One school night, in the fall, the physical location being a bed in the second year Hufflepuff girls' dormitory. But that says nothing of the location provided by the subconscious imagination, that gives way to the landscape of dreams in the night hours...

--in the ether of the unconscious Obderedria found herself on a seaside cliff. Only the sea smelled sweet. Sugar water, a more pleasant smell than the regular sea. The regular was too salty for her.

The whole sight was pleasant. Just the right temperature. The cliff stretched away endlessly from her on either side. The clouds were shaped and still almost like wallpaper. Although there was something that stood out. A red balloon floating above the sea. Far out of her reach.

But then there was something closer. When she looked back to the ground there was a black rabbit with a blue lace bow tied around its neck. It stared at her then lopped away.

"Hey, wait!" The rabbit seemed so familiar--as things do in dreams--that Obderedria had to follow it. The rabbit hopped before her, where there was a hedge of rosebushes, and disappeared into it.




Do you dream about me (dream about me...)



There was an echoing noise Obderedria couldn't really place. A rhythmic, fading call. Almost like a song.

Once under the cover of the rose hedges, Beverly was no longer an ordinary rabbit. For the moment, she could almost be considered shapeless. A black mass to the shadows. A form that could be a spectrum of forms. Intangible, unrecognizable except for golden eyes.

That was how dreams worked. The shapes did not need detail until they became the focus of the dream.

She got into position and waited.

She entered the hedges, tangled growth of roses and thorns. Only the thorns didn't hurt, they tickled her instead like the bristles on her toothbrush, the budding roses popping like bubbles -- popping? -- or fading fast like the thinest remaining layer of soap. Creeping through the soft foliage left little to be there for sound.


But still something was echoing, not that any source for sound could be seen as her vision, even skywards, was blocked by roses so soft they must have been sown from felt. Then the leaves were like green denium.

There's always something I can do


Direction was meaningless although she was coming to the edge of a location. Maybe. For how the gaps between plants were darker and shadowy, still with distance repeating forms but with less detail to make out.

And past the fuzzy plants, in the shadows of greens and red were a pair of yellow orbs. Glimmering golden eyes the size of car tires.


It took every instinct not to pounce just yet. Timing was important in these things.


A promise that was going to be kept this time...

Was the world growing, was she shrinking? Obderedria couldn't say. Things never stayed concrete in dreams. They shifted when you weren't paying attention to them. Thus the velvety plants seemed far taller than when she had entered.

And that was when she ran into it. Not literally, but suddenly her vision was taken up by the entirety of--

--the face of a giant black bunny.

The one she had followed in here? Probably.

And the strangest of feelings in dreams, because things can seem familiar even if this is the first time experiencing them, was that she knew who this rabbit was. Or was supposed to--

"..."

And this was it. Finally that chance to reconnect.

"Hiya Dreeeeeeeeeeeaa!" And Beverly pounced.

Somewhere in the bounce she switched from being merely a giant rabbit to a still bigger than Obderedria but more humanish rabbit, longer torso'd with proportionate appendages and a horse hair tail. She tackled the spotted haired Hufflepuff in a manner far better than the way stuffed tigers did it. Tigger, Hobbes, etc.

"Noogies! Ha ha!" Beverly had Drea wrapped up tight in a fuzzy embrace, one paw scrathing the girl's head until her hair stood up on end. "Hmm, that look doesn't suit you all that much." Standing at full height she was able to hold Drea out in her arms like the girl was a doll. She licked one paw with her tongue and smoothed the hair back down.

"Look how big you're getting now! My little lady all grown up, a woman of nearly thirteen. Where does the time go?" She hugged the Hufflepuff again. "So did you miss me? Huh? Did you miss me?"

"Beverly?"

And then everything made sense again. Her favorite imaginary friend, pen pal, and short fiction character. Here in a dream. It seemed like ages ago in childhood the last time she'd had a Beverly dream.

