(For this sample, we skip ahead from the previous chapters. Uncle Seven has returned the Time/Space Capsule and Piper to Earth, but the nanites rattling his brain send him leaping from the Lobe’s house roof to his death. With his robot servants under orders to destroy all of Uncle Seven’s inventions, Piper realizes the only hope she has to save Uncle Seven and his work is to use the time machine. But instead of traveling back through time, the TS Capsule flies across space, crash landing with other timeships on another world. As giant black creatures move in to capture her, Piper passes out, unable to breath the alien atmosphere.)

Piper woke up at school in her Second Period English class.

She was disoriented and groggy. It took a moment for her to focus. Her hands tingled from being used as a pillow on her hard school desk. She wiped a bit of sleep drool from the corner of her mouth. In the front of the classroom, Mrs. Gulley twittered enthusiastically about another rule of punctuation.

A dream. It had all been a dream. There were no scary black monsters or time machines here, just a classroom full of students and a skinny teacher lecturing through another English class. Piper sat up straight and listened attentively, pretending she hadn’t just been sleeping on her desk.

How much had she dreamed? Had she even flown off in the TimeCrab? Was Uncle Sev--Uncle Seven could still be alive!

The thought made her squeal in excitement, loudly. She covered her mouth in embarrassment, but no one looked at her. This was odd. No one paid that much attention in English class.

Piper looked back at Mrs. Gulley and found her suddenly on the other side of the room, writing a long sentence on the blackboard and wearing a plaid blouse. Piper was sure she had been wearing a green sweater. She was now talking about prepositions.

And then she disappeared.

A moment later, she was back at the front of the class explaning to a boy in the second row about writing in the past tense.

Piper watched, wide-eyed, as the teacher continued to pop from place to place, bouncing through several lectures, all of which Piper had heard before. Mrs. Gulley would simply disappear from one point of the room and reappear somewhere else, rattling off fractured rules of English as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

Piper now realized the entire room was changing. Students’ clothes switched from short sleeves to sweaters and back. Words flashed across the blackboards and were gone. The light changed from the windows behind Piper. She started to turn around in her seat to look, wondering if she would see a sunny day suddenly turn to rain or snow.

“No,” said a quiet voice. “Don’t turn around yet.”

Icy fingers gently pushed Piper’s face back towards the front of the room.

And she knew.

This was the dream. Somewhere, in the waking world, time machines, black monsters, and death were waiting for her.

Mrs. Gully kept teaching in bits. Piper didn’t listen. Her attention had turned completely on whomever, or whatever, was sitting behind her.

“Quite a messy language you have here,” said the voice. It seemed familiar. Something large shifted about in the desk at Piper’s back, metal scraped against metal. “All these words with more than one meaning, all these strange spelling choices -- and the overlapping consonants! Why does a ‘p’ make an ‘f’ sound if you put an ‘h’ behind it? What does that serve? It’s an ugly patchwork of old tongues sewn into a misshapen quilt...but it’ll work. You’ll be understandable here.”

Piper was confused. As nightmares went, this seemed a rather tame one. Dream monsters didn’t usually spend their time making rude comments about the English language. Piper risked speaking to the voice despite her fear. “Maybe you’d be happier taking a Spanish class instead?”

“Ahh, Spanish.”

Suddenly, the English class was gone and Piper was sitting in the Spanish class she had taken in fifth grade. The teacher, Mrs.... Mrs...

“Mrs. Ortiz,” said the voice, still behind Piper, answering her unspoken question.

Mrs. Ortiz was going through the same sort of scattered lecture bits and pieces that Mrs. Gully had moments before. It was like watching a film of an entire year of classes edited down to a few random sound bytes.

“Well,” the voice said, “yes, this language would have been a bit easier to adapt. Pity you didn’t try harder to learn it. ¿Ir continuamos el viaje de su cabeza?”

“What?” said Piper.

“Exactly, I had to dig pretty deep for that. Let’s see what else is in here.”

Piper sat on the couch in her den at home, watching a TV documentary about Germany that she had seen before. An old man was being interviewed about his time as a prisoner in a concentration camp. He spoke in German while English subtitles at the bottom of the screen translated his painful words.

Behind the couch, metal plates ground together as the unseen thing twisted and turned. “Now, what is this? German? German would have been an ideal language; everything from the throat and all those nice strong consonants. Pity, pity, pity...but at least you’ve got a mind that can handle more than one language. Some species have evolved down such a narrow path -- ‘Speak my language or I’ll sit here like a rock.’”

