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"... Awakened always return as Apparitions. We'll see her again, I promise." 

Penny gave a wry, pained smile and lowered her head. They’d see Caelea again? Yeah? And what form would Caelea take? Would she be herself, or would she be a smoke monster that moved faster than a bullet and was capable of eviscerating a person in a blink of an eye? Stacey gave words to her fears. What did that mean for the others Penny had already lost? She pressed her hand to her heart and closed her eyes so tightly that the spots she saw were on the inside as well as the out. A sob got caught in her throat and she held it there. She wouldn’t allow herself to break in front of the others.

"If it's a shared dream, is there a way out?" asked Stacey.

[color=goldenrod]“Yeah,”[/color] said Penny, the lump in her throat coming out as a dismissive scoff.  [color=goldenrod]“We find the dickhead whose nightmare we’re stuck inside of and shove our foot so far up their ass they’ll never be able to lie down to go to sleep ever again.”[/color]

She kicked off of the lamppost and tried to ignore how her legs felt like jelly. She wasn’t going to even start entertaining the idea of looking for an escape before she had taken care of the Apparition that had murdered Caelea. Odessa may have dumped another pile of doubts onto Penny’s mountain of them, but she had cleared up one thing that had been a concern: Caelea wasn’t inside of that thing anymore. She wasn’t going to allow her friend to go unavenged. However, before that she needed to recuperate, and she wasn’t the only one. Penny looked around and saw tired, broken faces.  

Penny put a hand to her hip and said to Odessa, [color=goldenrod]“Look, I’m not against figuring out what’s going on, but let’s do it somewhere better than this. Like a place with a couch, or even just a chair. Everyone looks like they could use a break, and the street’s not cutting it.”[/color] 

She threaded her fingers together and stretched her hands high above her head until her knuckles popped. There was little doubt  in her mind that the group would be against finding somewhere comfortable to lay low. Penny began to move, but slowed her pace as she neared Odessa and smirked, [color=goldenrod]“On our way, why not tell us about this place the Hound won’t go? I don’t know about you, but that sounds like paradise to me.”[/color]