Ship In A Bottle (A Monkie Kid Reader Insert)

Chapter 26: White Pawns

The dream was somewhat hard to remember.

At first, you were being encased in some sphere-like shape, in such a claustrophobic position...

You tried to get out, but couldn't.

You found yourself in a glass container of sorts.

You heard whispers...

You were dispensed.

You watched the container, stuck on the seafloor as the sphere you were in floated past the forest of kelp.

Claws dipped into the water, and you were fished out of the surface.

You looked below.

Nests floated on the surface of the water, as if they were lily pads.

You were dropped into one of the nests of willow branches, and fell through.

You emerged from a field of golden grass.

Golden...fur?

Towering aureate formations stood high, arranged to look like a titan's ribcage.

Gilded feathers ripped tears into the night sky.

It landed on the field, wounding it.

The sky bled gold.

The meadow bled black.

You floated as black pooled from below.

The ribcage closed, preventing the gold to rain down.

Blue seeped through instead.

The blue and black refused to mix, forming blob-like shapes as if with water and oil.

You tried to make sense of everything, and Stain's voice echoed into your head.

"Look, what you need to do is basically just trigger a lucid dream."

"I can manipulate your dreams to make that more likely, but..."

"...you need to realize you're dreaming to make it work."

You closed your eyes and concentrated, the blue and black sea forming odd shapes around you. It awaited for your command.

"You need to trick your dreams into showing you what you need to see."

You only managed a whisper.

All but one sphere of blue reunited, as did all but one sphere of black.

The colors swirled below you, with a piece of each other leading both halves.

Yin and yang.

Light left your sight, and a melody entered your ears.

A flute song.

...

Which led you to where you were now.

There you stood, in what looked like the back room of an auction house. That is, if the amount of paintings, artifacts, and catalogues had anything to say about it. The air-conditioned room was not without a black and white filter, no more different than the surroundings during Stain's earlier visits.

Ticking noises lead you to a clock, hanging on the wall as the second hand passed twelve. Each tick echoed louder than it should've, but it might've helped that it was the only sound here at all.