In my original conception, Kitten Dreams was a sort of 'psychic construct', a semi-sentient 'program' running in... let's call it 'Dreamspace'. Initially, she had very little ability to affect 'Realspace' except for a bit of poltergeist-like phenomena. However, on a psychic plane, she could wield fear, or forgetfulness, or selective blindness to deflect and drive off threats to her primary person.

Then her 'creator' leaves and she finds that her primary focus has been spread to the others in the coma-ward. Her 'program' is not ended, but extended. She comes to 'live' among their dreams, to be a friend to them, and the imaginative power of the dreaming children makes her Stronger. So, she begins to defend the dreamers from their terrors, to help them become stronger and face their fears. She learns from other dreams she encounters, and concludes that, in some cases (if not all of them), the best way to protect the dreamers from their Nightmares, is to Wake Them Up.

So, for a while, Kitty is an imaginary friend, and then more like a ghost, and her sphere of influence has gone well beyond the hospital, and her ability to manifest in 'Realspace' has some real punch to it. Until, one day, Kitty realizes that she's spending more time 'awake' and 'real' than she does in 'Dreamspace', at which point her career as a hero begins.

I played Kitty for several years and got her to 50 before the end of the City. At that point, she would have been able to 'hear' the dreams of Everyone in the city, as a sort of continual background noise. She would have learned how to be a 'real person' and fully relate to others she met. She would have been able to eat real food and dissolve it away into dreamstuff, but did not require air or water or any sustenance except the power of people's dreams.

She could walk or fly in a mist of dreams, practically invisible and barely tangible. She could manifest powerful 'dream-storms' that could physically affect enemies, knocking them down, and striking them with bolts of energy. She could seize individuals and Hurl them into the air with the power of her mind, or lock them immobile. And she could walk into a building and put everyone in the room to sleep, or paralyze them with fear, or send them into shrieking paranoia. Yeah, Mind/Storms is a fun combo.

However, that was then and this is next.

So, almost Three years later...

My friend got into WtC RPG (Wearing the Cape) and nagged me into joining him, at least so far as recreating my favorite characters from CoH. This means I ended up re-writing a lot of biographies, to fit a different system than CoH had. Kitten Dreams was certain to be one of them. One warning, this is Long.

[h2]Name: Kitten Dreams[/h2]

[h3]Identity: Aisling Anker[/h3]

[b]Archetype:[/b] originally Mind/Storm Controller, now Operator, but I'm not sure which spec.
[b]Primary:[/b] Mind Control/Telekinesis
[b]Secondary:[/b] Summoning 'Dream' Constructs
[b]Tertiary[/b] Healing Support
[b]Movement:[/b] Flight, Intangibility

[h3]History[/h3]
In a quiet corner of the city is a quiet private hospital with a sad, quiet ward where sad, quiet children lie, all in a coma. Aisling Anker is one of those children.

She was a talented young gymnast, a life long cat-lover, a fan of Anime and the musical ‘Cats’. At thirteen, she was attending a slumber party with friends, woke in the middle of the night and went in search of the bathroom in a strange house. Passing the head of a stairway, she suddenly slipped and tumbled out of control down the steep steps. She apparently hit her head, blacked out, and never woke from the ensuing coma.

She slipped because a land-shock had rocked the whole house.

Knocked unconscious, Aisling found herself in a misty landscape of dreams and infused with the ineffable essence of Cat. Propelled by Cat and her own curiosity, she flew through this ‘Dreamspace’, in search of whatever had gone ‘bump’ in the night.

She found herself hovering over a scene of utter chaos and catastrophe. A large housing-project was on fire. Worse, it was sinking into the ground at an alarming pace. The block was surrounded by multiple fire companies, police, emergency services for the gas, water, and electric companies, sewer services, and ambulances from all of the nearby hospitals.

Apparently, some flaw in the electrical system had conflated with a problem in the underground gas-main and set off an explosion that shattered gas, water, and sewer pipes. Under the burning tenement, the water had saturated the ground and rushed off through the sewer pipes, causing a massive sinkhole to open up.

