The Dream Connoisseur

The Ferguson Superstore radiated a relentless beige tone of despair woven from excessively festive music and the hum of fluorescent lighting at eleven-fourteen on a Tuesday morning.

Bradberry stood behind the counter in a MacPaws uniform a quarter too large for his frame, as the franchise procured the uniforms in bulk and refused to order again. The hat with the paw logo sat slightly crooked between his fluffy wolf ears. The fryer behind him occasionally let out gurgles of a dying seagull.

A very tall, very curvy dark jaguar in a dark wool cardigan stretched her spotted legs under the orange plastic table. She leaned back onto the red leather booth and watched Brad with the patient amusement of a theater critic that already witnessed her favorite show three hundred times.

“BRADLEY!” a voice rang out.

The gray wolf shuddered as Legate Ixthia breathed in his barely concealed fear. She greatly enjoyed the particularly crunchy dream-flavor of her favorite pet’s soul.

A black and white husky girl arrived at the MacPaws counter, falling-comet style, panting furiously as if she had never once in her life been informed that walking at a regular pace was an available option.

“Brad. Braddy. Braddberry. Braddberripiim! Okay so Alec and I were discussing the philosophical implications of the MacPaws loyalty card and here is the situation: I have eleven stamps and I need twelve for a free bucket of nuggets, buuuuut the promotion ended on Monday, which I feel is genuinely a prad rights violation, and I think you specifically should fix this for me, right now, as my awesomesauce friend.”

The wolf stared at the husky. “Nessy, the promotion ended yesterday.”

“Right, that’s the violation I’m talking about. I wasn’t here yesterday ‘cus Alec and I went camping on the weekend and got caught up in a rainstorm and… other stuff.”

“I was not involved in setting the promotion end date.” Brad stated.

“You wear the hat,” the husky rebutted, as if this settled it. “The hat means authority. I respect the hat…”

“Please order something already,” Brad ground out.

“That is to say, I respect the hat for now, Bradberry,” Nessy grinned. “But it would be a shame if…”

Irritation-laced worry bubbled inside eighteen year old Brad. Nessy was a teenage ocean of liquid mercury mayhem that relentlessly slammed against the citadel of his being in endlessly unexpected ways.

Behind Nessy, moving at the pace of a Buddhist monk who acquired great inner patience through repeated exposure to Nessy, arrived a brown haired teenage human. He stopped next to Nessy and nodded at Bradberry with an expression of profound solidarity.

Bradberry nodded back. The nod of two Nessy-disaster survivors.

“Alec,” Nessy announced, spinning to grab the human’s arm, hauling him forward, “explain the stamp situation to Brad, because when I explain it, he makes a face.”

“She has eleven stamps,” Alec said.

“The promotion ended yesterday,” Bradberry said.

“The promotion ended,” Alec repeated to Nessy.

“Whose side are you on, Aleeeeeeec?” Nessy whined.

“The side where we order lunch before lunch time ends.” Alec idly studied the menu board above Bradberry’s head as if he hadn’t seen it a thousand times already.

A third, feathery figure entered MacPaws and Brad’s heart lurched. The final key to his doom was here.

The sixteen year old raptor girl’s gait was prim and everything about her stated ‘I exist perpendicular to disorder’. She had a mane of emerald feathers framing violet scales and was dressed in a blazer that had been ironed recently and would assuredly continue to be ironed regularly for the foreseeable future. She regarded the ongoing stamp negotiation with visible, restrained suffering.

The tense concern pouring from Bradberry increased. Kristi, for all her projection of absolute properness, only created a perfect storm of increasingly unfortunate events when she came into vicinity of Nessy and Alec.

“I’ll have the grilled chicken Caesar salad,” Kristi said.

“We don’t have Caesar salad.” Bradberry displayed an immovable profile, but he had already grieved every possible version of the next thirty minutes.

Kristi blinked with gold-amber raptor eyes. “I saw it on the website.”

“The website,” Brad said, “is updated by a regional manager in Denver who has never once visited this location.”

“The website represents the brand promise.” The raptor pressed on.

Ixthia inhaled Brad’s ambient dread. Not every nightmare had to be obviously terrifying via flesh eating bacteria, falling out teeth, drowning, or walls of spiders. The best nightmares in her opinion featured the exact past with maximum realism in which the mind dreaded the mundane that ever so slowly creeped towards inescapable disaster like molasses.

