down in a fluttering spiral towards the beautiful dreaming city below.

…I have no idea what I should ’a done.

“Plenty of dreamers out in the city tonight,” the moon spoke, a delicate and motherly tone in its voice, “Shouldn’t you be down there, having yourself a grand old time, Starling?”

Star sighed softly, a weak but genuine smile gracing her lips as she glanced up at the moon, which was gliding its way towards where she sat on the stairwell railing. Before her eyes, the massive round shape of the moon began to warp and coalesce, shrinking as it approached at an equal rate so as that it never really seemed to get smaller to her eyes. Eventually, the massive celestial form of the moon gave way to the radiant beauty of an older woman, bald and wisened-looking, with flowing drapery in a radiant white extending out in ruffles and trails behind her and up into the sky.

“I’ve had enough fun for one night,” Star shook her head as Matron Moon joined her on the balustrade, “I don’t really wanna be around… people, right now.”

“As someone who knows you, dear, I take that to be quite troubling,” Moon fussed with Star’s wrinkled shirt, straightening out her collar and seeming to pluck off and flick away something that she hadn’t even noticed was there, “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah…” Star shrugged, “You know. Just had a long day. I’m alright, don’t worry ‘bout me.”

Moon just fixed her with a kind, patient stare at that, glowing white irises seeming to sweep over and take in Star’s entire state of being, causing her to fidget slightly and tuck one of her knees up under her chin.

“You of course know that I’m privy to everything that happens here in the Dreaming,” Moon sighed, resting a gentle hand on Star’s shoulder and squeezing softly, “You did well, today, Starling. You did right by the waking world and the Dreaming. You both did.”

Star just let out a long sigh, shaking her head in frustration as her crystals glimmered a glum salt-grey glow. Eventually, she turned to face her matronly companion more directly, a small note of unenthused accusation in her eyes as she grabbed the golden heart pendant at her chest and held it aloft.

“This was you, right?” she droned, expression flat, “Pretty little pendant, looks like a heart. Gets warmer when I’m close to Lachlan, gets colder when I’m far away from him. Took me a bit to pick up on it, but I’m not that dumb. It’s cute. It’s reeeeal cute.”

Moon chuckled at that, extending a radiant and soft-fingered hand to turn the pendant over in her own palm, examining the way her own light bounced off of the resplendent gold. The heart was, of course, quite bitterly cold at the moment, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

“It is pretty,” Moon at last spoke again, allowing the pendant to drop back against Star’s own heart, “But your initial instinct was correct, my dear. That was a gift from the city that owes so much to you, not from me.”

Star just snorted at that, turning back down to stare out at the sprawling city without responding. Moon joined her for a time, seeming content in the quiet that fell between them, leaning over the same railing that Star remained perched atop. Star glanced over at the sensation of Moon’s smile-lined cheek pressing up against her shoulder affectionately. Her expression softening, Star let out a light puff of a sigh and wrapped her wing around the ancient dream spirit beside her, who seemed to sigh and relax in delight beneath the warm embrace of Star’s downy brown feathers.

“You know, this is the exact same view of the world below that I always have,” Moon spoke softly, breaking the tender silence at last, “But it’s nicer when you pay me a visit, I think. The world seems a lot brighter, when I feel like I see it the way you do.”

Star hummed at that, before smiling and cracking into a soft giggle, “This is a hell of a city to be lonely in. Learned that much today, ya clearly saw.”

“Yes,” Moon smiled, “Yes, you did.”

A beat of silence passed, as Star glanced over her shoulder to meet Moon’s radiant, ever-kind gaze. 

The pendant was still cold. So, so cold.

“How could I possibly be lonely?” Star asked weakly, “Everyone and everything in this city loves me.”

Moon snorted, shaking her head, “Well, hardly everything, there’s a certain Dean Wyndran who dreams quite regularly of not having to put up with you, but I take your point. But dear, I do not think your problem is that you are alone, or that you are unloved. You have beloved friends in both the waking world and here, and we all love and adore you, of course we do. But loneliness does not always mean you are completely and utterly cut off from anything that cares about you. Sometimes, being lonely only means that you are without the single person who once completed you. A person that no amount of love from no other number of people can fill the space of.”

