The ground beneath Captain Keith's feet shifted queasily and he had to struggle to maintain balance. His training with the Cosmo-Ninjas of Arcturus VII had left him with the agility of a Jovian lynx, but even his unequaled equilibrium was failing him in this mercurial mountainscape. As he ran, great chasms appeared as if out of nowhere and land he'd thought was solid suddenly seemed to be a morass; he would've sworn his eyes were playing tricks on him, if he didn't know for a fact that his eyesight was the sharpest of any living creature in nine systems.
The sky was a fiery red, with impossible yellow clouds. His mind raced to identify the planet that might have such a firmament, but when he looked again, the previous welkin had been replaced by the cloudless starscape of midnight on Uranus.
Some instinct compelled him to look at his signal display. When the words on the display appeared to be gibberish, everything fell into place. "Dreaming," Captain Keith said aloud. That could be the only explanation for the chameleonic environment in which he found himself. But if this was a dream, what was the reality behind it?
As his keen synapses began to sift through the clues, he found himself face to face with a Corellian CyberGolem. The powerful creature raised its massive clay fists to the skies, the circuits where its eyes should have been sparked angrily under its furrowed brow.
"The dream is trying to distract me with physical danger to keep me from piecing together the mystery behind this place," Captain Keith thought, his blaster hand instinctively dealing with the situation already. As he pulled the trigger and sent a powerful bolt of deadly plasma toward the creature, Captain Keith's encyclopedic knowledge of every possible danger the universe offered reminded him that only blasters blessed by the Holy Men of Corel Major can defeat such a creature.
"But if I'm dreaming," his nimble mind offered, "then I can seize control of reality and turn this regular blaster into one that has been just so blessed." The plasma changed to a bright gold even as it left his gun and, as it hit the creature square in the chest, the monster screamed with pain and melted like a Rigellian chocolate candy dropped into the Firepits of the Mirken Asteroid.
His physical foe being dispatched so handily, Captain Keith quickly assumed the meditation pose taught him by the Venusian Ultra-Monks he'd studied with in his youth. He turned his mind inward and willed his conscious self to awaken and return him to the real world.
The ground beneath him shook and the mountains on the horizon suddenly erupted with jets of ash and lava which filled the sky. "An attempt to distract me," thought Captain Keith. He redoubled his efforts and sent one message to his body with all the concentration he could muster: "Awake!"
________
He sat bolt upright in a brightly-lit room, having snapped the restraints that had fastened him to the stretcher. His finely-tuned faculties immediately began to scan the room for clues as to the location of his imprisonment.
As his brain began to recall the circumstances that had led him to this place, a sneering orange face hoved into his field of vision. The jowly jaw, the beady eyes, the mass of inhuman hair; suddenly he knew in whose clutches he'd found himself.
"Thedo Nald!" he spat. "You disgusting fiend. What diabolical plan am I about to spoil now?"
"No!" Thedo Nald shouted. "The Nightmare Machine should have reduced your mind to l'k'thok by now. How in the name of Ming did you escape?"
Ripping the remaining straps from himself, Captain Keith jumped up and grabbed the quivering Dreamlord by his slimy throat. He squeezed as he looked into the foul creature's face and offered his deadliest smile. "Thedo Nald, the day I can't outthink you is the day I turn in my space badge and take up Neptunian Sheep farming."
With that, he snapped the disgusting blob's bloated neck and dropped its lifeless corpse to the floor. For the slightest microsecond, he wondered if he should have been merciful. "No," he concluded, "The cosmos is truly a better place without such a creature in it."
He walked from the room and closed the door behind him.