“Look… Nessy ate all of the salad sauce on Sunday night while I was cleaning the trash and the regional office hasn’t updated the website to reflect that,” Brad said. “Also… I forgot to order more until today.”

“You ate all of the sauce?” The raptor glared at the husky.

“Yes,” Nessy glared back. “Yes. I ate all of it on Sunday evening. To inconvenience someone very annoying who comes here for salads! It’s a clear message. MacPaws is our domain! Mine and Alec’s!”

Bradberry’s worry reached a pitch that Ixthia found delightfully warm akin to having a hearty soup with long gone best friends by the campfire beneath the endless, violet stars of Cradlefall Dreadspine mountains.

Brad sensed unnerving desolation arriving from several directions at once and lacked the vocabulary to describe it.

Ixthia, on the other hand, knew exactly where Brad’s doom lay.

Nessy’s actions and arguments moved in wicked, unexpected spirals, akin to soul-seeking, squid-like Astral Phantoms, naturally set to destabilize the mind upon contact. The husky’s mere presence pulled coherent thought slightly sideways in everyone around her, through invisible entropic waves.

Ixthia had observed this specific skill before in young Charmchain mages. The husky eroded order with her extra-clear and loud voice.

She was an Entropic Riffer with a future, the kind of girl that would one day make an excellent Third Fleet Marshal Commandant like Nexxali Everrim.

Kristi was the husky’s diametric opposition, a raptor attempting to install orderly structure everywhere she encountered its absence. Her attention on Alec only reinforced such desire, as if proximity to him made her even more organized.

Ixthia had deduced Kristi’s alignment long ago too.

Syntropy.

Raw. Young. Fresh. Powerful. Just like her great-granddaughter Galateya, this prad would make a powerful planetary Administrator Secretary one day for the Frontenachii Empire.

Alec, the human, stood between them like a compass needle between two poles, drawn fractionally toward each in alternating moments, making both of them more charged simply by existing.

The Legate smiled, endlessly entertained by the golden triangle of Brad-torment which featured Nessy’s conceptual, fiery chaos from one side and Kristi’s wall of cold blades from another.

“The point,” the husky pivoted with doggored energy, “is that the stamp card has a philosophical continuity. The stamp exists. My wallet exists. The nuggets exist. Are you telling me those three facts fail to generate an outcome in your heart? Where’s your See-Mass spirit, Braddy?”

“I’m telling you, the promotion ended on Monday,” Bradberry said.

“Monday is a construct. It doesn’t exist without us thinking about it.”

Kristi’s left eye twitched. “Nessy. There is a queue behind you.”

“There isn’t.”

“There is,” Kristi stated.

“Conceptually I have twelve stamps,” Nessy declared at the cashier.

Kristi let out a raptor growl.

“You can order around me,” Nessy commented. “Also why are you here? Whoever even invited you to our hangout lunch spot?”

Alec remained silent. Ixthia appreciated his non-commitment tree-style strategy which only made the situation worse for Brad.

“Bradlington.” Nessy placed her elbows on the counter, chin in her hands, presenting the face of a creature that considered her topic of choice as the most important on the planet. “Can I ask you something deeply personal?”

“No,” Brad said.

“When you stamp the card n’ press the little stamp down. Do you feel anything? Is there a moment of connection between you and the stamp and the card and the customer? Like a little magic circuit?”

“I feel the passage of time,” Brad stated dryly.

“Lame,” Nessy commented. “You know, some day you’re going to end up working in a job that’s far worse than this and regret not appreciating my niceness. Picture it! You, working for a manager who’s older than… one hundred and eighty years old and drinks your soul in your sleep!” She wiggled her dark claws for emphasis.

Ixthia’s heart hiccupped. There it was.

Innate Prophecy.

Nessy was a natural precog, a sniffer of the future. Combined with Riffweld, this made her an absolute menace.

Brad twitched.

“Prads don’t live that long, Nessy,” Kristi stated, winding the wolf down slightly.

“Who says this poor boy’s future villainous manager gotta be a prad?” The husky tilted her head, sky-blue eyes sliding in the direction of Ixthia. “She could be something else. Something truly horrific. A… spooki, magic-hoarding Dragon… FROM SPACE! Tun tun tun.”

