Will anything terrible happen if she jumps over it? Let's hope that no.

Nothing terrible happens.

The next room is full of ankle-deep water. The ankle-deep water is full of electricity. There's a handy-if-very-old computer console next to the door.

Let's see if there's a Stop Electrocuting This Flooded Pit button!

There is not, but probably if she beats up on it enough she can make it stop routing power to the rest of the place. Old things break easily.

Works for her.

Once she sloshes over to the other side of the room (which, mysteriously, doesn't leave her feet wet), the woman reappears.

"Where the cat walks, the clever mouse will walk unseen. A mouse cannot defeat a cat, face to face."

She vanishes again as the bunker door behind her groans open. The room beyond also has water on the floor, a great many support columns arranged in a grid, and something heavy clanking around inside it.

Gosh. Almost like she should sneak around the edge of the room and hide behind those support columns.

What a clever idea. There's another computer console on the other side of the room; this one does have a helpful large button labeled "POWER RESET."

Oh! A Start Electrocuting This Flooded Pit button! How convenient!

And wouldn't you know it, the clanking heavy thing is made of metal. It doesn't like being electrocuted that much.

The computer setup emits some sparks and smoke and finally dies altogether, but the Big Metal War Machine seems more or less out of commission.

With the power off, the door to the next room won't open automatically, but there's a big handle in the middle where it's clearly meant to be operated manually.

And does this handle perchance open the door.

Yep.

The woman's standing in the little section of hallway past it. As she steps past the threshold, the room goes blindingly bright, then pitch dark. A silver light illuminates the woman in silhouette. She holds out a necklace.

"Talismans can protect you, strengthen you, and focus you, but they cannot save you. Nothing can save you. But the choice will set you free, one way or another."

Again, she vanishes, and again, the door behind her opens.

Gosh. A necklace.

She puts on the necklace and proceeds.

It's New York. Or more accurately, it's New York if New York had been hit by several tornados and maybe a stampede. The concrete is torn up and strewn across what's left of the road; a crumpled taxi sits on its side on the sidewalk. There are only a handful of people there, standing in a loose group. None of them seem to notice her.

"Hurry," says an older black man. He seems to be in charge, if only because he's survived longer than anyone else there. "We have no time to spare."

"Shouldn't we consult the Council of Venice first?" says a white man in a dark blue suit. Both the man and the suit look like they've seen better days.

The first man catches the sarcasm and glares at the second man. "Now is not the time for argument!"

An alien roar echoes down the empty streets.

Oh gosh, alien roars! Her favourite!

Where is the thing doing the roaring, and how does it feel about having its heart metaphorically torn from its body?

"What was that?" someone says.

Someone else points. "It's coming out of the ground!"

Wreathed in dust and dirt, a... thing with far too many tentacles erupts out of the ground. It roars again.

"Go! Go now!"

"Don't hold anything back!"

The group starts running at the thing, half preparing some kind of magic and the other half aiming the heaviest ordinance they have. There's a bit of confusion on what to attack, but as the dust clears something that looks more or less like a head is revealed, and the firepower converges there.

If she had her alien slime powers in this stupid fucking dream she could run it down with an army of Tanks. As it is, the yoink sigil is the best she's got.

It has absolutely no effect whatsoever. To be fair to Naomi, nothing anybody else is doing seems to be working either.

The thing rears up, as though inhaling deeply. Its face looks like the underside of an octopus.

Then it leans forward, and blackness billows forth from its mouth, and Naomi is swept off her feet into a featureless void.

The voices come back, in the darkness, like a bedtime story or a kiss on the forehead. "Be mindful of the voices," the woman says. She sounds worried. "They corrupt."

"Be mindful of the voices that whisper," the man says. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. "For they speak the truth."

She wakes up back in the real world, still in her shell of Clay in her trashed apartment.

She curls up and hisses, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you fuck you fuck you—"

—and she can feel the fire stirring under her skin, but it stays there.

Okay. Fine. Good. About time. If she sees that dream woman again, she will grudgingly refrain from punching her in the face.

She takes a few deep breaths, and then has her Clay nest eat itself and stands up and surveys the damage. It says a lot about yesterday's stress levels that she only now notices that not only has the door of her bedroom been blown completely off, but a blast of slime blood followed it into the living room and painted a broad red path all the way to her front door, over two upturned end tables and a corner of her very nice secondhand couch.

"I'm not getting my deposit back, am I," she mutters under her breath.

Now - experiment with dream magic, or experiment with alien slime powers?

...Definitely the alien slime powers. The alien slime powers are so much nicer and more convenient in every way.

Okay, which of these creatures seems like it will come in the smallest and most convenient egg? The Imp definitely has the smallest adult size of the lot. She'll try one of those.

The egg is only a smidge bigger than the one for Clay, if that, and just as much fun to produce. She takes a minute to recover, and then picks it up and studies it. Her life-sense can clearly see the shape of the Imp inside, with its little face like a cartoon skull and big pointy ears and crumpled-up wings and curled-up tail. And - whatever sense or ability she uses to control the Clay - can feel the Imp as though from its own perspective. She can make it twitch its ears and wiggle its tiny clawed toes. It's like she has two bodies, and one of them is the one she's had all her life and the other one is a fetal demon.

Well, fine. She hatches it.

It tumbles out facefirst into her puddle of Clay, and likes the taste enough that she has it eat some. On this diet it grows at a visible pace, from small enough to hold in a single cupped hand up to the size of a cat, then a gangly toddler, then finally stops when it's almost as tall as Naomi herself. She looks at it, and looks back at herself through its eyes.