Star gazed at the celestial woman for a moment, contemplative blue sparkling into her crystals to replace their old, dull gray.

“Are you lonely up here, Moon?” she asked softly.

Moon just smiled in response.

“The Earth and I broke apart over four billion years ago,” she murmured softly, “And I’ve been missing her ever since.”

The wind rustled again, the breeze seeming to warm around the pair of them. Another of Star’s feathers dislodged itself and spiralled down towards the city, following the exact same swirling trajectory as its predecessor. It wasn’t as though Star didn’t know where they were going. She just wasn’t quite ready to follow just yet.

“Well, guess that wins out,” Star cracked, smiling and shaking her head in good humour, “I don’t think me not bein’ as close with an old school bud as I’d like can really stack up to four billion years. Way to fuckin’ show me up, girl, damn.”

“Perhaps not, but at least you stand a chance of rectifying your situation,” Moon pouted, “Sort of feels affronting, you know, that you don’t, when you have the chance.”

“Things are… different now,” Star tossed her head back and sighed, “He’s right, he’s got his own shit he’s gotta do. And heck, so do I! I’m the Vox, I have stuff in the Dreaming, people I gotta watch out for, here, and he’s… not willin’ to follow me here.”

A third feather billowed out into the wind.

“...and he’s got people dependin’ on him, too,” she finished, a single tear trickling down her battlescarred cheek, “I know what that means, to him and to me, and I know it’s… more important. And it’s not like I never see Lachlan, we still… text, and stuff, and we… see each other, sometimes…”

Star found herself trailing off, the gentle breeze seeming to steal her breath out of her lips before she could find any more words. 

“Starling,” Moon said softly, “You make a habit of making the dreams of the people of this city come true. Would you like to know a secret?”

Star blinked at that, gazing curiously at the dream spirit, who returned her gaze with a knowing smile.

“Lachlan Strate is dreaming, right now.”

Star’s eyes widened in surprise, her head suddenly flicking between Matron Moon and the city below, where her latest detached feather was just beginning to fall beneath the clouds and vanish out of her sight.

“Wai– seriously?” she asked, dumbfounded, “But I– I’ve never seen him dream! Every night I check, he’s just stone asleep, he doesn’t even appear in the Dreaming, I don’t… are you fuckin’ with me?”

“I am not,” Moon smiled warmly, “Though I’m not sure how long the dream will last… I believe it’s a remnant of your touch in his mind, when you brought him through to the Dreaming and back. You really ought to hurry, if you want to see, you know.”

“I…” Star stammered for a moment, beholding as Moon laughed aloud at her expression, the sound beginning to boom and echo out throughout the Dreaming as the celestial woman began to float softly away from the stairwell, growing once more and beginning to reassume her usual form.

Lachlan’s dream… she thought to herself, a sudden energy finding her tired body, her wings rising aloft, I don’t know what it means, what Moon means… I still don’t know. But I wanna see it. I wanna see his dream. And I wanna make it real, if I can. If I can’t do anything else for him, I can at least try to do that.

“I love you, Starling,” Moon’s voice echoed out as a final farewell, as Star’s wings flared out in preparation to leap. As Star’s mouth dropped open to respond, however, she was cut off by Moon butting in and adding, “And save that response for someone who doesn’t know it already.”

And with that, the moon was back to shining in the sky, and Star Thatcher was plummeting towards the ground, through shooting stars and misty clouds, and back down to the Dreaming city of Charlicton, Maricadia. 

The neighborhood of Lower Tryon, in the working-class haven district of Crapaud, was a homey and built-up sort of place, as far as regions in the west half of the city went. It was mostly two- or three-storey brick buildings stacked up next to one another in various arrangements, sure, but the graffiti on the postboxes, laundry lines strung between houses, and take-a-number advertisement sheets for piano lessons stapled to the nearby telephone poles told a story of a community that looked after its own. Lachlan was from here, born and raised; Star stared off wistfully at the old stairs down to the basement unit that had been his childhood home, remembering nights spent gaming together in his old bedroom in middle school and days spent skipping school and smoking up his living room in high school. He’d moved out, of course, and his parents were both passed away, but she still found herself paying a moment of reverence to the old place, even as it was reflected in Dreaming.