Piper put it all together. “These are my memories!” she exclaimed. “You --whoever you are -- you’re looking at things in my brain!”

“Smart girl,” said the voice. “Yes, I’m getting a sense of the way your mind is arranged. My apologies, it’s a necessary invasion of privacy.”

“So...you’re not a dream?”

“Well, I am a dream, but I’m my dream. I’ve projected myself into your sleeping thoughts. It helps me to get a better picture of the terrain.”

Piper stood up in alarm. “I’m asleep! I’m helpless! Those big black monsters were grabbing at me and...am I a prisoner?! Am I dead?”

“Nope, not dead. But we are prisoners -- of the situation, not the monsters. And we should stay as near to those monsters as possible...because there are worse things out there. But those are all matters to discuss when you are awake.”

“Did I faint again?”

“Yes, but you had a good excuse. Your lungs couldn’t handle the atmosphere here. It was nothing like a few weeks ago when you fainted after you saw your Uncle Seven moving into your house.”

“Yeah, I – how did you know that?!”

“Well, I am inside your head, Miss Lobe. There’s no information up here that I can’t access...and easier than you can.”

Piper felt naked. The most private secrets of her life were an open book to some mysterious thing lurking around in her dreams.

“Ahh,” said the voice. “Well, now that you’re afraid I’ll laugh at every embarrassing thing in your life, look at me.”

Piper began to turn. “Are you one of those black monsters?”

“Nope. Something else.”

Nervously, Piper turned around.

Behind her, a giant metal worm undulated about on the Lobe’s TV room carpet. It was at least fifteen feet long from its yellow beach ball eye to the slim metal fingers on its tail.

“Hello,” said Piper blankly.

“Hi,” said the worm, without a mouth. “You see, there’s no reason to be embarrassed by any secrets I may learn while I’m here. Your entire life is uniformly alien to me. So, if you’re worried I’ll find out about that time...”

The creature paused for a moment, waiting. Piper feared what it was going to say. Was it something gross? Like that time she picked her nose in the grocery store?

The worm said, “Yes, like that time you picked your nose in the grocery store. I know exactly where you wiped your fingers.”

“Stop!” yelled Piper. “Eeuww!”

The worm thing slithered out from behind the couch and crawled around the edge of the room. “I have no nose, and I don’t eat the sort of food you do. So why would it bother me that you had no Kleenex and decided to wipe your nasal fluids all over that…”

“Okay! I get it!” said Piper. “You’re really an alien?”

“To you, yes.”

“You don’t sound like an alien.”

“I sound exactly like an alien. But the alien I sound like is you. I’m using your own brain and speech center to communicate with you. I can do that.”

Piper realized it was true. The creature’s voice sounded familiar because it was her own voice, just a couple of registers deeper. “So why am I talking to an alien in my head when I was supposed to be traveling back in time on my own planet?”

“Good question. Ask it when you wake up. I’m not the guy. My job is to shape your mind so that you can help out here.”

“And how are you going to ‘shape my mind?’”

“The same way I’ve been doing it for the past twenty minutes: Sharpening your audio perceptions so you’ll hear the Folgassan language in your own syntax, strengthening the matching word associations, taking some of your old memory cells and reassigning new tasks to them.”

Piper felt her panic rise again. “You’re altering my brain?”

“In good ways--useful ways,” the alien said quickly. “You’d barely notice if I hadn’t mentioned it.”

“Look, you shouldn’t be messing around in somebody’s brain without permission.”

“Yes, I should. It’s the reason I was designed. But I do apologize. We only have a few minutes together so some liberties have been taken. I’ll be out of your mind soon. I’m only hanging around to make sure the alien tissue being implanted in your head is a good fit.”

“What!” Piper stepped back, covering her head with her hands. “What?”

“Don’t worry about the brain implants, your hair will cover them. It’s the implants in your chest that’ll need to be kept covered.”

“Ahh!!” Piper yelped, putting a hand to her ribs. “You can’t just put things in my body!”

The worm curled around the television set. “Your right, I can’t. But they can. They do a good job, they’ve learned a lot for a species with no use for surgery. There will be at least one implant attached to one of the speech centers of your brain, one at the top of your chest, and a couple at the base of your ribs. You’ll be thankful for them. Really.” The worm turned its beach ball eye on her. “You’re going to remain a mystery. Everyone’s going to be disappointed when they find out you know less than they do.”

Piper was about to ask what that meant when suddenly the worm sprang up to attention. Its yellow eye seemed to focus somewhere far away. “Let’s get you back to your English class. There are about to be some new lessons.”

