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

[bakusatsuo]

[Bakugou wakes up as well, leaning on a wall near Zhao. It takes a moment to get his bearings, and then with a grimace he's peeling his cheek off the wall. It's probably got some kind of weird pattern pressed into it after sleeping against it for god knows how long.]

...the fuck just happened... [The dream hasn't exactly fled from his mind, but between his disorientation over that and being awake, it's not going to be a narratively coherent memory for a few minutes yet.]

[wildguardian]

Ugh. [Zhao's not leaning on the wall; he's slumped at its base, and his head is killing him. He sits up, prodding at his temples delicately, and emits another heartfelt groan, one that might be hiding a couple of swear words in the trailing hiss at its end.]

Fuck, what'd I drink?

[Whatever it is, it hit him like a bus. He wistfully contemplates the idea of lying back down until the world stops spinning, but he knows he'll regret it later. Find a bed, then pass out. That's the order of things. At least he'd had good dreams; the details are fading, but it'd been a New Year's party, good food, friends... he can't remember which friends. Bakugou'd been there. It must have been Ginia, too. And whoever else: he doesn't have that many friends yet.]

[bakusatsuo]

Don't know if you drank anything. [The words are muttered as Bakugou straightens fully, raking a hand through his hair to fix any mess (beyond the usual) that might've been induced by the weird sleeping position. Unlike in the dream, his cognizance of his situation and surroundings is flooding back fast.] Lots of people have been falling asleep all over the place recently, remember? I think it happened to you. And then I passed out too while I was trying to wake you up.

[wildguardian]

Right. Right, yeah. [That kills his desire to roll back into bed and sleep off the pounding in his temples. How long has he been out here, anyway? And how long did Bakugou wind up collapsed next to him?]

So how'd it wear off? I don't remember a fucking thing after starting back for the temple.

[He must've collapsed somewhere in there; it gets fuzzy. And then he'd been dreaming, apparently.

Weird.]

[bakusatsuo]

I ended up in your dream somehow. I basically told you to wake up. That's pretty much it. [Bakugou shrugs. He's obviously not going to tell Zhao any dangerous details, but he doesn't see any need to lie about the generalities of the situation.]

It's about the only thing I remember.

[wildguardian]

Huh.

[He blows out a breath, at last, and shakes his head.]

Well. Guess we're both lucky to get out that easy, then. Thanks for the save, boss. I think I'm going to go check around the temple, make sure we don't have anybody else passed out, then take a look at the forums... has this been happening to other people too?

[How long was he out? It's unsettling not to be sure.]

[bakusatsuo]

Yeah it has. Yours isn't the first fucking dream I've ended up in, so I can save you checking your phone. [Bakugou rubs a hand over his face.] Had some dreams of my own, even. I dunno what the hell this is, but it's going around.

At least your dream wasn't goddamn dangerous. Some of 'em have been.