Bump in the Night [13 Training]

Training for C-Rank Partial Nightmare Manifestation

The first time was an accident.

How was he supposed to know one of the people in the café crowd was a costumed hero? He’d been in the midst of creating his second nightmare when she returned from donning her violet spandex and thrown a table at him. The screaming throng had no doubt proven distracting, because she missed, but it was still enough to disrupt his concentration for just long enough for the nightmare to fail…

But not totally. A single clawed arm had been solid just long enough to open the neck of a frightened barrista.

Now that was interesting. Up until that moment, he’d assumed that his powers were a whole-hog sort of thing, not just a hooves and snout sort of thing, to continue the metaphor.

A telekinetically hurled espresso machine had reminded him about the fight, though, so he’d stowed his musing for later. To make a short story shorter, the nightmare he’d already summoned kept the heroin distracted for long enough, and she wasn’t nearly adept enough to handle two. Most of the café’s clientele had gotten away, true, but she certainly hadn’t.

It wasn’t until later- now- that he had the chance to revisit his discovery. He’d remembered it by chance, watching a paper bag float on the wind, which had made him think of telekinesis, then the fight, and then… well, you get the idea.

His current lair was an abandoned warehouse; cliché, but then again, clichés often came about for a reason. In the very least, it gave him ample room to work in and plenty of targets to practice on.

His first attempt failed abysmally. He tried to recreate the loss of concentration, but rather than briefly manifesting, the three-headed sloth he’d dreamt up never came into being at all. He tried the same tactic a second and third time before abandoning it. Recreating serendipity was almost always impossible. Perhaps he could capture a telekinetic, and get it to barrage him with pieces of broken up crate?

No, he decided, there had to be another way. He visualized the three-headed sloth again, really taking his time with it, getting every detail of its matted, slime-slicked fur down in his mind before he proceeded. Rather than simply trying to gestate the thing all at once and abort abruptly, he cut away everything but one leg. He had his eyes closed, but didn’t need to actually see as he harnessed his drug-enhanced psionic potential; it was a very active process, extruding that energy, and he could feel what was happening.

Well, he managed to make the leg. That was about it though. It appeared, lying on the ground as if someone had lopped it off with a scythe, and then vanished just as quickly. It was too unstable without the rest of itself to linger overlong.

He managed to perform the same operation again, twice. He found himself frowning, though. For some reason, just making a leg was even more taxing than a whole nightmarish beast. He felt the onset of a headache, and vaguely wondered if his nose might start bleeding. Then he’d need to steal a new shirt, and it would be a whole production…

He was missing something, he knew it. Maybe it wasn’t enough just to envision the leg. Maybe he had to envision it doing something; perhaps momentum would give it just enough cohesion to stick around long enough to be worth a damn. He tried again, this time, adding a short, mental command to the leg as it manifested: HOP.

It was more of a… twitch. He tilted his head, watching the hairy, three-toed leg fade away to nothing. Progress was progress, he decided, squeezing his eyes shut and pinching the bridge of his nose in an effort to stave off the headache that was threatening. He repeated the process, and this time was rewarded by a sloth-leg that toppled over. The third time proved to be the charm; the leg cleared about two inches of air, traversing nearly a foot of ground before it faded away.

The question remained: could he make something do anything useful? His attempt to create a massive doll’s head to drop on a crate failed abysmally. So too did a try at raining down teeth on a broken pallet. It was too hard to concentrate on empty air and do everything else he needed to at once, he realized. He needed something solid to work off, something fixed.

A cruel smile formed on his lips when he managed to materialize a ten-foot long purple tentacle for just long enough to have it swat ineffectually at a massive shipping container. He tried several more times, each attempt more impressive than the last, until finally the flailing tentacle created a sizeable dent in the steel side of it.

For good measure, he manifested a grasping demonic talent that managed to claw its way through a crate and a star-fish beak that chomped its way through a large wooden beam he fed into it. By the time he was through, he was covered in cold sweat, and shaking, and it felt like there was a full brass band playing inside his skull.

[869/700 words]

Training for C-Rank Spawn Nightmare Swarm


“Do you know why people are so afraid of insects?”

There was nothing that 13 loved more than a literally captive audience. The young man who’d been so bold as to attempt to deprive him of his non-existent wallet was… well, not going anywhere. A four-legged creature that resembled a hybrid between a lion-sized bulldog and a lobster had him backed up against the wall of the alley where the would-be mugging went down.

