eswareinmal | Action: but you never tire of dreams

Entry tags:

Action: but you never tire of dreams

Characters: Any willing dreamers
Open? Yes
Where: In your minds
When: After the party
What: Part two of the dream plot!
Warnings:

The party went on, with the beast's head on display. A proud, twisted thing. Behind false ruby eyes, it waited. And as the music became slower and the wine less plentiful, it waited still.

Those who had gazed upon it at the ball. Those who had seen it once living in the forest. All heroes who dared to look upon its face and dream still that they would be able to live another day...

There are all sorts of ways of living. In waking. In sleep. Perhaps, now, they would find one in between.

(ooc: Feel free to keep tagging into the party post! Once your characters go home and go to sleep of their own accord, that is when the dreaming will begin. Remember, it is up to you to set up what kind of world your character is trapped in and how best to help them. Plotting post is here, make use of it!

The beast's power will wane once the bulk of the dreamers have escaped his curse. If your character was not at the party but you still want to involve them in the dream plot, that is fine! They can either help get people out or have seen the beast wandering in the woods before it was killed and have caught its attention that way.

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"Hm?" Giles looks up at her, pausing in his playing, and frowns in faint concern. Here is Ginia, his wife and the woman he loves more than anyone else, and yet...there's something wrong.

"Ginia? Yes, of course it's me. What's the matter?" He sets the guitar aside. "What's happened?" Then, realizing that she's here alone, and looking all the more worried because of it. "Where's Tara?"

He doesn't seem to have noticed the lack of a necklace, yet, if only because her lack of recognition and the absence of the child she'd left him there with is currently a priority in his mind.

"I'm not Ginia."

It's probably a set of words Giles wouldn't want to hear, right up there with "Helios accidentally blew himself up while testing out a spell" and "Tara fell into the lake and drowned." Because while Giles was never particularly good at distinguishing between Ginia and Alice, Alice instantly realizes she's probably the last person he wants to see. Things have changed again and like most places, she doesn't belong here.

"I'm Alice. Who's Tara?"

"Alice...?"

The words are unwanted, certainly, but more than anything, they're unexpected.

"Ginia told me you had gone."

The news had been one of the final nudges Giles had needed to finally propose, to feel safe enough about making a family, with her and only her. But...this is Alice? Had Ginia been mistaken, or had she lied to him?

Gone? No, certainly not gone if she's standing here, though Alice always recognizes the possibility. Maybe more than Ginia, she knows it'll be a reality down the road. While she still has her uses, she knows in time her usefulness will fully fade and she'll...Alice doesn't know what will happen then. Fade away and become a bad memory of the past? Go into some dormant state, waiting for the right trigger whether it's days, months, or even years away? She doesn't know, and honestly, that scares her.

"...Did she? ...I guess she was wrong." Her words are a little uncertain because she knows Ginia would never say that if she wasn't sure and she certainly wouldn't lie about it. Right?

"Where are we? Who is Tara?"

The question takes Giles aback, if only because...well, he's not sure how to answer. He doesn't have anyone in his life who would ever have to ask that question. Everyone knows who Tara is, because she's the light of his life and he wants to show her off to the world like the proud father he is.

But telling Alice who she is seems...wrong, somehow. Like a violation, in a sense. How do you tell someone that their body had a child while their consciousness lay sleeping?

And, as Giles is grappling with the issue, the landscape flickers again. For a few seconds, Giles is standing in front of her, no guitar and no weapon and no hope in his eyes. Two figures lay beside him, the girl bleeding from the head. They're in a metal room with one way out, left there as captives or perhaps as bait.

But then the seconds pass, and the scene flickers, and Giles is sitting on the fountain again. He finally decides that there's no good way to say it.

"My daughter."

Alice tenses up as the environment changes around them. She stares at Giles, looking painfully hopeless, then over at the two people on the ground, recognizing neither of them nor the room. Then things were back to how they were and she blinks. It's all very strange and she's certain things are very, very wrong right now.

"Your daughter." Alice repeats the words back as she cautiously moves forward, approaching him like a cautious animal and taking a seat on the fountain. There's plenty of space left between them, improvement over her usual space-invading ways. It's been a long time since Luceti, but some things, like respecting people's personal space, remain.

"Your and Ginia's daughter." she says, mulling over the idea. It is strange knowing their body carried a child, brought life into the world. Or maybe just Ginia's body if Ginia had told Giles Alice was no longer around. No longer an issue, Alice thought.

"...I probably can't meet her, can I."

There's still a respectable amount of distance between them, yes. But Giles still shifts away, not entirely consciously, but he moves away all the same. His issues with Alice were never personal, not really. She just...wasn't Ginia, and whenever she was here, it meant that Ginia wasn't. They've built too much together for him to give her up to someone else, even if that someone else is, in a way, Ginia herself.

But enough time has passed that he can at least acknowledge what his feelings are, why he's feeling them, and look apologetic about it. Even so...

"I, um, I don't think she'd be fooled. She's, she's quite a bright child, is Tara. She'd probably ask questions."

