Wherein I Become Muad'Dib

    We were driving back toward the gates of the capital when we saw a woman riding the wind alight atop one of the towers.  People riding the wind was pretty common but there were blocks around the tops of the walls that should have stopped any normal person from going over the gates.  This woman must have been very powerful at channeling the wind god, but obviously also highly dangerous.  Adalia pulled our vehicle over and we watched, not really knowing what else to do, as a portal opened on the opposite tower and another woman stepped through.  I inhaled quickly; that was rare, someone who channeled the god of doorways well enough to port accurately.
    "Should we do something?" I asked.
    "The guards will," Adalia responded absentmindedly.
    But they didn't.  Instead, the two women waved their hands in the air unimpeded, turning various different shades as they channeled several gods at once; a feat of which is mostly unheard.  I saw the obvious ones: fire, air, earth.  But I also saw the less common crossroads goddess, the wood god, and more that I didn't even recognize.  Golden lines spread horizontally and vertically over the city and I heard a hissing sound followed by a massive choir of wails from those in the city.  The ground shook and the city promptly exploded.  It appeared that everything was engulfed in flames and destroyed except for the two towers that the women stood upon; they laughed.

No, not these ones.  Don't lie, I know this is what you were thinking of, nerds.

    Adalia put the car in reverse and once we were at a safe distance we turned around and fled.  While we're driving to the next closest city I should probably explain a few things.  Here, all the gods and goddesses of all mythologies and religions were very real and present in every day life.  There was one main god and all the rest were secondary gods; the main god does not come into this story.  Temples were a very key aspect of the world and were everywhere; especially since the nearer you are to a likeness of the god the easier it is to channel them.  Every person has a connection of some kind with at least one god to begin with and many people become connected with other gods if accepted.  Most people can channel only so much power before they become exhausted, so most powers are minimal while still making everyday life easier.  The elemental gods were the easiest to channel, so you'd see a lot of flying people, saves on gas, but all gods could be channeled, except for the main god and the god of chaos.  The chaos god wasn't necessarily good or bad, but whenever a person tried to channel chaos every fiber of their being would be ripped apart so successfully they couldn't be put back together again.  The chaos god was known to be incredibly powerful, the most powerful next to the main god.  I had just the basics of a few gods down, very average and not more useful than lighting a fire with my hands or essentially being my own gps.  

    As we got closer to the next city we felt the ground tremble violent and begin to split open around us; someone was destroying the entire road.  Adalia stopped the car and, panicked, we used wind to whip us off the road, leaving our possessions in the car.  As we landed the road collapsed, with the car, down into darkness.  

It was the world's worst pothole.

Neither of us having exceptional channeling abilities, we walked.  Many, many hours later we arrived dusty, hungry, and penniless in the closest city, which was a very large one.  We saw officials trying to figure out ways to fix the road as we passed through.  We dragged ourselves into a hotel that had a food court where we could sit indoors as twilight fell.  The walls had been windows, much like an airport, and tvs hung above them, all of which were reporting on the horrifying events at the capital and the road that led there.  We sat at some bar stools and watched the tv while casually and longingly glancing at a food stand next to us until finally the owner offered us some free food, of which we gratefully partook.  As we ate, the cityscape in the windows changed;  without any warning at all an explosive wall of fire split the city in two, knocking down buildings and setting everything nearby ablaze.  Sirens of all kinds filled the air and everyone in the room silently stared out the windows in shock. 

    "I have to go, I have to find my mom," Adalia said woodenly.  

    Without a word from me she ran out.  My family wasn't anywhere near this city, but I didn't know what to do next.  I stepped outside into the weird purple light the massive fire combined with the setting sun created.  There I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in ages; he looked haggard and dazed.  He recognized me and started talking to me as if we were still friends, but in the same hollow voice that Adalia had used just moments ago.  "I hate my wife," he said, then he pointed in the general direction of the fire.  "My dad just died.  My dad died."

   Then he stepped away and walked briskly down the street.  I moved to follow him but down an alley I saw the remnants of a beam of energy that stretched up to the sky and then spread into a golden arc like I had seen at the capital.  Next to it was a still open portal, I probably had seconds, it was either die or go through the portal, and I chose the latter.

  

    I had never gone through a portal before and it was very disorienting.  It's what I always imagined it must be like for the Flash whenever he decided to travel super fast.  So many images whipped by me until the one step that I took landed in dim room that I recognized as a temple as soon as the portal fizzled out of existence behind me.  The main area of the temple was blue hued and completely empty, which is abnormal for temples; this meant I was in the temple of chaos.  I looked around and saw the chaos statue, a massive blue oval with several other opal rings carved onto the facade, crossing wildly over each other; the stone was worked so that the rings were constantly moving and the effect was dizzying.  I channeled the wind god and used the wind to see if there was anyone else in the temple and I found that there were two people on the open balcony.  The temple was huge and I quietly made my way toward the balcony.  I peered past the water-lined opening and saw the two women I had seen before.  Why were they here?  Had they somehow harnessed the power of chaos?  I felt my stomach rise in my throat until I calmed myself by recalling that the color of chaos is blue, and all the attacks had been devoid of blue.  They must have chosen this temple for privacy.  They had used some god's power to making hearing them impossible, but this also meant they couldn't hear me unless I got a few feet closer.  I could see a map that they spread between their hands; I could see that they were taking down everything across the country, like a wall of destructive tornadoes.  And if they were destroying entire cities they meant to kill everyone.  Anger and frustration boiled inside of me until all I could see was red.
     But through the red wall of my vision I saw blue on my fingertips that were pressed against the door frame.  No no no no no.  I had heard of this before, people with strong emotions in a temple could sometimes accidentally channel the god.  My rage turned into fear as the blue spread down my arms; I shook them uselessly to no avail and soon I was covered in blue lines.  Then they just disappeared.  I felt the chaos pulling at the organization of my body, my thoughts, everything.  I could feel my cells separating and the pain was beyond anything I had ever felt before.  I screamed and tried to think of everything I had ever learned in biology, how things were supposed to be, demanding myself back to order.  I had to destroy my animal fear to do this, I used the chaos power that was overrunning me to dissipate my fear so that I could focus on everything that was me.  I took one choking breath and the pain was gone, but I could still feel the roiling of the chaos; I controlled it.  