"Oof! Ha ha, yeah it doesn't work that way." Even without there being a mirror about she just knew her hair when puffed looked like a mostly rotten head of broccoli that had had small green clouds left of healthy vegetation.

"Grown up, yeah." Even with Beverly saying it she still felt a little self conscious about how she had been growing but Beverly's strong arms made her feel weightless. "I did miss you though." Hugging Beverly was like hugging a great warm fuzzy pillow, like a shaggy one from back home she could never get to fit in her luggage--even though the blender Figaro had busted somehow made its way in.

"But what have you been up to? More adventures on Jupiter. Upkeep of your pink coral castle?"

"Pfff, same old same old," Beverly made a dismissive gesture with a paw. "I want to know what's been up with you recently. You haven't been sending me letters you silly pickle."

She placed down Drea and sat herself and at once they were on opposite sides of a blue painted wooden table topped with stereotypical checkered cloth and a picnic basket. Beverly extracted a giant carrot from it and as she talked she ate the leafy green stem until she was down to the orange part, at which point she chucked it away. "You must know tons of flashy spells by now and have bundles of friends!"

When Obderedria pulled items out of the picnic basket she had a plate of hot dogs in buns and bottles of all of her favorite condiments she had experimentally tasted over the years; catsup, mustard, relish, horseradish, hot sauce, ranch dressing, chocolate ice cream and peanut butter. She paired each with a single wiener.

"I--" It would be lying to say she was all Beverly expected. "--know some spells, kind of interesting ones. But my wand--" Haltig her condiment spreading, she pulled out her apple wood wand. But that wasn't right. The wand in her hand changed into Sandusky's wife's wand, the very pretty one that smelled of lilacs and shimmered with ethereal lights rising from it like steam from hot soup and with every movement Obderedria took to set it on the table it chimed as if accompanied by an invisible harp.

"This isn't mine, the Transfiguration professor borrowed it to me. It's too nice for someone like me, and wands are only supposed to work for their original owners."

She bit the end of the mustard topped hot dog, experiencing the taste but not the texture. "I've got a few friends. I think. But there's a lot of bullies still. Like Silivia Bogg-Goyle, she's always nasty to me. And then Fig, he's not really a bully but he has a loose tongue that can say hurtful things and he got my blender busted just after I'd managed how to work it with magic."

"Wand troubles?" Beverly discarded another orange section of carrot and then she was holding the wand Obderedria had set aside. Gripped in her paw she gave it a shimmy, like the rubber pencil trick, which made the wooden stick look like it was bending back and forth. It switched between Drea's old wand and the borrowed wand. "I don't see why that should contribute to anything. Wands are just things the bigjob wizards use to channel magic. Tools. Some of them even figure out how to do things without wands."

Beverly's whiskers twitched. "Now that's no way to talk. You shouldn't let other people's naysaying or the fact you have to borrow a wand get to you."

The dinner on the table had changed, as Beverly was now picking fired onions of a green bean casserole.

The hotdogs had been forgotten because there had always been a Thanksgiving dinner pulled out of the picnic basket--dreams worked like that with their internal 'truth and logic'--with turkey, potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberries, the gravy boat was shaped like a bathtub, both pumpkin and pecan pie for dessert.

Why was her turkey leg covered in horseradish? That wasn't a topping Obderedria used with what she always associated with her birthday dinner, being a late November baby that born by Thanksgiving, mum and the American family still followed the observation.

"But they're right," Obderedria said as she wiped the horseradish off onto the floral pattern paper plate that was there when she needed it. "I'm not really good at magic at all, outside of the few spells I know. I don't know how to fix my blender, my Professor thinks theres a problem because I can't get the flashlight spell the right color, whether it's charms or transfiguration, and defense, Storm is so scary--"

Obderedria froze. The un-motion of having her train--gravy train?--of thought stop at a collision. Her skin prickled and a sour acidic feeling boiled from her stomach. It felt like ice cubes were being poured down her back.

"There's something I forgot."

