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Fischer's dreams started the night before he buried his father: he chalked it up to the stress of arranging the funeral and clearing up the matter of his father's estate. Which included doing something which his father's partners had loudly objected to: breaking up the old man's empire. He was not going to walk in his father's footsteps and just be a carbon copy: he was going to make something for himself, he just had to figure out what that was.Whatever it was, seemed to do with dreams, not entirely with a specific dream of building another empire, but dreaming itself. There were faces in the dreams that haunted him: a young girl in red and a blond man with a shadow that stretched behind him, and he had to put names to those faces. He wasn't sure why, but he needed to know who these people were, why they kept haunting him. It was a splinter that had gotten caught in the whorls of his mind and he had to find someone who knew about these sorts of things to help him remove it carefully.He worked with police sketch artists and portrait painters and 3D graphics designers to help him recreate the faces and forms that accompanied him in the dream. Finding out the names that belonged to those faces was trickier, but given enough persistence and money, the right channels can be opened, and he had plenty of both commodities.The man was easier to identify: Interpol and the FBI flagged him as a man who'd been linked to a number of mind thefts, something he knew about, something that, at his father's insistence, he'd been trained to avert: the old man had always been paranoid, and the first news reports of "mind crime" or "cognitive theft" as the scientists called it, had put him in a lather.That man was an architect known as Dominic Cobb, a man now living and working in the Los Angeles area, and as soon as he had a name and an address, Fischer went to pay him a visit......The last person whom Cobb expected -- or wanted -- to find knocking on his door was Robert Fischer. He'd wanted to put the Fischer Inception behind him and move on, but that wasn't possible, it seemed. Not in the dreaming world: since the job, Mal had stopped haunting his dreams and now Fischer was there, sometimes injured by Mal, sometimes whole.And not in the waking world either, since Fischer stood before him on his doorstep. And from the look of recognition and relief and hope, this was not going to be a simple conversation."Can I help you?" Cobb asked, simply, playing the baffled homeowner wondering what brought a stranger to his door."Are you Dominic Cobb?" Fischer asked, trying to hide his nerves and only just barely succeeding.Well, the young man had done his homework. "That's me.""I...think you can help me," Fischer replied, hesitant. "I'm Robert Fischer...This is going to sound like the strangest thing, but...I think you've been in my dreams lately. Not...that way..." he added, blushing, which only made him look more like a clean-cut teenaged kid than he normally did.Cobb pulled the door open, stepping aside to let him enter. "Well, you've come to the right person: dreams happen to be one of my specialties..."