Chapter 2

April 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

It was nine PM by the time Julie got home. Her parents were out of town on business, as they were most of the time these days. She wasn’t complaining — it was useful, and they very much wanted her campaign to succeed, and their absence gave her more leeway in her more ... esoteric activities. An aspiring prom queen had so many obligations, so many volunteer groups. She’d driven food from the canned food drive to the city’s homeless shelter for the Key Club, delivered a petition on bike lanes from the school’s Bicycle Club to the City Council in person (and looked very fetching doing so in a short-skirted business suit), chatted with a few small business owners near the school about cross-promotions for her campaign, worked on the web page for the school yearbook and handed out fliers for an environmental protest.

Homework was quick. She didn’t need to study. The courses were all silly-easy even without an extra year to study. She maintained a very careful 3.4 GPA — enough to show academic focus and professionalism, without drifting overly close to the social peril of being associated with the nerd cliques. She’d chat with them, mind you — part of being popular was outreach to all the cliques; she’d even joined them as a guest for a D&D session a few times, asking questions and learning politely. Similarly, she’d gone to a concert with the metalheads, helped the eco-nuts get permits for a protest, designed a recruitment poster for the MMORPG kids’ guild, sat in on the Young Investors’ stock seminars and attended a few glee club recitals. But she couldn’t be seen as actually being one of any of them. Especially not the glee twits.

Work done. Time to play. Time to dream.

In reality, Julie wasn’t just a smart cheerleader. She was an Adept — a high ceremonial magician of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Decepticon Bonnie was actually the reason Julie got into dream-walking to begin with. Julie reveled in her own sex appeal. It defined her. Part of her had really wanted to use it to win the tiara — heck, before her current scheme she might even have been willing to go all the way with a guy in the real world to win it. When she was honest with herself, she could even force herself to admit the thought excited her far more than any conventional romance.

But there were practical reasons she couldn’t just do that. It was a stupid, short-sighted strategy at the best of times, one that ruined a would-be seductress’ life more often than it netted any practical reward. Julie was level-headed enough to understand that — her recent dream-adventures aside, she didn’t glorify the femme fatale as anything beyond a pleasant fantasy. Bonnie Kellerman’s adeptness at, and affinity for, slut-shaming made what would normally be an unwise strategy into outright social suicide — in terms of high school popularity contests at least.

But dreamwalking was the perfect crime — she could fuck as many boys as she wanted and have a lot of fun doing it, and it was all totally deniable. If people started talking about dream magick like it was real, they’d end up being certified. She could capture hearts and minds (and cocks) every night, and anyone trying to accuse her of any impropriety would sound perfectly bonkers. She was effectively fucking a new stud every night, all while keeping her reputation perfectly pristine. The mere thought drove her let out a brief but maniacal giggle.

Her cover story was that she had a long-distance boyfriend at the University of Toronto. It amused her — the whole girlfriend in Canada trope, and no one ever ‘got’ it because it’s not like she’d have any problem finding a steady boyfriend if she wanted one. But claiming a long-distance relationship let her mildly flirt with and tease everyone, and then say it was all just joking around for fun — not serious. Really, though, it was about the makeup, the hip-swinging fashion walks through the corridors, the trendy but slightly edgy risqué outfits. At least, that’s how she got on the popularity ladder to begin with. Now it was all about the dreamwalking, but the flirting was still a necessary first step. The guys needed to dream about her for her to get into their dreams.

“You have a self esteem problem,” her last real boyfriend had once told her. “As in, you have way too much of it for your own good!”

She wasn’t sure if it was a diss or a weird compliment. However he meant it, though, she took it as the latter. Not that she really cared what he thought. That’s probably why the relationship didn’t last. Then again, did Juniors dating ever last?

It wasn’t like she’d started this for the sex. The original plan had just been to dream-tease a few popular boys in the big cliques. Get all the social luminaries talking about her before the prom. But her subconscious mind had tricked her — she chose the hottest guys, and they had the temerity to tease her back. Dream scenes change so quickly. One second you’re fully dressed, albeit in a delicious cheerleader getup, necking with Nick Donnely — a tight end for the Stallions who had a rather nice tight end of his own — then suddenly, things shift and you’re naked, and struggling to resist a raging libido that really, really wants a good dicking. And it’s not like guys are going to slow down and take it at your pace in their own wet dreams, you know?

Well, Julie lost the struggle with the unexpected strength of her own libido. An hour later, she was struggling to wash her sheets and air out her room before guests arrived the next day — she’d never gotten so wet or come so explosively as that first night, grinding back and forth, pumping and thrusting like a woman possessed, held in bondage by tangled, sweat-soaked bedsheets. She had to do it again, of course. She discovered in one night like a thunderbolt that her whole prior sex life had been mediocre. Now, it was ... not that. At all.

