He falls asleep on a mattress in a bare room and there is - fuck - magick - the dark sweet fall of sleep and then, and THEN: you know. Waking again, the strange disorientation that accompanies waking in a dream. The sudden arrest, honeyed and surreal.
--
It is dark, midnight or later, he can feel that in his bones, and Samir finds himself standing in what seems to be the lower formal garden of a manor house, which is bright and dark and brooding against a spangled night sky. Everything here is fine and strange and ordered; well kept boxwoods and perfectly pruned roses in a sunken garden surrounded by cedars. At the center, a pool of dark water reflects the scattered stars in the sky. Marble stairs lead to the dark bulk of the manor house, or down toward an open lawn silvered with starlight, framed by a dark copse of wild, wild woods.
--
There's a girl there, too, seated on one of the marble plinths beneath a statue of Diana the Huntress. This great mass of curly dark hair pulled away from her face. Her burnished skin, her quick dark eyes. She's watching him and rises when he seems to wake, to come-to, not steady precisely, but quick, white-rabbit like. Seems like she belongs here: and it is Sera, of course it is Sera, but different from the Sera he knows. More like the eighteen-year-old who stumbled out of Heathrow so-many-years ago. The dark hair, the thrift-store chic.
"C'mon. I think we gotta find you a way back into your own head."
Already in motion, but whether they go down-the-stairs or up, she seems to be leaving up to him.
SamirThis isn't a mindscape he entered into against his own volition. It doesn't even feel like a mindscape. He's been in a mindscape before. Two separate Seekings and the feeling of entering into a dream world is a difficult one to describe. Like it takes a certain amount of practice and skill to tell another person what it feels like to fall asleep and then realize you're dreaming. Most folks never realize they're dreaming.
He doesn't realize he's hallucinating back in the meatspace.
Samir does not have the conscious realization that he is in a dream. Moves forward on instinct. His subconscious doing all the work and this isn't a place his subconscious would have built. He moves forward through it without thought or fear all the same.
He does recognize Sera though Sera is younger than he knows her to be. Will not register the difference until he awakens later.
"Do we have to? Yours is way nicer than mine."
But his subconscious is the one leading him. His subconscious knows that the root of the problem isn't the outside world. It's him. Can't stay in the demesne forever. Their combined motion takes them down the stairs and out beneath the star-dotted night.
SerafíneMind 3/Prime 3: getting samir outta her head and into his own. Dif 7 (vulgar no witness) -1 focus when not needed) -1 time -1 quint.
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (5, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneAnd one more:
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneThe creature gives him a direct, skeptical look. Every line of her teenage self - the bravado, the arrogance, the raw, unembellished challenge - evident in the body she wears. Narrow hips and skin-tight denim, this wide old leather belt. Silly fur vest like a dead muppet over a band t-shirt and an expression that is direct and not-especially reassuring. He makes a joke and she favors him with a smirk, not precisely mirthless but private somehow. Retained. Withheld.
--
And off they go. The lacey, star-basted shadows of the lawn, the dark trees all around, the lane through the hedgerows and the strangest things somehow at once: within view and without. Barren hillside rising from a moor, dark brooding hulk of a something down a darker lane that looms larger than it seems. Passing hint of a conical-tower and then -
- and then London, the headlong rush of it, headlights smearing through the fog, neon, the Eye of London bright against a dark-cloudbanked sky, rain this constant wash, the bright lights of the tube leering and a hundred, a thousand unseeing faces and -
--
Quite abruptly, the world changes. He's inside his trailer on that dry creek bed out in the desert. The place is filthy. Half-empty Chinese take-out containers and half-eaten pizza, a pot on the stove with cloudy water and three-day-old hot dogs, cheetohs ground into the floor empty mountain dew bottles sticky all around.
Something terrifying outside, too: onetwothreefourfivesixseven voices screaming his name.
He is: very much alone.
SamirThat's about what he would have been expecting would happen when he went into his own dreamscape and why he told the young seer that her place was nicer than his. Nice is relative. For all he knows there's a monster chained up in the basement that has to subsist on a cocktail of tears and blood or else its howls attract ghosts.
Sam doesn't know how fairytales work.
Doesn't know how dreamscapes work either. Here they are though hurtling once they get into it and he can hear the yawning of the rules changing like stepping out of a pressurized cabin into a void and when his awareness shifts from that manor in the countryside to his trailer out in the middle of nowhere.
Even in a dream the mess makes him feel cold. No other feeling comes over him. Just one of the need to escape like he can drag himself up out of a nightmare if he just tries hard enough. Has to walk across the filth to test and see if he can open the trailer door.
