"Welcome to Penacony, honored guest."
"Very soon, all your ideals will spring to life before your eyes. Please step into the Dreampool and forget the sorrows and worries of your waking life."
In a standard, lazy spread-eagle pose, Caelus lay down at the center of the Dreampool, following the prompts on his Dreamscape Pass step by step.
This was the necessary ritual for entering a dream for the first time.
"Woo-hoo~"
Caelus let out a contented sigh.
"This feeling... it's like burying yourself in a blanket with the AC blasting on a scorching summer day! So good~"
Caelus turned his gaze to the elegant clock-face on his Dreamscape Pass.
Penacony, this vast world of dreams, was divided into twelve independent dream domains, each representing one of the twelve marks on a clock face.
They were, in order: Midnight, Serenity, Morning Dew, Daybreak, Gilded Hour, Sol, Oasis, Scorchsand, Blue Hour, Dusk, Stars, and Golden Hour.
Each moment was frozen within its own unique slice of time, holding an eternal, unchanging atmosphere.
Midnight, for instance, was an eternal, deep night draped in a mysterious starlight.
Oasis was fixed in the laziest, most soothing afternoon warmth, perfect for a nap.
Every domain had its own landmark architecture and one-of-a-kind thematic charm.
Setting aside the Moment of Serenity, which was closed to visitors, there were eleven dream moments open to choose from.
To outsiders, March 7th, Stelle, and Caelus always seemed inseparable.
But in truth, the Express crew spent plenty of time acting on their own—splitting up was, if anything, the norm.
If they'd stuck together every single moment, even the Express at the height of its power, one carful of Trailblazers trying to open up a whole planet, would take who-knows-how-long.
So everyone entered their dreams separately, each heading for the domain they wanted to see.
Ah Qi had already locked her sights on the Moment of Dusk.
In her own words: "How can a vacation spot not have a shopping paradise?! This young lady's already got her bags ready to fill!"
Of course, if people's interests aligned, there was nothing stopping them from going together.
Black Seele, White Seele, and Little Duck, for example, planned to head to the Moment of Blue Hour together.
That domain was eternally fixed in a romantic dusk, the sky painted with sunset colors, and stretching beaches beyond.
White Seele in particular was looking forward to seeing that dreamlike sea.
Haxxor Bunny claimed she wanted to check out the Moment of Sol first—but who could guarantee she wouldn't suddenly change course and chase after them the moment she found out about White Seele and Little Duck's beach trip?
"Hmm..."
Caelus rubbed his chin, his gaze sweeping once around the clock-face on his pass as he mulled it over.
"The Moment of Golden Hour—you're the one!"
He flicked a finger, steadying the starting hand just before midnight, then slapped it down hard.
"Original God, activate!"
His consciousness sank as though into a deep blue sea, swallowed by an unfathomable darkness.
But the sensation of falling lasted only an instant before some formless force lifted him, carrying him rushing back upward.
In that hazy interval between sinking and rising, a strangely insistent song seeped faintly into his ears from somewhere unseen:
"Come back~ Mikhail? My proudest~ faith?"
"That story~ still so vivid? Tears~ falling for no reason?"
"I still faintly~ remember the Nameless? And that spirited clock~?"
Who?
Whose kid was singing?
Mikhail... why did that name sound so familiar?
Wasn't that the Nameless Pom-Pom had asked him to find?
Like a salted fish bolting upright in a sizzling pan on the verge of death, Caelus's eyes flew open.
What met his eyes was, indeed, the familiar outline of a guest room—that much checked out.
In the dream, the guest-room portion of the Reverie Hotel was almost a mirror copy of the real thing, while the rest of it was far grander and stranger than reality.
But the atmosphere was utterly different.
The space felt sinister, as though smoke from melting, low-grade asphalt were slowly drifting through the room.
"What's going on here?"
Caelus leaped out of the Dreampool and looked around.
"Where the hell did you drop me?"
"Is this even still Penacony?"
A floating cup on the coffee table confirmed this was, without question, still a dream world—but the tone, the style... it looked less like a beautiful dream and more like some nightmare with warped rules, or the safe room at the start of a horror game.
"Don't tell me the Dreampool's broken? Or did the pool water expire and brew up some kind of problem?"
Holding fast to the simple repair philosophy of brute force solves everything, Caelus applied the time-honored ancestral technique for fixing an old-fashioned cathode-ray-tube TV—two solid whacks, bang, bang, right on the Dreampool's casing.
It actually responded.