All of the rescuers were fighting to gain control of the disaster and rescue the people living in the building before the whole thing was swallowed up and sent down to a flaming hell. Residents were missing and the rescuers despaired of finding them in time.

But, she could ‘see’ them, or at least, the trembling heart-lights of living beings, some deep in the rubble and others hidden by leaping flames. She tried to lead rescuers to these trapped people but they couldn’t See her, so she… somehow, willed herself through the veil and became visible.

“Over Here!” she cried, hovering over the nearest trapped people, and startled firefighters believed in her, fighting down the entrapping blaze and ferrying out victims. Insubstantial as a dream, but just as brightly compelling, she danced across the disaster area, encouraging, exhorting and leading the rescuers to the missing people.

However, the last group was nearly impossible to reach, they weren’t in danger of burning, they had sunken dozens of feet below the ground. They would surely be crushed or drowned, if they could not be dug out. “Is someone down there?” called a policeman, “How will we ever get them out? They’re buried!”

“Get ropes, get ladders, get anyone who knows how to work in holes!” called the hovering girl, “I’m going to try to help… if I can.”

“Okay, Kitten! Help is on the way!” called the officer, then began shouting into his radio, marshalling resources for a big job.

‘Kitten’, the ordinary heroes of the city had started calling her that and she’d been too busy to tell them her name… what was her name, anyway? ‘Kitten’ seemed good enough for now.

Now, she lowered herself down into the hole, where the people who needed help were still alive, but there was a pile of broken concrete on top of them. In plain, blind need, she reached out her hands and imagined grabbing those stones, then, with a mental heave, she flung the stones up and away. Stones around the hole started to slide in, to fill the gap and ‘Kitten’ instinctively gestured, telling them to ‘stop right there!’ and they Did. Again, she reached for the stones covering her goal and… Flung them out of the hole.

Then a man in a yellow hard-hat said, “Hey, Kitten, that’s great! But watch where you throw those stones, you might hit somebody. Look, “ he said, pointing nearby, “throw them over there, in a pile, and get those that are going to slide, before they ruin everything.” “Um, I’m holding them there, so they don’t fall,” she replied. The engineer in the hard-hat blinked a moment in surprise, then nodded, “Okay, I didn’t know you could do that, but wouldn’t it be better to get them out of there, so you didn’t have to hold them?”

The floating girl giggled, she was feeling a bit strained, “_I_ didn’t know I could do Any of this, I’ve never done anything like this before, but you’re right. It’s good that I could stop the rocks from moving, but better if I don’t have to worry about them.” In a few minutes, she had cleared the work-area of incipient rock-falls and relaxed her hold. “Okay, Mister, I’ve been working by instinct and by guess, so far, but I’d be happy for any other advice you can give me.”

The man chuckled a bit and said, “You’re doing Fine, Kitten, just fine. You can call me Bob if you want, I’m an engineer with the City. Are you sure there are people down there? What can you tell me about them?”

She gazed pensively into the bottom of the hole, and said, “I can see… or sense, I’m not sure how, but it feels like ‘seeing’... I see one big person and… six little people down there, in… a box, sorta, and they’re not at all happy about it.” Engineer Bob, hmmm’d in thought, then asked, “What kind of ‘box’?”

“Umm, dunno. Let me check,” she replied and hopped down into the hole, where she fell right through the bottom, much to Bob’s dismay. She drifted down through the earth and fallen concrete until she came out in the buried ‘box’ space. It was roughly pyramidal, a cube turned with one corner up, half-filled with mud and earth. There, she saw an old lady sitting in an old chair, surrounded by a half-dozen cats, who cried out, “Dreamer! At last you’ve come. Praise Cat!” She paused for a moment, then quietly asked, “Can you get us out of this one, dear?”

