Dream Stealing and Truman (Part 1)

In a room at the manor, Victor leaned against the armrest of a soft sofa. He turned to look at Schiller, who was seated behind a desk fiddling with a globe, and asked, "Why did you call us all here?"

Cobblepot was fiddling with a clasp on his coat pocket, apparently trying to adjust its length. Evans, seated across from him, held a wineglass and swirled the liquid inside. It gleamed golden and frothed with white bubbles. Jack lay sprawled across an armchair, dozing with narrowed eyes.

Schiller reclined against the back of his chair, continuously spinning the globe in his hands. When he set it down on the desk, the model Earth on it was still turning slightly. He looked at Victor and asked, "Haven’t you noticed that something is different here?"

"What’s different?" Victor raised his head and looked around the room. This was the reception room of Schiller’s manor. There was a row of soft sofas, two armchairs, and several cushions. A coffee table sat between the sofas. On one side of the room was Schiller’s desk, behind which stood a massive bookshelf. The desk and shelves were piled with all kinds of clutter.

Victor had been here before and saw nothing unusual. Just as he was about to question Schiller further, he looked at him again and felt that something was off. He asked, "What happened to your head?"

At that moment, Schiller’s head had turned into a spinning globe, yet no one else seemed aware of it. Only Jack, lying across from him, cracked one eye open and made two hissing sounds through his teeth.

"All right…" Schiller, with a globe for a head, rose from behind the desk. It should have been an extremely bizarre sight, but Victor did not find anything strange about it at all, as though Schiller looking like this was perfectly normal.

"Think carefully, Victor. How did you get here?"

"Of course I walked here from school, I…" Victor froze for a moment, then said, "Am I dreaming?… Is this my dream?"

"You have it backward. This isn’t your dream. It’s mine."

Victor looked surprised. Schiller walked over and sat beside him, turning his globe head toward Victor. Victor was not quite sure whether he had actually turned his head, since the globe had been spinning the entire time.

Everyone except Jack slowly sat upright, as though they had just woken up, and looked around the space in surprise.

"Of course, human consciousness spaces cannot be connected, just as dreams cannot be connected. Something imagined in one person’s mind cannot be seen, touched, or closely observed by another…"

"But…" Schiller, with the globe head, turned toward Evans again. "The reason I can pull other people’s consciousness into my Consciousness World begins with you, Evans…"

Evans looked at Schiller’s globe head and did not know what to say for a moment. In reality, this scene would have been horrifying, yet within this consciousness space, it did not seem wrong at all, because there were even stranger things going on. For example, they were currently sitting on the ceiling.

The sofa and coffee table they sat around were stuck to the ceiling. The Chandelier was not far from Evans’s hand. At some point, the entire space had turned upside down, yet they still had not noticed anything unusual.

For instance, when Evans focused his gaze on his own nose, he discovered that he was wearing a Joker’s red clown nose, yet he had not felt that there was anything extra in his field of vision.

Jack squeezed the red ball on his own nose, making two squeaking sounds. He grinned happily.

"You mean we’re all in your dream right now, Professor?" Evans scratched his head and asked in great confusion. "But like you said, how could several people’s dreams come together?"

"Since you already learned from Alberto about the truth of his birth, have you ever considered what the Court of Owls and the Old Priest used to create Alberto’s personality?"

"Uh… Alberto never told me about that. He seemed not to know his own origins either. He just appeared out of nowhere one day…"

"That is why I said it begins with you…"

"Let’s sort this out. During the previous incident, we learned that the Court of Owls discovered something called ‘Fine Wine’ beneath Gotham Cathedral. After failing to make progress in their research, they brought in a priest. The priest achieved some results and handed them over to the Court of Owls. After that, they created your brother’s personality. So what is the key to this question?"

Evans was not stupid. He had just been about to answer when Cobblepot beat him to it. "That Fine Wine."

"Exactly. When I previously spoke with the Godfather and the priest, the priest told me that within the cathedral, he possessed an ability ordinary people did not have. It was a special ability similar to mind-reading, allowing him to sense certain mental characteristics of others."

"It was also because of that ability that he saw my differences and hired me as your tutor, Evans. Do you understand now?"

"So that Fine Wine can give people mind-reading abilities?"

The globe head shook slightly. In fact, no one could tell whether he had truly shaken it, because the globe was always spinning.

"That Fine Wine—or rather, I prefer to call it the Dionysus Factor. You can think of it as a liquid Cerebro…"

"Cerebro?" Victor frowned. "I have studied theories concerning brainwaves as well. I have heard of theories about using interference with brainwave control to manipulate people’s minds. But you’re saying that some special liquid can amplify human brainwaves? Isn’t that a little too…"

"We do not need to figure out how it works. We only need to know what it does. In short, the priest handed the results of his Fine Wine research to the Court of Owls, and the Court of Owls used Fine Wine to create Alberto’s personality…"

"So where is he now?" Evans looked around. Schiller explained, "His house is at a crucial stage of construction, which is why you came here instead."

