Dreamscape

Roger felt himself falling into a dark void. 

He felt cold, the familiar nebulous energy suffusing his being even now. 

His first reaction was to try and struggle against the everpresent darkness, blindly searching for a way out. His mouth was gone, but he still tried to open it and scream.

No light existed around him, leaving him unable to see any way out.

Thousands of thoughts raced through his mind as he tried to desperately find some escape. 

'Where am I? What's going on? Is this what the ability does? Am I not skilled enough to use it yet? What's happening?'

Roger struggled to grasp the reality of his situation as he searched for answers. He began to consider if he lacked a key trait that the Mind Wraiths innately had, allowing them to enter the dreamscape while he could not. 

'That can't be it! Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to use the ability in the first place, right?'

Truthfully, Roger didn't have the first clue about whether he would have been blocked from the ability or not. The System was new to him, and unlike Lila he did not grow up in a community that saw it as commonplace.

Every day he spent on Avar, he felt more and more cheated out of his education. Even a few months in a normal school setting could have helped him immensely since being taken here.

He tried to twist his body around to try and see more, but he couldn't even feel himself, let alone move.

It was like he was floating as a spirit without a physical vessel. He was shapeless and formless, but couldn't move or act upon the world around him. He didn't have any way to track the time, but he felt it slowly pass around him. 

Without anything better to do, he decided to reflect on his current experience in Avar. 

Ever since arriving, he had been in a constant struggle to survive. The Administrator had warned him that he would be, but it was unlike anything he had expected. There had yet to be an easy day, each one more dangerous than the last. If the current trend continued, Roger would not make it out of the forest alive.

His non-existent eyebrows knit as a sudden thought occurred to him.

'It's only been a few days, but the difficulty keeps increasing, but it's not unmanageable. It feels almost controlled, like a faucet being slowly turned on to allow more water to flow.'

He quickly drew a connection between his thoughts and Lila mentioning that the System was seen as fair.

'I wonder if the System is going to keep the very dangerous beasts away from us until we grow strong enough?'

It was not a strong enough theory to go around risking their lives on, but it was a start. At the very least it gave Roger hope that they wouldn't just stumble upon a dragon or something similar.

'If dragons even exist in this hell!'

He had no reason to think they did, but both the tiger and the dogs had been twisted by the magic of this place. It was logical to assume something similar could happen with a lizard. 

That, however, wasn't the important question to consider. That title belonged to the everpresent "why" bouncing around Roger's head.

Why did the System keep things fair, then throw Lila and him into what's supposed to be a very dangerous zone for even veteran magi? How was that fair, and what purpose did it serve?

He thought back to the Administrator and tried to remember how the man had acted.

He had been well dressed and well spoken, and seemed very chipper despite belonging to a world Roger now knew was incredibly dangerous. He also spoke as if he had some sort of power connected to the System, which made sense as he bestowed the System onto Roger.

'But why did he only appear to me, and not Lila?'

The girl had appeared in the same spot Roger did, but the old man never came. To make matters more confusing, Lila had never heard of any Administrator despite having a wealth of knowledge regarding Avar and the System. It was a gap he had waved away the day prior as just a small gap in information, but she had repeatedly proven herself as incredibly well-researched on the topics.

Her not knowing about him meant one of two things to Roger: He was not actually part of the System, and could just be a temporary conduit for the System to use, or the Administrator preferred to keep a hidden profile. 

Roger could understand that second reason and felt it was the right one. He saw no need for the System to even need a host to deliver its benefits. Lila had begun initializing her powers without anything being the catalyst beyond traveling across the worlds.

'Is it something about me that caused him to intervene then? Do rich people on Earth inherit the System naturally while the poor have to be given it? Are the benefits of wealth so great they cross the universe?'

Despite the connections he was making in his mind, he felt like he had more questions now than ever before. He knew the System and Administrator had more to them than meets the eye, but he had no easy way to access that information beyond Lila, who had already stated she knew nothing about the latter half of his queries. 

Roger wished he had spent more time in the prison library reading. Maybe there he could have found some holotexts on Avar and the inner workings of the mystical planet.

'Wait, texts! I have the books the System gave me!'

A fresh wave of excitement rolled through Roger as he realized the System had possibly given him the answer all along in the form of a reward for killing the Spike-Tailed Tiger!

He was just about to try and find them when he remembered the situation he was currently in.

Eternal darkness.

'Has being here for only a few days already warped my sense of reality so much that I'm focused more on my questions than being trapped in an endless void for the rest of my young life?'

It was a sobering thought.

Gathering all his strength, Roger once again tried to will himself to move, but he felt nothing change.

It was possible he actually was making progress, but just couldn't see or feel it to confirm.

'There has to be a clue about what's happening somewhere! Think, Roger, think!'

He parsed through the memories of the last few days to try and find something pertinent to his current situation.

He thought about the information Lila had shared, and if any of it was of use. Despite his attempts, he couldn't notice anything in her shared knowledge that could apply to this situation. 

He then turned his thoughts to the Mind Wraiths and the Spike-Tailed Tiger before them, but still, none of his attempts yielded fruit. 

'What am I missing? Echo of Abilities allows me to use abilities of dead creatures I can physically touch, with the only limitations being that I can only have one at a time, it only lasts twenty-four hours, and the creature has to be of my own rank or lower…'

The realization hit him like a bolt of lightning.

'Lila said Mind Wraiths are low in Beta rank, while I'm still only Alpha! It's so obvious! I'm not high enough rank to properly make use of the Dreamscape yet! This must be me floating in her mind, but I can't access the dreams yet!'

Suddenly having an idea of where he was, he quickly began to consider how he could escape his predicament. 

'I seem to be unable to move, and I can't just wake her up, so do I need to sit around and wait for her to stop dreaming? How long could that take, and would it hurt me if her dreams were destroyed with me in them?'

Roger felt the icy claws of fear grip his heart as he imagined his mind being obliterated by her conscious when she awoke, his body forever left hollow of his soul.

Pushing his worries down, he tried to think of another solution to get out of the dreamscape.

'I used the ability to get in here, so wouldn't it make sense for me to use it to get out?'

He attempted to call upon the System, but it didn't answer, causing him to miss the familiar transparent screen that usually accompanied the thought.

'What else could there be?'

He tried to think about what he took with him into her mind when he realized he still felt the strange energy flowing through him, the same energy he felt when initially copying the ability.

Trusting his gut instinct, he decided to focus on the energy and command it to leave his body, forcing the mana to leave his veins and be defused into the cold night air around him.

He shivered as the breeze struck his body, which was currently lying in the dirt near Lila's bed.