Tak...tak...tak...
The second floor of the Writers Bloc was a mess, through and through. The hub room was littered with papers, tangled with cords, and strewn about with bodies.
Well, these bodies were still alive, just sleeping. The occupants in the room had a right to be exhausted, and to have the room be in the state it was. They had been up since dawn the previous day, having to go out to sell their paper. Despite the blazing heat, they pedaled tirelessly, receiving the fruit of their labors in the form of empty courier bags.
All this came crashing down when they discovered that their partial leader had vanished – leaving only a cupcake in her wake. They had spent the rest of the day and night looking for her, whether on foot or through wires, but to no avail. One by one, they succumbed to the darkness of their eyelids and fell asleep.
There was one left awake – SomeGuy, his fingers clunking over the keyboard as he worked his way through the Staffer network. As he held the rank that he did, he had far more access to information than the rest of the room’s occupants. But soon, he fell victim to exhaustion and collapsed backwards in his chair.
As the eastern sky began to glow in the light of the new day, the side street where the café resided commenced with life. But as the sun progressed, the building was the only thing to remain unchanged. A small group gathered outside the entrance, peering through the windows and knocking on the door.
“Why isn’t it open?”
“I dunno, they said they would only be closed yesterday.”
“Maybe something happened?”
“Like what?”
“…How should I know?”
As the morning hours became afternoon, the crowd around the entrance dissipated until not even a passer-by bothered to check. Up in the hub room, the journalists still slept, squirming and murmuring things as they dreamed.
---
“Beck? Beck?! Hey Becky, where are you?! C’mon, we have to open up shop before the ‘ites get testy!”
SomeGuy was walking around in a gray-scale dream, scaling a series of staircases that he could only assume were the sets used to go between the floors at the Writers Bloc. Up he’d go, then back down, over and over again.
“Becky, we need to open…”
His voice was growing smaller with each passing flight. He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped and closed his jaw. With a sigh and an eye roll, SomeGuy turned to the left, which held a blank wall where a doorway normally would’ve been. He rolled his shoulders and proceeded to body slam into the drywall.
---
Timechaser scratched his head as he gazed out at the landscape before him. This was obviously a dream, given the over-saturation of the colors and fuzziness of shapes. He looked down and raised an eyebrow at the fact that he was floating in mid air, even though reality would’ve placed him on a street. It was like being in a glitched video game, which was also a bit odd – he wasn’t much of a gamer.
“A dream,” he muttered, taking a step forward. He suddenly was plunged down into darkness.
“Cliché!” he shouted out. The falling stopped and he landed in an extremely familiar room.
“Yo,” a voice added to the familiarity.
---
That girl. Ace couldn’t shake her guise from his head, which was driving him crazy. She was normal, nothing odd about her. But every time his mind drifted up to her face, he would see those eyes, glowing in oddity. Down he’d look until the courage was mustered to look at her again, repeating the freakout and –
Wait.
“Blue and red!” he shouted, which echoed in his dreamscape. “Of course!” Ace paced around the empty white space, tapping his finger to his chin. “Blue and red, the colors of those cupcakes. God, I’m so unobservant! Wait, so, she –”
Possessed?
“That has to be it. Ho’snap, so that means…they have more power – hell, it means we have power.”
There came a thumping noise from beneath his feet. “Oi!” a voice called. “Stop talking to yourself and get down here!”
---
“Let me go.”
The room was a moderate 67 degrees. The humidity was at 30%. It was the ideal conditions for anybody. Yet she was not pleased, especially by the pastry that stood before her and blocked her every movement.
“Why do you wish to leave?”
“Because I have a business to run, things to do, and a life to live.”
“And these matter more than what can befall you?”
“Like what? I enjoy my meaty little fleshpod here, thank you very much.”
“Think of what you could possess.”
“I don’t really feel like it.”
“Think of the powers you could have.”
“I already have powers that you don’t.”
“Such as?”
She grinned. “Who else could boss around her own boss?”
The pastry sighed. “We could have been great together.”
“Could have. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
---
With a start, Katana’s eyes slid open. She jumped upon seeing where she was located.
“Kat, why are you on the coffee pot counter?” Kaydirt asked. He himself was curled up on the floor near the entrance of the café.
“I was more curious as to how I ended up on the first floor than anything else.”
Sangome yawned and stretched her arms out, only slightly perplexed by her spot near the cash register. “I had…a weird dream.” She eyed SomeGuy, giving him a look that screamed ‘I blame it entirely on you’. He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“So we…”
“Did everybody…”
“Okay. What I’m assuming happened was that we all dreamed of random places and somehow ended up back here, in the café, both in our dreams and in reality.” SomeGuy rubbed his nose. “And that it’s all connected, because that is what happens in dreamland.”
“Magic,” Katana whispered.
“So without further ado…”