Brad’s soul wobbled sideways.

“Dragons do not exist,” Kristi stated. “Life isn’t a DnD game.”

Such beautiful torment. Ixthia drooled slightly, tail swishing. Brad was pulled down then up then down again, like a person being repeatedly drowned.

“How would you know?” Nessy demanded, rounding on the raptor. “Have you ever been to space?”

“No I have not,” Kristi answered.

“Then stop contributing to this conversation, uninvited raptor!” Nessy huffed at the raptor girl and stared at Brad. “What do you think, Braddy? Does the future feel spacious to you? Like, directionally. Do you feel pulled anywhere? Up? Out?”

“I feel being pulled toward my lunch break,” Bradberry said, struggling to maintain a professional demeanor in the face of Nessy’s lunacy.

Alec asked for combo four.

This unlocked something in Nessy. She spun around him with the energy of a husky-shaped tornado. “Alec. Alec! If you could go to space with one person in this MacPaws, just one, and you had to survive in a small pod together for six months eating only whatever they had on the combo menu, and that person had to be interesting enough to keep you from losing your mind, who would you pick and do not say yourself because that’s cheating and also sad.”

Alec opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Kristi. Looked at Nessy. Looked at Bradberry with the expression of a man watching his house burn down peacefully because he had already accepted the insurance wouldn’t cover it.

“I’d pick Brad,” he said after a tense minute of contemplation.

“WHAT?” Nessy barked. “No! This is an illegal choice!”

“Why?” Alec wondered.

“Brad is the worker! You can’t pick the dreamer stuck at work in his dreams! He’s literally the infrastructure of this locale! You MUST pick someone interesting!”

“Brad is interesting,” Alec said.

“Oh? OH? In what way is Brad interesting?!”

Alec looked at Brad, who refused to provide the human any hints. Ixthia licked her lips.

Teenage Brad knew in his heart that he wasn’t interesting and firmly believed that he’d never amount to anyone interesting at this rate, be perpetually trapped with low end jobs having to deal with Nessies his entire life.

“Your hypothetical is structurally unsound,” Kristi stated. “Six months in a pod would result in psychological deterioration regardless of companion choice. The correct answer is to pack books.”

“Books are not a person, Kristi!”

“Books are better than… most people.” The raptor girl looked briefly at Alec as if she quietly revised the statement to exclude one specific person. Nessy clocked this instantly with the accuracy of a shark detecting a single drop of blood in an ocean wave.

Nessy flashed to Bradberry. “Brad. Bradberry Pimmm! Alec has just chosen you over two perfectly eligible girls standing right here, and I need you to understand the gravity of that decision and what it says about the state of modern friendship.” She then wheeled on Alec. “Is this because of the chips?”

“What chips?”

“Uhm… I ate your Wringles without asking a month ago and you probably think that I don’t remember but I absolutely remember and I am totally going to get you new Wringles eventually! The superstore is just out of that flavor!”

Alec let out a weary sigh.

“Also, you said books are better than most people and then looked VERY directly at Alec, Kristi,” Nessy spun back to the raptor. “I have great peripheral vision and excellent social awareness despite what some raptors might imply.”

“I looked at Alec because he was standing there,” Kristi said. “Nothing was being implied.”

“He is always standing somewhere! You could have looked at the fryer! You could have looked at the hat rack or Bradberry. You looked at Alec specifically and then you said books are better than most people, which means that, in your dino-bird-brain, Alec occupies a category above books. And… I am the only person in this MacPaws who noticed this diresome fact!”

Alec looked at Bradberry. Bradberry looked at the fryer. The fryer gurgled.

“I would like to order,” Kristi said.

“Order your feelings first!” Nessy suggested far too loudly. “N’ lay off my best friend who’s assuredly not interested in raptors!” The husky grabbed Alec’s wrist and began towing him sideways along the counter, apparently having decided that the conversation required a change of terrain.

“Alec and I are going to stand over here now! For… condiment-related reasons. Brad, I’ll take sixty nuggets, and before you say anything about yo’ stamp limits, I’d like you to know that I am prepared to be very patient about this. Patient enough that my ghost will haunt you in your dreams! Also, no matter how many times you die and no matter how many dimensions you cross, I’ll always be there… sideways-judging your life choices!”