The girl was momentarily surprised, she Knew this person, but she couldn’t quite remember how, exactly. So, she adopted the old lady’s calm matter-of-factness and replied, “I don’t know Granny. I’m working on it and Mister Bob the Engineer is helping me, and I know we’ve got other people coming to help, too, but I still don’t know. We’re going to Try, though.”

“That’s good, dear,” replied the old lady, “Only, it’s getting stuffy in here and, even if I try not to breathe too hard, we probably can’t wait all night, okay?”

The girl nodded seriously, she really didn’t want to think about what that might mean, then pulled herself straight and squared her shoulders. “Right!” she said, “I’ll be back soon, Granny,” then flung herself up through the stones and earth, to hover over the hole again, beside the man in the yellow hard-hat.

“Kitten!” he exclaimed, “Thank god you’re back! That really scared me for a bit, seeing you just disappear into the ground like that. Did you find anything? Did you see anything? Mmm, and are you a ghost, or something?”

“Thank you, Mister Bob, I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s a room from the apartment, turned all cockeyed, the walls are made of concrete and there’s mud and dirt creeping in through the window. There’s a lady down there, with her cats. She says they’re having trouble breathing and to hurry, please. And… I don’t think I’m dead, so probably not a ghost. I seem to be a Dreamer…”

“What’s a Dreamer,” asked the engineer. “I don’t know,” she replied, “but that lady down there seems to know about it and I’m not going to let her die.”

The man was very quiet for a bit, then gestured down into the pit, “That’s going to be very hard, then, Kitten,” he said, softly. “Look.” The bottom of the sinkhole was now filled with a thick slurry of mud and water… and it was deeper. “If we dug down and made a hole in the lady’s ‘box’, then the water would fill the box and we’d never get her out. You lifted those rocks out pretty handily, could you lift the box? Even if you can just get it above the water, there might be a chance.”

“I can try!” she exclaimed, but the engineer stopped her, saying, “Hold it, hold it, be careful.” She looked at him and he explained, “You can’t just grab a piece of it and pull. You might pull the piece out, break the box and it all goes down the drain, right? You’ve got to get ahold of all of it, if you can, and lift it all together, slow and steady. Let all of the mud go by, but hold onto the box and the cat-lady, see?”

The hovering girl looked down, seeing beyond the mud-filled hole, “Yes, Mister Bob, I do see. Thank you,” she said. Her face became set with concentration, as she reached down, her fingers working as if feeling for a grip on something invisible and insubstantial. Then she found her grip and pulled… hard… harder. There was a subliminal tension and an inaudible rumble as ‘Kitten’ strained with her whole body-mind, but finally she had to give up. Panting from the effort, she reported, “I’m sorry, Mister Bob, it’s too big, too heavy! I even tried to break off just the piece with the lady and her cats in it, but there’s just too much,” she sighed.

“I’m sorry, too, Kitten,” he replied, “I was afraid that might be the case. I wish we had some sort of mole-machine, like in the Saturday morning cartoons, we could tunnel past the ‘box’ and let all of the mud drain away. Or we could dig up into the ‘box’ bring the lady and her friends aboard, and tunnel right up out of there. Unfortunately, we don’t have any equipment that can safely reach them and no time to get it here. The local Crisis Aid and Intervention Hero-team is coming, but I don’t know if they have anyone who can deal with this sort of problem.”

Kitten was quietly thinking, then said, “A mole-machine… I… I might… maybe I can… I don’t know, but I have to try! Mister Bob, get the fire-guys, get the ropes and ladders and baskets and whatever is available. Get them ready to pull us out, I’m going to try the mole-machine.” Then she nodded to herself and jumped back down into the hole.

Landing beside the cat-lady’s chair, she called out, “Granny, be strong and call everyone together, here. I’m going to try something crazy.” The old lady was sagging a bit, but she pulled herself together, sat up straight, and ‘chirruped’ a call to her feline friends. The cats flowed together from their various hiding places and surrounded the lady, one climbing to her lap, some on the arms and back of the chair, and a couple huddling by her feet, practically under the chair.