    My fury staggeringly returned and I caught my reflection in the water basin nearest to me, my eyes blazed an unearthly blue.  

I had tasted the spice.

Now was the time to end this monstrosity.  I stepped into their sound barrier and the two women turned around, thinking of spells with which they would kill me.  I didn't stop though, I continued walking at them and raised my open hand, fingertips collecting blue from nowhere, and then brought it down again, closing my fist which became enveloped in blue flames.  Their smiles dropped and one leaped off the balcony and fled on the wind; the other woman created a portal and ran through it.  I laughed bitterly as I used the powers of chaos to keep the portal open.  "I have the power of chaos," I laughed, "there's nothing to save you now."

    I stepped through the portal.

And how can this be? For I AM the Kwisatz Haderach!

And that's when I woke up.   

          

           

Jubilee's Colony for Mutants with Crappy Powers

I hate her so much.

    Imagine, if you will, being on a lovely, relaxing vacation; you're walking down unfamiliar streets alone and doing some light souvenir shopping.  This is is where my dream begins.

    I felt that sensation you get when your back feels bizarrely exposed and vulnerable.  Someone was watching me.  Several times I peered behind me to find the same person following me; at first I thought it was just a coincidence, I was being crazy, but every turn I made they made.  I began to panic and kept making wild turns without even thinking about where I was going and eventually I was hopelessly lost. 

My dream self needs to pick better vacation destinations.

Finally I stumbled into a small, deserted square with a fountain in the center and two other passages that led to it.  At the same time two other frightened looking people came out of the other entry ways.  One was a boy of around fourteen years and the other was a man who looked to be in his thirties.  All we could do was stare at each other imploringly as we watched a shadowy person come up behind each other and shove a rag into our faces.  I smelled a vaguely sweet scent as I fell into unconsciousness.  

    We each awoke at different times in a small room lined with cushioned benches and the one door was, unsurprisingly, locked.  The boy's name was Will and the man was George; none of us knew each other but we were all on vacation.  The stories of our captures were all incredibly similar.  We deduced by the gentle movement of the room that we were on a boat of some kind but we were unable to find any clues to help put together what exactly was happening.  We decided that when someone eventually came to get us we would attack them at once in hopes of escaping, much like the heroes in The Three Ninjas.  

This is exactly what our captors saw and they ran away in terror
while simultaneously knocking each other out.

Somehow we were successful and the ship has also conveniently been docked.  So we took off together into a tropical paradise of sun, sand, and palm trees while being furiously pursued.  Our escape was still going quite well until our path was blocked by a some very weird sculptures.  We navigated around them to our best abilities but they were enormous and the wooded areas beyond the paths were just too thick to even attempt to go through without a machete.  After we made it past the sculptures there was an outdoor set of upside down and somehow inverted sets of staircases all connected.

Did...did I watch Labyrinth before this dream?

But we got around those eventually too, they didn't slow us down too much.  Ahead of us the path was wide and clear and at the end was an equally wide rope bridge.  Suddenly, my limbs felt like they weighed dozens of extra pounds a piece; Will and George looked to be having the same trouble to, we all appeared to be in slow motion.  Soon enough, we actually began to be dragged backward.  I felt compelled to look behind us and saw a blonde woman with angry eyebrows in a suit with a hand outstretched to us.  It was at this point that I somehow also noticed the three of us all were wearing a shade of red shirts.  I slowly took my own red shirt off, and since my dream apparently had a G rating I had a white tank top on underneath.  As soon as the red shirt was no longer touching me I felt normal again and almost face-planted at the suddenness of it.  I helped Will and George shed their red garments and we were off once more.  I didn't think of it then but this woman obviously had a color-based power, which was lame, but good for us at the time.

Her power was much like the Power of the Red Shirt on Star Trek.

    But shortly after we were stopped for one last time by a wall of bones.  This guy was basically the Magneto of bones that were not attached to any living organism.  So he just stood there in front of us and used his power to find any and all bones in the area and ripped them from out of the ground.  I imagine it took some time to amass the whole wall since a lot of the bones must have been very deep within the ground, unless of course there was a cemetery nearby.  I had thought it was the end of us, we were doomed.  But like the son of Poseidon Will blasted the wall with a wave of water.  

Will does NOT belong in this colony.

George and I were baffled, since we didn't have an powers that we knew of, but apparently Will knew of his all this time.   Boneto essentially waved a white flag and requested to have a chat and Will consented.  Boneto told us about the colony that our captors belonged to and explained that they were recruiting us.  We wouldn't exactly call kidnapping "recruiting" but we listened on anyway and he showed us around the place.  We saw people who could control books, eat rocks, and one who could turn into a working fountain at will.  Apparently this colony was competing with another colony for extra special recruits, except apparently the other colony didn't know it was competing.  Boneto insisted that George and I would eventually come into our hidden powers and also asked that we stay with them.  None of us wanted to, but in the end we decided to stay for a day or two, just to check it out.  Everyone was really nice but we began to notice that the place was more like a prison for us, because they kept extending our stay.  What made it even more terrible was when someone tried to make no-bake cookies, but with rice instead of oatmeal; it was disgusting and we just wanted to go home.  

But we could never leave.

    And that's when I woke up.