To sleep and dream.

Samir

[obligatory "how crazy are you today" roll]

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 2, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Samir

For those of you playing along at home: this is the second day in a row where Samir has recognized that he was hallucinating and attempted to reassert his place on the sane side of Paradox and Paradox has reminded him that it is stronger than he is. The hallucinations seem realer now than they did before he tried to rise up out of it.

Which means when Kiara lets Sera into her apartment today he's in the guest room with the door closed and a pillow over his head. He hasn't come out since this morning's expedition to clean the bathroom.

The door is not locked or barricaded like it was last time. It's just closed.

Serafíne

Our Sera has been here before. In that very guestroom, in fact, though she never slept in the bed. The building proper does not feel the way Kiara feels and it is a strange sensation for her to be riding up all alone in the elevator. Sid's back home, sleeping, wedged as far beneath the velvet green couch in the living room as she can get (which is not far, she's a big dog), Dan's working with one of his clients, and Sera - well.

It's early enough in the evening that she's probably only recently awoken or at least has only recently finished her tea-and-whiskey-and-crumpets breakfast and put on the things she has that pass for clothes and left her house - in time to see the sun before it sets.

--

The front door opens. The front door closes.

Amidst the innumerable hallucinations: another. A knock at the door.

Samir

Yesterday Grace told him that she thought he wanted her to go away because he had slammed the door when he heard her and Kiara speaking out in the entryway. He had mistaken them for hallucinations. It took Grace identifying herself for him to get up and open the door.

So he hears the knock at the door. But all of the noises he has been hearing lately have been threatening or terrifying. Sera will have to excuse him if he sounds a bit unhinged when he says, "GO AWAY."

Serafíne

Mind 2 / Prime 2 - Calm / Hope's Birth. Difficulty: 5 -1 (using a focus she doesn't need)

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Serafíne

Correspondence 2 to get that effect to Samir. Difficulty 5.

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Samir

[awareness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

He shouts Go Away and hey, that particular noise that asserted itself through the cacophony stops.

"It's Sera," the distracted murmur from the other side of the door. Her hand is still on the wood, and there's something music about the intonation of her name. A beneath-the-breath hum that sounds like the edge of the lullabye. If that is an hallucination, at least it is a soothing one. Feels almost like the crooning noise one makes to an injured animal.

And then some particular note - what is it about a lullabye? - dovetails into another, and it isn't even a major interval, no. It is something quietly minor, some hint of dissonance that seems settling rather than threatening.

This warm pulse of not-precisely-wellbeing, but perhaps instead: a strange calm, of the the-world-is-fucked-up-but-you-can-survive-it sort.

Samir

Around the same time that Sam is recognizing the Working of someone he may or may not recognize Sera is identifying herself through the door. Thus far his hallucinations have only been of the auditory variety. The day they start to manifest as physical entities with whom he can interact is the day the rest of them will have to start worrying about a Marauder taking up residence in Denver.

So Sera starts to hum. Sam peels the pillow off his head and goes to the door and opens it.

That sense of calm comes over him like a drug haze. His hair is unrestrained and he's wearing a pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt that has seen better days. Socks instead of bare feet. His eyes are a bit bloodshot from not sleeping and he's been chewing on his lips. Nervous habit.

"Hey," he says. He sounds as worn out as he looks. Steps back and holds the door open enough that she can read an invitation in the motion if she wants to. "What's up?"

Serafíne

Sera is dressed 'up' today in a (very) short pleated plaid skirt and a loose man's button-down beneath her favorite leather jacket, which has been altered and augmented with patterned studs and patches and zippers and fobs and safety pins, of course safety pins, and she has a bicycle chain wrapped three times around her slender throat as a choker and her shit-kicker boots and thigh-high fishnets, the neat little point of joinder between garter and garment visible, yes, and marked with a sweet little black bow.

Sunglasses hide her eyes and give him a doubled-reflection of himself. Behind those lenses she is giving him a quick, ticking sort of once-over.

"I heard you were in a pretty bad place." Her right shoulder curls and he steps back and the door is open and she can take that as an invitation, and so she does. "Thought I'd see if I could help. You don't look like you've slept much."

Longer study of his face with that, though again: her own eyes are concealed behind her glasses. There is that sense of fixed attention that feels avian in that precise moment - perhaps it is the combination of delicacy and precision.

Samir

The fact that he can't see her eyes would make him nervous if she had not forced his mind into calmness. As it stands he doesn't feel the same compulsion to try and meet her attention that he may have otherwise. Certain people he is okay with talking to without eye contact and certain people he is not.

Hard to tell where Sera lies on that spectrum. They haven't spoken to each other in months.

All that's in the bedroom is a closet with a set of closed doors and a mattress and boxspring without a frame to hold it off the floor. It is still made with hospital corners. She can see the imprint of where he had been lying a moment before. The ghost of a dent at the far stage-left side of the mattress. A pillow tossed aside.

Right now he hovers by the wall with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie rather than moving to sit. He does not engage in any of the rituals he would normally even if he is looking at the bike-chain choker instead of her face.

"I don't know how anybody can sleep through this."

Serafíne

Is he made uncomfortable by her eyes being hidden? (Per + Empathy) / Seeing Past the Mask

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]

Serafíne

The bike-chain-choker is simply wrapped, the ends left loose. Three loops around her neck, inside the crisp white collar, above the sharp cut of her collarbone. Something about the juxtaposition of metal and skin.

"Dreaming's one of the ways we work through our shit."

The quick twist of her mouth, wry. Her right thumb slips all thoughtless over the bronze ring she always wears on her right index finger.

