((Just a little venting of my CoH-inspired creativity.))

Dreams.

I’ve often overheard people talk about their dreams like carnivals - places you go to for entertainment and come out mocking what’s perceived as bizarre. To this day, versed in the unconscious realms as I may be, I still don’t understand that perception. Dreams aren’t just shadows of unrecognized worries or pent up anxieties, but more akin to your mind tossing your soul into the waters of the Collective Unconscious and showing you the ripples it makes. There is so much power, so much unrecognized potential in what is otherwise considered simplistic. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t making dream journals or thinking about what sleep had brought me the night before.

As always, though, my inability to absorb most of humanity’s disregard for their dreams is a veil parted slightly with a singular insight: all of mine, since I was a baby, have been vivid and entirely lucid. That’s what I come to Paragon City calling myself, in fact. Lu’cid. The apostrophe gives it flavor, I think. As far I understand it (getting back on point) the populace on whole isn’t so lucky. They recall only fragments, like grasping at broken mirror. The cuts they receive make them ignorant to the truths they had witnessed and the worlds they had visited in their sleep. I believe everyone laughs at their dreams out of a sort of…bitterness; an amnesia patient who’s confronted with a family he doesn’t recognize again and again until the day of his death.

I suppose I’m writing this because I want Paragon City to understand why I’m here and why I’m going to fight. When I was thirteen, all my years of yearning for that higher truth in the Dream World were given vindication and direction. To summarize a vastly complex topic, the Dream World is like one unthinkably large planet. On that planet, a myriad of continents exist under the sway of the Collective Unconsciousness; a continent of Storm, of Fire, of Bliss, of Technology and even the more abstract concepts of something like, say, the number seven. Now, within each of those continents, our own personal dreams are cities that vanish when we wake. One night, your mind visits the realm (see: continent, if you’re following the example) of Sweets when all you dream of is the cake and candies you’ll be gorging on at your grandparents house and another night might find your consciousness on the continent of Fear as you flee the school bully through a maze of school buildings that never end.

So when I was thirteen, I didn’t dream of one of those realms, but one of those realms dreamt of me - the Azure Dream. Amongst the Collective Unconscious, it is something of the ruling variety (though, I think, authority works much differently than we understand it to here in the waking world), comprised of all the world’s dreams of kings, queens, princes, and princesses and all of that jazz. Because I had the ability to understand the depth of the Collective, the Azure Dream bestowed upon me power that would carry over and mature until a time came when it could be a tool in the Azure Dream’s aspirations of ridding the conscious world of the horrors that plague it and have stolen away most of mankind’s ability to dream…to truly dream. It’s too big a weight for me to handle on my own, of course, and while the Azure Dream does not underestimate the rest of Paragon’s heroes, it granted me help more personal and in the form of someone I had known since my father first began telling me stories of the strength and chilly majesty of Mt. Everest.

So we, Lu’cid and Everest, send this as a declaration to all the citizens of Paragon City: we will help you reclaim what crime and fear of stolen from you. We will help you remember your lives in the Second World, in the Dream World.

To all of those who will hear this message that are, in fact, the very villains we seek to stop…know this:

Hope will be justice’s armor and we will be its hammer.

On his way,
Lu’cid

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A leather-gloved hand slipped the letter (addressed to a friend he knew would e-mail the contents to everyone who possessed an inbox in Paragon) in the mailbox. Though he couldn’t see him, Lu’cid could feel Everest’s smile as the hulking entity’s gravely voice sounded and his equally stony physique shifted to a crouch at the edge of the street, preparing for one of his mind-boggling jumps in the same way Lu’cid prepared for the long flight ahead with a hover of his body off the ground.

“Well, looks like we’ve got places to be.”

They did indeed.