Conor Kostick - LitRPG: Omnipotent Dreams

Chapter 39: Fingertip to Leaf

Conor Kostick — Fri, 09 May 2025 18:02:30 GMT

Without Daniel’s urging, I probably wouldn’t have attended Neo’s public dream but here I was, one of tens of millions, currently spectating in the form of a tiny screw with a Phillips head and feeling a little disgusted. Until the moment Neo fell asleep, we bucketloads of iron screws were assailed by young people, one after another entering a round stag…

Chapter 38: A World of Poets

Conor Kostick — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:45:28 GMT

‘Surprise!’

A dozen of my friends were present in the ground-floor kitchen of the squat. With red and black and gold, a metre-wide roll of paper that was hung across the far wall stated: ‘WELCOME HOME CYN’. A comforting scent from a stack of glazed Cinnamon buns, fresh out of the oven, surrounded me and caressed me as gently as the eyes of my friends.

Pat…

Chapter 37: A Mind Under a Dozen Blankets

Conor Kostick — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:08:59 GMT

Scattered, our blood covers the grass, our bodies lie as food for ravens, and Neo roars through the carnage, swinging the head of Oscar in his right hand. He brings the gruesome trophy up to eye level, regards the lifeless and sagging face for a moment, then suddenly bites at the lips of his defeated enemy.

With a gesture akin to a Nazi salute, Neo brand…

Chapter 36: Fight Night

Conor Kostick — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 11:55:14 GMT

Hillwalking was low down on my list of fun activities. I’d never owned the kind of boots you see on proper hikers. Yet the day was so pleasant, the paths so evident and mostly dry, that in order to tire myself before my million-person dream I walked over the hills of Clare Island for hours. I discovered that walking for long enough dissolves your ego an…

Chapter 35: How Can the Moon be so Heartless?

Conor Kostick — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:41:59 GMT

Below me, on the main deck of the boat, a sturdy girl wearing a Mayo top was talking to her cow to keep it from worrying. The ferry had plenty of room for the cow and on this morning journey it also carried two mountain bikes, both with a deep-blue metallic finish; one youthful crew member (male, handsome, confident); eight tourists, two of them childre…

Chapter 34: The Ship that Launched a Thousand Faces

Conor Kostick — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 09:30:29 GMT

Same streets; same alloy wheels rolling over the tarmac; same trees (well, not quite the same, the cherry trees had blossomed during the last few days); same red-brick houses with white, uPVC framed windows; same poles with sagging wires. And yet all quite different. All imbued with a life-force I’d never noticed before. Everything around me was glowing…

Chapter 33: A Scratched Blue Eye, Felinebold

Conor Kostick — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 21:12:12 GMT

A number of construction warning signs placed beside tall screens were misdirecting the public, giving the impression that the structure of the shopping centre was under repair. The discerning passer-by, however, might notice that the sounds that could be heard from beyond the awnings were soft. And if you took the trouble to prise the plastic sheets aw…

Chapter 32: A Dream of Peace and Beauty

Conor Kostick — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:46:42 GMT

Then indeed Peace had come. Her Cloak of Calm Tranquillity banished the growls of bus and car engines to the distance; her Sceptre of Forgiveness blessed us all and united us as a community. No better place for her to bequeath flowers of empathetic transference to tourists and Dublin residents alike than St Stephens Green, where it was almost balmy and …

Chapter 31: Psychotic Chaos

Conor Kostick — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:31:05 GMT

There are six of us in a narrow London street; or three of us; or five-and-a-half, depending on what counts as a person. Myself and Celine; Amanda and Amandus; Daniel and a child’s cot, whose painted eyes are watching us with an alertness that is more characteristic of a fox than a small bed with wooden bars. The soundtrack to the dream is a fragment of…

Chapter 30: The Shape of Silence

Conor Kostick — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:47:13 GMT

Two people on the near-full bus to Dublin were wearing Explorers. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed them, dismissing them as show-offs. Now I studied them with a question in mind: what it would be like to share their dreams? One was a podgy male, about seventy-years-old. He was almost bald but with a circle of grey around his head, like a medieval monk.…

Chapter 29: Better One Day in a Cubicle Working for Neo

Conor Kostick — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:22:43 GMT

Jenny Madox was a decent person, the kind that gave you hope in the face of growing support for fascism. A special needs assistant at St Joseph’s School, Derry, she’d been on a training course in Limerick hosted by Vision Ireland and RNIB Northern Ireland because she had responsibility for a blind child. I liked her voice and I realised, as I listened t…

Chapter 28: A Lorry Load of Trouble

Conor Kostick — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:53:48 GMT

Cyn Sweetwater in checklist mode; Celine Sweetwater floating in the depths.

