Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes, or dream cloud bubbles, are a kind of pocket dimension formed when people think or dream. They can be accessed by Ranald as Ra the Golden Griffin Warrior, either to fight the nightmare spirits infesting them, or to leap across them to reach his destination.

## Description

Cloudscapes are clouds that contains thoughts from the outside and dreams from the inside. Ranald in his Golden Griffin Warrior form can only get inside their cloudscapes when they're asleep but when they're awake, their cloudscapes will be solid as concrete, preventing Ra from going inside their solid Cloudscapes. It's like he can't walk through solid walls. When Ranald is asleep, he can access his cloudscape, and from there, fly to Dreamland or travel to someone else's cloudscape.

### Cloudscape Travelling and Exploring

He may not get inside heavily guarded buildings, but he can still travel from cloudscape to cloudscape by leaping through them like buildings. If you're a telepath, you can see from the outside of people's solid cloudscapes their thoughts, and you can see what they're thinking, and when they think, their cloudscapes build up a background image and symbols that match their thoughts, imaginations, good decisions or their personalities, it's something like you saw in LittleBigPlanet or a Diorama art set. When people come together and communicate with each other, their cloudscapes merge into one big cloudscape as the shared thoughts and their commonalities build up their combined cloudscapes into a bigger platform for their ideas and feelings. When they're done talking their thoughts split up along with their cloudscapes, but even if their thoughts are separate now, that doesn't mean they think too small. But because they communicate with each other, their individual thoughts still gets a bigger cloudscape for all the talking, inspirations and other stuff they have received, that's what you call thinking big.

When there's a faraway thought like an airplane filled with thinking or sleeping passengers or even birds with thoughts, Ra can still go to them by using his trusty Fire-Snake Chain that acts as a grappling hook to reach very high places and also while he's Ra, he must not touch the solid ground like the streets, crosswalks or sidewalks. Because he can easily fall through them like a ghost until he reaches the nightmare realm, Ra has to remain on their Cloudscapes or his own cloudscape where he's safe from the ground or it's something like the floor is made of lava. When he feels like he wants to go back to his body, except it's a thousand or million miles away, he cannot just wake himself up just by pinching himself like this whole thing is a dream. No, he's a spirit, and spirits are supposed to go back to their own bodies by themselves. But there is one way for him to get back to his body quickly in seconds, he has to launch his Fire-Snake Chain at his own cloudscape and once it's grappled, he pulls himself quickly towards it like an actual grappling hook and from there, he goes back to his body.

### Cleansing Cloudscapes

But not all people have good decisions, imaginations or other good thoughts. Some decisions they are thinking about are very bad and really messed up, thus when Ra enters their cloudscapes, they are infested with Black Shadowy Evil spirits, who not only haunt them in their dreams, they also consume their thoughts and cloudscapes like head lice, and like head lice, they also leave behind bad dust that contains bad decisions, bad influences and wrong paths. And the only reason people made good decisions again is that Ra cleaned up their infested cloudscapes by fighting off the evil spirits, and aside from fighting them in the Nightmare Realm, he also fights them in their cloudscapes, and once he finishes them off, the people have good thoughts again.

But there are some people with the most terrible thoughts contained in the most infected cloudscapes filled with twisted desire, greed, selfishness and yet able to sleep at night after they go scot-free from doing evil or harming the innocents. So like in tales of the crypt keeper or Hell girl, Ra teaches them a nightmarish lesson by entering their cloudscapes and infesting them with even more black shadowy evil spirits that he kept in his Wand-er. But he's not doing it out of anger or an eye for an eye, he's overfeeding their bad thoughts with more bad spirits, it's like giving them too much power or too much of a good thing but overflowing their bad thoughts with more of them, causing a nightmarish scenario to manifest in front of their eyes or backgrounds and trap them as the darkness in their hearts and minds spillover from the cloudscapes into reality, making them think and feel like everything they see is real. After they suffered their punishments (which reflect their crimes) from their own sins, the evil spirits become so overstuffed with bad thoughts that they explode, causing a bad person to not only return to the human world but to have a change of heart, confessing their sins and hope to never go back to their wrong doings again and to never forget their life lessons learned while suffering in their nightmares.

After the merger of Ra and his Dimensional Mate's spirit, Ranald can still access cloudscapes the usual way. He can fly to Dreamland when asleep and merged together, but when awake, Ra and Ranald can say the magic words, and then merge into the Golden Griffin Warrior Form in order to enter a cloudscape of a sleeping person as a spirit, and then leap from it to another one, and so forth until he reaches Dreamland or the cloudscape of the person he wants to reach.

### Cloudscape Shaping

A Dreamland Beast with a Dimensional Mate can enter his Mate's cloudscape and use the power "Mind's Land" to transforms an area of the cloudscape into an inner world called an Oneirijk. The Oneirijk is a place of constancy in a person's cloudscape where while he sleeps, his soul can meet his Dreamland Dimensional Mate and together fly to Dreamland. It can have environmental effects depending on the dreamer's thoughts and emotions. As the Earth Dimensional Mate grows older, he and his Dreamland Beast Mate can shape the symbols in the cloudscape into features such as Marches, Thrones, or Gates that grant entry to those close to them then add them to the Oneirijk, making it bigger.

Of course, it has its disadvantages. First, the Dreamland Beast needs his Dimensional Mate's permission to make an Oneirijk for him and his soul. Secondly, a cloudscape with an Oneirijk that's already made is just as susceptible to being infected by the Nightmare Realm's shadowy evil spirits as a cloudscape without one. An Oneirijk can also manifest in the real world by the powers of the Dreamland Dimensional Mate, but this strains the Oneiric Beast's limits and drains his powers, leaving him and his Mate weak for a long time.

## Trivia

'Oneirijk' is a portmanteau of 'Oneiric' and 'Rijk' meaning 'realm, kingdom' or 'wealthy' in Dutch.