eswareinmal | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Characters: Shin and anyone asleep
Open? Yep!
Where: the Dreaming
When: Nighttime, RD12
What: Shin goes dream walking.
Warnings: Lots of capitalized Ds

Even in Dreams, Shin was restless. Without the normal background hum of hundreds of Dreamers, the Dreaming felt empty. Hollow.

Far to much like it had when his Dreaming had been sealed.

There were still the doors to the dreams of everyone who was asleep, even if so many of them seemed like cardboard cut outs... It was easy to spot the ones of those who weren't native of the world. They were more real, solid, and he could feel more clearly who was behind them. It was something he had noticed before, back home. The doors to fellow Dreamers were the more vibrant and real, and those who had strong powers were a close second. Idly he drifted through the insubstantial hallway, knocking on some to announce his presence, others just phasing into the dream and looking around. After all, it wasn't as if he expected most people to hear him knocking. They'd have to be aware for that, and he knew for a fact that there were no other Dreamers around and active dreamers were rare.

[[OoC: Feel free to notice Shin entering your characters dream, or to just set up a random dream for him to step into!

Edit: Also, since Shin power allows him to manipulate dreams, let me know if you don't want him to be able to with your character's dream, please!]]

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Since the ball Tatra had the same dream, not every night but most nights. The garden full of tropical plants and flowers stretched on forever beyond the small courtyard, and the band was gone. There was only a small stone table, a set of chairs and a complete tea set.

Tatra sat at one side of the round table and Tarta at the other. Both drank tea, although four cups stood empty around the double tea top. They spoke and laughed and argued, but everything was silent. She always felt as though she was watching herself from a distance.

Needless to say the whole affair was the source of some distress to Tatra and quite unsettling. She missed her sister dearly, and would have given almost anything to hear her laugh, but her subconscious would not grant her even that small favor.

When a stranger walked on the scene, Tatra's smile left her completely and she felt quite suddenly solidly within her own consciousness. Tarta continued talking and laughing in silence, as though nothing had changed, but Tatra turned to watch the stranger approach.

One side effect to having been in so many dreams was that it was easy to pick up traces of what things were from. Maybe it had been some part of the Dream King's role in the past to fix broken dreams, he didn't know. No one really did since it'd been so long since there had been one.

But the urge to reach out and just... smooth away what was bent or broken was very strong.

It was also a little rare to suddenly be the center of the dreamer's attention when he stepped inside and it made him a bit uncomfortable, like he had walked in on something private.

"Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt."

Tatra shook her head somberly and turned back to her sister. Even close enough to read her lips, her mind couldn't register what Tarta might be saying to her. It was like being trapped inside a doll house, where you were allowed to look but not touch. She was barely more a part of the dream itself than he was; merely an observer of the twisted little fantasy world.

"I miss her," she said, as much to herself as to the stranger, as though she were merely thinking out loud. Which, essentially, she was.

"That's why she's here," Shin nodded.

Reaching out, he put a hand on the dream echo of Tarta's shoulder, stilling her movement. "Or at least, your memory of her is here..."

"If I never see her again..." Tatra trailed off miserably. In the waking world she would be all smiles and sweetness, but here in her own mind she could let herself go. She wasn't happy here, and she would never be as long as she couldn't be sure her sister was safe and well.

Shin was quiet a moment. "I think that you will. Even if it's a while, I think.." he trailed off. "No, no I know you will," he corrected. There was a confidence in his tone that hadn't been there before. "There's more to your dream than this place."

Eliot writhed in the chair, just praying that the car battery would die soon. It felt like hours since they'd dragged him in here. "Chapman, stop! I can't... No!"

This, right here? This was why he normally only slept about ninety minutes at a time. He opened his eyes, pleading silently with his unitmate. "Chapman, why?"

The blond just smiled. "You know why, Eliot. And you know how to stop this." He gestured toward the gun by Eliot's hand.

"No!" he screamed as the other man connected the power again, his scream becoming wordless in his pain.

It was reflex when he encountered a nightmare, reaching out to the fabric of the dream and freezing it so that everything but the dreamer was suddenly like a painting or photo; lifeless and still. A strong enough mind sometimes would keep stubbornly stuck in the dream, staying within the picture instead of being removed from it, but most were glad to be out of whatever situation their sleeping mind had conjured for them and would break free.

Faolan's dream held green woods and blue sky and laughter. His pack was there - Mutti and Vati, Hawk and Snow, Loki, Gretel, Alanna, and everyone he loved. And he was there with all of them, playing and leaping and chasing.

Life was good.

Liara stood in a small room, in front of a bank of monitors. The technology was far and away beyond anything in the kingdom, but every last monitor was empty, blank. She simply stood, watching them, trying to find a pattern out of nothing.