“Goin’ to see the old man, Star?” the doorknocker shaped like a lion asked her.

“He’s not old, his hair’s just white,” Star laughed softly, “It just makes him look mature! And… yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

The old lion knocked at her, which Star supposed was its version of a respectful nod, so she returned the gesture with a smile and headed off once again. This wasn’t the first time she’d visited Lachlan’s latest apartment in the Dreaming, even though she’d never been there in real life. That hardly mattered, though; nothing about the place was ever remotely anything but real.

Even without flying, it didn’t take long for Star to locate the old laundromat-turned-jazz-bar, ascending the brick-and-mortar steps in the alleyway beside it up to the second floor of the building and pushing her way through into the apartment. Lachlan lived with roommates, so the entire space wasn’t his, but she already found her heart to be beating at the sight of a few familiar pieces of decor that he must have donated to the common spaces; A terracotta bear sculpture on a windowsill, a junior high second-place aikido trophy on the mantle, a dog-eared copy of George Ayittey’s Defeating Dictators on the glass coffee table.

And then she was at his door. And with a moment longer of hesitation, taking a second to hold the golden heart in her hand and feel it warm beneath her touch, Star took a deep breath and stepped inside. 

The first thing that always hit her, about any room or apartment that Lachlan would ever inhabit, was the smell. She found her eyes closing instinctively and took a deep breath, marvelling at the deep, rich aromas of coffee grounds and old books, of antiques and aftershave, of the utter and profound realness of the place that even most places in the waking world seemed to lack the sheer weight of. If you caught him at the right angle or proximity, you could sometimes catch an unplaceable whiff of this aroma coming off of Lachlan himself, but being in a space that belonged to him just made it all-encompassing and warm.

Opening her eyes again, Star’s smile widened as she found the slumbering form of Lachlan in his bed, a cramped little mattress laid out between a bookshelf and a similarly-heighted windowsill, light blankets draped haphazardly over him as his lithe, built chest drifted up and down in tender slumber.

“You’re here,” Star murmured to herself, almost unbelieving, “You are here…”

The dreams of sleeping humans were normally private things, with only their slumbering forms appearing in the Dreaming as they slept, with their own fantasies and nightmares existing on a sort of separate, private layer of the Dreaming, which other beings could not access or trespass in easily. The girl at the university, Rajani, had been a special case of a nightmare being powerful enough to bleed through the reality of the layers; for most dreamers, the only form they ever took in the Dreaming was their own. 

For the Vox Phantasmatum, though, their dreams were just as much a part of her domain as the primary realm of the Dreaming, able to come and go between dreams as she pleased, or just peer into them if it struck her fancy. A subtle invasion of privacy, perhaps, but such things had scarcely bothered Star before.

And yet, she found herself hesitating, staring down at the slumbering form of Lachlan Strate, white locs out of their tie and splayed out like a radiant halo around his head, face at peace and angled gently towards the window. She could sense the dream in him, all it would take to see it is a single, gentle touch, and yet she hesitated.

She’d never seen Lachlan dream, before. He was the only person she knew who just didn’t seem to dream naturally. She’d never been quite sure why, but it always just made sense. She’d always been the one of the pair of them with her head in the clouds, and he had always been the one dragging her back down to earth. That was, until she drifted too high into those clouds for him to reach, and now she couldn’t get back down. 

What if I can’t make it come true? Star clutched a hesitant hand to her chest, second-guessing herself, Or, hell, what if it’s something I don’t wanna make true? What if he wants to leave the city? Move away, be… somewhere else? What if I can’t—

The moon glimmered through the open window, refracting off the glass panes in a way that flared softly into Star’s eyes, pulling her down out of her thoughts and glancing out at the city beyond. The moon looked, from this vantage, as it did in the waking world, but Star could still feel the mists of the Dreaming around her feet, even if in this space she couldn’t see them.

Three brown feathers were resting on the windowsill outside, shifting and quivering slightly in a soft breeze, but never flying away. 

