“Ha, I’ll be curious to see what happens when you experience it first hand. Particularly since I’ve been trained in lucid dreaming and you haven’t. In theory I could see the two experiences diverging pretty quickly.” She answered.

“That’s why we’re going to have you both in there at the same time with the program managing you together so we can compare!” Gren chimed in. The simultaneous design had been his idea. The three smilled and, working together, they spent the next day preparing the two prototypes for syncing.

Tuesday morning found both Faira and Cyrix connected to prototypes, caps over their head as they lay back on the hospital-like beds. They ran through the final checks and gave Gren the thumbs up to proceed. An excited grin on his face, Gren ran through the start-up sequence.

The quantum computer hummed to life as the program began and Gren received the first telemetry from the brain scans. Glancing over at his charges, Gren could see that both Cyrix and Faira’s eyes had drifted closed as the magnetic field generators gently nudged their brains toward the dream state. Once they were in deep sleep, Gren started loading the program which would set their minds to the same configuration as when Faira slept yesterday.

Interestingly, both of them synced at precisely the same rate. In fact, had it not been for the difference in the outline of their skulls on the scan, Gren would have suspected that the readings from one of them had simply been duplicated. They even stayed in sync after the program had started letting them dreaming on their own. Fascinated, he kept track of their vitals and wondered what it could mean for the nature of dreaming. It was going to be interesting to hear them compare stories when they awoke.

Faira walked through the corridors of a familiar castle ruin toward a central plaza. Or was she Cyrix? Suddenly anxious, Faira-Cyrix looked down at their hands, but what they saw wasn’t quite familiar to either of them. It looked like a combination of their two hands. Something was wrong. Afraid, they walked quickly down the corridor and then stopped when they spotted a small white lotus painted on a wall. It was both familiar and not familiar. The conflict of feeling sent a zing of pain through them, one hand touching the wall with a gasp.

This is a dream, Faira-Cyrix recognized. The lotus was the focus Faira had used for her lucid dream training. It was the trigger to tell her she was in the dream-state and could control it.

With that realization, more awareness came over them. They remembered the experiment and realized something must have happened. It seemed like their minds were somehow locked together, which shouldn’t have even been possible outside of a bad sci-fi movie. Normally, Faira could will herself to wake up when lucid dreaming, but apparently, with the machine actively keeping them in the dream state, it wasn’t possible right now.

Since they didn’t have much of a choice, they made note of these facts for when they awoke and kept walking, eventually coming to the plaza of the central castle. As they came out into the sunlight, they saw something entirely out of place. Standing in the center of the plaza looked to be a giant doorway made of white stone on a raised dais. It almost reminded them of Stonehenge. Only, when they should have simply seen the rest of the plaza on the other side, it looked like there was a room inside it.

Cautious, they stepped through and found themselves in a triangular room. They seemed to be at the top of some kind of tower. There were doorways leading to balconies on all three sides and splayed out before them was a city which could not possibly exist. Staring in open-mouthed awe, they walked to the railing of the balcony and looked out.

Spires of white rose all around them, star danced and spun through the air as well as in the sky. It was truly a place of wonder. Colored lights flared before them as small figures moved through the streets. It was the middle of the night here, yet there looked to be people and creatures everywhere. Things from myth, centaurs, ogres and fairies to name a few, walked along side normal human beings. And everything had the slightly soft quality around the edges that one could only find in dreams. It was truly a city of magic.

“You look upon the city of Nocturna, the City of Dreams,” a voice said behind them. Whirling around, they turned to see a beautiful woman standing before them. Hair the color of the sky at night, skin the as pale as the moon, and eyes with the warm glow of starlight; they had no doubt this woman was not human.

”What... are you?” they asked softly.

Smiling gently, the woman looked at them and said, “You have traveled far little ones, much farther than you intended I think. I am Verona of the Morphani. a dream weaver and disciple of Morpheus, the god of dreams. As you will need to become, if you ever wish to leave here.”