"People who are sleep-deprived enough start hallucinating on their fucking own. Without any of the rest of it.

"What about meditating? Have you tried that?"

Samir

Sam frowns when she uses the word 'hallucinating.'

Maybe that's why they call it Quiet. Because the reality that the rest of the world hears falls away decibel by decibel until all the afflicted is left with is his own madness. Last time Sera saw him he was just about blind by it. Sensory overload and too-close distance to the attack that put him there.

Today is one of those days when he can't ignore the things he's hearing. When he accepts them as real. For a moment he realized he was hallucinating and tried to fight it but the noises only crescendoed.

"How would meditating help?"

Serafíne

"I don't know that it would," she tells him, still quiet and pretty strangely sober for a Sera. This sharp breath out. "But there's a disconnect between what you're seeing and the reality everyone else is sharing, right now. I've been on some bad trips.

"This is different, right? But not that different. You've got a fucked up concussion because you broke the rules everyone else agrees to and so now you're getting hit with the very edge of what it would be like if we didn't agree on any of it, any of it at all.

"But you're not some teenager who took a windowpane and is watching the ceiling melt. Your mind belongs to you. You've got a Will.

"I mean it seems to me that you can maybe suffer-through right? And it'll all come out in the wash. Or you can try to wrestle with it."

Samir

Nothing the Cultist is saying isn't true except for maybe the part where he ended up in this predicament because of a spectacular display of backlash. He had not been performing vulgar magick at the time of the breakdown. Kiara did him the kindness of keeping the particulars about the inciting incident off of Ginger. Means he won't have to relive it later when he finally gets back to his trailer and recharges his phone.

The problem is Sam has been wrestling with it for several days. Every time he fails to pin it down he runs the risk of making it worse. He will have to try again later. Right now even if he feels no distress and feels as if everything is going to work out in the end he is not physically capable of accepting that that far-off persistent scream or those two voices whispering under the floorboards or the sound of blood dripping behind the drywall aren't real.

He'll survive until tomorrow. Then he can try again.

"Yeah," he says. She can see on his face that he isn't convinced because Samir is a terrible liar. Or he wasn't listening. His eyes had been slowly sinking from that bike chain down to the floor as she went on speaking. Now he blinks and his eyes snap back up to her face. Would meet her eyes if those shades weren't between them. "Yeah, no, you're totally right."

Serafíne

"You don't believe me." Her mouth twists, wry. This strange, enduring tension between her absolute forwardness, her challenge, her bravado, and something else very real, all sharp and quick, beneath. Bravado wins out, always. Or at least, it is almost all the world sees and that must be the way she likes it. Look at how she's dressed.

"I can help you, if you want to try it. I can take you to a dream-realm. It's mine - but I think from there I could find a way for your back your own dreams, not as a Sleeper, but with your eyes open.

"Or at least, I can help you sleep, mind and body, for real. Then tomorrow, you'll be stronger."

Samir

For a moment he looks as if he's going to attempt to argue with her. Like no no no I totally believe you. But he is too zenned out to argue with her right now especially when he can't lie to begin with.

Of course he doesn't believe her. He's hearing the earth screaming and every time he walks past Kiara's house plants they start talking shit. Logic doesn't have a lot of pull here.

Sleep though. That's the one thing he's found makes it so he can't hear all this shit. Makes it easier to deal with the next day. Sam considers her offer. Though his gaze drifts away again it's because he's thinking. It's less effort to accept help than to try and turn it down.

He's learning. Sort of.

"Alright," he says. Looks back up from the floor. "Thank you."

Serafíne

"Alright to sleep?" Clarification is pretty damned necessary. Consent, see: before she goes meddling with another's person's mind, another person's dreams. "Or to sleep-and-dreams?"

Samir

The world is fucked up but he can survive it.

Sera asks him to pick one of the two options and he laughs an exhausted laugh that flashes teeth but lacks mirth. Having seen him stoned before she can state with certainty that he is not acting stoned right now. Even stoned he feels the jangling of anxiety under his skin. That compulsion to act out rituals. Right now he just looks like he's misplaced his last fuck.

Plus the last time she offered to help he panicked and hurt her feelings and she called him an asshole.

"Whatever you wanna do, man," he says and crosses the room to sit down on the mattress. "Either one is alright. It's your dream-..." What'd she call it? "... thing."

Serafíne

Sera reaches up and takes off her glasses then. Slides them from her face onto the crown of her head, where they hold back the mass of her hair. Then a moment later, entirely off.

She tucks them into some hidden pocket of the leather coat, before she takes that off too.

And she's in motion throughout: the glass and the coat and her feet solid on the hardwood floor, crossing to - well - there's no place to sit, so she takes off the coat and slides down the wall to sit cross legged at the head of the mattress. She's done that before: that slide-down-the-wall belongs to late nights and many different kinds of drugs. Sometimes, pineapples are involved. Sometimes, she just starts packing a bag insisting that they go somewhere, anywhere, right fucking now.

Tonight she's almost-sober and the room is bare not because its occupant spends too much time partying to bother furnishing it and she reaches to start unlacing/toeing off her boots as she rests against the wall. Gives him a look if he's still sort-of upright.

"Lay down."

--

And the way this starts, is: she sings.

Serafíne

Mind 3 / Life 3 on Samir: Restful Sleep. Difficulty - 6. -1 (time) -1 (using a focus that isn't required)

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 2, 7) ( success x 1 )

Serafíne

OH COME ON SERA. +1

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

Hmm. Need Another Success.

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )