I had a dream about Pretty Cure. Not the kind where I watched an episode from the sofa. I was in it, seeing everything through the main character's eyes. I couldn't even tell what my costume looked like.
What I did know was that our team had five members, we were traveling together in a car, and by the end we would be digging for our lives.
This was supposed to be a magical-girl adventure. Apparently nobody told the villain.
The lunchbox had a nasty surprise
It started with thin strips of metal. Touch one and you instantly fell asleep. A surprisingly sinister power for something so small.
Then I discovered that the bottom of a lunchbox was packed with these sleep-inducing strips.
Who hides a trap under someone's food? Are we doing lunch or a kidnapping?
The clue made us suspect that an enemy might be hiding in a nearby house, so we headed over to investigate. So far, it was a reasonably normal mystery episode.
A five-person car ride turned into a chase
All five of us were in the Pretty Cure team's car when a suspicious vehicle started following us. It wasn't content to tail us, either. It charged straight at our car.
I defended us with a hardened shield, knocked the attacker back, and used a confusion-like ability to keep the danger away. Every power I had was suddenly useful.
But we couldn't shake the pursuit. We fled down a road and found a dead end.
Great. We'd driven straight into the enemy's ideal trap.
The villain started chanting. A nuclear bomb arrived.
Cornered, we watched the enemy begin some kind of incantation.
And what did the spell bring down?
A nuclear bomb.
This villain went from putting people to sleep, to ramming cars, to nuclear annihilation in about three scenes. The escalation was completely unreasonable.
Forget a flashy finishing move. The new objective was simply: keep all five team members alive.
Dig down. Fill above. Hurry!
So we started digging into the ground.
It worked like Minecraft: dig downward, quickly fill the space above you, keep descending. And I wasn't alone. The other four Pretty Cures were digging with me.
There was one small problem. In dream logic, the earth forming our ceiling kept pressing closer after the blast.
Dig below. Fill above. The ceiling closes in. Dig faster.
“Come on! Make it! Make it!”
I wasn't watching this happen to a character. I was that character, desperately trying to outrun the collapsing ground. This was dream physics, of course, not a real-world nuclear survival technique.
We survived. The world above hadn't.
Somehow, all five of us made it.
Then we surfaced. Everything that had been on the ground was gone. As far as we could see, there was only desert.
We had started out investigating an elaborate lunchbox trap. We ended up standing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The strange part is that the dream had an actual plot: find the clue, investigate the house, survive the car chase, get cornered, dig to escape, discover the aftermath.
Five Pretty Cures. No world-saving victory. Just five survivors with excellent digging instincts.
Exactly what age group was this show supposed to be for?