No longer just floating, Kitten set her feet and focused inward. She had seen that show, just a few weeks ago… Friendly machine people, helping humans do things, fix problems, and have adventures… The mole-machine, a digger and tunneler, flexible treads and a giant screw-shaped cutter… She remembered it. She visualized it. She saw it. She Needed it, Now. She stretched out her hand and… opened a doorway through the veil.

Out of nowhere, a thick stream of misty clouds rolled into the space around her and the people she was rescuing. Thickening, the fog began taking on shapes, triangular, conical, cylindrical, a shining metal space, walls covered with blinking lights, a saddle-like seat facing a viewscreen and simplistic controls. Out of the mist of dreams, the animated mole-machine from that show formed around Kitten, Granny, her chair, and the cats.

Kitten jumped onto the driving-saddle, pushed the big green button, grabbed the joystick and T-throttle and cried out, “Digger! We go Up! Up and out of here!” Then she yanked on the joystick and thrust the T-bar forward. There was a roaring, grinding sound and the whole small chamber where the people were started trembling, like a powerful engine and improbable machinery had been engaged. Slowly, but steadily, there was… motion, and on the viewscreen was dirt and rocks and clumps of mud being whirled away to the sides. Suddenly, there was a wash of mud and water and debris, which gave way to the night sky, obscured by billowing smoke and lit by flickering flames.

There was also a crowd of people, firemen and rescue crews, and an astonished engineer in a yellow hard-hat, all yelling in surprise and excitement. Kitten called out, “Thanks, Digger, you saved the day!” then pulled the T-bar to stop and pressed the big red button, then she thumped the big blue button and stood up. Above her, the giant drill swung aside, allowing fresh air and the sound of shouting to rush into the chamber, through the opening roof. Ropes, ladders, rescue baskets, and excited men and women descended into the pit and through the open top of the improbable mole-machine. They scooped up cats and Granny and her comfy chair, and pulled everything out of the hole in a rush, then gazed down at the hovering girl and the colorful, impossible machine.

Then, Kitten swooshed up, out of the hole, and landed on the side, while the wonderful machine suddenly popped like a bubble and dissolved into a cloud of vanishing mist.

And there was much rejoicing…
And Kitten is oddly more solid, now.
And the heroes show up...
And the psi-expert realizes there’s something funny about Kitten.

And Granny tells her she’s done a good job, but she should go home now, but Kitten doesn’t know/can’t tell where that is...
Granny says they need to talk, but not just now, and the heroes swoop down to carry Kitten away, while Granny starts thinking about plans for the future and how to protect the Dreamer and what has Happened to her granddaughter? and what to tell her very mundane parents.

And the heroes quickly help return things to ‘normal’ for after a disaster.
And Kitten goes about, calming fears and helping people rest.
And they start calling her Kitten the Dreamer, or Kitten Dreams.

And the heroes take her home with them.
And when she falls asleep, she gently, softly, vanishes away.
And her dreams are full of Cats and Grannies and the people she helped and the people she met.
And, when she wakes up, she gently, softly, fades into view.

And she helps the heroes.
And she can’t remember anything about who or what, or where she was, before the incident.
And Granny reaches out to the supernatural community… and eventually the Department of Superhuman Affairs.

And everybody gets a new home and a new ‘life’, thanks to the DSA.
Granny acted as Kitten’s first mentor, explaining who she is and what she might become, but Kitten has some sort of mental blind-spot, when it comes to Aisling’s body. She cannot, or will not return to it, just yet.
And Kitten visits her family, but they can’t see her.

And the DSA sends Kitten to Hillwood Academy, a school for 'super' youngsters, to study and learn and grow.
And Aisling Anker gets put in a ‘suspended animation tube’ in a safe place.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Should I take it that this story is excellent and not in need of adjustment? Or is it just not interesting enough to excite comments?

Be Well!
Fireheart