"In any case, after confirming this with the priest, I knew that the Dionysus Factor might be related to the human Consciousness World."

"And I happened to have several other liquids related to it. I asked another biologist friend to mix them in certain proportions, producing an effect that amplified brainwaves to their absolute limit. I call it Mad Wine."

"When it was first made, I could not be certain whether it worked, so…" Schiller turned his head toward Jack. Jack shook his head and said, "So when you drank with me, you added this stuff to our drinks…"

"Then our Consciousness Worlds really did connect, and an annoying guy ran out of your Consciousness World. He wanted to trick me into entering it and serving his prison sentence for him."

"Just now, I invited all of you to my manor and gave you drinks. I added a few drops of Mad Wine to every glass, so now we are sitting here—"

"Welcome to my consciousness space, everyone."

In an instant, everyone came fully awake. Victor remembered how he had arrived at Schiller’s manor on a rainy day and taken a sip of wine. Cobblepot and Victor also recalled the entire process from entering the door to taking off their coats and putting away their umbrellas. Schiller explained, "When you first entered, you had a period of adjustment. You might not have been able to distinguish reality from illusion, so you could not sense any abnormalities."

"Just as you would not find an upside-down skyscraper strange in a dream, there is an adjustment process between waking and dreaming. Of course, if I reveal The Truth, that process becomes faster."

"I understand the theory…" Victor turned to Schiller and asked, "But why did you turn your own head into a globe?"

Schiller reached up and spun the globe on his head, then said, "Not just me. You can change too. Although this is my consciousness space, when our brainwaves blend together, you also have a certain degree of autonomy here."

As soon as he finished speaking, Jack’s head changed into a fried chicken wing with a bang. A huge smiling face appeared on the chicken wing, and Jack’s voice came from its split-open mouth. "This is what I had for dinner tonight. It tasted pretty good, though some of it was undercooked. It was so damn fishy…"

Evans stared wide-eyed at Jack beside him, whose head was now a fried chicken wing. He could even smell the aroma of fried food coming from it.

"This… what should I do?"

Before he could try, a strange-looking freeze gun appeared in Victor’s hand. They curiously examined the gun in their hands. "This is the newest model I designed before, but I never had the chance to build it. I did not expect it to materialize so realistically."

"In consciousness space—in dreams—the things you can do depend entirely on your imagination. In other words, ‘what you believe is what you get.’ The more detailed your imagination, the more detailed the result. I assume you have already fully designed that gun?"

"That’s right. The design was finalized a week ago. So does that mean it can fire too?"

As he spoke, Victor pulled the trigger. An ice spike shot out, instantly freezing the Joker across from him into a block of ice.

"As long as you believe it can fire, it naturally can. Just as someone who believes they can fly in a dream really can fly."

"Hey, you made my head cold! Don’t you know cold fried chicken is the most disgusting food in the world?!" the big mouth on Jack’s chicken-wing head shouted.

Cobblepot squeezed the red ball on his nose. With a bang, it turned into a sharp cone, like the sort people often wore at parties.

Evans scratched his head and said, "Can I change my hair color? I have always wanted dark brown hair like the Godfather’s, but dyeing it is such a hassle."

As he spoke, his hair slowly changed color, shifting from brilliant gold to dark brown. Schiller’s globe head swayed as he said, "I think gold suits you better."

"Is there a mirror?" Evans turned his head back and forth, seemingly searching for something reflective to look at his current appearance.

"You only need to think of one."

Evans thought for a moment, then drew a rectangle in the air with his finger. The crooked frame turned into a mirror and fell down. Evans caught it in a fluster, then looked at himself and said, "Yeah, blonde does look better…"

As he spoke, his hair changed back.

Victor picked up the wineglass before him and asked Schiller, "So why did you bring us into your consciousness space?"

"There is nothing serious to do. I merely invited you to watch something entertaining."

"Watch something entertaining? What is there to watch?"

"It is precisely because there is nothing entertaining to watch that we need to create some entertainment. Not just me—I think Mr. Jack feels the same way, doesn’t he?"

Jack changed his head into a toilet brush again and kept running his fingers through its bristles. "Gotham without Batman is so boring. If I don’t find some fun for myself, I’ll go crazy!"

"All right, then what exactly are you going to do?"

Schiller shifted to the other side and leaned against the sofa’s armrest. "Right now, a highly professional psychology expert—one of my colleagues—is sitting in Arkham Asylum. In a little while, I’ll be going over there to hand off some work…"

"I’ll have a theoretical discussion with him, then invite him to have a drink…"

"You’re going to pull him in here too?"

"No, no, no. This is the audience seating, and he…"

Jack across from him picked up with a grin, "He’ll be an actor. A very lousy actor."