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terryclothI had a dream just now, that had a remarkably coherent plot. So I'll try to leave out all the stupid random dream digressions, and just tell it as a story.
The dream is told from the daughter's point of view, although most of the dream was third-person.
On a small, struggling colony, there's a tower of high-tech metal floating in a pool of lava. It crashed there a while back. A scientist and his daughter live inside. The scientist is 'researching' a way to (a) melt the tower down for its metal, and (b) the nature of a strange alien creature that's been dead since the crash, that lived in the lava.
But he's not really much of a scientist -- he's really more of an occultist. A lot of his 'research' involves a strange game-board that represents his spiritual journey or some such crap... still, he does spend a lot of time studying the body of the alien creature. But more staring off into space and brooding over his dead wife.
The daughter likes to explore the area around the lava pit, sometimes taking the elevator down to the part of the tower immersed in lava, which is dangerous. On one such trip, there's a terrible accident and she's dropped into the lava -- but doesn't burn up. She doesn't know why, until she sees some little lava fish swimming around her... that look like the creature her father is studying. Apparently, they saved her from the lava! She brings one back alive for her father to study.
But there's a problem. Her father's been selling shares of the tower's metal when he gets around to melting it down on the black market, and the authorities are after him! They storm the tower, and in the fight (which happens a ways away from the tower) the daughter helps her father escape, but falls into a deep chasm, a fall no one could possibly survive.
But she does, landing lightly at the bottom of the chasm, surrounded by glowing firefly-like creatures which watch her with great interest. Did they save her from the fall, just like the fish? Unlike the fish, though, she feels hostile to them, and chases them off, heading back to the tower.
In the tower, her father has finished dissecting the fish only to discover that it's just a dumb animal. It wasn't what saved his daughter from the lava after all -- apparently, she was killed in the crash too, and he thought the now-dead creature he's been 'researching' saved her. All this time, when he's supposedly been researching it, he's been practicing 'astral projection' with it as his spirit guide, and it's been stringing him along (or, we now realize, his fantasy has been stringing him along) with the promise of bringing his wife back. All his 'work' was wasted!
But he has one last thing to try -- a powerful occult item he got from the black market, which he's already charged up with the three elements (sunlight, rock, and fire) -- all it needs is for him to let it consume his soul, and then he'll have the power to grant himself one wish before becoming a terrifying soulless monster (no physical transformation involved here; just talking serial killer).
His daughter comes back in time, though, and chases him down, wrests the device out of his grasp, and sacrifices her own soul to charge it up instead... and dissolves into a puddle of goo. She wasn't his daughter at all, miraculously saved from the lava -- just one of the aliens from the lava imitating his daughter all along. In remorse, the father uses the item to destroy the tower and himself. The end.
Or is it?
The daughter wakes up in the even-more-ruined-now bits of the tower, and broods that she'll never get offplanet to fulfill her destiny now and breed a new race of her kind on another planet. She watches over the internet as all the claims her father made for the lava fish are debunked (they were recovered after his death), and the last fleeting hope that someone else would come to study them fades.
The last part was scary, because all through the dream the daughter was a very nice and caring person -- she realized she was a fake as soon as she heard about her father's bullshit 'astral projection' -- the 'fish' couldn't have saved her, either time, and neither could the bugs in the chasm. She remembered that she'd taken the daughter's form to comfort him, originally, and she sacrificed herself because she was 'expendable'.
But in the last part, she doesn't care about that, or about humanity, or that her father killed himself (except for how it inconveniences her), or anything anymore except this selfish desire to use her shapeshifting powers to take over the universe. Because, you know, she gave up her soul...
The dream is told from the daughter's point of view, although most of the dream was third-person.
On a small, struggling colony, there's a tower of high-tech metal floating in a pool of lava. It crashed there a while back. A scientist and his daughter live inside. The scientist is 'researching' a way to (a) melt the tower down for its metal, and (b) the nature of a strange alien creature that's been dead since the crash, that lived in the lava.
But he's not really much of a scientist -- he's really more of an occultist. A lot of his 'research' involves a strange game-board that represents his spiritual journey or some such crap... still, he does spend a lot of time studying the body of the alien creature. But more staring off into space and brooding over his dead wife.
The daughter likes to explore the area around the lava pit, sometimes taking the elevator down to the part of the tower immersed in lava, which is dangerous. On one such trip, there's a terrible accident and she's dropped into the lava -- but doesn't burn up. She doesn't know why, until she sees some little lava fish swimming around her... that look like the creature her father is studying. Apparently, they saved her from the lava! She brings one back alive for her father to study.
But there's a problem. Her father's been selling shares of the tower's metal when he gets around to melting it down on the black market, and the authorities are after him! They storm the tower, and in the fight (which happens a ways away from the tower) the daughter helps her father escape, but falls into a deep chasm, a fall no one could possibly survive.
But she does, landing lightly at the bottom of the chasm, surrounded by glowing firefly-like creatures which watch her with great interest. Did they save her from the fall, just like the fish? Unlike the fish, though, she feels hostile to them, and chases them off, heading back to the tower.
In the tower, her father has finished dissecting the fish only to discover that it's just a dumb animal. It wasn't what saved his daughter from the lava after all -- apparently, she was killed in the crash too, and he thought the now-dead creature he's been 'researching' saved her. All this time, when he's supposedly been researching it, he's been practicing 'astral projection' with it as his spirit guide, and it's been stringing him along (or, we now realize, his fantasy has been stringing him along) with the promise of bringing his wife back. All his 'work' was wasted!
But he has one last thing to try -- a powerful occult item he got from the black market, which he's already charged up with the three elements (sunlight, rock, and fire) -- all it needs is for him to let it consume his soul, and then he'll have the power to grant himself one wish before becoming a terrifying soulless monster (no physical transformation involved here; just talking serial killer).
His daughter comes back in time, though, and chases him down, wrests the device out of his grasp, and sacrifices her own soul to charge it up instead... and dissolves into a puddle of goo. She wasn't his daughter at all, miraculously saved from the lava -- just one of the aliens from the lava imitating his daughter all along. In remorse, the father uses the item to destroy the tower and himself. The end.
Or is it?
The daughter wakes up in the even-more-ruined-now bits of the tower, and broods that she'll never get offplanet to fulfill her destiny now and breed a new race of her kind on another planet. She watches over the internet as all the claims her father made for the lava fish are debunked (they were recovered after his death), and the last fleeting hope that someone else would come to study them fades.
The last part was scary, because all through the dream the daughter was a very nice and caring person -- she realized she was a fake as soon as she heard about her father's bullshit 'astral projection' -- the 'fish' couldn't have saved her, either time, and neither could the bugs in the chasm. She remembered that she'd taken the daughter's form to comfort him, originally, and she sacrificed herself because she was 'expendable'.
But in the last part, she doesn't care about that, or about humanity, or that her father killed himself (except for how it inconveniences her), or anything anymore except this selfish desire to use her shapeshifting powers to take over the universe. Because, you know, she gave up her soul...