"Dream ███ under repair, please ████ staff for guidance, from the designated ████ enter ████..."
The eerie, warped broadcast, like some ghost radio station with bad reception, made Caelus's brow furrow.
"Is it really broken?"
An ordinary guest might genuinely have been spooked by such an eerie atmosphere.
But this was Caelus, after all~
Not to mention his skill matched his nerve.
One Jerry transformation, and a horror film flips into a comedy skit in an instant—the whole art style could get memed on!
Just like Jotaro in that boss OVA, seventeen years old, afraid school wasn't violent enough.
Jerry, the little mouse, was afraid horror movies weren't weird enough.
"This feeling... it's a lot like before."
"Raw, coarse, blurred at the edges—like there's a bug wedged in the crack between reality and dream."
As Caelus scrutinized the room in earnest, his gaze sweeping across the desk, he noticed something.
Compared to the room in reality, there was one extra thing here.
A note giving off a faint glow lay quietly there, utterly out of place with its surroundings.
Caelus picked up the note and unfolded it:
[Even in dreams, there are things that shouldn't be possible. Find it, and you may be granted an audience.]
"Ummmmm..."
As Caelus read the cryptic, cult-leader-esque text with neither head nor tail, his expression slowly morphed into the classic "Old Yang, subway, phone.jpg" meme face.
"Who!"
"Who left this note?"
"You want to see me? Then come out!"
Caelus bellowed, hollering into the room.
He, of course, knew perfectly well that impossible things existed even in dreams—he, Caelus-Jerry, was practically the walking embodiment of impossible things.
An audience?
An audience with me?
"What the heck! Why are you yelling so loud, huh!"
Just as the provocative shout was echoing through the room, a crisp, loud voice—carrying the solemn weight of an imperial address, laced with a touch of impatience—suddenly exploded from the hallway.
Bang—!
Before the words even finished, the room's grand, ornate door was kicked open with brutal force by a foot in a black ankle boot, slamming hard against the wall.
"Oh, so you got warped here too."
Caelus looked at the gray-haired raccoon standing in the doorway, hands on her hips, without a shred of surprise.
Never mind the tangled, inextricable quantum entanglement between the two of them—just their subconsciouses blending together was enough. Getting tossed to the same spot during a mental-layer activity like dream-entry was as natural as Silver Wolf running a game with cheats on.
"Caeeelus~ cuuub~"
Stelle crossed her arms and leaned lazily against the doorframe, sizing Caelus up with an expression that was three parts fake self-reproach, two parts fake guilt, four parts fake wistfulness, and the remaining ninety-one parts pure, unabashed lechery and contempt.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk..."
She shook her head with an exaggerated, theatrical tsking sound, switching to her heartbroken-mother channel, one hand pressed to her chest as though suffering a sudden angina attack.
"My poor child... could it be that, freed at last within this dream, you've fully awakened some terrible hidden fetish and become an out-and-out streaking pervert?"
Stelle's voice trembled, thick with the tragedy of a family gone to ruin:
"Mommy... I don't recall ever raising you to be the kind of bad boy who flashes his bird in broad daylight!"
Caelus, who'd been so distracted marveling at the grand and strange sights of the other dream moments elsewhere, only now belatedly looked down.
Oh!
The dream state connected seamlessly to reality—laid bare and honest.
But his face showed not a hint of embarrassment; instead, he squared his shoulders with total confidence and shot back:
"That Dreampool's shaped like an oversized bathtub—have you ever seen anyone soak in a hotel bathtub with their clothes on? This is perfectly reasonable!"
"Ha, no matter how eloquently you spin it, it doesn't change the ironclad fact that you're currently streaking."
Stelle sneered.
That contemptuous gaze only grew more shameless, and the gray-haired girl stretched out a hand as flawless as fine jade.
"Let big sis take a look, see how healthily you've developed!"
"Get lost!"
Quick as lightning, Caelus slapped that wicked claw away with a crack, snapping a warning at her, thoroughly annoyed.
"Keep messing around and you won't like it when things heat up and I can't cool them back down."
"Aw, come on, no need to be so formal with your big sis~"
Far from backing off, Stelle seemed only more fired up, the contemptuous smirk on her face maxing out instantly, looking every bit the shameless bully harassing an innocent boy, and she pounced at Caelus, claws bared.
"First of all, I'm your older brother. Second, if you touch me again, I'm hitting back."
Caelus channeled his best sword-drawing spirit.
