Oh my, Tommy thought upon awakening. What did I do last night? I kind of remember getting up and walking around, and yet, it didn’t seem like I was doing it.

While getting dressed, he saw the note next to his computer. Wow, Tommy thought. The amulet really works! Or more likely, Sarah’s gained control of her powers but just needed to be encouraged to visit other places, which was what I hoped for by lying to her about the amulet.

Tommy was distracted by this in school all day, but that evening, after finishing off the short final escape from Death March 6, he wrote a real-life note for Sarah at the bottom of her note.

---

The next night, I started by possessing Tommy again. I read his note, put him back to bed, and found my way into his neighbor Becky. “Kind of cute?” he says? She’s a major-league hottie. I wonder why she stays inside.

I found something for Becky to cover up with for going outside, as her bedclothes were indecent. Then I found Becky’s phone, and called Tommy.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Tommy, it’s Sarah.” I whispered. “I’m in Becky. Or somebody in your neighborhood anyway. She’s more than cute; she’s a serious hottie.”

“Yeah, that’s Becky. Can you get out of the house?”

“Yeah, nobody else is awake here. I’m at the front door. I’ve got Becky’s keys. She has keys, even if she doesn’t use them, and I confirmed they lock and unlock this door.”

“Okay, if you’re looking out the front door, my house is to your left. And the coast is clear here, too.”

“Be there in a few seconds.” And I ended the call.

I went to Tommy’s house, and he had the door open for me when I got there. We crept inside quietly and he led me to his room, where I took off the long coat I was wearing.

“Tommy, it’s so awesome being able to meet you in person... even if I’m not entirely myself.”

“It’s great meeting you, too, Sarah. And I am so glad that my long effort in that game paid off for you. So how well does that work?”

“It’s awesome, Tommy. I can go literally anywhere in my dreams. Bad news, though. That gold I took, it partially vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Yeah. I think that the stuff I take out of the game isn’t really anchored to my world. As long as I keep it near me, it’s fine and passes for the real thing. When it gets separated from me, it starts to vanish. I left it under my bed, and after a day at school, the coins were half gone, and many of the threads of the backpack disappeared as well, so there were many tiny holes in it. After another day, there wasn’t enough backpack to contain the coins and only about a hundred coins were left. Tomorrow I expect it will be completely gone.”

“That’s too bad, but it explains why some coins came back to Elissa,” Tommy replied.

“Oh, and thank you,” I continued, as I grabbed Tommy, hugged him, and kissed him. He kissed me back passionately, and ran his hand up under the filmy top I was wearing and started fondling my breasts. Er, I remembered, Becky’s breasts.

Tommy remembered that at the same time, and pulled his hand out. “I think that we should stop here, Sarah, to avoid invading Becky’s privacy too much. We didn’t ask her permission to do this.”

“Yes, you’re right, Tommy. I was about to say the same thing. Maybe you’ll be lucky and she’ll come back to visit you as herself and you can feel free to go further with her when she’s in control of her own body.”

“Yeah. When I woke yesterday morning, I vaguely remembered what you did in my body. Becky will probably have some memory of this too.”

“I’ll see if I can influence her in the right way. Anyway, I think I’m going to go explore the power of the amulet some more, but I’ll come visit when I can.”

“I need to confess one thing,” Tommy said. “I lied to you about the amulet. It was an unimplemented item in the game, something the game designers meant to do something with but apparently never completed, perhaps for another phase of the game which was dropped. It doesn’t actually do anything. Your control of your powers is simply due to you gaining that control on your own.”

“Really? It seemed like it opened up a game-like menu of options for where to travel. But thanks anyway. Good night, and see you some time.”

Tommy led me back downstairs, and I crept silently back to Becky’s house, unlocked the door, entered, re-locked the door, and went back to Becky’s room. Before I put Becky to bed, I wrote her a note:

And then I climbed into Becky’s bed, closed her eyes, and then I was in my own bed again, briefly, with the menu in my head. And then the menu collapsed and I realized it was just a way of organizing my thoughts. I could go anywhere, directly, without browsing through the immense hierarchy of the menu, but I could still bring up the menu when I wanted to.

But I had had rather enough of this, and tried to ignore it and just sleep. That didn’t work. A couple minutes later I found myself back in Becky again. I switched over to Tommy instead, and when I left him and tried to just sleep again, I ended up back in Tommy again. It looks like if I don’t choose a place to go it just takes me back to the last place I went. That must be why I kept going back to Tommy’s game.

But since I couldn’t not do it, for my next stop I chose Pigwarts again, but using an option I just noticed to do so as a real-world visitation in the present instead of a viewing.

I went there, entered some random Hufflepuff student, and did manage to find one of the professors there to help me. Except she really couldn’t. She found another professor more knowledgeable about dream magic, who still didn’t know.

“I can see that you are some sort of spirit possessing this student, but in a way which is totally unfamiliar to me. The kind of dreamwalking magic I am familiar with allows you to enter the dreams of other people, not have dreams in which you take possession of the bodies of other people in real life.”

“Sorry to trouble you, then. I’ll get this student back to her bed and go try some other world.”

“Wait, some other world?”

“Yes, your world is a work of fiction in my world. But I’ve got some ability that lets me enter these fictional worlds for real.”

“Well that is really remarkable. I can see that you are really a spirit possessing this girl, and not just a student making up preposterous stories. But I’ve never heard of spirits coming to visit from outside our world. I’m sure there are many people here who’d love to have you visit them so they can learn more about your world.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m really looking for somebody who can help me understand why I can do this, and how I might keep it from happening automatically. And I think you’ve confirmed for me I’m looking in the wrong world.”

And then I really did walk away. I put the girl I’d possessed back to bed, and l then I moved on to see if they could help me in Central-Earth, which was a challenge because the magic users there are spread across the whole world, and one person can’t just lead me down a hallway to refer me to another magic user. But I could pop out of the world and into somebody else in the right place. After several attempts, though, it seemed to me that they’d never seen anything like this, either.

Then it was time for me to wake up in my real body, so at least I was able to stop dreamwalking.