The least you can do is be a bit interesting. Well that's easy for you to say, you aren't just mad at the world you have things that you find enjoyable. There are things that make you try new experiences. Ya that's called my soul. You don't have one? Or you just tortured it into submission to your everyday habits? Ouch Well I'm somewhat serious. The fact you aren't interesting is a reflection of your disinterest, and that's something that just makes no sense to me. In any given situation there are novel experiences, even if that is just the smell of mildew and damp rock of a dungeon. You think I wouldn't be touching the walls to stim, waiting and looking for insects to buzz at the window? Or listening for the sound of water dropping off in the distance? Even the discomfort of total captivity is a wealth of new experience but here the only prison is the one you have created for yourself out of habit and that's just repulsive. To the extent I seriously question the existence of a core 'human' essence within you. Silence It seems the voice was shattered by the truth. New New York City, or just New York was a supermassive black hole of a place. Our troupe came on my whim. I wanted to prove my ability to survive in such a place I wanted to show up one of the other members of the troupe. They had become aggressive and claimed they were better than others, myself included. We didn't need to go to New York to deal with it, but for some reason I felt like making an example. Let them live on the streets and I'd do the same. See if they even survive the night. Doubtful. The streets were dangerous. Espers and other mental psychic users who didn't have a place in society, or for whom societies use for them was "Unfulfilling" regularly attacked non-psychic humans. This uppity little bitch didn't have the mental defenses to defend against the strongest I had encountered there in my youth. Then there was the basic rule of kill or be killed. Our troupe didn't expose most of our members to this reality. We were somewhat successful in the world, doing trade between large places with caravan defenses, using various above board traveling entertainment services we offered as our initial ask in order to do our other business of illicit and less illicit trade. In the early days we had to deal with road warriors who considered us a mark, but that was just until they understood what it was they were dealing with. A true witch. A firebrand. And any number of other-worlders with unique powers. Just stopping us on the road now was a feat for gangs, one that would be repaid with complete destruction. The only forces we had any real concern about was the core dream infrastructure army. They left us alone as we made ourselves a part of the dream doing the dreams work. Moving items and ideas from bubble to bubble. We decided not do do our little experiment. By the time we arrived I had already cooled down a bit, and realized I was begin quite selfish. That I had taken the troupe off our normal path just to show up someone who was coping with their situation poorly. They didn't actually think they were powerful enough to be on their own. They just didn't have any other choices. I had been party to making this existence a way of life, and they had just been swept along in that that for lack of a better road on their horizon. There weren't any safe places anymore. The dream was under attack from outside forces it was apparent enough to any of the denizens of the dream. Take just New York. When I first awoke in that place it was a nightmare of 13 different New York cities copied and pasted on and around each other like some kind of data error. 12 statues of liberty 3 of which were in water. Most disturbing was the single Tokyo tower that fell out of the sky one day. Fear that New York and Tokyo were merging abounded. Maybe they still would but it hadn't happened yet. The seedier parts were on or near the ground level, or what passed as the ground level. Nobody knew for sure which layer was the true ground as it was possible to go down a subway station into the middle of a totally below ground central park and to go from there still further down. But power infrastructure hadn't been brought down to all those lower levels. It was a city on top of itself, surrounded by itself and drowning in itself. The most evil place imaginable driven to the worst of it's own excesses. The poor were the most motivated poor in the dream, willing to engage in murder for less than a dirty look. The rich had been known to carpet bomb entire swaths of the landscape for "Restructuring" as long as the bubble continued to function as a "New York" the dream infrastructure army didn't involve themselves. What's a few million dead after all? But not all of this was the natural course of events. Lately it had been found that some individuals were able to cause bubble merges, and if they were responsible for some of them, who's to say they weren't responsible for most, or all? The merging of bubbles had been a known phenomenon all my life but it wasn't always the case as the records scant tho they may be, showed. Now the core dream space was made up of a hundred or so "Core dreams" connected as a mesh. Various roads along pathways enabled travel between them. To get outside the core dream space took powers most didn't have. Plains walkers some had termed them. We had one such person in our troupe who told us that the dream space now was sparce and dangerous to traverse. Before it was unheard of to have such distance of idea between various bubbles, they could be above or below in physical space but were nearby in an ideological one. Now due to various mergings those nearby bubbles had popped into the core. .