A soft prodding was what accosted him awake. Or, at least he initially thought that he was now awake. However, the fact of the matter was that he knew for certain when he took a look around that he was still very much asleep, just trapped in a very different kind of world.

“Come play with us, MC-kun!”

“Yes, yes! Come and play, come and play!”

“We bet you can’t find us! Heehee! Come and play!”

Vaile was not amused in the slightest by what was going on. If there existed places worse than the typical depictions of Hell itself, he was fairly certain that he was now stuck in one of them. The sheer intensity of the colors around him and the pure unadulterated sweetness of everything was just too much to bear. This shit was like the most over-the-top children’s tv show that you could imagine but cranked up to a hundred. The color saturation was beyond intense, the clouds were literally made of cotton candy and marshmallows, and he was fairly certain that if he went full Hannibal Lecter on the people around him, he would be tasting candy and not flesh.

Given that he had just ‘woken up’, he was sure that he was actually still asleep, just dreaming of this bullshit. The gamer in him wanted to see what he could do, but the part of him that had treated the waking world as a Horror Movie was keeping the rest of him in check. That specific part of him was yelling at him to not try and anger the candy people around him, lest he find out that candy people ate human flesh.

And, of course, playing with them was out of the question. Given the fact that he had fallen unconscious in front of some weird… dog? Well, anyway, given that he had zonked out in front of a thing and that he was fairly certain that the thing and its ilk were the dog-like things he had seen out of the corner of his gaze for days now, he figured that sticking around would be hazardous to his health.

He was surprisingly lucid for this dream, but if his knowledge of pop culture and Horror let him in on any kind of knowledge it was that lucid dreaming could be a very high risk, high reward enterprise. If he let even a modicum of fear in, then the dream would spiral into a nightmare unlike any other. He could not even consider fear in his current situation, lest he… Oh, fuck.

He had to think of fear just once in a lucid dream for the spiral to begin, and now he was bracing for that spiral. He was absolutely certain now that things would get worse.

And they did. The dreamland around him froze, with the candy people stopping both in mid-motion and mid-speech. He could feel things begin to tumble out of control, and he was not interested in sticking around in this section of dreamland to find out what was to happen next. However, the ground before him broke away and he tumbled down through a chocolate floor into something else entirely.

Gravity around him shifted at a rate he couldn’t mentally catch up with, flinging him around like a rag doll tossed about in a hectic storm of high-speed spatial currents. Finally, he was set on his feet and took another look around. There were islands floating throughout a void, each in seemingly random spots and at random angles. They each looked like someone had taken a random seed generator for a Crafting-Based Survival Game and just picked the weirdest features from each individual seed to cut off and place here.

Hell, this place reminded him of a certain place in the very, very old remake for certain monster capture/ battling game, just with more crazy and less cute but dangerous creatures. Thankfully, this place was just different enough to avoid the mighty and indiscriminate fist of a certain company’s overreactive legal teams, if that would even have mattered to those people in the slightest, to begin with.

Vaile stood and observed everything for a time, hoping that he would just wake up already, but after what to him was far too long he made up his mind and went to try and find something that could hopefully lead him out of his dreaming state.

…

This was far from ideal, but it was, quite possibly, the only way that any kind of conversation could be initiated. It had overestimated Vaile’s abilities, or, perhaps, it had underestimated the limits that had been placed upon him by those that kept the status quo here from shifting. Vaile lay passed out on the floorboards, and it was locked in position, looked down at him with a mix of worry and pity. This was not the kind of pity where it is was a form of mockery, but one where it actually felt horrible that the person being pitied was in such a situation.

It could see Vaile’s mind trying to wrap itself around its form and existence, only to fail and ultimately end up knocking him unconscious out of pure self-preservation instinct mixed with copious amounts of stress and exhaustion. Such things were not good for anyone’s health, either physical, mental, or emotional, and the fact that when Vaile woke up it would still be there meant that Vaile could be caught in a death spiral.

Still, there was one possible way that this could be averted. If it could focus just hard enough, perhaps it could manipulate Vaile’s dreamscape just enough to get a message or two across. Given its current situation, astral projection and dream-diving were the only real options available, and due to the sheer potency of the defenses in the room, it would be a chore and a half. It was ultimately unsure of whether it should be thankful that Vaile would likely remain passed out for a good ten or more hours or whether it should be highly concerned that Vaile could die.

In the end, it chose both options at once and decided to risk it by focusing its full existence into entering the Dreamlands without first crossing into The Space Between Spaces. For one of its kind, this could, quite possibly, be a death sentence if too much went wrong, but what other choice did it have? This could very well be the only chance it would have of breaking a potential death spiral in the making, and thus it began to slowly fade into a semi-transparent and semi-tangible form as it strained against the barriers and fortification to send just enough of itself into the Dreamlands to contact Vaile.

Hopefully, he hadn’t fallen into a Nightmare. If he had, then the risk of both of them dying would increase exponentially. But even if that did happen, it had faith that Vaile’s absurd luck would let him pull through, even if it could not. Aside from the Nightmare Realm, there was one other thing to worry about, but the defense here had kept everything out up till now, so the odds of them getting into Vaile’s Dreamland was small and practically only non-0.