If that’s what it is… if that’s what he wants… it doesn’t matter. I’m the goddamned Vox Phantasmatum, I make fuckin’ dreams come true. If I can’t make Lachlan’s dream come true, whatever the hell it is, then what am I even for?

Firming up her expression, Star gritted her teeth slightly and stepped forward, reaching a hand out towards Lachlan’s slumbering head. His expression shifted slightly as she neared, though, prompting her to jerk back in sudden alarm as he stirred softly, but didn’t wake. 

The heart pendant pulsed warmly against Star’s breast as she glanced down, watching as Lachlan hummed softly, the corners of his mouth curling up in a momentary half-smile. 

Despite herself, her heart soared at that, her crystals flickering to an adoring rose as her gaze swept over him. 

“Yeah…” she finally whispered, leaning down, “...okay.”

With one hand, Star stroked away an errant loc that had fallen into Lachlan’s face in his slumber. Her other hand gingerly curled around his chin, gently angling his head up towards her.

She pressed a gentle kiss into his forehead, heart pendant stoking a fire against her own heart, and she gazed into the only dream she’d ever seen Lachlan Strate have.

…and was instantaneously confronted with the rather shock-inducing image of herself, stark naked as the day was long, with her lips puckered sultrily around the twitching tip of his slobber-coated cock.

“Fuck…” Lachlan rolled his head back in the dream and groaned, hands reaching up to tangle themselves in dream-Star’s hair, “God, you’re so… fuck…”

“So what~?” Dream-Star teased flirtily, smiling up at him whilst jerking him off, scooching her way up the side of the bed until she met his mouth with a kiss, the two of them drinking in one another’s flavours hungrily as Lachlan’s hands fell to her breasts, caressing and pinching in a delectable rhythm.

In lieu of responding, Lachlan just grinned and pulled her astride him, his still-sloppy cock bouncing up to nestle between dream-Star’s thighs and the cleft of her ass. Lachlan grabbed two meaty handfuls of her perky ass and began thrusting softly, caressing himself with her body, as she let out a delighted hiss of pleasure and he seemed to be getting close to climaxing.

Star took a step back in utter shock, and the dream vanished from her sight all of a sudden. Feeling the pressing, urgent need to make absolutely certain that she hadn’t just accidentally dug into one of her own dreams somehow, she reached down for the top blanket and flung it off of Lachlan’s sleeping form, only to discover that yes, he was rock-hard, and there was a tellingly moist dark spot forming on the white undersheet just above his pelvis, where his cock was standing at attention.

A beat of incredulous silence passed, a sudden warm, anxious sweat beginning to dot its way up Star’s back. Then another, as she managed to pry her gaze back up to his sleeping face, touching his forehead lightly with her fingertips to get another brief look at the dream.

Dream-Star was throwing it back on him now, literal sparks flying around them as he bottomed out inside her, groaning out a half-coherent slur about how perfect she felt as he came deep within. Star couldn’t help but notice the accuracy; evidently, he must have been looking at her ass at some point earlier that day, dream-Star was just about as perfectly accurate from top to tip as she’d ever seen any figment in a wet dream be. 

She pulled away again, watching as Lachlan’s sleeping form groaned softly in pleasure, the erect cock beneath the sheets spasming and twitching softly.

Another beat passed.

And then, Star laughed.

“HahahahAAAAAAAAAH~!” Star just about screamed, tossing her head back and having to lean against a nearby wall to double over, arms crossing over her belly as she writhed in delight, “Hah, oh my god, the first dream you’ve ever had or some shit, and it’s a wet one! Oh, fuck me, I fucking knew it! HAH! Suck my dick, Priya from the library, YEEEEEASS, haha~!”

The moon was shining a brilliant beam through the window as Star finally regained some measure of her composure, and she could swear she saw the damn thing wink at her, just then. Star sighed, a delighted and joyous smile on her face as the final ebbs of giggles shook at her shoulders, before she allowed herself to fall out of the Dreaming. The appearance of the space around her didn’t change at all, Lachlan’s room was far too innately grounded of a space for it to be reflected any differently in the Dreaming, but the change was identified by the dropping away of the inherent sense of floatiness that was characteristic to the Dreaming, dropping away to reality as Star returned herself to the waking world. 

