It had been pretty bad, but fortunately, the crowd had gotten some amusement. He'd forgotten the name of the band at the last moment, when he'd been trying to rock it out on stage. He hadn't learned more than four or five chords, and it was bloody obvious that he wasn't the real guitarist. He pretended to be passed out from a heroin-induced coma, but the audience didn't buy it. They sniffed out the fake and threw clumps of mud up onto the stage. He ran off and just barely made it out with his skin. It was almost as bad as the time that Green Day played at Lollapolooza.
He was back in his study, looking at the bubbly vials of slime that might have impressed the most naive of the non-magical crowd who still held fast to the old-world delusions of magic in its cliched form. In reality, the slime had resulted from some experiments gone stinky. He decided that he had been trapped in this mockery of a world long enough, and that he was ready to start creating his own world from scratch. He'd actually decided this long ago, but the latest fiasco where his lack of mad skillz had trapped him onstage like a rat had led him to confront a brutal reality: he was still buying the oldest tricks in the book. Hook, line, and sinker. There was nothing he didn't know, but he forgot that there was any other way to be. He needed to forget a lot of what he "knew," but he needed to be able to recover the useful bits of it at will. Total amnesia would not do.
There was only one answer to this problem: dreams. He needed to ReAwaken each night in his sleep, discarding the shells of memories that he'd made a Past out of. He needed to awaken into a newly forgotten past in each dream, or else author himself a new past to awaken into. He needed to experiment with different pasts. He needed to erase his current past like a program from a computer, and set an automatic timer to re-load it when he'd experimented enough. He already had such a mechanism built in, and sleep seemed the only logical choice of the moment.
He had an ally who could help him with this, and her name was Charlie. Charlotte Anne DeVille had been her full name, and she'd been sleeping for several years now. She could be just fine when sleeping, and he was sure that she'd been up to some interesting things during her non-waking hours. He may need to wake her up soon, or he may need to plunge into the depths where she dwelt. She knew the dark realms well, and she knew how to navigate them on intuition, using logic only when absolutely necessary. The two of them together would make an unstoppable force. The world would never forget.
He put himself to sleep that night, and he fell more deeply into sleep than ever he had before. He didn't remember what happened immediately upon waking, but as the next day went on, he began to remember, one Sign at a time. Each time he looked in the mirror, Charlie peered back through his own eyes at him.
Charlie was awake again.
