outline

Some ideas about where we might go in the future.

-- In the first story, we learn that Mehta has a gift of 'remembering' or knowing the past of other people. She helps them to remember themselves. This seems to reverse the plague, but leaves some differences...

-- Mehta calls in a favor from Takeo to look for her mother and little brother. They live in a town that was cut off by the sandstorms. She discovers her brother is gone.

-- Some monster-of-the-day stories. Cult of the Dreamer is headed by someone who looks a lot like her brother. Mehta and Takeo figure out more about her power, which is a kind of revelation or restoration of some 'realer' world. The Dreamers believe that the world is a dream, and that power comes by plunging it deeper into dream. Waking (revelation) means apocalypse.

-- Mehta discovers that her 'revelation' is double-edged. For example, if a person's 'true self' in the awoken world is a beast, her revelation turns them into a beast. But it's the only way to reverse the plague.

-- Takeo is infected with the plague. Around the same time, Mehta starts dreaming that she finds a statue of him, and begins to worry that if she 'restores' him that that's all that will be left.

-- In the end, the Cult is ascendant (really just her little brother). The world is covered in sand, most humans are sand zombies, etc. Mehta ends the world.

-- She wakes up in the 'real world' in a hospital, sitting besides her dying (now dead) father. She wanders into a nearby park, shell-shocked. Sees various people from the dream world, in new but recognizable forms. Sees her brother sitting on a bench, looking at the Takeo statue. She sits down besides him and starts crying.

-- A policeman puts his hand on her shoulder, thinking she's crying for her father. She stares at him, going between him and the statue. He grins, says that a lot of people think they look alike.