I was alone in a jungle. I made my way carefully along a large tree branch, high above a small river. When I reached the end of the tree, I saw several creatures, each one a cross between a monkey and goblin. They were not friendly. They started throwing stuff into the river; odd plants, dirt, mud and sticks, something they claimed was spider webs with bugs in it. They also weighted my feet down with a brick and tossed me in the water. I landed in a clear spot, luckily, but I was surrounded by the junk. I would have to swim through it all. Even then, going up didn't seem like a good idea, as the monkey-goblins were still there.
I started to get worried that I would run out of breath, until a mermaid appeared and handed me air bubbles. The mermaid was advised me about the monkey-goblins. She said not to touch the kelp since the monkey-goblins would see it move at the surface. I noticed that I had a carrot in my mouth for some reason, and spit out the bits of it. The mermaid said not to let it drift away, and that we should bury it so that it wouldn't float to the surface. I tried sticking it in the sand, without much success. I eventually dug up a hole, stuck it in diagonally, and covered it back up.
The mermaid said it was time to make a break. She went over to the kelp, which was sticking up so that it resembled bars. She simply grabbed one section and pulled it open like it was a roughly rectangular door. Then we hurried through the opening, swam for a while, and scrambled onto land. I was worried for a moment that the mermaid wouldn't be able to run (for obvious reasons), but she had easily grown legs. The mermaid said there was a creature we could ride, and we would find it nearby. At first I was hopeful that it was a baby dragon, but it turned out to be a large horse.
***
The mermaid was in the water again, swimming along a canal, and I was not far behind on the bank. We reached dam with monkey-goblin guards patrolling along the top of the dam. There was a narrow passageway to the left. We had to climb up the cliff to get to it, and one of the guards saw us. Then followed a long and complicated conversation which was a series of intricate reasoning between the three of us, mostly by the mermaid. The guard apparently had to run away into exile due to some kind of rule breaking, and we convinced him not to alert the other guards of our presence.
The three of quickly made our way down the narrow passageway and found another creature to ride. It was five-foot-tall, white and furry, somehow managing to give the impression of being both fearsome and cuddly. It somewhat resembled a dog, although it was hard to tell with the masses of long, wispy fur hiding its face. It couldn't carry all of us, so it led us down another passageway where it said its sister was. Its sister turned out to be a giant pink bunny, with similar masses of long wispy fur.
We travelled until we came to a room with the door open. We jumped off the fuzzy creatures and entered the room. The door closed behind us. There was another open door on the other side of the room. Almost the entire floor was covered with thin golden chains. The fuzzies seemed depressed. They walked ahead of us, very slowly approaching the door. They were stepping carefully over the chains. I followed a few feet behind them. I somehow got the information that you had to walk over the chains without shame, which was hard for the white fuzzy because he was in love with his sister. In any case the fuzzies managed to get across the room and out the door.
I was about to go through the door when it closed. I had expected something like that to happen. A woman's disembodied voice filled the room saying, "You can't go yet." I looked back to see that the mermaid was almost over the chains, and the guard was still at the far side of the room. The voice continued, "You should get up off the floor. Try that ledge." I noticed a short ledge against the side wall. The mermaid and I both got onto it. I didn't think it would do any good. The voice sounded unnatural, neither human nor machine, and was keeping up a constant stream of chatter. The words seemed like innocent bits of helpful advice, but the tone was unmistakably mocking.
I looked around the room. There wasn't much to see. "Do you want me to catalogue what's in this room?" the voice was saying, "I know everything down to the words in the books and the dictionaries..." I focused my attention on the chains. I knew they would move, that was a given, and I didn't want to be anywhere near them when they did. And I knew the voice was in some way connected to what happened in the room. It was playing with us, dragging things out. It felt like I was stuck in the middle of a dramatic scary movie.
After staring warily at the chains for a while, I saw the guard try to run across them. The end of a chain caught his foot. He managed to get free for a short time before the other chains wrapped around him and he fell on the floor. I glanced over to see that the mermaid was still safe on the ledge, then I ran over to where the guard was and tried to pry the chains away. It didn't work. The guard started saying something about his exile, and the voice may have said something too, but I woke up.
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