Geronimo Stilton: INTERPOL-Trouble In France: An Old Enemy Returns

Taken

Château de l'Arif
Wednesday - March 26, 2014
0904 hours

Began a new day after a night's rest. Nightmarish everything was in my dreamscape, and it was safe to say that the days after this were not going to be perfect... not since the vision I had the other night.

My mind raced with thoughts during and after breakfast. Who were those men? Why were they after Charlene and Melanie? What were they planning to do?

In an attempt to escape the things that troubled me, I sat down on a deck chair at the yard and decided to walk through my mind literally in a lucid dream, or more like a virtual reality walk, visiting the museum of memories from the past I had collected. I stared at the photos which housed in frames, hanging on nothing but pure blue vastness of...well, nothing. If it's to hard for you to picture, then think of it this way; remember the third season finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic? Before when Twilight turns into an alicorn, she walks with Princess Celestia through her memories in Ponyville in that empty, blue space? That's sort of how the virtual walk was.

I still had the HUD on even in the VR walk, telling me anything about the real world so that I'd wake up. An alert of a heat signature of a person lurking from behind popped up in my HUD while I was reliving a memory that started to play. I used the Force to identify that person, or, rodent, perhaps, and that rodent was actually Thea.

I said out loud: "I'm a Jedi, Thea. I know you're behind me."

I sensed that she froze in place. "You're no fun when you get to sense someone about to jumpscare you," she said. "Whatcha doing?"

I opened my eyes to exit the VR walk. "Taking a virtual reality walk through my mind. It's another way to review the memories I had stored in the chip."

She sits down on the grass beside the chair. "Virtual reality, huh?"

"Yeah. It's basically my way of saying that it's actually lucid dreaming, where your conscious roams around without your body moving and you get to wake up whenever you want. But the VR is slightly different, though. It's like you play a game with the Oculus Rift."

"Can anyone else access it?"

"Yeah. If given the permission."

"Can I?"

I looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "...Why not?"

She positioned herself closer to the chair. "Take my hand," I instructed, holding mine out.

She held onto my hand, and I lowered my eyelids. "Close your eyes..." I said.

I brought her subconscious into my own, and started the VR walk in a lucid dream. "You can open them, now."

I saw her reaction; I've taken her breath away. "Great melted cheddar..." she murmured, starting to shift her head around.

The hanging pictures started to rise from the bottom and stopped in midair at eye level, left and right.

"How does it feel like?" I asked her.

"It's so...surreal," she answered.

I moved forward with her joining me. "What does it remind you of?"

"Season three finale of My Little Pony." My smile grew wider in pride while looking the other way.

"All of it is here. From the day I got that chip." A photo rose up from the infinite space below and stopped at our left. We halted to view that memory as it played like a video.

It was the time when I first had the chip implanted into my brain, waking up on a hospital bed inside of Caltech's underground labs. Professor Philips was there, along with his partners and my family, and it was the first time it was being tested. "Are you feeling better, Danial?" said the professor in the playing memory.