Alice looks disappointed. She knows she shouldn't, that it would be expected and too strange to try to explain to a child. People were strangely understanding about things, but it's different when it's family. At least she thinks it would be different.

"I guess so," she replies all the same, shrugging it off. She looks around at their location, at some of the people about. There's someone in the distance with long green hair she thinks may be Grune, but she's not entirely sure.

"Is Helios around?" Her tone is very hopeful in that regard. Even if this place is strange, she feels it'd be nice seeing him again.

"Yes, um, Helios is around." But it's clear that Giles isn't sure why Alice would even ask. Of what he's aware of Alice's and Helios' interactions...well, she doesn't sound like she's on the prowl for someone to make uncomfortable, and so Giles doesn't understand why Helios might interest her.

"Not, um, not specifically here in town, though. Or at least, um, h-he wasn't, when I left. Still up at the castle." He nods up the hill, to where the bulk of the castle sits overlooking the land like a benevolent, ancient dragon.

A lot happened between Helios and Alice in his absence. All the twisting of the Malnosso and their experiments, but they've come a long way since her first meeting in the created space resembling Davenport. She smiles a little, a happy smile, when he mentions Helios is around, her gaze falling toward the castle in the distance.

"Are we at his home then?" she asks, remembering all the stories he'd told her about his home and his world and how beautiful it'd sounded. Once, he promised to show her, though that was during a week when neither of them were exactly themselves. But she also knew Helios had made the same sort of promise to Ginia and that idea made her happy.

To their side, just out of their field of vision, there's a strange little shift as Helios and Alice walk out of a building, both of them much less corporeal than everyone else. Their hands are linked together and Alice's head is on his shoulder as they walk away and disappear.

"Yes, we..."

Giles is, in many ways, safer nowhere else than in his own mind. It accounts for a very great deal of his personality and behavior, when all is said and done. His defenses are perfected and alert for the slightest intrustion or wrongness. It might take him a bit to rally...but he always does, in the end.

And so Giles' head whips round when he catches sight of two familiar figures out of the corner of one eye. Their backs are to him as they walk away but, even at a distance, even in a dream, there's no way he couldn't recognize the two of them. Especially not in this dream.

"...are," he finishes softly, thoughtfully, before looking back at Alice with the air of a man grasping at a straw.

"R-Romania. Hunadora county. Um, yes. Ginia and I, we, we teach, a-at the school. Have for a while, now."

Alice brings her feet up and rests them on the edge of the fountain, hugging them as she rests her chin on them. She may be a woman of thirty-two, but she still gives off the air of someone much younger. It's all very nice for her to hear and she feels happy hearing all of it, but she feels lost too. The world moved on without here. They're in Helios' world, Giles and Ginia have a child together, it's all very nice.

But she knows it's not really the case. The strange way his dream flickered, the lack of necklace around her neck. Unless there was some other sort of magic working, this place can't really be real, can it.

"That's nice. So you two got married then. I assume you two are since you have a kid, unless you knocked her up first."

Giles' expression of restrained patience is probably rather familiar to Alice, at least, as he takes off his glasses to massage away the beginnings of a headache.

"We're married, yes. Have been for nearly ten years, now."

So his surprise to suddenly have Alice turning up after all this time is, to Giles' mind, at least understandable.

Ten years? Alice carefully studies him with a tiny tilt of her head. Ten years is a very long time to be together, it's a very long time in general. A lot can change in that time and she's glad the two have been together for so long. But theta one problem that stands out in her mind, and being Alice, she voices it.

"You don't look ten years older. You would have more wrinkles if you were older. Are you using magic to stay young?" Because magic can do everything and clearly that must be the case.

Giles gives a truly admirable display of offended sputtering at the very suggestion. Alice wouldn't be the one to know, of course - no one does - but "using magic to stay young" is something of a family trait, with him. He has a pair of great aunts that look decades younger than him.

"N-No, I most certainly..."

And then it happens again, like one picture laid over another, the metal room where three injured and scared people are trapped overlays the happy scene, before flickering out again and Giles is sitll sitting there, as though nothing had happened.

"...haven't. I...I-I just, um, age well, I suppose. It's, it's been a far less stressful time than it used to be, after all. That, um, th-that probably had something to do with it."

"Who are they?" Alice asks, waving a hand to gesture at two people that aren't there with them now, at an environment no longer surrounding them. "What's going on, how did we get here, why am I here?"

Greater distress follows each question as she asks them with all the insistence of someone who is lost and confused and refusing to drop the subject. This can't be the happy, perfect, shiny world Giles wants because things keep changing and she's here. Things can't be perfect if she's here and so is Giles. She knows Helios wouldn't mind and he would be happy to see her and show her around, but Giles would mind.

"Only the best chocolate for my sweet carbuncle."

On the otherside of the fountain sit the spectral forms of Helios and Alice, both bundled up in winter clothes and cuddling against each other. Helios smiles as he feeds Alice a piece of chocolate, the image vanishing as his fingers touch her mouth.

"Why am I here?" Alice asks again, giving no indication she'd seen the vision.

Edited 2012-06-02 05:33 (UTC)

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Action: but you never tire of dreams

Or maybe just bitter

Probably just bitter.

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