This was the basic template for Tallulah Cowden’s latest nightmare: everything in the world has gone gray, and you are all alone. Where her “classic” nightmares typically involved failing a test, forgetting her homework, or drowning during a swim meet, this one’s meaning couldn’t be so easily discerned.

She was in downtown Destiny City, but everything was gray, like you’d stuck the frame in photoshop and hit “desaturate” a few too many times. It wasn’t exactly that she was being chased – Tallulah didn’t feel the rushing sense of urgency or the taint of an unseen menace like she did in some dreams – more like she was being pulled forwards.

Invisible fishing line tied around her brooch or not, Europa felt compelled to keep moving. Yes, Europa – she was Europa here in this dream, although if that was the case then Tallulah could not fathom why she was on foot instead of leaping from building to building. Her path was clear, at any rate- no cars, no pedestrians, no businessmen in suits running frantically between buildings, trying to get last quarter’s numbers in before the exchange closed—

The world was uncannily deserted. The only thing she could hear was her own ragged breathing, which seemed out of time with her actual intakes of breath, and the pounding of blood in her ears. After a while, even the familiar streets of downtown Destiny City warped and changed, the waterfront becoming a crude caricature of itself, the solid masses of buildings fading away until they were just sketchy outlines.

Do-do-do-doot-doot dah doo doo doo dah…

The opening musical strain of A-Ha’s Take On Me played and then faded out – she wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Everything was starting to move on its own now, anyway. She was pretty sure she’d just seen the statue from the park ride by – some long-dead revolutionary war hero on his horse.

A piece of glass fell from a collapsing skyscraper, and instead of shattering, lodged itself in the concrete in front of her. Europa stared at her reflection. She didn’t look like herself – or, rather, she did, but not the way she was now-

A much younger Europa stared back at her, Tallulah aged six or seven, her uniform hanging off her, baggy and overlarge. She looked down – her uniform looked fine, her limbs looked fine- she was herself, seventeen.

The figure in the glass melted grotesquely, all the color running off it like liquified paint, and then its very form twisting – eyes gone hollow, costume gone to tatters, limbs squishing and elongating all at once.

She reached out to strike the mirror and clear a path. It shattered into a million pieces, glittered like fish scales, became water, then coagulated into a quivering human form.

Europa reached a gloved white hand out to touch the figure. It was ice cold, dead. She turned it over and for the first time its form became distinct. Some nights, it was her mother or her father, other nights it was Pasha or Aggie or any other of a number of school friends. Sometimes it was Jaimie.

On the worst nights, her own dead face stared back at her, eyeless sockets gazing into oblivion.

Billie Jean is not my lover--

Tallulah awoke with a start. It was morning – her alarm clock had been playing WDCE’s Best of the 80’s morning show for five minutes.

She’s just a girl who thinks that I am the one, but the kid is—

Tallulah reached out and turned off the radio. The dream’s meaning remained elusive, but she at least knew she had the undeniable need to get back out on patrol.