Can you please tell me why we’re looking for bigfoot at three in the morning? I didn’t sign up for this.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Jiah Veritas
Race: Halfling – Elf (water) / Human
Age: 42, physically about 23
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 767 words
 

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I’m not sure if it’s since I’ve tried to put my dreams to art so much that I don’t remember quite many of them anymore. I haven’t really had that many dreams I would consider weird as of the past few months and it has left me scratching my head. I’m more than aware that not having weird dreams should be, well, a dream come true. Those dreams always left me scratching my head and just wondering what was going to happen next. Even worse, they usually made it very difficult for me to fall back asleep.

I still haven’t managed to put down to paper—or anything else—the beast that haunts those strange dreams. The little one has had more of a presence recently—at least, while I still had those dreams—and I suppose that, in a strange way, I’m grateful for that.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself unable to sleep. It was in the dead of the night, and I didn’t want to keep my delightful pair awake—or wake her up—so I excused myself to the couch. Before I made it there, I took a detour to my art room, I picked up a pencil, an eraser and a pad of paper just in case. I mostly had in mind to read a book but there were times when even the book did me no good so having these things on hand, so I wasn’t constantly walking back and forth in the house had seemed like a good idea.

I had my book, some tea, my art stuff and a light blanket with me when I flopped on the couch. I even had headphones with me because listening to music seemed to help me settle into a sort of weird restful focus—that’s an oxymoron for sure—but yeah. Anyway.

I settled, I tried the book but before too long I was more lost in the almost meditative music than I was anything else so I set my book down, picked up the pad of paper because, wouldn’t you know it, I’ve scribbled interesting things while in that mindset, and I just allowed my gaze to go out of focus.

I don’t really know how much time passed. I sort of found myself startling at something or other. One moment, I’m just sort of sitting there with my eyes out of focus, the next, my left arm jerks a little as though something had tugged on my elbow and the sort of meditative trance was gone. I looked down at my pad of paper, not expecting much and I found that I’d drawn something that resembled what was seen as bigfoot back then.

That first, quick glance almost made me believe that I’d managed to draw the beast from my dreams but looking a bit closer at the drawing—messy as it was—revealed it to be something else entirely. I looked at the clock, found out it was three in the morning. It’d only been twenty or so minutes since I’d put the book down, it had felt so much longer.

I don’t know why my brain went to that particular option. It isn’t as though I’ve ever really looked anything up about that thing before, this is more along the lines of the fact that when I first saw the beast in my dream, I tried to look things up to see if it wasn’t something I’d possibly heard of in passing before or if it was something that had truly come from my mind. Information about bigfoot had been found during these searches but that and the thing in my dreams have very little in common.

Still, I ended up cleaning up the sketch a bit but not much. The more time I spent on it, the more I found I would mess it up more than anything else. I figured that leaving it mostly as it had been, just with some slightly clearer lines, was enough for me and it ended up going into my countless books of sketches that may very well never go anywhere.

I’m still not sure why I drew what I did but it’s one of those things. I’m not going to complain. In a way, I think I would have almost preferred the idea of my mind somehow, without my real control, being able to will my hand to draw the beast since I’ve never been able to put it to paper but maybe it’s for the best. Maybe there’s a reason why I can’t draw the best, in the end.

Instead of signing contracts you don’t read to otherworldly beings, maybe you should… not do that.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 2nd Generation
Characters: Thanh Minh Nguyễn
Race: Souls – Star Keeper
Age: Ageless, physically about 28
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 788 words
 

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Memories are as they are and always will be. That of anything attached to a previous shell is usually not thought of but, once in what they state is a blue moon, things will be different. Memories of a past shell—a past life—will crop up, I will find myself wondering at it for a bit of time and then I will move on.

There is very little I can do with these memories as they crop up. They are of a life that no longer is and filled with people who no longer are. Even if the world had not ended as it did, this would remain the same. I treated each shell with the best of care I could, it was not always easy, but it was done. I made sure to do what I could to keep the shell in good health and strong for as many years as it was possible so that I would not have to be relocated into a new shell. Especially if I was in the middle of trying to achieve something. Not that this particular part was that common that I can tell from the memories that do come and go.

A month or so back, I found myself faced with memories of a life that must have been just before this one, or possibly the one before that. The clothing was not very dated, and the things being talked of, during the memories, were things I recalled as being fairly recent. Not that it had anything to do with the memories themselves, no.

The memories centred around a half-hearted argument. Memories of arguments are not all that uncommon, I would even dare say that they are fairly common. When a shell was forcefully taken from me, it was usually because I was needed elsewhere and that meant that someone was asking for my presence, if you would.

Stars fall. This is an inevitable truth of the world though they seem to be hanging somewhat stronger into the sky now. When the world had so many more souls attached to it still, there were more wishes to be had on these stars which then forced a chain reaction. My main goal, usually, was to locate these stars and ensure that all was well after they had landed. That landing was not always pleasant, to say the least.

The argument from the recent memory still makes me shake my head somewhat. Not all stars that were encountered were pleased with the idea that they had been plucked from their sky for the whim of one or another. They sought to be brought back to their original form and that simply was not a possibility, not really. Not until they usually passed but this was something I preferred not to tell them, I did not need them taking their own lives prematurely, in the end.

Looking back, this particular one I was arguing with was not new to me—the me from the memory. There was a very strong sense that I had had this near-identical argument with them more than once before, but they still remained stubborn about it. Something along the lines of signing contracts to otherworldly beings and how it truly should not be done.

Now, I know that not all otherworldly beings were bad beings. Most of them were quite nice but the ones that tried to sneak in a little signature at the end of a contract were rarely the ones you would wish to spend too much time about. They were no longer truly common by the time this shell had been forced upon me and it is possibly why this memory decided to surface.

I know that if faced with a situation like that, even only so few decades back, I would have been more than just a little exasperated with it all. It makes no sense to go to such lengths, especially when the knowledge that the contact will keep you on the plane even long after your passing. This is a detail that the contract-waving ones rarely mention, of course. They promise great things and freedom and all one might wish for, but the smaller prints need to be read.

I know that I may not seem like one such person that would know about fine prints, contracts and things that may be marked as knowledge that only scholars would know. My quiet nature and my just as quiet habits of mostly keeping to myself possibly make me seem as though I have not had much knowledge of how things might have been in the world before but that would be quite wrong.

Not that it matters anymore, does it?