Colin clenched his eyes shut tight as the world slowly stopped spinning. His head hurt. Bad.
"Ow." He said, and sat up, hoping he'd just wake up and discover he'd somehow knocked his Dreamworlds headset off in his sleep and had been dreaming some weird dream normally or something.
Only to find himself in a grav-car's ejection seat stuck in the palm of a giant robot hand. "How do you hurt this much in a {Dream}?"
By tumbling around in a giant hand and an ejected grav-car seat, that's how. Colin grimaced and struggled out of the harness. His arms felt like rocks; he could barely move his hands, and his fingers didn't seem to work right. {Something tells me there's no respawn system for dying here… whatever 'here' is.}
What happened if someone died in a no-respawn zone? Did they die for real? Go into some sort of coma?
…Wake up the next morning missing some memories?
{I'd rather not find out. I don't wanna die.} Colin looked around. {I have to find a way back. Back to Nakama World. It's the only place I have a fighting chance.}
Meanwhile, he was stuck on a desert island. Quite a big one; there were several giant robots on it, and plenty of space between them. It was like a huge beach, really, an oversized strip of sand surrounded by distant waters. Soggy sand, by the feel of it.
{What kind of Dreamworld is this? Weren't we in Gardens Dreamworld?} Colin wondered as he got to his feet. There was the skeletal dragon; the closer one got to it, the more dangerous things looked. Apparently fireballs and such just shot out of it at random. Those giant robots closer to it were dodging lasers from its eyes, missiles from its wings and believe it or not, what appeared to be flying jaws.
The cultist ships were nearer and also exchanging fire with giant robots. They were faster, smaller, and much more intent on getting to this beach than the dragon. Colin frowned at them. Those three saucers looked… {different} from the kinds he'd seen at Nakama world. Not so big, but stronger than the ones he knew. {Way} stronger.
As for the teenagers on airskates… they seemed to be busy fighting each other now, ignored by robots and cultists alike, though they still had to dodge random fire from the dragon.
{The cat. Where's the cat? The cat got Alicia.}
Colin took a few painful steps in that general direction; away from the dragon. His legs felt both stiff yet watery at the same time. {Are we supposed to feel this hurt when we're dreaming?}
People were still after him, it seemed.
"Grab this!" it was the guy with the net again, swooping in from above.
Meanwhile, the dark green giant robot was closing in from the other side, hand outstretched.
Left or right? Colin wondered. Either one could get him away from the dragon way quicker than his jelly-legs.
And then he saw the flash of beige. Singed fur. Whiskers.
"Cat!" Colin pounced for it. {The cat has Alicia!}
***
Colin didn't know it at the time, but that incident set forth a new principle in the organization that was trying to rescue him. That very night a memo was sent to all its operatives.
It basically went like this;
"In cases of rescuing lost children from the Lower Plane, we Highly Recommend cute furry animal forms."
***
"Where's Alicia?" Colin asked the minute the cat reached him and swooped him up into the air.
The guy with the net was left behind. The giant robot, Colin noticed, had stopped trying to get him altogether and left him to the cat. {Are they allies? Or did he just plain give up when he saw he wouldn't reach me in time?}
"The girl is safe." The cat said shortly. "We brought her to a Planar Gate."
"A what?" Colin stared.
"Have you forgotten?" the cat swerved to dodge a particularly large fireball. "The Green Gate."
{Green?! There are Green Gates?!} Colin didn't know what to think. Every Gate he'd ever seen had been blue, unless it was locked, which would turn it red. But green?
Yet for some reason… he didn't feel surprised. {It's like I already knew… wait. She said 'have you forgotten'… does that mean she knows me?! And she expects me to know all this?!}
"Who…" Colin gulped. "Who are you guys?"
The cat stiffened. Stared at him, eyes wide. "What?!"
She didn't see where she was going. Neither did he.
Together, they slammed into something very big, and very, very solid.
"OW!" the cat protested, clutching her head with both forepaws.
No longer held in those paws, Colin went tumbling out of the sky, feeling very, very sorry for himself and wishing he'd kept his mouth shut. A moment later, a flash of light appeared, and a human hand grabbed his. Colin glanced up, thinking he'd see one of the guys on airskates…
{Wait. That's not one of them…}
Green armor. Purple visor. The insignia of a crown and eye in the center of the helmet. {The Cult of Gaia.}
"WHOA!" Colin kicked himself away from the Gaian. He glanced at the big heavy thing he and the cat had crashed into only to see what appeared to be a purple-and-green giant robot. {The Gaians have those too?!}
Snake head. Missile launchers on the shoulders. Heavy square shield on one arm. {That} was what they crashed into.
