Thanks for reading the story so far, to catch up our hero Trego is a scientist who is fired when they were researching information on time flow, and he meets a interesting girl who no one else seems to see.  He is killed by a black wave, wakes up and thinks he saw this all in a dream.  Is it a dream, or something else?

Story:

I sprinted over to a fence separating where most people could come and where a road was that the supply vehicle was on as memories of my dream came flooding back.  There was not a single doubt about it, it was a…the ReCorp noisy vehicle I had seen later in town in my dreams.  I watched in a shocked silence until it and its noise were out of view.

I ran as fast as I could back to the port, the door sliding barely out of my way in time.  I was breathing hard, holding the frame of the door as I looked up at the flirty attendant, hoping I would not fall off, either off the door or perhaps off reality.

What I thought was ‘now’ seemed just another frame of a picture, the dreams were just as bold and vivid as what I was seeing in front of me.  Was this girl the girl of my dream?  I stared hard at her, perhaps crazily, while her questioning face looked back.  It was not.  The angles of her face and body were a bit different, no Strive, and her hair was black.  This girl was directly flirtatious, the other was more coquettish.

What was that name in my dream?  Was it her activation code?  Scenes flashed through my mind like some final moment before death.

“Prove…uh pride…proof?”  I said to the woman, a grasp on my sanity was slipping.  She blinked once and I ran out of the door before I thought I might lose it completely.  Running felt real, and I was ready to hang on to this fragile sense of reality as long as I, and my body, could.  My entire morning’s walk was reversed by my hard, panicked run.  That fence, where was the fence?

I took a few turns, heading towards the ReCorp pit, and came to the fence, but the guy was gone.  “Different…huuuu…time…” I said, breathing hard.  I lifted my face to the sky, sucking some air down while I tried to figure out what was happening.  There was no doubt what I was living now was real, and I felt a strange certainty that if I didn’t do something key, I actually would die here.  The dreams were warning me.  Holy shit.

Where was that bar?  I think over this way.  I headed through some alleys I was trying to navigate backwards through based entirely on some dreams.  Coming to it, I was not sure what I expected, and I paused only a moment before pushing the door open.

I think there was supposed to be a man who was my first fight over on the right, and my assassin further down…but the bar was empty.  The bartender was there, but in a different position than I remember in the dreams, and no one else was here at this time.  No one else was in the large bar, except for the green-haired girl with her bright pink bow in the corner.

‘Proud.’  Her name came to me in my mind.

I walked decisively over to her, throwing my credcard onto the bar telling him I’d take a few rounds but to leave me alone.  I was under no delusion that something big was happening, and my little credcard was far more useful saving my annoyance from this guy than anything else.  I sat down, and her happy face did not at all match my hurried-anguish.

“Proud,” I said definitively.  She did not respond.  My focus started dropping, did I mess something up?

“Proud?”  I asked this time.  She sat there blinking at me.

Get the name wrong?  I started to doubt myself.  Why would this girl’s name be something random from a dream?  Was I really crazy?  Damn, maybe I must be a victim of thought implant experimentations…But…everything was too perfect to just be a crazy delusion of mine!

“Proud!”  I yelled, trying to convince her as much as myself that I was not crazy.

The girl’s confused, silent face said otherwise.  My mouth opened in a shocked frown, how did I get something like this wrong?

Suddenly she started laughing, putting one hand out onto my arm as she bent forward, unable to control her laughs.  “Sor…sorry!” She lifted her face, one eye was squinted closed, the other half-open with tears coming out of both. “I was just kidding!  That reaction is usually priceless!”