Dress. Brush teeth. Pack. Check.

Ring Daniel. Check. He wants me to buy him an Explorer Cap, I do so even as we chat. I explain I’m leaving Cork and will meet my dad in Limerick; I’m not sure when I’ll be back in Dublin. Maybe tomorrow.

Ring Amanda. Check. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she answ…

Chapter 27: Food. Drink

Conor Kostick — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:27:43 GMT

If you transported Cork to northern Italy, everyone would be happy. The Italians would welcome another friendly, easy-going body of citizens and the Irish would have the climate their city below the hills deserved. Streets here, especially north of the river, rose steeply towards the clouds, creating a terraced effect like you see in Siena, say. Unlike …

Chapter 26: Woman Off Wire

Conor Kostick — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:55:04 GMT

Under soft clouds that caught the ruddy pink of dawn and an otherwise clear sky of amethyst purple, Dublin was a serene and self-assured mermaid stretching languorously along the coastline. My view of her was from a window on the second floor of a squat in Ringsend and as I contemplated on the rows of redbrick houses that formed sinuous lines curving to…

Chapter 25: Everything Seems So Normal, Except When it Doesn’t

Conor Kostick — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 11:02:41 GMT

Item. Pounding drums.

Item. The harsh scent of iron; the cloying scent of decay.

Item. Two men and a woman in insect masks and ballet costumes of bright colour, the latter with plastic yellow cones over her breasts to exaggerate their motion. Note: ecstatic dancing.

Item. One ballet-costumed and insect-masked female corpse.

Item. A vast pool of blood; also …

Chapter 24: The Heart of Darkness

Conor Kostick — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:00:03 GMT

The DreamAds headquarters was a forty-minute drive out of Dublin, situated in an industrial park near Kildare town. Not that I drove. Foot or bike for me. And the occasional bus, such as the motherly A50 that carried me in her warm interior through along roads swept by a cold and aloof north wind.

‘Are you Cyn today?’ asked Daniel, from the seat beside m…

Chapter 23: The Life of a Grey Wall

Conor Kostick — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 18:12:58 GMT

Walking along the canal path, I greeted the world and the world greeted me. Specifically, a raven flew up from behind me and gave the top of my head a light brush with its wing.

‘And a high-five to you, my raven friend,’ I said as I walked past the patch of grass it had landed on.

No sooner had I walked past him, than the raven leapt up and patted my hair…

Chapter 22: At Least it’s not Blackmail

Conor Kostick — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:29:40 GMT

My studio felt uncanny and not in a good way. When you enter the same room repeatedly, it simply exists for you, effortlessly, withdrawn, happy-in-itself. You and the room get along just fine without paying each other any attention. Now though, even before I’d put my backpack down, I sensed that the studio was in a state of high alert, waving at me to b…

Chapter 21: Looking Down at Heaven

Conor Kostick — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:54:21 GMT

Descending from wherever good sex took me was a journey with its own pleasures. Radiance from nirvana still attached to me, like tendrils of golden paint after I’d touched the viscous liquid with my brush tip. No doubt my Kirlian Aura was brilliant, capable of powering the entire city. My pulse was sending aftershocks of sweetness to my limbs, like list…

Chapter 20: Everyone a Mozart

Conor Kostick — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:57:01 GMT

‘It’s just like the MacHenry awards.’ Daniel took the chair next to mine, looking around the large, well-lit dining room of the Shelbourne Hotel. ‘Except that this is the upper middle class, not the lower.’ Once more he was wearing his thrown-together tux and once more, since I had no choice in the matter, I was wearing my deep green dress. Fortunately,…