SerafíneThe filthy crunches beneath his feet. Pretty sure he can hear the skittering of something sly and susserant disappearing into the shadows as he heads toward the door. The closer her gets the loud the noise in his head becomes: those onetwothree-four-five-six-seven dissonant voices growling and screeching in half-a-dozen plus one tongues. Even the doorknob is grotesquely sticky and there's a wet ca-rrrunch beneath his right boot like a shattered femur eviscerating a sick-wet-lung but the door opens-opens-opens-
- the sick, slick assault of hot-and-hungry breath, something dead-and-rotten from six plus one heads yawing over this ugly, molting body screams at him, needle-sharp teeth and gummed up bits of flesh stuck behind them.
wrong/sick/dead/broken/false/filth/samir
Each head screams a different word and if he doesn't get back inside he's probably going to get snapped the fuck in two as they are all careening at him from the broken gray landscape.
SamirNope.
No way of knowing if he would be as calm about this if it were happening to him in his actual trailer and not inside his mind. Depends on if magick had been worked on him. Depends on a lot of things.
His subconscious very much wants for him to stay alive. That's why his conscious mind is overrun so easily by anxiety. The thought of dying used to terrify him. Old fears are hard to slough off. So it persists here.
He steps back inside and slams the door shut. Closes himself up with the wrongness that isn't liable to get him by the midsection and pull him apart. Disgusting sure the crunching and the sticking and the smell of rotting food is disgusting as fuck but it isn't going to kill him.
In his trailer there is a small desk. On that small desk is a setup consisting of two computer monitors and a laptop. That's where he leaves his cellphones and his deck. Everything that lets him contact the outside world. It's to the desk he turns now.
Samir[perc + aware!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneThere's something that looks like his deck.
There's something that seems like too-many-cell phones.
--
Filth-encrusted keyboards covered with a line-up of whispering, carnivorous ants, but: keyboards nonetheless. Monitoring and humming electronics that have the sick-sweet smell of insects that survive on warmth and human filth burrowing inside.
--
(Somewhere in the midst of this: he understands it - briefly, wholly, entirely as metaphor. He also knows: that he is not alone. The sense of the girl: visceral/enthralling/liminal, invisible but near-to-hand.)
SamirIf this is a metaphor then he may be totally fine if he touches a keyboard that has fucking ants crawling all over it. May be better than fine since that would be conquering his fears and powering on in spite of the filth and the lack of order and so on and so forth his subconscious doesn't care about all that so much as it cares about staying alive it's the higher-functioning parts of his brain that have gotten it so fucked up.
The other part of the metaphor may be that yeah okay the filth won't kill him but he has to get out of this trailer and rejoin the real world and his subconscious isn't thinking about that so much as it is thinking well okay how do you kill a seven-headed zombie dragon. It's not like he has a sword just lying around here somewhere.
He's a fucking wizard. He could conjure up a sword if he fucking wanted to.
Still: tries to pick up the deck. That's how he works his magick. He's a technomancer. Even his subconscious doesn't believe he can surpass a necessary instrument yet. Hasn't ever tried to.
SerafíneBoom
That computer explodes in his goddamned hands.
--
Or maybe it simply turns: on. This strange, sick, wavering scroll of characters on the screen like the aura of a goddamned migraine but what the hell. They they are, glowing green-against black.
The dreambeat of noise from without: loud loud loud too-loud.
--
This happens simultaneously, here and there. The computer explodes in his hand/turns on. There is a place where he is in searing pain, tatted flesh hangs like scorched paper from the meat of his palm and the pain or no: his hand is whole, entire, just ants scurrying over the blunt edge of his fingertips, their marching drumbeat.
SamirIf the worst thing that can happen is he gets a hand blown off trying to pick up the handheld computer that lets him do everything then that is probably why he has two hands. Humans evolved to have their hands replaced by robot hands in the event that their evil darkside-serving fathers lop one off in a lightsaber battle they can just replace the missing appendage and move on with their lives.
He doesn't know who his father is. That's beside the point. On one side of what's happening the computer blows his fucking hand off and for a moment that sucks pretty hard. Somehow even in a dreamscape it hurts and of course he screams.
Or nah. It's just ants. Just ants ignoring him because why on earth would ants care about what he's doing. He shakes the handheld computer a bit to try and get them off the keys. Squints against the glow.
There's a program on the handheld computer for making something out of nothing. Hard to concentrate enough to find it and input what he wants with that seven-headed asshole screaming but Sam has a knack for concentrating in spite of distractions. It should just appear in the overhead cabinet space that he uses to store books and random hunks of metal. 'Should' is a useless word. It either will or it won't.