Piper sat at her desk again as Mrs. Gully taught more scattered fragments from English lessons. The worm thing now slithered heavily around the front of the room. Mrs. Gully was oblivious to the metal creature that shared her teaching space.

Piper had to smile, if only her real English class was this interesting. She called to the worm, “Do you have a name?”

The thing crawled over the desks of the students in the front row. “In your language it would translate to something like ‘Special Armored Mobile Biotechnical Psychomorphic Stealth Weapon A-5: The Fear Eater.’ Here they’ve given me the charming title of ‘The Mindworm.’”

“Did...did you say you’re a weapon?”

“Yep. Ooh! Here it comes.”

The next time she appeared, Mrs. Gulley wasn’t human. One of the towering black monsters Piper had seen when she burst out of the time vortex had taken her place.

The Mindworm slithered among the students to watch the new teacher. “It’s always a fun school day when there’s a substitute,” it chuckled.

Piper stared in horror at the massive humanoid walrus as it roared and barked at the class. Its bulbous white eyes scanned the students menacingly. Lobster-like maxillipeds surrounded its mouth, thrusting up and down like the keys of an old typewriter as the creature spoke. Nobody in the class reacted as if anything was different than usual, except Piper. “What is that?” she gasped.

“Well,” said the Mindworm, “what should we call this planet? ‘Land’ is the best translation. You are on the planet Land, and that is a Landian.”

The shapes and swirls of a new written language were on the chalkboard. The monster teacher pointed at the jagged squiggles at the top with the pinky of a colossal four-fingered hand.

“Burrrgalll mmaw-hooph bow’gazz gwa-ahhh,” the Landian said. Piper sat back in shock. She’d instantly understood that the dark giant had said: “Of all words, let this one lay heaviest upon you.” The harsh squiggles that the thing pointed to spelled out the word “Survival.”

“Ah, good,” said the worm. “Successful integration. Thanks to your implant, you are now fluent in Folgassa, the language of our hosts.”

With effort, Piper pulled her gaze away from the professorial alien to glare at the worm. “You couldn’t just teach me the language?” she whispered in horror. “I couldn’t just watch an instructional video? You had to put an alien thing in my brain?!” Piper groped at her skull. “Where is it anyway?”

“Well, it’s not in there. That’s not your head.” The alien worm slithered through the class towards Piper -- or rather, what had been the class. Now it was a rounded cavern full of other black giants sitting on benches. Light was provided by a cluster of bubbles glowing brightly from the center of the ceiling. “Trust me, kid. I’ve been through this with lots of the new arrivals. The implants are necessary to keep you alive and talking.”

The class responded to a question from the teacher. In unison they roared and grumbled. Piper heard the noise as: “Of all the Survival Gods, Self-Preservation is the one in whose footsteps we must always tread.”

Piper turned to the worm. “What are these guys doing in my brain?”

“These Landians are in an ‘Inspiration Council.’ It’s the closest thing they have to a ‘school.’ When the language repository was added to your brain, this bit of memory came along with it.”

“How is that safe?” Piper leaped down from the huge bench she was sitting on. "You put something in my brain that belonged to another species! It’s gonna have alien germs and...Jeez! What about interspecies transplant rejection?! This can’t...”

“It works, Piper. Here, it works.” The metal worm extended the finger tentacles on its tail to pat Piper’s cheek. “You’ll be fine.” It turned and slithered toward the large classroom door. “It’s time for me to go.”

“Go?!” Piper ran after it, dodging around the alien teacher as it appeared in her path. “You can’t just leave me here with these things.”

“I need to go help the others that arrived when you did. Each time the Portal opens there’s a new group of time travellers to fix.”

“But I have so many questions!”

“I know,” said the worm. “The problem is I have the same ones. There are many smart people here all searching for answers. And the questions are huge! ‘How did I wind up here?’ ‘What is here?’ ‘How do I get back home?’ Well, I don’t know. None of us do. Help us find the answers when you wake.” The worm nodded at the room of black giants. “This is a dream. It’ll dissolve into something new once I’m no longer around to anchor it. You’ll probably sleep for a few hours more. You need it; you’ve been through a lot.”

The long metal worm reached high to twist a lever and slide open the door.

“What’s waiting for me out there?” asked Piper.

The worm looked back. “Brace yourself, kiddo. It’s gonna get strange.”

It slid the door closed.

“Then what is it now?” Piper asked in a small voice. She turned to face the bubble-lit cave room of roaring monsters before losing herself in the flow of dreams.