13 had a hard time judging age. He could have been sixteen or in his early twenties, but that didn’t matter. The thug shook his head, swallowing hard and watching the large, rust-colored claws that 13’s nightmare had raised at him.

“I didn’t think you would. It isn’t because they can bite, or sting. It’s because they can act as one. Bees carry out the orders of their queens, army ants march in formation. As individuals, we can’t understand that, and so we fear it…”

13 licked his lips. Closed his eyes. After a few seconds of that, the petty thief tried to run. The mad man didn’t need to look to correlate the cry of pain he heard with the dog-lobster nightmare’s response to his attempted flight. Sighing, he retreated into the landscape of his nightmares, searching for one in particular…

It was a dream that he’d dreamed years ago. The cell he’d been kept in was always clean, but one day, he’d found a small beetle on his bedspread. Instinctively, he’d swatted at it, but the springy nature of the mattress meant that the force of the blow was too spread out to kill the hard-shelled thing. It had begun to scurry, and so 13 had tried to swat it again, and again, but then it was gone. Not truly gone, though. He knew it was somewhere in his room. Lurking and waiting for him to sleep, so that it could crawl into his ear and lay eggs and spawn generations of little beetle brats in his brain…

He hadn’t been able to sleep for hours, but when he did, he’d dreamt of beetles. But not just ordinary beetles.

He found them, crawling about in the recesses of his mind, and smiled. It was not at all a friendly smile, but rather a pale, stillborn thing that offered no comfort whatsoever.

“I don’t know who sent you to accost me, but I don’t care. You should have chosen your allies or employers or whatever more carefully, because I am not one to be trifled with.” He hadn’t opened his eyes yet. He was still visualizing them, every detail. He’d never tried anything like this before, but he knew that it could certainly be done theoretically. It would send a fitting message to his enemies.

“M-man, I’m bleeding. Please, ain’t no one hired me. I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, I just… figured you’d be easy. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please…”

13’s smile exacerbated. “That’s what your kind always says, but you’re just puppets. I’m going to cut your strings, my friend. I’m going to set you free.”

The first of them appeared, coalescing out of nothing. Not precisely; the psychic-energy that 13 was feeding into reality was potent enough to have mass and form, and that form slowly began to reveal itself. It was small, was a brown and black mottled body. Six legs, hanging down obscenely from a thumb sized body. The wings were shiny and black, chitinous, beating furiously to keep its comparatively large body aloft.

Most disturbing of all was the head. It was the head of a much younger 13, fully human, just as expressive. It had a frightened, surprised expression, just like the mugger was no doubt wearing.

The himsect bobbed and weaved through the air before alighting itself on 13’s victim. It landed right on his neck, and a fleshy slap and crack report made 13 aware that he had killed it. Only when the youth inspected his hand did he realize just what he had killed…

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” he screamed. His shrill voice echoed off the concrete walls of the buildings that flanked them, but 13 couldn’t let himself be distracted.

Another baby-faced beetle appeared in the air, and then another. They zipped toward the frightened criminal, and 13 could hear him beating at his own body to get them off. Another, and another, and more. A squadron flew at him in formation, and the air was now thick with the steady drone of buzzing wings.

The boy’s screams had changed tenor; they weren’t so coherent now, no actual words, just animal sounds. The dozen nightmare bugs were too many for him to kill effectively, and so as 13 made more and more, they began to outnumber him even more drastically.

He felt himself approaching his limits, and so he dismissed the canine crustacean. The only footsteps he heard were erratic shuffling, not the steady plods of an escape, so he kept his focus on filling the air with insectile abberations.

It was different than unleashing a singular, much more massive nightmare. Rather than a single surge of power when he had all the details fixed in his mind, it was a continuous, slow trickle of mental energy. Like air escaping from a punctured balloon, perhaps. Could he speed it up by squeezing the metaphorical balloon?

His smile became one of genuine pleasure when his thought yielded fruits. Six-legged, buzzing, angry fruits. When he was finally satisfied, he opened his eyes and was treated to the sight of a vaguely man-shaped clump of brown-black skitterers swarming over the mugger’s body. By then he’d collapsed to the ground, perhaps succumbing to the hundreds of bites, perhaps simply fainting due to fear. That was one for the academics, 13 decided.

When the boy was well and truly dead, the swarm lifted off, hanging in the air and treating 13 to a rather delightful view. The corpse was bleeding freely from a thousand tiny cuts, many of which had formed into angry looking bumps before his life had fled. A fitting lesson indeed…

[1015/700 words]