Lachlan, now in his real sleeping body before her, looking much the same as he had in the Dreaming, had at some point started idly rubbing at his own erect cock in his sleep. Star just rolled her eyes and grinned, plucking a tissue box up off a nearby stack of old books and papers and tossing it gently at his head.

“Wake up, jerkoff!” she called as his golden eyes suddenly shot open, “Ya got some ‘splaining ta do!”

“Gah!” Lachlan cried out all of a sudden, practically falling sideways out of his own bed at the disorientation of his rude awakening, arms flailing about momentarily before catching himself. His vision darted around wildly for a moment before settling on Star, widening in shock and mild horror, as he stammered for a moment, “S-Star!? What the– what– what, uh… what are you doing here?”

“Oh, just checkin’ in,” Star laughed aloud, striding over to take a seat at the foot of his bed, which he awkwardly shuffled his feet out of the way for, still looking bewildered and sleep-addled, “Thought I’d see if you were all good after all the fightin’ today, and all, but blimey, I couldn’t’a guessed just how good I’d find ya!”

Lachlan just stared up at her, looking confused for a moment, before his eyes wandered down and eventually found his own pelvis, where his cock remained hard and quite visibly pressing through the thin white sheet that was now all that separated it from the open air. He let out a sound that was somewhere between an embarrassed gasp and a gulp of dread, quickly reaching down to cover it as his cheeks reddened, before Star saw something click in his expression, and he sheepishly glanced back up at her, biting his lower lip awkwardly. 

“Some dream, Lachie,” Star teased, wiggling her eyebrows at him and confirming his fears with a devilish smirk, “Sorry to interrupt, were you enjoying yourself?”

“God dammit,” Lachlan groaned aloud, slapping his own face with both of his hands in consternation, “Shit… Star, I–”

Star just rolled her eyes and deflected his embarrassment with a wave of her hand, only to suddenly make it return in force as she just about lunged forward, landing atop him and prising his hands away from his eyes with her own. Lachlan’s eyes widened and lips quivered unbidden as she straddled him in bed, holding his hands by the wrists above his head and letting the comfortable warmth of his cock nestle between her legs and up against her abdomen. Star bit her lower lip in delight as the white-haired man was clearly struggling to keep his eyes locked on hers, her breasts pressing themselves up against his chest, heart pendant glimmering and warm above her ample cleavage.

“Oh, c’mon, don’t get all flustered on me,” Star rolled her eyes with a smirk, “Don’t ya remember how we used to fool around? You really only needed to ask, Lachie.”

Meeting his eyes again, her mischievousness suddenly gave way to genuinity, and she found herself reaching up to caress his face with her thumbs, almost marvelling at how close they suddenly were, the wild smile dropping from her face as her eyes softened.

“I didn’t know you missed me, you know,” she murmured, lips tight and tense as the admission at last slipped out, “I thought… you were…”

Lachlan’s expression softened alongside hers as she trailed off, and he let out a soft sigh and shook his head. His hands freed, he reached up, subtly adjusting her slightly-askew sunglasses on her face before running a gentle, caring finger down the length of her sharp chin, a soft smile beginning to tug at the corners of his mouth.

“Of course I miss you,” he said gently, “But, you know… we aren’t who we were in high school, Star. You got yours, I got mine, and the city needs us to not compromise on that. I just… didn’t want to get in your way, or… distract you.”

Star just chuckled at that, “If ya didn’t wanna distract the bitch who can see your dreams, maybe you shoulda considered having a hot-ass wet dream about somebody else, Lachie. Kinda the most surefire way that exists to keep my attention, don’t ya think?”

“It wasn’t exactly intentional,” he rolled his eyes in complaint, “I don’t really dream at all, usually. Don’t really know what came over me, tonight.”

“I’m pretty sure I came over you,” Star wiggled her eyebrows, before snorting in amusement and gesturing down at the wet stain on the sheet that separated them, “Well, and I’m pretty sure you kinda came all over yourself a bit, too, ha.”

Lachlan snorted, tucking his hands in protest behind his head as Star sat back upright atop him, taking in the sight of him beneath her and smiling wide despite herself.

