Hey, I'm a Super Hero!

What Dreams May Come: Part 2

He clicked onto the page, which had as its banner image a picture of an angel flying over the Earth, reaching out to cover the planet in sparkles. A woman whose screen name was Astral Jenkins led the proceedings, but he was fairly convinced it was an alias. That just couldn't be a real name, even for a crystal cruncher.

Is everyone here? If so, type X, came her message.

Various avatars appeared in the chat box with the letter "X" written next to them. Some members of the group typed "XOXO," trying to be funny. The boy had to hit refresh on his computer's browser, just to make sure everyone was there. It annoyed him, sometimes people's comments would appear in the window, and other times he had to hit refresh to make them show up. Actually, they seemed to spend an enormous amount of time chitchatting and trading quips at the beginning, which was just a bit boring and didn't make sense since this was a meditational group.

What he liked about this was that he would actually get a buzz off what they were doing. He'd swear that they were actually tapping into something, that maybe one or two members in the group really were psychics as they claimed to be. When he sat down and did the little meditational exercises with these strangers, he could actually feel a kind of... electricity filling up the room around him. It almost looked like a white, buzzing light, but perhaps this was just his imagination, or wishful thinking that there could be something more to his existence.

Another fun aspect of the meetings was that no one knew his real name, or age, so he could feel like he was an adult, or someone other than himself. He had created a profile with the name "Johnny Rocket" to play Facebook games on, and it came in handy now.

After a few moments, a message from Astral came up on his screen. She was the only one he was really friends with, and they would chat sometimes. He had even told her his real name, or first name actually, which was probably a mistake. But she still was in the habit of calling him Johnny.

Hey, Johnny. How's the week going?

Pretty crappy, so far. What else is new? he wrote. How about you?

Pretty amazing, actually, she wrote back. I met this incredible guy. It was pretty odd, I should say. I was on the group's homepage and suddenly I got his request to join out of the blue, and he came on and started talking to me. He's the most amazing person. He's a medium, and channels this extra-dimensional being called Kyron. We meditated for a bit, and I got the most intense burst of energy. It was like a drug high... oh, though I'm not sure you even know what that's like.

The boy had hinted to Astral that he was still in high school, and that he had a dreadful home and social life.

No, I definitely haven't tried any drugs. That's not my thing.

That's good. Anyway, when I asked him how he found out about the group, he said that Kyron had given him the name, and instructed him to come here tonight to assist us with this meditation. Isn't that crazy?

But it wasn't crazy... it was disturbing that some stranger had stumbled onto a Facebook group that only had 10 members, and said some weird inter-dimensional being had sent him. Then again the boy had practically met Astral the same way, which made it even more upsetting. He wanted to tell her to run, to be careful, or maybe kick this person out. But before he could say anything, a new member came onto the screen.

His user name was Kyron Friend but there was no picture of his face, just a graphic of a strange symbol that looked like a series of figure eights linked vertically, or perhaps a cartoon image of DNA. Of course, the boy didn't use his own picture either, and instead borrowed the avatar from his video game profile, a graphic of a guy with a blonde pompadour haircut holding an oversized gun. He had searched on the internet for it everywhere, only because it was so ridiculously opposite of his true personality.