Astral

Prologue

It was a dream. She knew, somewhere –in a paint bucket in a maintenance closet in the recesses of her mind– that it was a dream, just a dream... Or was it?

Four humanoids –for they could not have been human– playing a game and betting their lives on it. Four hits, and one may get an extra life.

The life essence just oozed out of, and formed in the palm of one: a chubby, not tall, business-type, serious-looking man with a determined half smile at another player's conceit. He appeared to be wearing a formal, grey suit.

The other player: a white male, a lot like grown-up Harry Potter with a short beard, seemed to have more lives than he cared for. He seemed to have dared the chubby one (or everyone, but only the chubby one rose to the challenge, rousing the other two into a high-stakes game involving all four, with heavy bias against adult Potter).

The chubby male, apparently standing beside a car –of sorts– with the door open (front door on the left side of the car), but turned through ninety degrees on its hinge such that the inside faced upward. He then stretched out his left hand, sky palm, and green orbs the size of lawn tennis balls began to form: merely a corporeal outline at first, then gaining depth, substance, and solidifying quickly. One orb, then another, and another, until there were four orbs floating in his palm. All four orbs were exactly the same size, but formed in his palm at non-uniform rates. The moment he had four fully-formed orbs, he sent them careening outward in the order they appeared. Before the fourth orb left his palm, more had already begun to form. In all, he let loose eight balls of life.

The game had begun, and progressed. It involved a lot of effortless running, jumping and flying around. It seemed a bit like lawn tennis played without rackets. Also, if lawn tennis were a 2D sport, this would have been its 3D equivalent –without rackets. The playing field was the entire white space they were in. Bizarrely enough, there were no edges our dreamer could see that defined the boundaries of this space; there was simply no way for her to estimate the upper limits of the space by sight. Also ridiculous, was the absence of any noticeable shadows. She could not even tell whether they were inside a building or not –but they had to be because, how else do you explain the light? Light so intensely white, yet, not blinding. It shone white from every direction. She could feel gravity acting on her where she stood...? It wasn't so much that there was a floor to stand on, as that you just aligned yourself in the space as your mind allowed you to. The exact rules of the game were unknown to her, except that all four played, and each was a one-man team. The inhabitants of this white space seemed to notice her presence, ignoring her as one might ignore a butterfly in a flower garden. The life orbs seemed valuable, very valuable, and four meant an extra life.

As the game progressed, one of the remaining two players scored a hit off adult Potter. The player looked like he'd just stepped out of the cover of a high-profile, glossy, men's fashion magazine: a tall, handsome blonde. While the exact dynamics of the game would be a tad difficult to explain, our dreamer would remember watching adult Potter in his neat, white, long-sleeved, corporate jacket shirt; lithely landing from a flight trajectory, recoiling as though from the impact of an invisible force, and grinning as a life orb just pops out of his right upper arm.

"Nice! Four of those and you get an extra life," adult Potter seemed to say to the fashion model. That is not quite right. He never actually spoke, none of them spoke, but they seemed to understand one another perfectly. Our dreamer seemed to understand as well. She wasn't sure how she came to know a lot of things. There was just an awareness about the space, she concluded, filing the thought away for further processing later.