“Is there a reason behind why ya didn’t just ask me for this, too?” she asked, planting one hand on her hip, “I woulda said yes, ya know. If anyone, ever, thinks they gotta be nervous about askin’ me for a quick fuck, I have failed that person in a very deep way.”

Lachlan sighed, glancing to the side as he seemed to be gathering his thoughts. Star allowed him to, the adrenaline of her little surprise ambush dying down a bit in trade for a tender warmth between them that she didn’t feel like disturbing.

“I don’t know,” Lachlan finally spoke, voice soft and gentle, gazing back up at her with golden eyes shining, “...I guess I just wasn’t sure what it would mean, to you. I mean, you’ll fuck just about anybody, sometimes anything, and I wasn’t–”

Star just rolled her eyes and leant down, silencing his words with a kiss. It began tender and chaste, only her lips locked around his, an invitation rather than an assertion. After a few moments, though, his hot breath puffed up against her face in tender acceptance, and his lips parted, his tongue slipping into her mouth to greet hers in a gentle dance. 

Lachlan tasted real. And to Star, in that moment, that was everything she felt she’d ever need.

“You aren’t wrong,” she spoke at last as they both were forced to come up for air, gasping and uncertain of how long they’d been locked together in the heat of it, Star tossing her head back and breathing his scent in with an amorous smile, “I’ll fuck anyone and anything, just about. And fair warning, just in case ya get any ideas in your cute lil’ head, I’ll preface that that ain’t changin’ anytime soon, but…”

Star stooped back down and shuffled lower, resting her head against his chest and breathing in a deep breath of contentment. Lachlan’s arms wrapped up around her as his golden eyes swam, silently waiting for her to finish.

“...it’s not because it doesn’t mean anythin’ to me,” she concluded with a smile, “It’s cuz I love ‘em. The people, the dreams, the hearts, Lachie… I love ‘em. I love ‘em all. Including you.”

Star hesitated for only a moment longer, before sighing, craning her head up, and kissing him softly on the forehead again.

“...maybe especially you,” she smiled, crystals glittering pink above her head, “So yeah, we both got our own shit to do, and it won’t always be together, but… be in my life, Lachie. Can ya do that for me? Can you promise that?”

Lachlan just smiled back at her, wrapping her up in his arms as his tattoos pulsed with their golden, radiant light. He pressed a soft kiss into her head, and as he did so, Star could feel some of that light pass from him and into her, travelling down from her head to her spine, nestling its way into her heart, and warming her entire body in a soft, golden glow.

“Pinky promise,” he said with a smile, proffering a pinky to her, that she accepted with a grin brighter than the stars themselves. 

As much as it might have seemed fitting for the moment to be still and romantic for a long while after that, basking in one another’s scents and proximities after having kept themselves from one another for so long, it was with a small, inadvertent twitch from down below that Star and Lachlan were very suddenly reminded that his erect cock was very much still pressing up against her belly, straining against the cloth confines of his soiled blanket in a desperate attempt to be free.

“Yeesh, someone’s needy,” Star chuckled, reaching down to gently stroke the form through the blanket with delicate fingers, judging the size to be more than satisfactory for her needs, and even feeling a spark of excitement as she realized it must have developed a slight upwards curve as it had finished growing in his maturity; the last time she’d seen or experienced Lachlan’s cock had been when they were both seventeen, and now that they were twenty-five and much more experienced, she found herself beginning to visibly salivate in a way that Lachlan noticed with a breathy laugh.

“Don’t we both have to work tomorrow?” he asked dumbly, glancing to the side at his alarm clock, which was presently reading 2:13 AM, “You already called off yesterday, you probably shouldn’t just–”

“Lachie, I love you,” Star interjected firmly, pouting sternly up at him, “But if you don’t get your dick up in my guts in the next thirty seconds, I will introduce you to the concept of wet nightmares, copy that?”

“Yeah, yeah…” he at last laughed, finally pulling his blanket off of his body with a shake of his head and a glimmer of radiant light in his eyes, “...love you too, Star.”

And with that, Star kissed him again, a pair of strong hands lifted her shirt up over her head, and all of a sudden, the night was filled with golden stars.

And Star Thatcher dreamed of nothing more than this.

-END-

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