Mantra has underestimated her opponents and has been captured by an alternate-world version of her friend Warstrike. The latter seems to be leading a gang of ultra-villains in a ruined version of Los Angeles. She has a right to expect the worst, but the more she learns about what's happening in this alternate Los Angeles, the worse it sounds.

"Wait, wait!" I said. "Go back a second!
You said 'The Iodine Story'. What is that?"

"You don't know?" Hugh looked surprised.
"The Iodine Story," he repeated, as if saying it again somehow clarified it.

As I was leaving, Hanna ran and fetched the book.
She pressed it into my hands, insisting that I take it.

"Be our Perry Mason!" she chirped, smiling and nearly dancing with excitement.

“RUN FASTER!” Nick was running as fast as he could in the new body he was in.

Jack was in front of him and Cheshire was ahead of both of them. She was leading them towards the river on the map. Explosions were going off around them.

Whoever was after them this time decided they weren’t going to play nice anymore. They were bombing the area with missiles and rockets. Several trees explode behind the three of them, sending them flying over a cliff and into the river they were heading for.

Lucy continued: "You know, I'll admit that I'm more than a little jealous.
I'd love to have interesting men interested in me. But I gotta say that it worries me a little, too."
She paused. "Because if you're going to be carry on like this with all kinds of men,
at some point they're going to come here, looking for you."

Time Jump Being Mom in the Past

The following Monday, Genesis met up with Charlotte at school to tell her what had happened.

"You've got to be kidding me," Charlotte said when Genesis had finished explaining what had went down at the party. "You actually turned Jesse into a girl?"

"Yes, I did," said Genesis.

Charlotte shook her head. "Well, I'll bet Jessie's gonna have a tough time adjusting to being a girl," she said. "Did he-or she-text you at all after you changed her?"

"No," said Genesis. "She said we were breaking up. And now I'm starting to regret turning him into a girl."

"Hmm. So once the bump is gone, you won't be able to claim to have amnesia any more, right?"

"What? No! It's not as though the bump is full of amnesia. It's just a bump."

New York offered us plenty of opportunities. However, we still had to be careful, as Manhattan had a large demon population. With all that money and power, it was a contract demon's haven.

I had to find out whether I owned a car, and I had to talk to Barney.
Once I had a handle on those two things,
All my curiosity and questions about my past would be over.

I'd be ready to move forward, as though last Tuesday was the first day of the rest of my life.

"Aren't you hot, lying in there?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "But it's good practice... eventually I'll be living in Hell,
so this... this is a tender prelude."

A strange call from his friend Melissa could change Charlie’s whole life.

Once they were finished with the Awakening, Megan took Genesis back out to the living room to teach her some basic magic skills. She didn't do anything too advanced. Megan just had Genesis levitate objects and will some of them to change color.

"Okay, good," Megan said after Genesis had performed her fourth successful levitation of an object. "It seems like you're getting the hang of it."

"That's good," said Genesis. She waved her hand at a nearby notebook, and it floated a few inches off the ground. "So what next?"

I worried I was on a fool’s errand. The theories of lucid dreaming ran counter to my experience. So did much else of my experience. Conventional science had no explanation for being able to experience other people’s dreams or sensations. Even the occult couldn’t explain it. There was no way around it: This was going to require me to develop original theories, ones which only I could test, unless I found another dreamwalker, and they might be difficult for anyone else to accept.

By the time Genesis finished explaining her dream to Charlotte, her friend's jaw was hanging open.

"You've got to be kidding me," said Charlotte. "Mirna actually decided to make you her successor?"

"She did," said Genesis. She looked down at her hands, wondering what it would be like to conjure light or fire or something from them. She felt no different, which made sense-Mirna had said she'd have to do some kind of Awakening ritual to unlock her powers.

"Why would she do that?" Charlotte asked. "I thought she didn't like you."

Mantra is about halfway convinced that Gabriel is telling the truth about a Multiverse-ending catastrophe that is on its way, but she's determined to be wary. The adventurers retrieve Gabriel's "Time Capsule" and travel into the future of a different timeline. They observe the crucial battle being fought their by heroes from two different universes uniting to overcome a resurrected god bent on destruction. The Time Capsule's monitoring equipment detects that there are not two parties involved in the faithful battle, but three. This is a mystery of the utmost importance, because finding out who or what the third force is may mean the difference between victory and the Multiverse's collapse.

The work on the papers and other ideas had brought me near the end of my freshman year, and that was the time to plan next year’s classes and, ideally, to declare a major. Since I couldn’t progress on the goals within dreamwalks, I tried to figure out what classes would help me in other ways.

I was a freshman in college when I heard the news on TV that Hiroshi had died. They called him video game entrepreneur Hiroshi Yamamoto, who clearly had to be the man I had been dreamwalking with for the last three years. Sure enough, he was present neither in World of Dreams nor in the studio. So I figured that was over and I was on my own now. I’d learned a lot; enough to be dangerous, but I wasn’t planning to use my power to steal, kill, or worse.

Herren was there as the leader to introduce me into advanced training, and I got my new room and all. But it was advanced training in name only, because the first thing there, intermediate trainers I’d worked with before were back, putting me into practicing level 3, 4, and 6 dreamwalks properly, using the isolation of the privacy chamber to let me hover on the edge of sleep.

Lilith and Shar'li, their hearts heavy with concern, sat across from Elizabeth. The room, bathed in the soft glow of the candles, seemed to mirror the flickering shadows of their emotions. The two succubi keenly sensed the lingering sorrow in Elizabeth's eyes, a pain that no amount of vengeance could truly erase. The loss she had endured had carved a profound void in her heart, and while she had managed to reclaim a semblance of justice, the wounds were far from being mere scars.

In my dream that night, I found my game and entered it, finding myself in a weird, featureless body which was waiting for me to define it. I was a vaguely woman-shaped cloud. I wasn’t able to move the body, but I could basically see it from any angle. On the computer I would have been choosing colors and sizes for aspects of my body, but here, after a little experimentation, I just forced my own body image onto the character, and she became a virtual clone of me.

Umberto didn’t respond to my note. I guess I wasn’t too surprised. Elissa never interacted with the notes I left in Tommy’s game; it was Tommy doing so, though he thought my responses were coming from Elissa at first.

As we ventured through the bustling streets of New York City, the towering Empire State Building and the iconic Chrysler Building rose above us like giants of glass and steel, their mirrored surfaces reflecting the city's chaotic energy below. The air was filled with a symphony of honking horns, bustling crowds, and distant sirens, bouncing off the towering buildings and creating a cacophony of sounds.