"Glyph, pull up everything we know about thorns." A ball of light appears, hovering behind her. It speaks in a heavily mechanical voice.

"I am sorry, Dr. T'Soni, but I have no information on that subject."

"Damn it." She thinks for a moment. "Let's start with Species 37, then. And all information pulled from studies done on the subjects of Zhu's Hope before the invasion." A few screens light up, this time, but everything on them is fuzzy. Still, she seems happy.

Shin closed his eyes just a moment, willing himself to match the scenery around him before he stepped forward into the dream, the fabric rippling like water at a subtle breeze as his appearance changed to match what Liara's expectations of someone would be wearing.

"Any luck?"

Shin smiled, slipping in seamlessly before joining in the chase, something he never could have done in the physical world.

"My entire network has been disrupted. I've lost communication with almost half of the inhabited galaxy, and the rest is spotty, at best." She tapped a few controls and then pointed at a screen. "I can't really pull up much more data than I can already remember on the Thorian. And maybe that much on any other kind of mobile or highly reactive plant life."

She looked over at him, clearly frustrated. "Without my network, I'm practically useless." She waved at hand at the screen. "Glyph, pull up any studies done on worlds with high levels of element zero. Look for any reference to oddities in the plant life compared to worlds lacking eezo."

She turned to Shin and straightened. "So. Nothing to report that we don't already know."

"Everyone's suffering the same. All we can do it try and build new networks here and gather what information we can," Shin nodded. "Your skills are still as good as they were, right?"

She stopped and looked at him for a moment. "Finding reliable sources of information will be almost impossible."

"There's always first hand knowledge, right? If no one's reliable, then you just have yourself to rely on."

She looked up at him with desperate hope in her eyes.

"What do you mean?"

Faolan saw the new movement from the corner of his eye. Someone new was joining the fun! There was only one way to properly greet someone new.

Faolan zipped between a pair of trees to pounce on Shin, arms winding around the man.

"Did you want me to show you? It's not a future set in stone, but something like that is clear enough."

The teen gave a small exclamation as he tumbled back at the force of the pounce, laughing a bit as he fell on his rump. Oh man was it good to be out of his body, that would have killed his back if he'd been awake...

"Hey you," he greeted with a grin, mussing the boy's hair.

"Can you do that?" She blinked, for the moment surprised out of her revery. Seeing the future was something even the most powerful magic users of her world had difficulty with.

"Kinda," Shin looked a touch embarrassed. "It's a little hard to show, since it spreads out a lot like a fan, because the future shifts all the time, but just to show something like where you are changing, it's not too bad. It's easier to show than to explain."

He held out his hand.

She nodded, still abnormally serious, and placed her hand in his.

"Please."

The tea party faded, leaving the two of them standing in what seemed like nothing. Shin reached out with his free hand, keeping his other around Tatra's as he focused.

After a long, tense moment, trails of images began to spread out from Tatra's feet in a fan like pattern, each thread branching off into two or more until the space before them was filled with them.

"Walk with me," Shin instructed, not letting go of her hand. For a short while, all scenes at their feet were from around Schwanheim, familiar and unfamiliar faces moving by in ways that were hard to see across the threads. But then, like a pattern changing color, a thread would shift, the background of the town vanishing, replaced with something far more fantastic and lush that was familiar to only Tatra until the entire fan had changed.

Everything is burning.

The colors are inverted red and gray and white. The moon is unforgiving. There's something wrong about the smell of the smoke, but it's too thick to see the source.

He steps over glowing coal remnants of wood and dirt, following the smoke. Underneath his foot, a charred plank cracks, falls apart; his family crest is split down the middle before it breaks into pieces.

"You're a failure."

He whips his head to the left and looks down at the child, himself, seven or eight and cruelly smiling. The nasty twist is out of place on his soft features, still full with baby fat.

"How could you let this happen?"

To the right, it's The Avenger, taller and stronger and prouder even at twelve, dressed in his old black jumpsuit and radiating anger so strongly that a beam next to him explodes in fire. Sasuke tries to put his arms up to shield his face from the shower of sparks, but he can't move.

It burns.

"You failed them." His child-self points and the smoke clears, revealing the source--what looks like a hill, a pile of old clothes. Sasuke steps closer.

His mother, eyes wide and unseeing, is at the top of the pile, her body stiff and unnatural. His family's corpses, hundreds of them, are stacked and burning.

The smoke tastes like spoiled, charred meat.

Sasuke gags and falls to his knees, and his hands splash in hot, sticky black fluid. Blood, pooling from their bodies, seeping close to him, staining his clothes.

He tries to back away, but he can't move. The child laughs and The Avenger grabs Sasuke's hair.

"You'll never be clean," he growls, and shoves Sasuke's face into the blood. It's halfway up to his elbows, now.

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