At one point, there had been an information-gathering plan. She’d talk to the guys in dreams, ask them questions about gossip and secrets before she let them make out with her. Private things they’d only tell in dreams. You know — for leverage. For the prom queen campaign. That had kind of fallen off her radar early on, though. She wasn’t quite the cinematic black widow ideal. She found herself uncomfortable exploiting people’s openness in their own dreams. There was an intimacy there, something she felt compelled to respect. So the carefully-guided pillow talk and subtle probing suggestions were forgotten about.

Ultimately, this didn’t bother her. It was something to be proud of, in a sense, and regardless it wasn’t like she needed it — the tiara was basically locked in at this point. Heck, some cautious part of her mind told her, she ought to be slowing down. The school already all but worshipped her. She didn’t want to accidentally turn it into some kind of weird cult of personality focused on her. That would be creepy, harmful and worst of all: conspicuous.

Julie understood herself. She actually possessed a fairly remarkable capacity for introspection and self-analysis, given her age. She knew there was a problem — well, at least there might be a problem, based on how she decided to form her own values and ethos. The sex had started as a means to an end, an instrument in her campaign to claim the title of prom queen. Certainly, it was enjoyable, but that was just a perk. Now it was obscuring her thoughts, clouding her mind. She struggled to focus, spending each day longing for the next night’s dream-fantasy. It became less a tool and more an end unto itself. Was that bad? She had to decide that for herself.

Ultimately, she reasoned, pleasure was fine as long as it didn’t get in the way of her objectives. Julie was a very pragmatic, goal-oriented young lady. She wanted that tiara — the glittering symbol that would cement her standing as the very epitome of desirable womankind. It would be as if she had strode out of the very Cavern of the Archetypes itself, deigning to walk amidst mere mortals in the corridors of Magnolia West Academy. It had become her personal vision of Tiphereth. It was an important goal — she could afford to have some fun along the way, though, as long as it didn’t impact her self-discipline or her longer-term plans. Objectives before orgasms. That had to be the criteria, the fundamental line she wouldn’t cross.

She’d done all the volunteer work, the chores and obligations. The sun wasn’t even down yet. That meant there nothing wrong with another night of fun.

The secret to having amazing sex in dreams seemed to be as simple as suggesting to the guys that they look the way they wished they could look, and making them feel confident in their masculinity and ability to keep it up. She wondered idly if there might be something to that in real life, but decided she just didn’t care — she had dream-sex, and wasn’t about to risk her rep on any more decidedly inferior material dalliances. Keep the confidence up, keep it a wet dream instead of a nightmare, and everything else got idealized by the dream-reality — in some ways, the inexperienced guys (and the narcissistic macho guys) were the most fun, because they were totally unfamiliar with all the ways that sex could be bad. She was learning to evaluate boys less by their looks, personality or any other assets in the waking world, and more by their creativity and the needy, vivid immediacy of their fantasies about her.

Inexperienced wasn’t always great, mind you. She’d learned never to ask for dream-cunnilingus from guys who’d never done the real thing. At best, it was unsatisfying. Often, it got surreal. At worst, well ... she’d had to look up ‘unbirthing’ on the Internet after unexpectedly experiencing it first hand. Yikes! Not enough yikes to stop her rampage of wanton dream-sluttery, mind you, but still definitely a marked level of yikes. She set up clear bail-out systems and safety protocols after that.

In spite of this, she liked the uncertainty of it, the novelty and variety, and tried to stick out the semi-weird dreams. Sure, sometimes she got a sadist, a scat fan, a furry or a pedo and bailed out of the dream as quickly as possible. She also bailed on the dreams of anyone who she knew to be in a committed relationship — and, keeping an eye on gossip the way any popular girl would, she was pretty sure she knew about all of those. Not many seniors were actually going steady — her generation was a lot more open about that than prior ones had been. What she did in dreams wasn’t exactly like real sex, but she still thought it might qualify as some kind of cheating, like sexting another girl — definitely something to avoid.

But the novelty of the rest thrilled her. She was willing to deal with guys that wanted to suck on her toes, tie her up or re-imagine her as a Twilek if it meant she got a really intense pounding for her cooperation. That it was their fantasy gave the whole experience a passionate kind of intensity. She wondered if she was ruining real sex for the boys. She hoped not, but she didn’t think too much about it. Julie did not possess the kind of mind that agonized over decisions already made.

One of the weirder dreams to date had been Donny Broekner, the jock-clique conspiracy nut. She’d gone in for his militia-uprising fantasy at first — she liked how badass-sexy she looked braless in a tight, ripped-up action-girl tank top and mirrored aviators with an AR-15, and it was just a dream after all. Then it got weird, politically and physically — among other things, Donny was apparently into kissing and licking women’s scars. As a result, she had some and learned about that first-hand. She played out the fantasy script as it came into her mind, letting Donny reassure her that the scars didn’t make her ugly, and he loved her anyway, and all the other usual cliche-lines from a LiveJournal scar-fic.

