33 - Sweet Dreams

[godsoffortune]

Who: Everyone!
What: A mysterious plague of dreams is sweeping through gods and shinki alike.
When: Jan 30 & 31
Where: Wherever the dreamers go...
Summary: A strange sleepiness is spreading through the Heavens. Those who succumb to sleep find themselves dreaming vividly, and even wandering into each other's dreams. Will they be able to escape the seductive power of their dream worlds and return to reality?






Waking World

Everyone in the Heavens, gods and shinki, new and old, seems to be vulnerable to this sleeping contagion. For those who remain among the waking, it's a frightening experience: people can be found slumped by the side of roads, white-robed shinki doze at their duty posts, and some people even fall face-down into their dinner plates or drift off in the bath and need to be rescued. If you're still awake, you'll need to help them out! Are you up for the challenge? Or is this a time to flee the Heavens before the sleeping bug bites you too?

Be careful -- touching the sleepers makes it much harder to stay awake. You might be dragged into their dream even if you've woken up once already. At least it'll be easier to realize it's just a dream the second time around....

Sweet Dreams

Some dreams are hard to wake up from, and some of the dreams that come with this mysterious sleep are especially hard to abandon. Friends and family, happy times, achieving your heart's desire, or maybe your best dream is living in a world entirely made out of giant ice-cream sundaes!

It's possible to wander into others' dreams whether you understand that you're dreaming or not; those who wander in not realizing that it's a dream will find themselves swept up into the dream logic in whatever manner suits their own subconscious. Those who know it's only a dream will have the unenviable task of convincing the dreamer that their ice-cream sundae world isn't real after all, freeing them to either travel into other dreams to save their lost dreamers or return to the waking world as they choose.

Shinki characters may have dreams that involve memories that they have not regained. However, when they wake from those dreams, they will not be able to remember any detail that hints at their past-- and although other characters who witnessed the dream may, any thought of telling the shinki what they learned from the dream will freeze them with a sense of impending doom.

Nightmare

Not every dream is a happy one. Those who find themselves lost in nightmares might be trapped in painful memories, pursued by terrible monsters, falling from a great height, or just called on to write the answer on the blackboard when they're not wearing pants. Whatever your nightmare is, this, too, has to be overcome before you can escape to the waking world, and while it's easier to accept that a nightmare isn't real life, it might be much harder to fight your way through it.

Those nightmare monsters might just be a dream, but any injuries that they inflict are real. And you know what they say: if you die in a dream, you die in real life.

Mystery Dreamscapes

It's possible for more than one person to wander into the dreams of a third, and among the many dreamscapes that a sleeper may travel, some strange ones appear.


• A vast, shining building of many rooms is hung everywhere with wooden plaques that rattle like dry bones in the breeze. Each one has an urgent and desperate prayer written on it, and they keep falling from the walls, only to catch fire and be reduced to ash as soon as they hit the floor. The sound of hurrying footsteps is audible, but the dream's owner never quite comes into view.



• The street is crowded, packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers who shove rudely and refuse to move out of the way. Their voices make it almost impossible to hear, and the crowding makes it almost impossible to move. Despite this, anyone who enters this dream will have the irrational conviction that there's someone or something at the other end of the street they have to reach. As they push through the crowd, though, the people around them grow angrier and angrier, and might even start to fight back.



• A giant crystal glows blue in the middle of a room, surrounded by dozens upon dozens of tiny straw dolls in intricate traditional clothing from all over the world. A middle-aged man is crafting small dolls on the far side of the room, muttering under his breath, "This one, this one." He can't be roused or distracted from his task, except if the room's door is opened, in which case he screams and flees outside into what appears to be an endless, dense, ancient forest full of strange shadows and ominous sounds.



• A huge lecture hall is filled with students sitting in folding seats. At the front, a vast man, easily eight feet tall and wearing a tweed suit with patched elbows and a traditional demon mask, is pointing out students in turn and forcing them to come to the board to answer increasingly bizarre, arcane or deeply personal questions. He turns to point at the newest arrival.



• A beautiful springtime meadow filled with fallen twigs spreads out around the visitor, who innately knows that picking up one stick in each hand will allow them to fly. Above, other dreamers circle and swoop in the blue sky. As they rise to join them, though, flocks of giant crows almost as big as people swoop in and begin attacking the fliers, trying to knock the twigs out of their hands and force them to plummet to their deaths.

