((OOC: Italics reference the events from Mister Sandman, with Alex.))

There was something wrong, bad, fundamentally incorrect with the universe and him and everything.

Jiri was dreaming he was a hawk.

(No he wasn't, he wasn't dreaming, he was a mu--)

He'd been flying over a large building set on a larger tract of land. But he'd landed when the confusion had started. He perched on top of a chimney stack, tail flicking for balance, his gold eyes searching for the source of his intense unease. The sun painted his feathers in red and gold as it eased down to the horizon. 

(He had been researching. He'd avoided the news for days, but he had to know, had to check. He'd gone online, searching. Mutant crimes--no, hate crimes against mutants, mutants taken to the hospital. He wished he could remember which hospital.)

In the dream, the hawk's mouth was open, its tongue tasting the air, its breathing fast. 

(Ace. Ace was a hawk. In the other dream, about the kid named Alex, with the animal people in his head. It had been crazy; it had to be a dream. 

But he couldn't stop thinking about it. How he'd cornered the kid on the bus. Tried to stab him. Watched him bleed out as he knelt over him and then they were in that house with the stars and there was an ambulance and everything had blurred together--

If it was a dream, then everything was fine. There would be nothing online about it, because it wasn't real.

He found the post in the first forum he checked. Audubon X, a mutant spotter site.

"Video of mutant v. douches. Help ID power? Snake intestines are a new one"

His hand shook as he played the video. He remembered. He remembered everything it showed, but from a different angle. 

"Anyone know what happened to him?"

"--friend works the night shift at Mercy General, he told me the police had the kid collared. He was in pretty bad shape, don't know if he made it--"

It had been real. The whole thing, it had been real.

He was so tired, so tired, he couldn't deal with this--)

The hawk's breathing gradually slowed as the minutes ticked past and no threat presented itself. Jiri couldn't remember what had upset him; maybe this was the sort of dream that had transitioned from another. From a bad dream to a good one. He tilted his head back, feeling the wind combing through his feathers. Tested his wings. The lingering unease was almost gone now. It was only a dream. Nothing could hurt him here.

(But he could hurt--)

Jiri took wing, leaving whatever had been preying on his mind behind him. 

It felt amazing to fly--he stuttered a bit here and there as the wind shifted, catching him unawares, but it grew easier as he went. More intuitive. It was like there was something in the back of his mind willing him to fly right, something that really didn't want him to fall. It was a good feeling. A secure feeling. 

The suburbs stretched out before him, then the city. His wings began to feel tired. Not gliding enough, something in his mind put forward, wasting energy. They weren't really words--just thoughts, images, feelings. Not gliding enough, huh? He'd remember that for next time.

For now, he was tired of flying. He swooping down lower, winging between buildings, only thirty or so feet from the ground. Things were louder down here. City sounds: voices and cars and the electric hum of signs. He didn't think too hard about it. Just waited until something caught his eye.

There--the man with the frameless glasses. It was very Matrix, very cool. Jiri didn't want to be a hawk anymore.

Just like that, as easy as thought, he wasn't.

Jiri was dreaming he was an Asian man, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Now. What to do, what to do? A guy like this should be up for a little fun, right?

Richard had jsut exited the restaurant where he had launched and was starting to walk back to the bus stop when...well...something happened. It was hard to describe the sensation as Richard had never experience it before. The only thing he could compare it to was if his body was a mechanized suit and he was usually the operator but had been... hacked? and was now for the first time in his life a passanger in his own body. He could not move his limbs or cry out. he was suddenly transported to...someplace. That someplace felt familiar, although it contained a strange unfililiar presence. Richard suddenly realised that this was his brain, he was looking at a visualization of how his brain worked. With that understanding he yelled at the man "Hold on". Suddenly from the side came a flash of light that was mirrored on the ...ceiling and the whole world seemed to tilt to one side like a boat in a huge storm before righting itself. "So that is how it works!" Said Richard to himself.

He turned to the strange presence. "Hello there, either I am having a hallucination that is terribly accurate or you have somehow intruded? into my mind and taken control. You don't seem too evil. Anyhow I should probably give you a little tour or you might find yourself ummm... rather dead rather quickly."