She almost bailed, but she was actually really glad she didn’t. Donny was fucking her in a luxury suite atop the Space Needle — surprisingly tenderly, actually, given everything else in his fantasy life — when his drunken father unexpectedly burst into the scene and started whipping him with a belt. It was too real, too detailed, to be fictional — and the things he said came out of nightmares, not fantasies. But she was consciously aware she was in a dream, so she gave herself the strength and endurance of a superhero, walked up to the fat, abusive fucker and just tore his throat out with her bare hands. Donny apparently watched a lot of rather violent cinema, as his imagination was able to provide a lot of vivid, realistic and disturbing details about what it looks and feels like when someone gets their throat ripped out, and what a human body does immediately after death.

The dream never quite got back to sexy territory after that, but Julie did hold Donny as he shivered and cried, and did listen to his story, and did say the things her psychology textbook had suggested one ought to say in that sort of situation. Really, he just came off as a kid with a desperate deficit of affection in his home life. When she saw him around in school in the weeks after the dream, he seemed less into the macho posturing and desperate need for friends, and more able to just chat normally.

She even went up and talked to him in realspace a bit — he told her about the Scratches on Saturn and Robert Gulf’s found footage of Heaven (and, if she was being honest, proved himself a really decent storyteller). She, in turn, dropped a few subtle NLP-enhanced suggestions she hoped would give him the needed confidence to report his father to the police — while being careful not to hint at anything she knew about him.

She didn’t pursue any further contact in the physical world — being a dream girl was one thing, but stringing people along in real interactions felt like it was crossing a very different line. A few weeks later, though, she caught him wearing a brightly-colored Green Lantern shirt a few times instead of his trademark black ensembles. She wished she could find his dreams again — she’d love to finish the guns-scars-and-tenderness fantasy on a more positive note with him for motives both carnal and altruistic. But she couldn’t select specific dreamers yet, and while she mourned the lack of repeat visits, the uncertainly of it all did still thrill her.

April 1st, 2024. Julie Lambert.

The first thing to do was to make sure the house was locked, no one was home, the blinds were drawn and so forth. Julie did it each night she planned to do anything esoteric. She was meticulous, as she knew the potential prices of exposure. The rites were almost habitual at this point, but she focused her mind with Qabalist centering techniques to make herself consciously aware of every step. Magick was not a force to be taken lightly, and she would not let herself get complacent.

First, she consecrated her ritual space. She kept all her ritual implements secreted away in a big, locked antique chest — and the key in her wallet at all times. She hung the eight-cornered Daoist shield-mirrors in each of the cardinal directions (and slid a fifth one under her bed), called out to the protector Chesed-angels of the Four Watchtowers and pinned hand-painted prayer strips in each corner of her bedroom.

Next it was time to check and tune her existing spells. She went to her bathroom and rubbed the Ochre Kohl of Hatshepsut (or as close as you can get to the original recipe with ingredients from the world’s largest DalMart, rare stones she’d nicked from the school’s geology lab and herbs scavenged from Hobbs State Park) on her eyelids, then chanted Blavatsky’s third eye mantra from Isis Unveiled until her view of the world split up into a kaleidoscopic rainbow mess of symbolic surrealism reminiscent of the depiction of cyberspace in a late 80s anime. She examined, carefully massaged and realigned her chakras (which showed up to her astral sight as rotating, interlocking neon runic circles etched with Hebrew and Sanskrit glyphs), making sure they were bearing up under the weight of the longer-lasting self-augmentation spells she currently had active.

Nothing too extravagant — a health blessing to make her exercise routines super-effective, a skin-care dweomer, your garden-variety precognitive danger sense, a blessing of preternatural poise, gravitas and emotional equilibrium, a bit of boosted agility, muscle memory and overall stamina to help with the cheerleading. And of course, the centerpiece of the set, more powerful and taxing then all the rest combined — the spell that jacked her intelligence up into the low transhuman range, only slightly above the theoretical human maximum.

She’d thought about adding a bullet ward, given the school shootings splashed over Vox News every second week, but resisted the temptation. No matter how wrenching they were to hear about, they were still vanishingly rare statistically — and she needed all the capacity her chakra matrix had these days for the campaign.

No enhanced charisma, either — not yet, at least. Charisma drew attention, scrutiny and jealousy. It was Decepticon Bonnie’s path, and it had weaknesses. Besides, the raw sex appeal she was working on gave her most of the advantages anyway, and a lot of students still thought of her as “approachable” that might not if she radiated awe and grandeur like a bargain-basement Saint Michael. Depending on how things went, she might pop it out for the prom proper to target some last-minute swing voters — people would be a lot less likely to question the apparent change if she showed up in a really pimped-out prom dress. (She wanted to do that. A lot.)

