[OOS: This is intended to be a worst fears dream, but it might also qualify as or be angsty fantasy. it's just the idea that came out when I started it. I hope having elements of a different prompt won't cause issues, but I won't complain about the deduction if you feel it necessary.]
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Elis hated going to sleep. She had chronic nightmares, and while she had friends who could help afterwards, it didn't help with the dreams themselves. It didn't help with the fact that she had been having them since childhood, with no reason why, nor nothing she could to to stop them other than staying up until she collapsed. She envied the elves, who didn't have to truly sleep, but it wasn't up to her. She was human, and humans had to sleep or die, like most species.

She was in college now, and only sleeping by literal collapse wasn't an option. So she went to bed anyways, and utterly dreaded what would follow. It was a nightly routine by now.

----

Vast. That was the first thing that struck her, how huge she was. (Every dream, that surprised her. She had limits, even within the dream, but they were so much lower.) Mostly, that was in a metaphorical sense. So much she could do, so much she could be, so much she instinctively knew. She didn't even need to move to change things.

She caused an earthquake on a deserted moon without an ounce of effort, just genuine intent. She shattered a star in a deserted solar system with equal ease. She hurled the now-dead planets into one another, uncaring for the chunks of rock it sent soaring into space (A tiny part of her worried that the continent-sized chucks would kill someone. The rest ignored it.) She tried unmaking a black hole, just to prove that she could. (The tiny part wasn't the only part of her anxious during the process, that time.)

She then turned her attention to a half-dozen inhabited planets at once, watching what their people did, without moving her physical form. For a while, she entertained herself in this way. Watching people in quantities only appreciable on a statistical level, learning and seeing their actions. Soon- relatively speaking- she became bored with it.

Then she began experimenting. Setting up situations to see how specific people reacted, triggering or averting global conflict, causing one to fall into ideal prosperity, seeing how long it took to fall apart. Manipulating another to drive itself into extinction. Still not truly present, but more active than before.

Design, creation, art- they had never interested her. She wanted to understand. She didn't care about the people on those worlds. They were nothing to her, nothing. She could hold the concepts of the universes in her head, and these things were nothing more than animals. (A tiny part of her whispered horror at this belief. The rest continued as if she had not heard it. Perhaps she hadn't.) There were less and less questions she cared about every day.

She didn't care about worship, either. Some of her kin played god for species, the worship and adoration fueling their own narcissism. She studied them and how their worshipers' cultures responded, but never did it personally. It reminded her too much of the pit, and that was the only place or thing she truly feared. The pit- the greatest wonder and horror her predecessors had created- called for her as boredom and disinterest grew greater. She would not go there, not by any means. If she went in, she would never come out again. It might as well have been death itself, for all it mattered.

She had an idea, for a grander experiment than ever before, a larger project than ever before. She conveyed it to the remnants of her kind, who found the idea equally entertaining. A game, for real stakes, but no stakes harmful. It wouldn't be a war, not truly- every sapient species would profit from play, even if some would profit more, and that would be true from the highest down to the individual. It would simulate the world exactly as it was in truth.

She did not care much for the idea of it, herself, but she knew her kin would. She watched how they interacted, now that they had an incentive to do so. That had been why she'd convinced them to do it in the first place. Now there was another culture, one that was all-but-impossible to truly understand.

This entertained her for even longer. Between the way other species interfaced with the game and how her own species now both chose and had to interface with itself, this was a fascinating sociological study. Eventually, though, as she went from measuring her age in millions of years to hundreds of millions of years, she grew bored again.

She had seen her kind as from a dying race who had advanced too fast and then isolated themselves in either the pit or in making an equal paradise for themselves in reality. She had seen every instant of the transition to the massive society they now had. Still minuscule compared to the population they had before the pit, but nearly as vast as any society. She still didn't understand her own kind completely- there was simply too much to know for that- but there was nothing left to know that she both believed she could know and cared to know.

She considered doing something truly horrific that would inevitably get her killed- for she could feel no difference between the pit and death, except for what it left you feeling for all eternity- and decided not to. (Not due to the tiny voice screaming at her for even considering that idea. It had no power here, or maybe it never was here in the first place.) It wouldn't teach her anything. It would be boring.

There was still a question she had to ask, one she'd never asked before, though. One no one could answer, for those who know the answer can't convey it to those who don't, and that blade cuts both ways.

After all, the mortals don't know what it's like to be approach godhood, either.

So she devised an experiment for that, and enacted it.

-----

Elis woke up screaming in horror. Not another godhood dream. Every time, she did horrific things, and every time she was powerless to stop herself. She had tried to learn lucid dreaming, but it did no good. It helped, but only when she didn't have these nightmares.

She needed comfort. She stumbled down the hall to her friend who helped her with this, moving on reflex towards their location.

She never noticed that she couldn't have known where they were, even after she entered the coffee shop she'd never visited before. She was too busy dealing with the horror of watching a civilization crumble, and a small subset of the horrors that entailed. Today, that was the thing that she remembered from the dream. Today, that was what her friend would be helping her deal with. Tomorrow, if the nightmare returned, it would be a different vision of horrors that she would be to blame for, and a different friend to vent to. By distributing it, she managed to hide exactly how bad the nightmares had gotten.

She just wished the nightmares would go away.

Finished the story!or the part i'm entering at least

Sorry to bother but what was the theme of the story supposed to be?

ROUND ONE
Round one ends March 1st, 12PM game time!
Choose and write for ONE of the following:
- An angsty fantasy
- A realistic fiction story of any type
- A dream scenario in which the character sees their worst fear. They wake up, but things don't seem normal...

I think this is what they mean by "theme" of the story, because I don't see anything else.

Great story! ^-^
Wonderful, and don't worry about multiple prompts, you won't get points taken off.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=57176&page=7#70 Author: Aphelion Time Posted: 2/14/2018 at 8:01 PM Your writing is good- don't assume otherwise. Now, if you don't write, you'll never discover how good it is. Go ahead and write~

Well, I assume mine's terrible, because once i give up on it being excellent or flawless, it's so much easier to write. But that's channeling imposter syndrome to my advantage, really. I try to put that assumption down later, and upon re-reading, my work's better than i think. Not good, but better than I think.

EDIT; sorry, meant to quote you, not ping you. Quote added for context.

No, no, your story is amazing!
That post was directed at another person :3

18eities is right, you are writing a story for one of the prompts listed.

Was just saying a reason why some people might find it beneficial, even if it might not be for that person. Assuming it's going to be bad lets me not be paralyzed by a desire for unattainable perfection, as happens when I don't. Nvm, being an idiot.

Oki then, whatever floats your boat ^-^
I'm not gonna nitpick stuff