Take my hand....

[yumemi_no_ou]

Characters: Shin and anyone.
Open? Yep
Where: In your dreams
When: GHB 14
What: Shin's playing around with the Dreaming to try and find some of the answers. Or at least something more than he can find in the Waking.
Warnings: Shin will likely god-mod the setting of whatever dream he enters. It's just kinda what he does. Also, purple prose inner monologue. Again, it's what he does :)



There was sometimes a fine line between the Dreaming and the Waking. Like twilight times between day and night where the memories of dreams still lingered even as tired eyes looked forward into the daylight.

It was a tricky state to replicate, but something Shin had been working on ever since he had realized that his soul didn't fit right in his body any more. Walking the Waking world as a Dreamer, bridging the two worlds as only someone who was becoming the Lord of the Dreaming could... it was almost easier than walking while awake in his broken body.

The only trouble was that it was as if he were a ghost, drifting effortlessly through the streets, searching for the echoes of dreams from the houses around him. The pale bubbles of the locals paper-thin dreams were like those from soap, popping as he drifted near, fading at the slightest touch like shadows to the light....

It was frustrating. To go from a world so rich in dreams, where every person who slept had a rich full dream he could walk into, to one where the number of true dreamers were like flowers in a desert....

He smacked away the thin dream of a napping guard out of spite as he drifted by. Surely someone with a soul was asleep...


[[OoC: Anyone sensitive to spirits or whatever, feel free to spot Shin floating around in town. Everyone else, set up a dream and receive a visitor!]]

Comments

[steelhearted]

The garden is becoming more mazelike--overrun and darker, with thorned vines reaching out into the path, the briars rising overhead and blocking the sun. His chest begins to grow tight, but he follows her laughter anyway--if he concentrates, he can follow the sound of it and catch a glimpse of red curls and white flowers, a gold silk slipper.

Abruptly, the maze ends--she is standing in a lone beam of light, directly in the center of a ring of thorned, tangled vines. She looks up at him and holds out a single white rose.

He steps forward, trance-like, and into the light. Her hand is cool where she takes his and wraps it around the stem of the rose.

"I'll be waiting for you," she says, and her hands fall away, and as they do so she begins to fade, backing away from the light and into the darkness. "I believe in you."

He blinks and she is gone, and the rose in his hand has withered.

"Aine!"

[yumemi_no_ou]

There's an uncomfortable feeling, like he's seen something he shouldn't have, leaving Shin awkwardly standing apart font the dream, the fabric of it crumbling slightly around him to leave him standing in a spot of nothingness, very clearly an intruder.

[steelhearted]

The library at Dinas Clogwyn. The weight of Sir Olwen's sword is heavy at his hip, awkward and out of place. Much like the stranger, who looks oddly as though he has been cut and pasted into the setting--Yuan knows every single soul who lives here, and he's never seen anyone who even resembles this man.

"Do you have something to tell me?" he asks, keeping his distance. More likely from Olwen than from his mother--she being a witch is much more practiced at seamlessly integrating her messengers into his dreams.

[yumemi_no_ou]

Shin shook his head. "I'm just an observer, not a prophet."

[steelhearted]

"Where do you hail from?"

Apprehensively. If it's some sort of dream magic, a curse or scrying, he doesn't want to open himself up any more than he already has--but the magic is being done to him, not by him, so he's not sure he has much of a say in the matter.

[yumemi_no_ou]

"Wherever I can catch a cab from," Shin replied, deadpan before cracking a slight smile. "Sorry, um... " He ran a hand through his bangs. "There's no way I can answer that without sounding cryptic or melodramatic or just vague as hell."

Way to ruin the mood there, Tensou. Good job.

[steelhearted]

"Not from here."

Obviously. He frowns a little, looking over the stranger's odd features. "Are you under orders, or was it accidental?"

Yuan didn't know much about the inner workings of magic, but he still recognized it when it threw itself at him.

[yumemi_no_ou]

"Neither. I just wanted to see what was," Shin shrugged. "Real dreams are rare in this place, after all."

[steelhearted]

As opposed to fake dreams?

[He finds that amusing. Everyone dreams, don't they?]

[yumemi_no_ou]

More or less, yeah. [[he smiles]] Sort of like finding a painted background instead of the world outside your window.

[[he paused]]

...no, that's a crap way to put it. Um... More like thinking you've found a gold coin only to find that it's a chocolate coin. Only just the foil on the outside because the chocolate's not even there.

[[....yeeaaah that wasn't much better, was it?]]

[steelhearted]

I'm not following.

[He smiles apologetically.]

My dreams--it's not because of me. Magic has a way of--finding me, I suppose?

[yumemi_no_ou]

Main character syndrome or something like that? [[That guess came with a smile]] It's more to do with everyone else than you, though. People in this place... unless they've been imported by whatever the heck it was that brought us all here, everyone's paper thin.

... or locked away. It's weird.

[steelhearted]

Something like that.

[It's true that this sort of thing is usually relegated to stories.]

Paper-thin or locked away.

Which gives them fake dreams?

[yumemi_no_ou]

They feel fake. If you can't even go near enough to see what they are without them popping like soap bubbles they can't be very real, can they?

[steelhearted]

I've never been in anyone else's dream before, so I couldn't say.

[yumemi_no_ou]

Most people haven't. Unless they're Dream walkers.

[steelhearted]

Is that a kind of ghost?

[yumemi_no_ou]

[[a blink]] Not.... really. Just.. a person who can walk between dreams when they're asleep.

[[Though he guessed he could be considered a sort of ghost back home, but that was because he didn't fit in his body any more... and that was way to complicated to get into.]]

[steelhearted]

Huh. The only people who have visited my dreams--actually visited, not just me dreaming about them--have been dead.

[yumemi_no_ou]

[[a blink. Wait..]]

You've had that actually happen...? You're sure they were the actual people coming back and not just a regular dream?

[[It took a lot of self control not to just reach out into the dream and find out himself. If that was true...

A real Dreamer? In this place where people barely dreamed at all?]]

[steelhearted]

Only a few times. Usually it's my mother trying to warn me of something, or my knight letting me know I'm straying off my path.

[The stranger's reaction is odd--almost disbelieving.]

I can tell when it's Sir Olwen, because he's as terrible as putting himself into my dreams without me noticing as you are. [A smirk.] With my mother, I often don't realize she's spoken to me until I wake.

[yumemi_no_ou]

[[The smile that blooms over Shin's face is the warmest it's ever been and he's unable to help the feeling of utter relief, joy and sense of everything bring right with the world that escapes into the displaced patch of Dreaming around him.

Another Dreamer. Fuck YES! Even if it was a type of Dreamer he hadn't even met yet, it was still-- heck, he couldn't even express it. He wanted to get back to being the King of Dreaming and Dreamers so badly that he was just so overjoyed to find someone that would have been one of his people back home.]]

Normally I do pretty all right. Just not when I walk in on something personal like that. It's kinda like walking in on something you really shouldn't have seen, you know?

[steelhearted]

Uh, not--not really?

[He returns the smile, although he's a bit confused as to what prompted it in the first place.]

[yumemi_no_ou]

[[A blink]] You don't think that was a personal dream?

[steelhearted]

No, I mean--you asked me if I knew, and...I don't. I'm not even sure I know what it is I'm supposed to know or not.

[He scratches the back of his head for a minute, glancing to the side.] But I suppose it wasn't that personal, either. Just my wife saying hello.