"No I am not exaggerating, you see my power concerns information. Hmm more precisely I can understand how an object is built and can manipulate it. The point is that my mind can accept, absorb, process and store massive amounts of information in very short periods of time, enough information that would literally fry the minds of people who don't have a similar mutation. Sooo, if you want to stay alive you might want to listen."

****Description of surroundings***
The floor was covered with grooves that interconnected like rails. The ceiling was light blue and appeared to have an endless depth, it was crisscrossed by millions upon millions of strands of what looked like dim lightening frozen in time. every so often a new "line" would appear with a flash and the whole world would rock slightly. To the north was a large Plexiglas window looking out onto what appeared to be some sort of processing...place. cube like objects appeared to be arranged in three dimensional grids exchanged small arcs of electricity in a blindingly fast yet somehow.. orderly fashion.

In the floor was set a view port that started into the bottomless space below, a space in which seemed to be occupied by countless number of many sided objects of varying shapes. the objects were not stationary but were constantly moving, shifting, re-configuring, rotating, as though trying to connect with each other in new configurations. Every so often a configuration would lock into place for an instant and a flash of lightening would fire from there to the ceiling, adding yet another line as well as rocking the floor.

Finally to the side in the wall there was what appeared to be a glowing transparent door. Though it there appeared a room without end. In this room hundreds of cloud like objects floated and drifted. It was a room that was filled with raw power, even walking close to it made one's hair stand straight on end. Every so often without warning an ark of light would start from one cloud and chain from one to another, growing brighter as it went. The path it chose often seemed random but the more clouds it touched the brighter it got and the louder the rumble. When the arc stopped the floor would tilt more violently and yet another line usually thicker would be added to the ceiling.

This dream involved a very excited voice at the back of his head. It was a strange mix of young and old: now it sounded like a kid who'd just learned he lived in a candy store, now it sounded like a Professor Emeritus of Candy.

"None of the above. We're asleep," Jiri explained, when the voice asked. He said this out loud as he walked down the street. No one particularly seemed to mind that he was talking to himself. After a moment, he conceded that to be fairly realistic for a dream--with earbuds, it was hard these days to tell who was crazy and who was just on a cell phone. "Specifically, I'm dreaming of you. Don't worry--it'll be painless when I wake, and you disappear."

He assumed it would be, anyway. He'd never heard his dreams screaming as he woke, and he hoped he never would. He smirked as the guy complimented him--not too evil, eh? And in threat of dying rather quickly? His eyes scanned the street while he listened, smirk still firmly on his face. It was past rush hour, and cars were actually moving. A rarity in New York, to be sure. He liked the sound of the horns, the quick slap of wind as they raced past him, better than he did when he was awake.

That looked fun.

That looked fun even before the trippy colors began to overlap everything. 

Jiri laughed, a sound of rich masculine delight, a the rails of blue light appears under his feet. In the way of dreams, he felt surreal, like he was seeing two strikingly different scenes at once, but they harmonized. A dark room, strands of lightning, flashes of electricity--they arced and connected and shifted over the electric meters, the cars, the animated billboards. All of it flowed together, flowed off the screen, flowed to and from the same source. All of it made sense, and not at all, all at once. It didn't bother him.

"Not too worried about the dying," he reassured the voice, because it did seem concerned for his health. Very sweet of it. "Or the brain frying. The way out of a lava flow is just to surf the surface." 

This made sense to him. He didn't know if it made sense, but it made sense to him. There was something to the lines, something hot, something that threatened to burn; there was a depth to things that was dark, and might sink him if he went too deep; nooks that might disappear him from himself. But there was was a cool breeze tonight, and it smoothed everything over. He felt like reaching out his hands, and thrumming the chords; he felt like...

...like stealing a car.

A beauty was parked near the corner, in ten minute parking. A purple lotus convertible. In the passenger seat, wearing a doggie safety belt, sat a black and white shih tzu. It wagged its tail as he leaned over. He offered his hand for a sniff, it woofed and licked the back of his hand. Jiri walked around to the other side of the car, and hopped over the door and into the driver's seat.

"Can you see how this works?" Jiri asked, taping the steering wheel. " 'Cause I've always wanted to hot wire a car." 

Woof, the dog repeated. In his dream, it seemed pleased about the prospect of going for a cruise.