"Colin!" The cat darted in and grabbed him off and away.
{She knows my name!} Colin stared. {She knows my NAME!}
Other giant robots were dropping in from above. Colin glanced up to see a fourth Saucer, this one bigger than all three of the others combined. It was raining Gaian Mecha.
The teens on airskates were pulling out. It didn't take a genius to see they were completely out of their league in a mess like this. The other giant robots were gathering into three distinct groups. The skeletal dragon was charging onwards, indiscriminately blasting away at everything.
Then, almost at the same time, all three groups of giant robots and the Gaian saucers/robot mix all turned and headed towards Colin.
"Hang on!" the cat yelped, diving for the ground when the Gaians started shooting. Colin was looking straight down, thinking of how it would hurt to fall from this height when the ground itself literally {changed}. A canyon rose out of the flat sand; cliffs and jagged rock spires bloomed like flowers. Where once there was a flat strip of sand, now the cat tugged Colin through an obstacle course of rock.
{Falling onto sand would have been bad enough. Falling onto THIS would hurt like crazy.} Colin gulped and hung on to the cat's paws as hard as he could. The cat didn't object.
"Not much farther!" The cat gasped. Colin glanced forward to see a little glimmer of green on a cliff in the distance. {Wait. That little figure right in front of it… is that… Alicia?! What's she DOING here? Why hasn't she gotten out already?}
The giant robots were all over each other now. They had all come together in a tangled mess and were tripping each other up as the cat zipped on towards the Green Gate. They reached it far more quickly than Colin expected; when the cat stopped, Colin lost hold of her paws and her of him. Both went tumbling onto the cliff painfully.
"Colin! What is this?!" Alicia demanded before he could so much as groan.
He really did groan then. "Alicia… get through… the Gate!"
"What Gate IS this?!" Alicia demanded. "I'm not going to walk through some weird Green Gate I've never even {heard} of before just because a talking cat tells me to! She says she knows you! What's all this about?!"
"No… time…" Colin gasped. "Gaians…"
Alicia saw. The Gaians obviously had the advantage over the other groups. They had saucers and enough numbers to block the other groups {and} come after Colin and Alicia at the same time. Still, she hesitated. "Colin, this Gate is green! I don't know what's going to happen when we go through it! Who's the cat? How does she know you? Where {are} we?!"
"G-go…" Colin struggled to his feet.
"How do I know this is not some trick on your part to get rid of me?!" Alicia barked wildly. "You always hated us! From the very start, you always…!"
There was no time. Alicia wouldn't go through unless he went through first, Colin realized. Saying anything was useless unless he himself took the risk she did not dare.
And what risk was that? A {Green} Gate?!
{The cat knows my name. She knows me, somehow, somewhere. Something in my lost memories? Perhaps. But she seems friendly. She seems deliberate in keeping me away from the Cult of Gaia. Isn't that a good thing? She seems to think I should know exactly what's going on. Alicia does too. But I don't. I don't have the foggiest idea.}
The cat was panting, completely exhausted, barely able to breathe, it looked like. She was twenty feet away, looking battered and likely unconscious. This was as far as she was going to bring him, and was too far away to talk. There was no time to question her, no way to reach her before the Gaians reached them.
But the Green Gate was here. Six feet away. Colin got to his hands and knees. {We can reach it. We can make it before the Cult gets us. Barely. But we can do it.}
Was it worth it? Was it even {safe}? Alicia was right. This was as risky as anything in Dreamworlds could get. 'A talking cat told me to' wasn't a good enough reason for doing anything this crazy. And what basis did Colin have for trusting the cat?
{She pulled Alicia and me to safety.} Colin saw the cat heaving in exhaustion. {She really struggled to get me this far, this fast. She went all-out to save us. And she knew my name. She expected me to recognize her, and remember her.}
{I think… I think we were friends.}
The Gaians were coming. There was no more time. Colin made his decision and struggled to make his way to the Green Gate.
"Colin?" Alicia hesitated one last time as Colin crawled on. Seeing that he was determined to go through the Gate now, she gave him a hand, helping him up so he could sort of stumble there rather than crawl.
One last wisp of doubt nagged at Colin but by then it was too late. Green light engulfed them, and then they were through.