DREAMING HOPE

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((14 - Hypno Angel))


Spider is falling.
She's falling down through the empty void, falling past dozens of crystals.
She's falling towards some huge crystal below.
But no, she's falling towards one of the smaller ones.
No, wait, she's falling towards the Archimedes--
Or is she falling towards the Corkscrew?
She falls, faster and faster, until she--
--wakes up.


Giraffe dreams of fire.
Her world is burning, burning, all heat and red light and--
But it doesn't hurt.
She's burning, but she doesn't hurt.
She looks down, and sees her hands, wreathed in crimson flames, but...
Unscathed. Not burning.
Giraffe stands on a crystal plain, looking up at the creatures in the sky above.
Shapes of leathery dark, they loom like skylit shadows.
She makes them burn.


Zebra dreams of her forge.
She stands over it, hammering at the anvil.
Clang, clang, clang, her hammer drops over and over again.
She's making it for... someone...
She knows them, but for some reason she can't quite place them.
They tell her exactly what shape to make it, but...
That doesn't make any sense, they must've meant something different.
The man... tries to explain... gesturing...
She's trying so hard, so hard.
Then he falls!
He's... he's down, and she can't fix him.
She tries, she tries, she tries to get him up.
But he won't.
He won't sit up. He won't.
A voice... comes through.
"Zebra. Oy!"
She recognizes that voice, from... somewhere...
She looks upwards, trying to find the source.
"You alright?"
When she looks back to the man, though, he's gone.
She frowns, speaking to herself.
"Who? Where... what happened to him?"
Around her are cages. Great steel bars and walls, everywhere.
She steps back, then looks around, turning full circle to see everything--
She wakes up.


Goat dreams of himself, floating in the empty void.
After a moment, he's standing on... something. Nondescript.
Far up above, there's something else.
Something to stand on. He wants to be there.
He tries to leap, jumping up as best he can.
It's nowhere near enough, and he falls heavily back to what he was standing on.
He really wants to be there.
He wants it so bad...
The void is red, bloody red, sickening, vicious red.
He can leap.
Goat pushes off the platform with far greater strength than he's ever imagined,
feeling the raw power sending him hundreds of feet upwards in a single bound.
He drifts clear past the second platform, watching it recede,
before running heavily up to reach him again, and he's falling towards it--
Goat wakes up.


Skunk dreams of herself.
She's back in Face, back in the enforcement complex.
Back in the jails. Not where she belongs.
She should be outside, putting people in here.
She reaches for her knives, to try to cut through the wooden bars.
They're not there, but as she raises her arms again...
They are the knives.
She steps forward, and slides her shimmering hands into the wood, cutting easily.
Slowly, she steps out of the cage, and it falls apart behind her.
She sees Owl before her, but... blurry. Gone.
With a start, Skunk realizes that Owl too is in a cage--a cage of crystal.
She tries to cut the crystal, but it is harder than her.
The crystal sends spikes, reaching for her, but she is hard as steel, and they shatter against her.
She retaliates, hardening herself rather than sharpening, and swings a fist at the crystal.
It shatters into a thousand pieces, and--
Skunk wakes up.


Owl dreams of shapes.
Some curve, some have straight lines, some have loops.
There are hundreds--thousands of them. Occasionally they overlap, repeat.
Each one has... a sound. A meaning.
Slowly the shapes come together in lines, forming more meanings, more ideas.
They make sense. They flow. They're logical, like her.
They don't change, they keep their meaning. They're like memories.
But... more than that.
Their meaning is... more real than meaning itself.
They don't change themselves, they change what they touch.
What they mean becomes real.
Owl watches as worlds are written from nothing, a thousand times over, and rewritten again by worlds of words.