"Heh heh, go ahead then~"
Stelle crooked a finger at him tauntingly, wearing an expression begging to be smacked.
"..."
How had this particular Stellaron spirit lost every last shred of decency?
ε=('ο｀*)))) sigh
Caelus sighed inwardly, sorely missing the Stelle who used to blush at just a peck on the lips.
Nostalgia was nostalgia, but a lesson still had to be taught!
"Watch me put you in your place!"
Just as Caelus was about to summon his Immortal Artifact to teach the lawless little raccoon a lesson—
Right at that moment.
Tap, tap, tap...
A crisp, somewhat hesitant set of footsteps abruptly sounded from the corridor outside, cutting through the tension in the room.
The two of them stopped their scuffle at once.
"Someone's coming?"
Caelus and Stelle exchanged a glance.
"Caelus-cub, don't you want to cover up with something?"
Streaking in front of Stelle herself was no big deal, and being seen by a pretty girl wouldn't bother her either, but if some burly guy saw him, Stelle would feel awkward about it—after all, Caelus's little brother was, in a manner of speaking, her own little cousin too.
"There don't seem to be any clothes in this place."
Caelus eyed the empty closet.
"Wear mine?"
Stelle's model-standard height matched or exceeded most grown men's, and the two of them had always shared clothes freely.
To be precise, Caelus's closet basically doubled as her spare wardrobe.
Aside from little skirts and qipao-style outfits that emphasized feminine features, Caelus could wear pretty much anything of Stelle's.
Caelus glanced at her—the pale green T-shirt stretched over a full curve, the hem of her black pleated skirt swaying lightly with her movements.
Stelle followed his gaze and looked down at herself too.
"Er, forget I said that."
She didn't mind lending Caelus her women's clothes, but that would leave her with only her underwear.
"Henshin~!"
Without further hesitation, Caelus let out a low shout and swept a hand in front of himself.
A dazzling light instantly enveloped him, his body shrinking rapidly within the glow.
In the blink of an eye, a small, brown, fuzzy mouse—not even the size of Stelle's palm—appeared in his place.
"Oh right!"
Stelle smacked her forehead, suddenly remembering. "Forgot about that."
Caelus-Jerry stood with both little paws on his hips, gazing up at the towering Stellaron spirit with an air of superiority, tilting his tiny head, then extending a tiny paw and beckoning her over like summoning a mount.
The meaning was obvious: don't just stand there, pick this lord up already!
"Oho~ oh~?"
Stelle had one hand on her hip, her intrigued expression quickly shifting into a mischievous, gleefully malicious smirk the instant she took in the little mouse's imperious, bossy posture.
She reached out a finger, pinched the scruff of Caelus-Jerry's neck as he struggled against her, and lifted him up with ease.
"Well, would you look at that, actually kind of cute!"
Stelle's eyes lit up, and she cupped the fuzzy little bundle in both hands, ignoring the little guy's frantic kicking, and set to work squeezing and nuzzling him like a woman possessed.
"Such a cute Jerry was born to be eaten up by Mommy!"
She made as if to actually bite down, until she felt the practically solidifying killing intent radiating from the small thing in her palm—an unmistakable if-you-suck-on-me-one-more-time-I'm-really-going-to-hit-you vibe—and reluctantly stopped her rampage, clearly not having had her fill.
She lifted Caelus-Jerry up above her chest and let go.
Whoosh~
After a brief moment of free fall, Caelus-Jerry landed precisely on Stelle's collarbone, skin smooth as polished white jade.
The slick surface gave him no purchase whatsoever, and he slid straight down the steep, snowy-smooth slope like on a playground slide, tumbling right into that deep, warm valley between.
Boop~
Two seconds later, a tiny head finally struggled its way out from between those plump, snow-white folds.
Caelus-Jerry, utterly without will to live, pressed both tiny paws against Stelle's cheeks and patted them helplessly, resigned.
Oh well... the process was a little humiliating, but this mount's saddle... was a lot softer than her head.
He gave up resisting and lay obediently in place, eyes fixed on the doorway.
Just then, the owner of the footsteps happened to walk in.
It was a figure with soft blue hair, a slender build, and features so delicate they blurred the line between male and female.
"Hello, I'm Misha, a Penacony service attendant..."
The newcomer gave a slight bow, their voice gentle and clear.
Thanks to the angle and Caelus-Jerry's perfectly concealed position, the newcomer clearly only saw Stelle.
"Forget all that—I'm far more concerned with your gender."
Stelle cut in, her expression suddenly deadly serious.
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