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Chloe stared at Tuffy. She'd long since grown used to him talking like Stephen Fry. To hear a girl's voice coming from him, even telepathically, threw her off. "Angelica? You're... possessing Tuffy?"
"Not by choice." Tuffy wrinkled his snout and looked down at his legs with the closest thing a dog could show to disdain. "How am I supposed to get around on these stubby little things?"
"We could go find a wagon..." Chloe said, her voice trailing off as she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over her dresser. Judging from her haircut and braces, she was eight years old again, somehow. Angelica's presence proved that her work with the Explorers was not a dream. But what then was this?
"Also not a dream," said the telepathic voice in her head.
"Hey! I didn't give you permission to read my thoughts." She tried to clamp down on her mind, to hide the momentary pang of disappointment. In the four years that she'd been dreamwalking, she'd come to accept and enjoy the way her life had turned out; that didn't mean that she didn't occasionally wish that things could be different.
Angelica-in-Tuffy's-Body paced up and down the length of her bed. "Sor-ry. I think we have bigger issues at hand than privacy. This isn't some dream realm, Chloe. We're really here. I think... I guess... you're possessing your younger self, and I somehow got pushed into Tuffy's body."
"Well, at least you're not my Mom. That would be awkward." Trying to be practical, Chloe walked over to the dresser and looked for something to wear. She was disgusted at how childish everything was. She'd been such a kid at eight.
"Sure, because being a dog isn't awkward." Tuffy sprung off of the bed, landing with a clatter of claws.
"Don't do that," Chloe chided. "It's bad for your back." She gestured vaguely at the carpeted stairs leading to the bed. "You're supposed to use that. Same for the couch downstairs."
Tuffy growled audibly while Angelica's voice tore through Chloe's head. "I'm not going to be getting onto the couch! We're not going to hang out and watch Saturday morning cartoons. We need to figure out how to get back through that rift and tell Andrew what we found."
Chloe nodded as she pulled a smiley-face adorned ringer tee over her head. "Right, right. I need to stay focused. Ugh, if we're stuck here, I'd have to go through puberty all over again. And I'd have to find a way to convince Mom to give you people food instead of kibble... ugh." If she couldn't focus on the positive of the last ten years not being a dream, she could at least focus on how negative it would be to relive those ten years.
"Ugh indeed." Some of Tuffy's dog instincts must have kicked in, because despite apparently being controlled by Angelica, he brought Chloe her sneakers. Angelica asserted herself again and protested the ear-ruffling she got by way of thanks. "Please try to remember who I am."
"I know, I know. Let me see... if I'm eight, that means it's 1998ish. Any idea why we'd be here?"
Tuffy let out a yip of surprise. "That's when H. Reginald Wilson died," Angelica said.
Chloe looked down at the little dog. "Who?"
"The guy! The one we saw right before we hit the rift." Tuffy started spinning in circles, an external expression of Angelica's agitated excitement. "He was part of some weird church. He must be behind all of this. He must have sent us here for some reason."
"But why us?" Chloe said, nibbling her lower lip in concentration. "There's really not much that a kid and a dog can do, not in the real world."
"Which is why we need to go back to sleep," Angelica said, coming out of her spin and standing in a perfect show-dog stance. "Here we may be a plucky eight year old and her faithful canine companion, but there we're the pre-eminent dreamwalker and her amazingly powerful telepathic partner."
She took one long look around her childhood bedroom and then grinned shakily. "You're right about that!"
Angelica-Tuffy climbed the little stairs onto Chloe's bed and stretched out, wallowing in the blankets a bit. "See you on the dream-side, Somnambula!"
"Don't call me that," Chloe muttered, her temporarily childish voice perfectly apt for the sulky tone. She kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the bed next to the telepathically possessed corgi. She put one arm around the body that encompassed both of her best friends, breathed deeply, taking in the scent of doggie shampoo, and fell immediately asleep.
They were back in the dreaming, and back in their own bodies. Chloe felt awkwardly tall, as if part of her mind was still having trouble adjusting to being eighteen instead of eight. Next to her, Angelica stretched and smiled.
"I have never been happier to be myself," Angelica said, with a little bounce.
Chloe looked around the ever-shifting meadow that served as her home base. Tuffy was still absent. She wondered where he had gone. They were always together in the dreaming, though surely he did things by himself for the four hours she was awake every day - or maybe he slept, dreaming dreams within the dreaming.
She stretched as well, taking a moment to refamiliarize herself with the proper length of her limbs. Lost in introspection, she wondered how she could ever regret this life she lived, how she could be nostalgic for a childhood that had been so mundane, so boring. Sure, there were things she could never do, experiences she would never have - but while the rest of the world was doing those things, having those experiences, she would be looking out in the vast darkness of the sea of dreams, a sight they would never see.
"Hey girl, you okay?" Angelica sounded concerned.
Chloe snapped herself out of the reverie. "Just thinking. It was weird being a kid again, you know? But let's stop dawdling and go find that rift again."
"Do you remember where... when... whatever we were?"
She nodded. "Well, as much as I can here. You know how it is, nothing is really static."
With that, rather than walking out into the sea of dreams, she stepped sideways, turning ninety degrees from her current viewpoint of reality, and pulled them both out of the meadow and into view of the space-time continuum.
It never failed to take her breath away: all of creation, spread out in front of her, stretching from horizon to horizon, dwindling off into infinity, displayed in abstract terms that her mind couldn't quite grasp. And there, just in front of them, was the rift through which they'd unwittingly been pulled into her childhood.
"Wow," Angelica breathed.
"You can say that again, Freckles." Chloe's cavalier tone belied the awe she was feeling.
The rift was a ragged gash, like a gaping wound in the fabric of the universe. It seeped colors that hurt her eyes, and through it she could see shifting scenes, as if she was rapidly clicking the channel button on a remote. After a few minutes of observation, she guessed that they were looking back into their own time - she saw flashes of the Explorers, her home, the president, events she'd read about in the news, day-to-day life of people she'd never met, and more, all flickering past.
And just like a wound - albeit one on the body of a hero with increased healing - the rift was slowly closing, the edges drawing together, already scarring where they touched at the ends. There was no telling how much longer it would be open, or if they would be able to force it back open if they had to. There was still so much she didn't know about all this...
"Looks like home," Angelica said.
"If we go back through, it should pop us back into our bodies."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded, and hoped that Angelica couldn't sense the little smidgen of doubt in the back of her mind, the nagging voice which said they could end up anywhere, any time, in anyone's bodies. "Then you can tell Mr. Weinstein what happened, and he can put his super-brain to work figuring out what it all means."
Angelica smiled, clearly putting on a brave face. "Let's do it then!"
Holding hands like schoolgirls on a field trip, they walked through the tear in reality.
Next: Tripping Through Time
Characters created by Jesse N. Wiley and various authors
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