She dreamed of having dinner.<br/><br/>It was a very simple dream, bordering lucidity in it's realism. Katie walked into her favorite Chinese restaurant, nodded to the hostess, who knew her by name, and took a seat at her customary table near the kitchen doors. The waitress brought her order automatically, a heaping plate of steamed sticky rice, veggie lo-mein, and a tall glass of water. She was too hungry for the affectation of chopsticks and dug right in with a fork, the food cooked perfectly to her taste. Just enough crunch to the vegetables, the soy sauce in brilliant measure...<br/><br/>She was halfway through the plate when a shadow fell across the wobbly table for two. She sighed, blotted her lips on a paper napkin, and set down her fork with deliberate annoyance before looking up. The wait staff came and went silently, unobtrusively, here. She looked up, her jaw already set in irritation.<br/><br/>The man from that other dream, the one about the auctions, was standing over her table. His torso blocked her whole view of the dining room, and he held a newspaper folded under one arm. Her heart flopped in her chest, giving her the sensation she'd only felt once before in her life, when she was on her first and only roller coaster ride and the cart she was strapped into began it's sudden, breathtaking plummet... Her eyes traveled up his body to his face, but it was shadowed against the tacky red glass light fixture hanging directly behind him. Only his eyes, and his teeth, glittered to give away the fact that he was living, and not some shadowed ghost.<br/><br/><br/>She woke up, blinking to awareness suddenly and violently. Her heart and stomach were still squeamish and filled with sparks, the sensation of dropping fast and without any sense of control lingering on. She reached up to brush the hair falling over her eyes away, but was halted  as she realized she couldn't even feel her arms. She was lying on her side on something marginally soft, though very hard beneath the padding, and her arms were so deeply asleep she couldn't even feel them. She tried rolling over onto her back and realized why; she had been crushing one of them beneath her, and they were... tied behind her back?<br/><br/>Katie yelped softly in pain as she tried again to move. Her shoulder was cramped and aching from so much pressure applied directly to the joint. The burst of unpleasantness was enough to knock the rest of the sleep from her mind. Her eyes went wide and she managed to shake the hair back from her face to take in her surroundings.<br/><br/>Before she could really absorb where she was, she saw... him. For a moment she was incredibly relieved, then something in her belly constricted. She licked her lips. Thought for a moment.<br/><br/>"Hey," she tried, her voice a low, hoarse whisper, "can you let me out of here? I can't move. And I'm starving."