Whatever it was it was important. Very important. And whenever she tried to think what was worrying her there was nothing but blankness. Was it related to her wand, her magic? Or something else?

"There's something I forgot," she repeated again, more like a shriek edging towards hysterics. "It--I think it's something I did, but I forgot."

And when the lid opened on the picnic basket there wasn't food in there. Rather a gaping maw with pulsating gums and sharp fangs. A maw that opened impossibly wide, roaring as dangling spittle dribbled out with each sound wave.

"Time to fly!" Beverly proclaimed as she smashed the lid of the picnic basket shut on the maw. That didn't stop it, the stereotypical picnic basket was always made out of wicker and had to lids. The other sea-sawed open and a geyser of partially digested junk, like the anti-thesis of a cleansing shower, sprayed upwards from the picnic basket. As the column of spewed sewage, or spewage, climbed higher Beverly hopped to where she had tossed the spent orange sections of her carrots. A final knot of the bungee cords was all that was needed to finish the rowboat made out of carrot sticks.

"Come on Drea! You'll have time to think about it later." The spewage still climbed impossibly high, darkening the sky overhead, although bits of gunk were threatening to rain down. When both Drea and Beverly were in the makeshift rowboat the latter rowed like mad. A few strokes got them out of the velvety lined roses, two more took them over the edge of the cliff where they splashed into sweet smelling sea.

Once they were out some distance in open water Beverly stopped and looked up to the cliff. "Nasty stuff." It looked like a tornado had joined the eye of the storm in a hurricane, the sky lurid with sickly yellow, radioactive green and poisonous purple, all amassing with clouds like black ink.

Obderedria felt her mind had drifted back behind her head so she could see herself, the same way she knew about how her hair looked when Beverly had messed it up. She had gotten to the safety of the carrot rowboat, and with Beverly at the oars the ride was like a roller coaster without the g-forces. Though as the blurs of ground, cliff, and sugar water sea blurred passed her Obderedria wasn't paying attention to the passing scenery nor the storm of yuck that had overtaken their picnic location.

All of it. Maybe. Or maybe none of it fit. But she still couldn't remember what she had forgotten. Where was a Rememberall when you needed one, although Obderedria had never figured out how those were supposed to help.

Spray from the sweet ocean hit her face though that sensation wasn't the one that brought her out of her mired thoughts. It was the sound. A long ringing echo, coming to a crescendo. Obderedria remembered the sound from old history documentaries she had seen on the telly or in primary. A siren that suggest nuclear fallout. Her eyes shot up to look at the sky. It seemed to match with the radioactive green in the sky as if there was atomic waste.

The sky--

The sky was falling!! And this was actually falling--in a dream--and not like the chicken little sense of a falling sky. It wasn't the storm of spewage that was over the distant cliff, but the pretty sky that had been a light faded blue with fluffy clouds. The blue bleached away until Obderedria saw that it wasn't sky. The whole limitless mass of it, an angled expanse of something white and papery, was pressing down towards them.

"Beverly, what are we going to do??" Obderedria shrieked as the paper--maybe cardboard, for how big of paper it was--came ever closer.

"Merrily we row along
Boatin as we sing this song
As you row along this stream

Rowing the boat so gently
Down this stream so merrily
Don't you know life is just a dream?"

What may have been a familiar nursery rhyme tune was a jumbled mess of syllables trying to fix the syncopation of British pop. While Beverly was singing she had stopped rowing, being jovial about the inevitable.

Then she scooped up Drea in another fuzzy hug. "It's gonna be difficult for a little bit. But remember, I'm going to be with you this time. Even when I'm not. 'K?"

And darkness covered them both.

((OOC: Mild unconventionality warning ahead))

"What? We need to move, we need to--I didn't mean to--"

Darkness.

Not plunged into the ocean. Not fallen anywhere. No sensory input of any kind, that intangible state of black between states of sleep. It was damp.

No.

No no no no please no!