In Summary:

• Help out the sleepers
• Have a good dream
• ...or a nightmare
• Explore others' dreams
• Have fun~

Comments

Recurring Dream

[mithrarin]

That... isn't what I expected your head to look like.

[Dust crosses the line from 'not there' to 'there' with a blurry, hazy transition that seems to have no precise beginning or end. This is a dream, after all. He looks out of place here, faintly ethereal in a way, as a gentle breeze tugs at his cloak, his tail, his hat.]

[lookingforhead]

Hmmm?

[The armorclad dullahan turns properly to face Dust, holding the head in both hands at belly level. She smiles at him but then furrows her brow.]

I'm sorry...have we met?

[mithrarin]

We have.

[Dust takes a breath, unnecessarily so.]

You don't remember because you're dreaming.

[lookingforhead]

Am I? I suppose I probably am.

[The head shifts in the armored grasp to look at him, and then and turns to look outward again.]

It seems like this is the only way we see each other these days.

[mithrarin]

To be honest, I was never sure you had a head at all.

[Because that raises a lot of questions, especially with her coming to the Far Shore. What happened to her head? Is it dead too? Why didn't it come with her?]

Funny how things work.

[lookingforhead]

Maybe. But it probably has to do with how I exist. I'm not human. I can't even say if I'm mortal. Magic means different rules.

But the last time we were separated she decided she didn't need me to live a happy life. Not a rejection, but rather acceptance. I can only hope I'll be able to find the same.

[mithrarin]

Sometimes you have no choice but to go on without something you thought you could never exist without.

[Someone, maybe. No matter what he remembers, people from his life will never come back. So he has to exist without them. So he understands that thinking.]

[lookingforhead]

It's true. And it's not uncommon to make your purpose pursuing that missing thing. But that's no way to live your life. That's what she's taught me. You can still search for that missing part, but you need to find something else to live for.

[mithrarin]

And sometimes that thing is beyond your reach forever, and you have to accept it. [Like when you're dead and they're not. Like when you're worlds away.] Yeah. A reason to live, or at least a reason to keep fighting.

[The two are very different. If Dust died (again) tomorrow, what would it matter? So why not fight, when he can do so much more good by risking himself than keeping himself safe?]

[lookingforhead]

People tend to work well for that. They're not the same, and it's wrong to call them replacements. More like a new foundation to build yourself on. To support you.

[The head glances at him a bit more directly and smiles.]

So please, keep supporting her? I promise she'll keep doing the same for you.

[mithrarin]

[It's... really weird that they think of each other as separate. Apparently? He doesn't know what to say about that, but...]

I won't ever turn away from my friends.

[lookingforhead]

(ooc: Sorry, work has been Dramatic and I didn't realize this one slipped so badly)

[The head smiles, and manages to nod a bit even in its stationary position. The armor of the body clatters a bit as she wriggles her shoulders and the black shadows stream a bit thicker into the air.]

[mithrarin]

[Whatever that means, it has to be good.]

What is this place?

[lookingforhead]

This is a place of dreams.

[The head generally nods at the whole meadow before them.]

I spend much of my time asleep, but I find myself here at times. Often when she's dreaming. She doesn't remember much about the dreams I think, but it's nice when we get to be together, even here.

[mithrarin]

Oh... sorry to wander in here like this, then. [Not that he'd done it on purpose. What's he doing here in the first place, anyway?] I'm...glad that happens, though. And I think it explains a lot.

[lookingforhead]

It's alright. You didn't come here on purpose or with ill intent. I suppose that obliges us to be good hosts.

[She glances around, reading the wind and the feeling of the air.]

Still. We should likely be parting soon. Is there anything else on your mind?

[mithrarin]

Countless things. Most of them don't matter. What matters here, I guess, is just hoping you two can be happy.

[Celty is, after all, his friend.]

[lookingforhead]

I think we can. I don't know if we'll ever meet another of our kind, but she's made good friends in spite of being an Outsider. I'm sure I could too if I was able. It's the connections that we make which make life worth living, and the last time we tried to throw those away we were shown how wrong we were to try. I just wish I could have come along...but it's okay. Maybe sometime in the future.

[mithrarin]

Maybe you will. [Stranger things have happened, stranger things have reappeared in the Far Shore, but...] Maybe not. All we can do is just keep going on.