She’d figured out by pure accident that the boosted stamina was her secret MVP. It was meant to help with cheer practice back during tryouts, but it turned out that stamina gave you energy, and energy was basically extra hours in the day; it let her stay peppy for all the volunteer work and hob-nobbing she needed to do day after day.

If she wanted the charisma, she figured, she could drop the dream sending she had on that metalhead creep, Harold Lansing. When she met him in his dreams, he’d bragged that he’d date-raped like five girls at MWA — and then gleefully tried to force himself on her, too (not that she’d judge him for anything he did in dreams). He came off as a real psycho, though — a headcase. After a bit of detective work she’d confirmed it wasn’t just fantasy — he’d drugged at least three of the girls he claimed to have in reality. So she set up a nightmare-caster for him.

She pulled the sinister sandalwood box out from a hidden panel under her sink. It was hand-carved with the astrological glyph for Aries, Harry’s birth-sign, and with the geometry of his natal chart. Being on the school yearbook committee was useful, if you wanted to know when your fellow students were born! The box was bound shut with black ribbons covered in golden Enochian glyphs; she untied these and examined the unpleasant materials within it. Still looked good to her astral sight, so she re-tied the ribbons and put it back in its hiding place.

Tonight would be the seventy-ninth consecutive night he would dream of dozens of bloody hands pinning him down naked while a winged, fang-mawed giant maggot with Nancy Pelosi’s face slowly gnawed off the head of his cock. (Hey, if you’re going to send someone soul-scarring nightmares, you really ought to also make them too embarrassing and inane for your victim to want to talk about!) She hadn’t seen Harry at school after the first month or so, and assumed he’d dropped out.

She needed to check on her other hand-carved curse-box as well. Less sinister and brutal, perhaps, but ultimately far more important. The mesmeric binding she’d put on Decepticon Bonnie — the Barbie doll with a cutting of Bonnie’s hair, wrapped in newspaper clippings from the National Inquirer, which served to make her oblivious to the difference between credible and far-fetched slander. Julie had actually been very careful with the wording of that dweomer — as long as DB didn’t try to slander anyone, it wouldn’t have any effect. Of course, she would, and hilarity would ensue — just as it had so many times before. Julie liked poetic justice.

She set Bonnie’s curse-box back beside Harold’s in the secret compartment under her sink. She took her nightly shower. Once her oxidizing treatment was done, her lashes recurled and retinted, her chakras realigned and her nail polish redone, the most exciting time of her days was once again upon her: it was time to get ready for bed. She winked playfully at herself in the mirror. Her skin shone with a moist, post-shower glow. Damn, my curves look fine wrapped in just a towel.

She thought about the implications of having thought that. Okay, I’m either bi or a narcissist. Maybe both. Probably both, actually. Neither really struck her as a negative thing. She tossed the towel back on the rack before leaving the washroom.

Julie did all her positive ceremonial magick and pathworking naked — though not the darker, more serious curse-workings. Her sexuality gave her confidence, and the thought of godforms, aethyrs, celestial intelligences and planetary rulers ogling her nubile young figure as she made supplications to them thrilled her natural vanity. She wasn’t sure which side of the big Hermetic debate she came down on — were they actual, discrete beings with will and volition, or just symbolic archetypes given anthropic forms in the Jungian universal unconscious? As long as they can appreciate pert teenage boobies, either one works! She had developed the oneiromantic rites she used for dream-walking on her own, through gradual experimentation and refinement. She was proud of them in the same sense she was of her toned body, so it made sense for her to associate them.

Finding the antique brass basin graven with the iconography of Hypnos at a garage sale had been either a staggering stroke of luck, or more likely a mystic signpost from her True Will in disguise as a coincidence — she’d only been developing her dream-walking ritual for a month or so when she stumbled on to it as if through sympathetic attraction. It cost her four dollars; she’d have paid four hundred easy. It wasn’t actually ancient Greek — she was pretty sure normal people weren’t allowed to own actual artifacts like that. It was a Victorian replica, though, from the period when Victorian England was really into the nitty-gritty of classical mythology.

In it she set a stuffed Pikachu with a packet of ketchup masking-taped to its belly. Then she plunged the wavy-bladed dagger down through the mock sacrifice’s gut as she chanted a ritual invocation to the Lord of Dreams in Attic Greek. Her pronunciation was getting better. If the universe was karmic, it was possible a fake (she’d prefer to say symbolic) sacrifice could have some consequences. Then again, if the universe really did operate on some system of karma Julie thought it probably wise not to be on the side with the ritual animal torture.