Brad’s expression remained stoic, but there was a gnawing pit in his stomach.

“You exist in many dimensions?” Alec asked.

“Duh, basic-ass probability math says so, my dude!” Nessy stated, “Well, not me particularly but like other versions of me? Like a cat me. Or a fox me. Or a wendigo me. Or a dragon me! Many juicy options, yo. Sideways math!”

“I am struggling to picture you as a cat,” the teenage human stated.

Kristi followed the husky and the human at a measured pace, having ordered her salad without the sauce. “Brad isn’t a rule breaker like someone I know and terrorising him with haunting threats accomplishes nothing because dream-ghosts aren’t real.”

“It accomplishes everything! You could be a dream ghost right now,” Nessy declared at the condiment station, stacking paper ketchup cups into a small tower. “Alec, back me up!”

“I’m not getting involved in dream… ghosting,” Alec said, clearly struggling to mentally follow along Nessy’s wild, entropic narrative track.

“You’re already involved. You picked Brad for the space pod and now Kristi is upset about it and I need your social weight on my side of the MacPaws.” Nessy increased the condiment-citadel to precarious Babel Tower dimensions and then glanced at Kristi. “The issue isn’t the stamps, raptor-butt. The issue is the philosophy of completeness. A stamp card with eleven stamps is a tragedy. You, as someone who is very interested in order and also in a certain human standing next to me, should feel this viscerally.”

Kristi’s beak made a sound like a stapler closing on nothing. “I am not interested in Alec in any capacity other than the ordinary capacity of a… regular friendship.”

“Incredible,” Nessy said. “Brad. Brandonnis, did you clock that sentence? Regular friendship?! Such specificity! You don’t specify the type when you’re not defending against another type.” The paper cup tower collapsed just as Brad had expected it to, scattering cups across the MacPaws. “Alec, what are your thoughts?”

“‘Bout?”

“About us being dream ghosts in Brad’s future nightmare!” Nessy repeated, sounding delighted by her own wild brilliance. She vaulted sideways onto the condiment counter and sat on it, legs dangling, black and white tail swishing, completely ignoring the small placard that said DO NOT SIT ON COUNTER. “Aight, bud, here’s my theory. The nightmare dragon manager from space almost certainly operates on dream-logic rather than sleep-logic, which means she’d be aware of us in the dream but we’d only be aware of her in the corner of our eye, right? Classic horror geometry!”

“Nessy, get off the counter.” Alec said.

“No. I’m making a philosophical point from an elevated position for greater emphasis.”

“They have a sign, Nessy. Pretty sure they put it there just for you.”

“Signs are for people who are alive. We’re not actually alive. Not in a classical sense. Means that we can do whatever we wanna here. No limits!”

A violet-scaled raptor hand shot up and forcefully dragged Nessy off the counter by the scruff. “Get down and clean up those cups.”

“Kristi,” the husky hissed out, swatting at the raptor with white paws. “You cannot just yeet a philosopher off her narrative counter.”

“This isn’t a dream,” Kristi growled. “And you cannot do whatever you want to do here, your damned uncultured dog philosopher.”

“Alec,” Nessy announced, dangling briefly before her feet found the floor. “Witness what is happening to me.”

“I am,” Alec said.

“And?”

“And you were sitting on the condiment counter,” the human pointed out.

“Slayer! Whose side,” Nessy demanded, “are you on?! Your best fren’ or this dastardly raptelloid who understands nawting?”

“The side of not getting banned from MacPaws.”

“Brad can’t actually ban us. He has no power here. Only endless torment. Because this is a dream. Or, maybe, will be a dream someday. N’ways, one day he’s going to wake up in his space-manager’s arms and know that I am right. ‘Cause I’m the supreme doggo of right-ness.”

The gaping pit in Brad’s stomach grew deeper, darker and wider.

Some part of her pet assuredly knew that this was a dream, but most of Brad believed that Nessy was simply spouting nonsense like usual. The unnerving dissonance produced by the husky bard was a delight to Ixthia’s fear-catching hooks.

It was time.

Diving fully into her pet’s dream, Ixthia slid out of the red booth, approaching the MacPaws employee.