And then it wasn't as dark, only dim. A dank dinginess, wet corridors going off in an insurmountable distance, the branching paths being real corridors or mirrored reflections.

And in the nightmare Obderedria was back there in the lost levels of Hogwarts basement. The Terror Dungeons some had called them.[1]

She couldn't hear the screams except for distant sounds. Silence edged by the skittering of giant spiders, the howl of a wolf. The collected soundtrack of an untold number of nightmares. She couldn't tell what was worse, hearing those echoes or the silences that left nothing but the blood rushing in her over-beating heart.

Obderedria felt sick. Panic clawed at her insides, gnawing outward from her stomach. This is where it would happen. She didn't want to see her fear again, just like it had stalked these halls last time. The wrinkled form like beef jerky of a dead version of herself--

She willed her legs to stop, her hands to cover her eyes as it didn't happen, her gaze tilting the viewpoint of the dungeons. The moist brick angled, raised, came ever closer to a mirrored archway while something drew rattling breath--

And in the mirror was--her perfectly fine self??

Obderedria blinked stupidly at the regular reflection of herself. Spotted green and brown hair, rounded cheeks, pudge pressed into a school uniform. She might have just finished putting in her contacts before heading out for a day at Hogwarts. Did the Terror Dungeons really have regular mirrors that didn't act like bad funfair distortions or openings for frightful phantasms?

But she could still hear that deathly moaning. Her reflection didn't have her mouth open. Then who was moaning--?

And when she raised her hand to her level of vision, as her normal reflection copied the motion, she saw that her hand was a mass of burnt flesh on bone. And she couldn't scream. She could only moan louder!

Obderedria was now her zombie self, the manifestation of her worst fear. Hollow. Undead. Unreal. And her reflection moved out of the mirror, her normal self with an unpleasant and twisted smile on her face, an expression that would normally never appear on the young Hufflepuff. Once again Obderedria was looking both outside herself and through the eyes of the zombie she had shriveled into as her regular facsimile grabbed her by the chin.

That unnaturally creepy smile was backed up by humming. Obderedria recognized the tune. That one she had been singing on the dock. I believe I Can Fly. But as her other normal looking self hummed it off key she ripped off her zombified jaw. The shock of it hurt more than any actual pain--zombies didn't feel pain. Plain Obderedria parted her lips--somehow still humming through her nose--her tongue licking the corners of her mouth in a mocking gesture. The throat was torn off next, crumbling to ash from esophagus to vocal cord leaving a shallow depression of her neck.

And Obderedria was trapped in this zombie form, wrecked with feelings of emptiness as her supposedly normal self pulled off more useless parts of her corpse-like undead self--it was like Sally, the sackcloth/scarecrow person in a Nightmare Before Christmas who had her limbs removed and sewn back on over the course of the film Obderedria liked to watch on her birthday, the holiday between Halloween and Christmas--was her normal looking mirrored self getting bigger, or was it Obderedria's own shrinking perspective as she crumbled away in dust??

And as she diminished, Obderedria noticed something else was off--something almost worst than her being the crumbling mummified version of herself as her real reflection antagonized her--the walls of the Terror Dungeon weren't right. Suddenly she could see past the bricks, the gaps where the cut-outs didn't fit together to complete the backdrop. The colors were wrong, not the cold grays and blues she had witnessed during her first time in the dungeons. The walls bleed brown mud. Lurid colors shown through: poisonous purple, nuclear green, yellow yuck--

--the filthy geyser that had erupted out of the picnic basket was coming here too. Or maybe it had been the glue keeping this sham yet none the less horrifying copy of the Terror Dungeons together. This dream really was getting horrible, Obderedria had been having such a lovely one earlier and now she was so scared even as she couldn't remember doing something significant and bad, she must of--maybe her brain had rotted out of her skull along with the other broken off parts of her zombie form.

And that left one desperate cry.

"BEVERLY!!"

1.	Where Your Fears Face You - Oct 27