Bringing in a bad one.

"What's up?"

Felicis, awakening into his dreamworld with his great round world of a spotted-star friend, thought that was a strangely casual thing for Calla to greet him with. He had to laugh. "Oh, not much..."

Now a laugh from Calla. It wasn't a laugh in the same way that he or anyone he knew in his real, waking world laughed. It was a psychic, cosmic sort of sensation.

You just had to be there.

"No," the star continued. "I don't mean that. I mean, what is it? Up? Or down, actually." She laughed. "Yeah, all of that. I think I know, but it's kinda weird."

Felicis flew and soared, not material and not really with his full sensations that he knew on the other side of dreaming. Of course--it was a mental experience. That made it somehow purer. Less and more vivid at once.

"Up means...well..." He looked around them. There was no up, no down, only their relation to other things hanging in the great void.

"It really only exists down on the world, doesn't it?" said Calla. "Thought so."

"Yeah. Up is, up into the sky, away from the ground. Down is towards the ground. That's...all it means."

A sigh. "I feel like I miss out."

"You should visit me when I'm awake then and you're asleep," said Felicis. "I could show you Earth stuff."

Calla giggled, if a star could do that. More like a twinkling in his thoughts, a delightful cascade of staccato light. "you don't want me to fall asleep."

"Why not?"

"Because when I wake up, you'll be gone."

"...What?"

"You will," said Calla. "That always happens. Luckily I only just woke up a short time ago. So we have a long time. You don't have to worry about it. I'll always be awake to you."

"What--"

"Don't worry." Calla insisted. "Really! I'm kind of used to it."

"You knew others? Like me, and then you fell asleep and they were gone when you woke up?"

"Mm-hm," said Calla. "It sucks. You know what sucks? Time. Time sucks. Can't live with it, can't live without it. But by the Brights! Couldn't they put everyone on more of a similar time scale? Nooo." She paused, letting the energy of her frustration wind back down as she collected herself. "But yeah...I visited before. Many times. I love visiting your world. I search till I find someone like you. Well, someone I can talk to and play with and all that! They're all unique. None like you though."

Felicis listened to her. She wasn't such a great storyteller from what he could tell, but he imagined she must have so much more she could regale him with. "What're the Brights?"

"The brightest stars. Really bright ones. Big, great and powerful and shining with the light of lots of stars together."

"Are you a Bright?"

Calla laughed with a mind sensation like pulses of light or releases of energy. "No! I'm...well, barely a star, like I said. A real stellar runt. But I am a star. The Brights are really rare. Aragalestes was a Bright. They said he wasn't a really bright Bright, but he was one." She sighed. "I never met him, like I said."

"You showed me memories of him."

"Not mine. The others in my Clan showed me those. They said I got a good memory. Hmm, maybe too good. But I guess I like having a good memory. Kind of means my friends and all the good stuff in my life lives on better."

"I wish I could remember before I came up out of the land below," said Felicis as he spoke about this to Calla for the first time. "I came from under the ground."

"...Really?" Calla's demeanour changed as she asked that. It was a surprise and sort of fascination, yet with the hint that something was wrong with that. "How?"

Felicis shook his dream-head. "I don't know. I sometimes just wonder if that was all a dream too. I had another mother, and ...can't really remember more than that. I can't really remember her face even, anymore."

"Maybe if you ask the others in your family and stuff," said Calla. "Just ask. You can find out a LOT that way. Trust me."

Felicis woke up planning on doing just that. He had questions, suddenly--lots of them.

Felicis was asleep...deeply asleep. Here and there a paw twitched. He was dreaming...and through the dream, experiencing.

"Taide is dead...he has failed to be born."

"But I can see his thoughts...I can feel them. I can hear him singing." Calla would never forget the muted, very crude and primitive, muffled pulses of song that her brother had emitted to her in the earliest period of her life, as she and he had circled each other in their dance together. A dance they had taken up before either of their birth. And now, Phinigretta was telling her that Taide was not alive...

"Taide! Talk to me...sing to us, say my name! Show her you are alive!"

Taide, of course, could not muster the coherence of thought and power to sing like the stars could sing. Calla felt his mind rising towards hers in a valiant push, whirling with the forces of gravity that swung them around in the dance whose rhythms defined their lives. Calla again focused on the more distant but still nearby Phinigretta, and her music was a stellar wail of despair. "If he was dead, he wouldn't be singing to me right now!"

"Many of the failed ones sing a faint, faint song. But soon, that too will fade. Calla....I'm so sorry."

Felicis woke up to the sound of his best friend's calling his name. He opened his hazel eyes. "...What...?" He seemed disoriented.

"...Yeah." To Felicis, it was more like travelling than dreaming. "...Were you?"

"...I didn't really...find any answers this time," Felicis looked down. "More like just...a little bit of her memories. But--cure? You...so the poison isn't the cure? Well--that's good!"

Felicis shook his head. "No. No we should not fear them. But..." He looked up at the den's ceiling. "I miss Mumma, and Mayor and Diamant. I just hope we get to go home...sort of soon."

Felicis relaxed a little, lifted his head and stepped out into the light. He looked back at him. "Really? What about your family?"

"I know how that feels...I mean, my family loves me but they think I'm a little loony." Felicis thought he might be loony, too. He couldn't ever be sure, except that he knew deep down it was real. But did that make him loony?

"I think that she has more ability to help than anyone we've met so far," said Felicis, "but that she...and us...are not on the same understanding of what's going on. I think we all only understand small pieces of it."

"I think maybe they are, and we just fail to understand it," said Felicis. "It's such a different world. What seems so normal to us that we don't even think about it...is just...unknown to them."

He looked more intensely at the larger tom, gazing hard at his curled-eared face. "When you go to that place in your dreams...what is it like? What do you see, and hear?"