There's No Pain In "Dreams"

"A Child of Heaven..." pondered James, eliciting a laugh from the rabbit. "Of course you don't know about it kiddo, to think I tried to use an illusion on a mortal kid and failed, that guy would never let me hear the end of it..."

"I'm 19, what makes you think I'm a kid! I'll have you know that I'm pretty mature for my age!" lied James through the skin of his teeth, well aware of the list of chores waiting for him when he awoke, cursing at himself for being so lazy the last few weeks.

The rabbit took a long look at the "man" in front of him; short, scrawny, clothes that looked a bit too big for him. Without breaking eye contact, the rabbit brought out a cigar from thin air and put it in his mouth, lighting it with a spark from one of his paws before taking a large toke of smoke into his mouth.

Blowing out a few rings, he turned around and used a paw to beckon James over silently, the latter following cautiously with a confused look on his face staring at the back of this talking magic rabbit hopping away from him into the forest.

After a short few minutes of walking, they arrived before a silver pond, the surface seemingly unperturbed by the wind: and the surface giving off a large amount of multicoloured haze in James' eyes, curiously, lacking the colour green. The trees directly around the small pond seemed to be significantly larger than the rest of the forest.

"This is an Ironsoul Pond, it's a naturally occurring feature that springs up when an itsy bitsy bit o' natural energy seeps into some metal underneath a regular pond. Usually they stay as a source of normal energy, but this one was in a forest so the damn trees separated out every last drop of Earth Attribute energy over the last ten years: so now it's just a dangerous puddle.".

"Go, look at your mug in the pond." said the rabbit, taking another toke of the cigar as he stared at the deathly still pond with a restrained look of anticipation.

James walked up to the pond, mostly understanding the words of the rabbit, but confused as to what he meant by energy. 'Kinetic, no, it's still. Chemical or nuclear maybe? I was pretty good at chemistry in school so maybe I could do some experiments on it…'.

A look of confusion turned into a look of shock as James stared down into the metallic pond, seeing the reflection of his own face - but one 6 years younger. 13 year old James' boyish face seemed to grin back at him with a look of understanding. Understanding that James had been desperately trying to avoid this whole time. You can't feel pain in a dream.