trans_9 | What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

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What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

In her sealed, silent, sensory-deprived meditation room, Roxie is sleeping. It's a special sleep: for all dreams are connected, she knows, and by spinning her mind out along the web of thought, she might step into others...

[Roxie is dream-hopping, getting a look at the subconsciousnesses of the other people on the ship. So, how it works - if you're interested, go ahead and post with a dream your character is having, and Roxie will slip into it, subtle at first but more obvious as she tries to satisfy her curiosity. Just her being around will make the dreamer more lucid and more likely to remember the whole thing when they wake up.

Also, feel free to ask any OOC questions in a thread here, or poke me on AIM at 'anagramarye'.]

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It's the first time he's dreamed in a long time.

He's working with his teammates in the hangar. Bright late-morning sunshine spills through the open bay doors, and the noise of a blaring radio is overlaid with the sounds of idle chatter - shouted, to carry across the vast open space, but casual nonetheless - and tools clanging against metal. Jamie takes all this in somewhat distantly; his attention is focussed more on an open panel near his Zoid's shoulder. He contemplates its mess of wires and components for a few beats, reaching in with a pair of needle-nosed pliers -

- and there's a sudden lurch, a jump, like a sloppily-edited video, an unidentified span of time abruptly cut out. Jamie can't tell how much time is missing, just that it's gone, there's a different song on the radio than there was just a second ago and the quality of the light is different and what happened to the pliers he'd been holding?

He blinks and looks around for them, his concern over their disappearance disproportionate to anything else occurring in the dream right now. They're lying at the opposite end of the gantry on which he's standing. He knows, with that weird sense of intuition that people sometimes have when they dream, that someone took them during the missing span of time and put them there. Someone - he doesn't know who. The not knowing angers him as much as the fact that it was done in the first place.

Roxie has had her own blackouts sometimes. Even as tough as she is, being rendered momentarily unconscious is rather common when she gets battered through a wall or shaken like a ragdoll by a thing with eyeteeth and teetheyes. But it's rarely been more than a second or two, just long enough to turn life into a strobe-flicker as her head recovers. For it to be as long as this, without warning, disturbs her. It makes her think of drugging or other, more insidious things.

She leans from one of the upper catwalks, looking down at Jamie. Shadows cloak her lightly, but don't completely hide her away.

The atmosphere of the dream has changed, almost imperceptibly. Jamie can't pinpoint exactly how, so he disregards it for the time being, moving to retrieve the pliers. The emotions he's come to associate with his lapses of time - disorientation, dread, anxiety, that gut-wrenching sense of worry that there's yet another person who wants to kick his ass for whatever happened while he was out - are a mere undercurrent to a feeling of quiet, simmering rage. The pliers. Someone took them while he couldn't do anything about it and that was rude and who the hell did they think they were.

He snatches them up from the gantry and stalks back to the open panel. Its innards look untouched; he takes a moment or two to collect his thoughts and then sets to work, the upset over his blackout rapidly fading. As he works the background noise of the hangar rises to the forefront of his consciousness and then falls away again, in waves; the familiar scents of industrial lubricant and oil-stained concrete and sun-warmed metal reassure him, lull him back into a sen

- it happens again, without any warning. He comes back to himself, once more, with no knowledge of how much time he's lost or what happened during it, and his pliers are gone. At the end of the catwalk, as they were before.

The rage wells up in him again, stronger than before, as he goes to get them, stoops over to pluck them from the metal floor of the platform. He straightens, jaw clenched. Someone's aware of him - he thinks. Watching him, observing his reactions. Maybe they're the ones screwing around with his pliers, too.

"Stop it." The words are grated out through clenched teeth as he stares fixedly at the railing of the gantry. He's afraid to look for whoever it is, afraid to meet their gaze.

"I'm not doing anything," Roxie says, and her arms cross over each other on the railing of the catwalk she's looking down at him from. "I'm just observing. I probably have less idea what's going on here than you would."

Jamie doesn't recognize the voice - or, when he looks up to see its owner, the face - and this confuses him for a second or two, but he brushes it aside in his agitation. He regards the stranger warily, certain that she's just here to mock him or something.

