I just napped for seven hours because I am sick and weak and wear ruffly poet clothes and Tohru called me by my first name.
I had a dream where Sasuke from Naruto, Agent X from Deadpool, Baron Wulfenbach from Girl Genius, and the Narnia children were trying to save the world from some kind of problem with space. But there was great tension and angst between the heroes, and they couldn’t work together as a team (no!), so they all went off on their own.
I was one of those albino super-intelligent telepaths you get in anime, and I’d been ordered by the mad scientist who created me to keep an eye on Sasuke, the most unstable of the heroes. At first, I was five years old and had itty-bitty fangs, but I had a Great Shock towards the end of the dream, which apparently aged me to about thirty.
Sasuke was based in Florida, building up a team of fanfic-writing middle-school girls to carry out his plans, with three or four of the adult Naruto characters around to manage them. Only one of the adults (I don’t know his name, or even if he was a real character) realized that Sasuke had become a cokehead – he frequently gave Sasuke sad looks with ominous piano music, sighed, and said nothing to the others. He glared at me whenever I was about to say anything. My Shadowy Creator, who was one of the frivolous, giggly mad scientists, offered me an educational video involving singing puppets to solve Sasuke’s problem, but I was not enthusiastic.
Sasuke knew that I was there to spy on him, and did petty things like forgetting to inform me of meetings and breaking the complicated weapons my Shadowy Creator sent me to try and get rid of me. At one point this worked well enough that, against my Shadowy Creator’s express orders, I left to rescue Agent X and Baron Wulfenbach from some mad scientists, and was duly chastened to find they’d gotten away fine without my help. However, while investigating the scientists’ labs, I accidentally discovered something disturbing about my own creator’s past, and returned to Sasuke’s base deeply unsettled in mind and spirit.
You could tell that I was upset because, when I arrived back, I threw one of Sasuke’s middle-school girls against the wall when she said something obnoxious to me, and then walked off without noticing the shocked looks the others gave me. The narration was a pretty loose third-person-omniscient type, I guess. It was also at this point that I was suddenly a grim, embittered thirty-year-old instead of a spooky savant-child.
Sasuke was holding a meeting, clearly high – the adult ninjas now all knew what was going on. I sat off to the side, brooding on what I’d learned and wondering how I could speak to my Shadowy Creator, now, without letting on that I knew his secrets. There was no doubt that he would kill me when he realized. Suddenly, Sasuke jumped at me with a small knife, cutting my upper thigh before I pinned him – me being twice his size and not stoned and flailing. I snarled at him and shoved him at one of the adult ninjas, who looked at me opaquely. They were all unwilling to go against their leader. It was no longer safe for me at the ninja base in Florida.
I grabbed up my bag and stormed out again, deciding to search for the Narnia children, who, I knew from my Shadowy Creator’s reports, were incompetent and making no progress – but who also, at least, had no dark secrets. As I walked through the night across the rice paddies (rice paddies?), I belatedly noticed that the moon was forty times its normal size, and writing was appearing in the Milky Way. Somewhere, the clockwork dragon from Unico and the Island of Magic screamed. The terrible secret of space had come.
