[Gift] The 11th Hour | Dream

The quiet hum of machinery was a near-constant in the lab, a murmuring backdrop to the life-sounds of dragons, familiars, and rider as they went about their daily business. Harsh darkness often camped along the shelves of samples and experiments, cast by blocking the artificial lights overhead which cut through the air with all the subtlety of a knife.

Their absence, too, was just as noticeable, bathing the laboratory in deep and unforgiving shadows, often broken by monitors and displays, harsh blue light flickering as images danced along the screens.

A murmuration of black and white static, a headache in motion waited on one now, dots flowing in nonsense patterns.

On the desk lay Morel, his normal bright glow dimmed to occasional, irregular flashes, wings and antennae, tail and little toes twitching in his sleep. Small pads were gently attached to different parts of his head, carefully skirting the mushroom that grew out of his skull, and wires snaked into a device with many dials and sliders nearby, connected by a thick cord to the monitor.

Slowly, the device began to tune with Morel the way a rogue instrument might find its way to a harmonious middle C with the rest of its orchestra.

Sliders and dials moved of their own accord, and the dots on the monitor moved until rudimentary shapes played across the monitor.

Morel was in a damp and dark place.

Some part of him, distinctly non-Jungle and more mushroomoid, liked this very much.

He pattered around on rich soil, spores and light seeding under his feet.

Morel could feel time passing as the behind him began to sprout, grow, and gleam, but all he could do was continue to spread the spores until he came upon a mushroom he hadn’t planted. It was bigger than all the others, and it did not glow. A quick flick of his tongue in the air around him told him it was poisonous, but this failed to worry him. After all, he was a Jungle dragon.

He was more worried that it would compete with his mushrooms.

Then, the smallest door — which must be quite small, when compared to a Jungle dragon — opened on the side of the mushroom, and a man stepped out.

He didn’t look like a man. He looked like a carrot, truthfully, if a carrot had four limbs and the flexibility to walk. He was thin and willowy, and had to bend to step out of his home in the mushroom hut. A limp stem hung forward as he crouched over a cane.

He had no discernible face, but Morel could tell he was frowning.

And though he had no discernible mouth, he yelled in a reedy voice, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to my property values?”

Morel blinked one eye at a time, then both, then made the executive decision to open his mouth wider than it had ever gone before and swallowed the poisonous mushroom whole while the carrot-man stared in abject horror.

“It was poisonous,” Morel reasoned. “You would’ve gotten sick eventually.”

The carrot-man glared, and with surprising agility, leaped onto Morel’s head and slipped under the mushroom attached to his head.

Morel jolted awake, thrashing in sudden surprise and further disorientation as he wasn’t where he usually slept as well as the wires tethering him to the device on the desk. Soothing hands calmed him down and unhooked the electrodes, and a kind — if gruff — voice assured him that no, nothing had slipped beneath his mushroom while he was asleep.

It had been nothing more than a strange dream.