It will.
Samir[doo de doo rolling the thing that makes the thing happen -1 for practiced rote, -1 bc quint fuck it also spending WP bc sera was nice enough to give him some back might as well use it if he's about to get eaten by a monster]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 1, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
SerafíneSera says have another WP you poor bastard.
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 5, 6) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneI think she needs another success for that to work.
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Samir[come on you crazy bastard]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Serafíne"That's more like it."
--
Where? God, who knows. The walls are crawling and he has the sensation that the whole place could be seized the roof peeled back like a sardine tin and the darkness without made the darkness within and his hands are burning (no: just ants, a colony of ants nibbling at the tips of his fingers, sloughing up the dead skin from the trenches between the keys).
--
Should?
Yeah, okay. It will, it is, it does fucking appear.
Hell, he could've made it appear in his goddamned hand instead of settling for a cabinet.
SamirEven in his subconscious Sam is a humble piece of work. Could have made it appear in his goddamned hand. They can talk about the psychoanalytical significance of his sticking to the script reality has written for him even though the rules don't apply in the trailer and also hello he follows the rules plenty and still ends up hallucinating and mood swinging and drowning under white noise. Rules haven't gotten him anywhere. Order doesn't mean shit.
Or maybe he just really likes opening doors and finding shit where it's supposed to be. Like a prime-infused sword is supposed to be in the overhead cabinet where all his miscellaneous shit lives.
Whatever. In the hand that's screaming from remembered pain he takes up a sword that he does not know how to use and sets down the deck. Considers the significance of the not-knowing-how-to-use-it-ness and executes one more program before clipping it onto his waistband.
Nerd.
[entropy 1: locate weakness. base diff 4, leaving it there bc fuck it. also using corr bc he can't see the thing yet.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneAs if knowing or not-knowing how to use it matters here but: he opens the door and SWORD and he straps it to his body SWORD and there is from without an ungentle, urgent, rattling roar and a low-stink like a thousand anaerobic microbes dying and then: then: then: well fuck.
Whatever he was trying seems to have worked.
Another shuddering thump against the trailer door.
The thing outside is the size of a small dinosaur or large elephant, seven necks, seven goddamed weaving heads, this weird narrow body molding and slouching into indifference all tattered in the center and it is flinging itself against his front door. Yup: that is definitely where the fuck it is.
SamirThe name of the theory is If He Hits It Where It's Weak It Will Hurt More.
This is not a theory Samir has ever tested before. So maybe it's just a hypothesis. A hypothesis that could have him getting the shit bit out of him by a fucking seven-headed paleolithic menace that smells like everything he never knew he needed to be afraid of and of course the concern is that it's going to kill him but it would kill him if he stayed inside too.
If he dies here he'll just wake up atop the bed in Kiara's apartment and probably more crazy than he was before. Might as well die doing something badass like trying to kill a swamp beast with a sword.
So he waits until it's near enough his door for him to strike and then he strikes the inexpert strike of someone who has never swung a fucking sword before.
SerafíneMind 3: Being a Badass With A Sword Isn't That Hard, Samir.
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
SerafíneAwww. BAM.
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 10) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneWTF. GODDAMNIT.
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneHe has a goddamned sword and he surges through the filth and he's thinking about dying and how if he dies here he maybe just wakes up somewhere where he was but isn't that always true except for the waking up, the assembled consciousness, the machine language of life-death and the filthy trailer crawls beneath his hands and feet and he flings open the door and there is
hot death
blasting at him from without, wretched and stinking three swimming faces five seven warming, swarming tearing, hunks from his skin, the acid-barf-blast of a broken, unhinged jaw, the smearing hideousness of a laughing cataract of awareness and he hacks (clumsy) makes contact (clumsy) , and hacks (clumsy) again and thinks time the solid feedback of all jarring up his goddamned arms of CONTACT, dead-thing hissing the grotesque release of air from some vague bladder and then he
hacks again but this time it is no-hack but a swing and that point of weakness in the decaying breast where the sad meat-heart pulses there one more time and the piston-like gush of blodd from the broken wound again and again and again now a rhythm in his arm a grace to it the forward force the will the need the broken-thing breaking into
- into
- into
- pieces.
Everything is wrong. Everything is wrong. Everything is broken.
--
He sinks into sleep.
Went burrowing into his mind on a Thursday. Wakes on Saturday, ten minutes to noon. The Culist who slept sitting up throughout is gone now. Left two or three hours ago.
He through is raw, he has to take a piss, he's starving, and his mind is fucked the fucking fuck up, but you know. The walls aren't speaking to him anymore.
Nothing is.
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