...she's kind of a total fucking mess. More important things to worry about, though. Like: so far, this experiment indicates that the eggs she lays do not produce noticeably independent beings, and do produce things that grow up real fast if they eat enough Clay. So cloning herself is a plausible option. And if that dream was anything like an accurate warning about future events, she wants to have ten of herself scattered across the continent by the end of the week.

She hesitates for a moment. But wow she really doesn't want to be murdered by a great big tentacle beast the size of a fucking house. Clone egg, go.

The clone egg turns out to be considerably bigger and more painful than the first two. She's pretty sure she screams; she might have even blacked out for a moment somewhere in there. She is very glad that her destructive dream magic is under control by now, or there probably would have been a lot of fire involved. But here she is, still alive, catching her breath in the aftermath of an agonizingly orgasmic egglaying.

...her life is very weird.

She hatches the clone. A little baby Naomi opens little baby eyes, and Original Naomi looks blurrily out of them. She can't detect any signs of autonomy in the duplicate, but... hm. She feeds little-her a bunch of Clay, and absently sends her Imp into the bathroom with a handful of Clay to see if Clay can usefully drink tap water. Turns out it can. The Imp has a little trouble operating the faucet with its long clawed fingers, but soon there's a blob of Clay in the sink, growing until it spills over the sides. Conveniently, the shower is off, and presumably has been all this time, even though she definitely did not have the presence of mind to turn it off on purpose when she was busy fighting an alien slime creature. Maybe she got it by accident in all the flailing around.

Fed on gooey Clay, her clone grows up fast. It's only a few minutes until there are two identical Naomis sitting in a puddle of Clay in their wrecked bedroom. And it's - definitely easier to think, like this. The Imp didn't seem to contribute any cognitive capacity to speak of, but having two of her is like... well, it's like having two of her. Connected so deeply that they share every thought, but still two full-sized brains, in bodies haloed by invisible flame.

"Cool," she says from her clone self.

"Let's get exponential," she says from the original.

Both of her start gestating new clones.

A very loud and intense twenty minutes later, the apartment is starting to get crowded and the Clay in the sink is getting a little runny from drinking all that water. One of the fourteen Naomis - number twelve, if she's keeping track correctly, which she might not be - goes to turn off the tap, and she sends the Clay out of the sink to ooze down the hall and eat some broken furniture.

None of her are hungry or thirsty or need to go to the bathroom. Whether that's dream magic or alien slime powers, it's very convenient. All of her are covered in Clay and egg-related fluids, but when she has the Clay retreat to the floor and then sends herselves to have a series of quick showers, they all clean up fine. And with fourteen brains, the staticky noise of the dream powers is barely a distraction at all; she's thinking more clearly than she has since she woke up from that first dream. She's thinking more clearly than she has in her life.

Two Naomis sort through their supply of clothes and assemble outfits for everyone. One Naomi sorts through their supply of cash and divides it into thirteen shares. With a little luck, some of her will be able to stretch that far enough to catch a train or bus to another city; others will have to stick to local transit and find a relatively innocuous place to start burrowing. She equips each of her thirteen clones with a bag of some kind - purse, backpack, messenger bag, environmentally friendly grocery sack - and puts two Tunneler eggs in each; Tunneler eggs are thankfully in the small size class, so this isn't too much of a hassle. Actually, with fourteen Naomis in total, she finds that she can put out a small egg without distracting the rest of her much if at all. After a little more thought, she adds a Clay egg to each bag.

Thirteen identical women heading for the subway in a pack are bound to attract some attention, but she thinks it'll probably be safe to send them off at a rate of one an hour. After double-checking their inventory, she has the first one head out the door.

Some part of her expects that they'll lose contact somehow after the clone passes out of mutual life-sense range of the apartment, but in fact this does not happen. All fourteen of her remain connected even after the thirteenth traveler gets on the subway and zooms off into the distance. It's comforting, in a sense, but... there's too much she doesn't know. If she gets fourteen clones set up in fourteen different cities and then horrible tentacled monsters rise up from beneath the earth and eat everyone, safety in numbers won't have done her much good. It's a bit nerve-wracking.

To distract herself from her worries, she experiments with sigil magic and her Imp. One good yoink and it's a goner; she has her Clay eat it, then makes five more, with the intent of investigating just what the constraint is on using several yoink sigils in a row.

The constraint is both frustratingly vague and a harder limitation than it was in the dream; she has to wait about twenty seconds between casts, or else it just doesn't do anything. It's a bit harder to draw the sigil in the air, too - there's some component of the magic helping her remember all the exact bits and curlicues, and it doesn't do that if she tries it again too soon.

She kind of wants to experiment with the fireballs thing, but she also kind of really doesn't want to do that because even though she's probably going to end up completely abandoning her entire life to go be a hundred clones living in caves and experimenting with fucked-up magic shit, it would still be super inconvenient if she blew out a window or something and had to explain the current state of her apartment to, well, literally anyone.

Night wears on and she doesn't feel the least bit sleepy, but she has her original self curl up in a comfy puddle of Clay next to her gross bed and go to sleep, just in case there's any more infuriating dream bullshit to be had. The rest of her continue on their various journeys.

Thankfully, the infuriating dream bullshit seems to be more or less done with, unless you count dreaming about dancing pineapples selling burgers to be infuriating.

Around midmorning the next day, there's a knock on her door.

...uh?

She separates herself from her Clay puddle and puts on a bathrobe and goes to get the door. There's slime blood covering the peephole, and it refuses to yield to a vigorous fingernail; she gives up after a few seconds and warily opens the door a crack to peer out.