From the day of his arrival in Ireland onwards, Faris Buckner adjusted his sleeping hours to Ireland’s nights, so that they would line up with Jodie Moore’s nights. That way, they would both be able to talk to each other in the dreams of their nights, and he could search for the portal in the daytimes.

“I think there’s another benefit of this,” said Faris, “The clearer the image of you becomes in my dreams, the closer I am to the portal. If it starts to look less focused, I’ll know I’m going in the wrong direction.”

“And then there’s the most important benefit of all,” said Jodie, “When you do find the portal, we can meet each other in the daytime, while we’re awake.”

After several weeks, Faris came to a village which seemed similar to the description given to him by Jodie in one of their dreaming sessions. It had a high school, a set of public gardens, and a forest on its outskirts. He walked through the forest, looking for the portal, came to the other end and saw the countryside, and found the meadow. It was most likely the correct forest, and yet he had not found the portal.

Then it occurred to him that this would be unlikely, as a portal on a wide pathway through a forest would have been visible to anyone who walked through it. In such a case, Jodie would have found lots of people his size passing through the portal, each time she had gone to the mountainside lookout in her realm. She’d never seen the portal in the mountainside flowerbed either. It was getting late in the day, and he simply lay down in the meadow to camp out for another night’s sleep.

*          *          *          *

Colleen dreamt again, but this time only that she was hearing mysterious voices. Brother Zeke and Nathan Ural weren’t speaking, but a girl named Millicent was:

“What a shame, I was reading the story and didn't leave a review yet? My bad, I'm sorry lol!

Well, I still didn't finish reading the story to the last published chapter as real life was being really busy (I mean it hahaha) and I was having little energy or time left for enjoying stories, but this week things got lighter on me and I'm finally having time to read something without collapsing on bed hahahaha!

My favourite chapter so far is "How he made his way". Having the preteen boy wanting to be eaten by his own teacher and all the thing he did to accomplish his desire was pretty interesting, but I still have almost 1/3 of the story to be read yet, so let's see if it remains being my favourite chapter when I read everything.”

Millicent’s voice was an unfamiliar addition to the invisibly sourced dialogue that Colleen had somehow been hearing. Then she heard Tim again, this time responding to Millicent’s apparent appraisal of Colleen’s dream self’s alternate adventure with Henry. Colleen’s dream self recalled the earlier dream, but still didn’t know that it was actually the event sequence from a previous timeline.
“Thanks for saying so,” said Tim, “It's up to 154 chapters in my manuscript, with plenty of twists and surprises to come.

If I were that boy, I'd be trying everything to bring it about too, along with a time trick or a teleporter to undo the effect afterwards.

Then of course, I could do it again, and again, and again....”

Chapters? Manuscript? Colleen was more confused than ever when she awoke. Had somebody learned of her secret shrinking and gobbling activities and written them down as a form of fictional entertainment? If that was even the case, why did she only know about it while she was asleep?