Jane didn't sleep, she just stared.

They called her plain Jane. Or at least that was what the humans had started calling her, and it hadn't been long until everyone, aliens and all, had picked up the trend. Because, after all, she was quite plain. From her appearance, to her job, the name suited her well. There was no excitement in her life, there was no growth, there wasn't a great deal of stimulation or challenge; it was just the same old thing day in and day out.

But there was a trick to Jane: while every night she did nothing but sit there and quite fixedly gaze at the heavens, her mind moved. In Jane's mind, as she sat on that window ledge and stared up at the night sky above, she would travel all the way across the Galaxy. She would do the things that she never did in real life. She saved star systems from corrupt and crazed space pirates. She invented wonderful new technologies and thought up solutions to some of the Galaxy's most complex problems. She traveled to star systems and galaxies that were beyond the reach of all others. She fell in love. But despite her night-time adventures, her days were always the same: Jane went to work and she came home again.

But every single night Jane's imagination moved, grew, and always created the most fantastic and wondrous adventures. So she closed her eyes, a small smile spread across her lips, and she opened up the doors of her mind.

~~~

Jane sat at her desk, staring down at the console in front of her. Blue and green holographic images moved around an inch above the console display panel, and Jane stared at them glumly, her head propped up on one hand. She had been staring at the same damn images for almost the past hour and her eyes were losing the ability to focus.

Around Jane her co-workers chatted, laughed, and went about doing far more interesting work than that which Jane was always lumped with. The beautiful, blue-skinned, elegant Hoya that sat alongside Jane, who all the other humans called Mandy, even though her real name was about three sentences long, was chatting and laughing about the exploits she had gotten up to the night before.