"If you don't know what's going on then why're you here?" he counters. "Somebody's doing something. And I want it to stop. You said you'd stop." The last is blurted out before he has time to think about it, but it barely occurs to him that he might be addressing the wrong person. She's watching him flounder in his discomfort and disorientation and she's not sorry for it. Sorry she got caught, maybe. Nothing more. She deserves to be snapped at.

"If I watch long enough, I might be able to figure out what's going on," Roxie says patiently, unoffended. "Sometimes you need to be able to look from outside the familiar context to be able to see something that should be obvious."

"Well why do you wanna know what's going on?" he shoots back, proverbial hackles raised. "'s none of your business."

"I was curious," she says honestly. "And it's my duty to keep an eye out for unnatural things that might happen in dreams. This seemed like it might fit."

Unnatural. He hates that word, hates its connotations. Even now, in the dream, it embarrasses him, though the emotion is muted in contrast to the intense shame and indignation he would've felt normally. He merely frowns, eyes darting to the girl briefly. "What d'you mean, your duty? And what's - what's unnatural about this?" He flicks one arm at the surrounding hangar in a distracted gesture.

"The gaps," Roxie says. "That isn't normal. They may or may not be natural, but I can't just assume one way or the other."

For some reason she reaches over the edge of the catwalk to point in the direction behind him.

[if by any chance you could just do a little tag with him turning around that would be totally cool ;D]

Jamie wants to shoot back something defensive about how he's perfectly normal, everything's fine, so this girl can butt out and go skipping off to someone else's dream now, thanks, but then she points to something behind him. Practically out of reflex, he turns to follow the gesture, frown deepening.

"And I serve a god of dreams," she says, and now she's standing in the direction he's facing, on the same catwalk just a few feet away from him. "My duty is to him."

Jamie jerks a little at her sudden change of location - he's always surprised to encounter yet another person who can teleport, despite the several he's met over the past three years - and eyes her guardedly. So she serves a god, huh. His previous interdimensional experiences introduced him to a handful of those types, too - people who worked for a god, or were descended from gods, or claimed a god as their guardian. They all made him nervous, to one degree or another, and the girl is no exception, now.

"Wul. So what's he gonna do 'f he thinks my dreams are weird or whatever? What're you gonna do?" he asks, shifting back an uneasy step.

"Well, I'd try and help you figure out how to fix them," she says, expression edging sideways into something that's almost a smile. "But I wouldn't force you, if you weren't willing. Conformity isn't my god's modus operandi."

Jamie's frown deepens and he averts his gaze, taking another step away and turning so he can lean back against the railing of the gantry. "You can't fix 'em," he says. It's hard to pinpoint his tone; it's equal parts sullen, embarrassed, defensive and defeated. "They're just memories. 's all in the past. Nothing to fix anymore."

"Then I could help you control the dreams, at least," Roxie offers, and one might hear a tiny of embarrassment at her voice at the previous presumption. Not that she wants to admit she made it.

Jamie considers the offer for a moment or two, glancing at the girl sidelong. "What would that involve?"

"A little practice and training. Nothing dangerous or strenuous, but I can't give any guarantees it will work."

He gives this a little more thought. The dreams don't bother him as much as do his waking memories of the circumstances surrounding his blackouts, but he supposes it couldn't hurt to have one less reminder of them. His gaze becomes more suspicious. "You wouldn't have to go any further into my memories or whatever, would you?"

Roxie shakes her head. "Lucid dream training isn't as specific as that."

Jamie chews his lip, stares out the distant bay doors of the hangar, drums his fingers against the railing of the catwalk, and finally shrugs one shoulder, the gesture mildly agitated. "...mn. All right, I guess. I'll give it a try."

"The first thing you'll have to do is, when you're awake, every time your surroundings change—ask yourself if you're dreaming."

Well, that seems silly.

He looks a little puzzled by this, but after a brief pause he nods for her to continue. "Okay..."

"That's what we'll start with," Roxie says simply. "When you're doing that all the time—all the time—come see me again."

Puzzlement gives way to full-on confusion. "Wait, what? I don't - I don't understand." He sounds a little embarrassed to admit it.

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toariversodeep.livejournal.com - 2009-10-16 04:32 (UTC) - Expand

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