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

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

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'.]

Comments

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Are you sure you're not an archetype, little one?" Darwi asked teasingly. "Sheeana said she saw you in the library, but i'm not convinced. You're too wise to be an ordinary child." And too cute to be a Tleilaxu.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"I am a servant of the Night-Time," Roxie says. She maintains her position effortlessly—it might be from practice, but there's also a certain physical quality, as if she's simply ignoring entirely the mild strain the lotus position should be putting on her. It's a dream, certainly, but if this is echoing how she really is...

"My name's Roxie," she adds irreverently.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Darwi-within observes the girl with interest. There is something prana bindu-like to her movements. "I am Darwi Odrade, former Reverend Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit." She can think of so many old gods that could mean. She waits for Roxie to speak, looking for a clue to narrow it down.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

The words don't mean a thing to her, but they demand a certain degree of formality. She bows forward, head nearly touching the sand. "As Roxana the Red Evening Before Gentle Dawn, I greet you," she says, and then her voice relaxes a little. Interesting implications and subtext, really.

"If I can ask—why are your eyes like that?" The curiosity is genuine, but well-walled behind her normal coolness.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Red Evening...It must mean something else. She doesn't look old enough to menstruate. The amused thoughts of a thought.

Sheeana's finished whatever she was talking to Bellonda about. She returns to them, dream-worm in tow. "I am the current Mother Superior. The total blue eyes come from addiction to the Spice. It is a price many gladly pay." She doesn't explain further, wants to see what conclusions Roxie draws from just a name.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

Spice. Roxie free-associates: spices—trade—wealth—value—concentration; addiction—drugs—power—illusion of power?—crime—control; prices—sacrifice—mysticism—understanding—TANSTAAFL.

But her face stays calm. "What does the 'spice' do?" she asks.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana can see the little gears spinning in the girl's mind. She may be powerful but her reactions are not at all opaque to her. "It is almost easier to list what the Spice can't do for the human body than what it can. The Spice extends life. It expands consciousness. It makes interstellar travel possible. This Other Memory too. And in certain individuals, it unlocks prescience."

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

The presence of 'interstellar travel' in the list throws an almost audible wrench in the process of Roxie's train of thought, but the rest of it gets through.

"So it's a metaphysical bootstrapper," she comments, still trying to work her head around it. She talks as though some or all of those things would be possible without Spice, though...

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Is the wheel a bootstrapper? The gun? Ancient smiths had no need to know the chemical properties of the iron and copper they worked. They talked of spirits in the metal while they continued to operate their hammers and forges. We have isolated the chemical properties and brainstates of the mystical state in our universe and can induce them at will. The rules for the spiritual world in each universe are different, but the state of the experiencer remains constant." She smiles, also sitting next to the girl. She knows immediately better than to talk down to Roxie, so she approaches the girl as if she were an intelligent yet ignorant adult.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

Roxie...

...thinks about that.

The tone caught her off-guard enough for it to properly penetrate, and she's quiet as she turns it over in her head.

"But that still limits it to the physical brain," she objects experimentally. "The abilities I have come from a level beyond that. They manifest through my physical body, but they do not come from any quality of it."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"The rules for your world are different. You are a conduit for something else. A Bene Gesserit's abilities all come from her own body. Training and Spice unlock them. Regardless, if I were to scan your brain during one of your mystical experiences and compare it with my own, assuming you are Homo Sapiens, the two diagrams would probably look very similar." Exactly what Roxie is a conduit for she leaves as a string for her to pull with the help of her leading statement. It does go, in her mind, a long way to explaining the girl's prana-bindu-esque abilities.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"My body is a conduit for something else," Roxie says, glancing down at herself. It's a precept she knows, but it's not one that she's ever really thoroughly internalized. "The abilities that are mine manifest from my atman, through my chakras and from there my koshas." She's pretty hip on all this 'subtle body' stuff, apparently.

"I am Homo sapiens, physically... mostly. I haven't had the resources to check if any of my genetic material has changed as part of my empowerment."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"And who or what gives you the thing that flows through you?" No doubt whoever gave her that fancy title.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

Roxie edges into just a hint of a smile. "Shyama, the Night-Time. The deity I serve."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana looks back through Other Memory, for in it she knows many gods, often ones the Bene Gesserit created themselves. They flash in front of them, a blur of the sacred all the way back to the first human to put on an animal head and let the Presence flow into them.

There. A variant of Krishna.

"Tell me of your Night-God. What does he ask of you in return for those gifts?"

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"That I destroy his enemies," Roxie says bluntly. The word isn't used as a euphemism for 'kill'—it's an extension on it. Kill them, burn them, stomp on their ashes... "Particularly the cho."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"And what are the cho?" The girl seems to be giving leading statements too.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"They are... parasites." The word doesn't quite fit properly, but she can't think of a better way to concisely describe it. "They spread like an infection, and eliminate individuality and free thought in the process." She looks between Sheeana and the other women. "The presence of the cho is extremely difficult to discern in the early stages."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana gets an idea. "Call up an image, please. Two uninfected humans and one infected."

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

Roxie gestures with a hand, and darkness bubbles up, shaping into three random, ordinary people (http://i38.tinypic.com/2istl5l.jpg), frozen in space and time.

None of them seems out of the ordinary at all, at least for the time period they come from.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana closes her eyes and inhales deeply through her nose. She sorts the chemical signals looking for...There it is. The taint. The subtle scent of corruption. It takes some concentration but she manages to place it.

She unsheathes her crysknife and points the bone-white blade at the water-fat girl on the right.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"Good pick," Roxie says. "But I don't know if you'd be able to find one of the ones that knows what it is, that's... trying to hide."

Her phrasing is dangerously impersonal here—but if it's as she's describing, maybe it's how she deals with having to... deal... with people who are infected.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana lunges in a blur, splitting the apparition in a spray of phantom blood. Blood, girl and companions soon vanish in smoke. She sheathes the crysknife

Turning back to Roxie: "Face Dancers conceal themselves in much the same way and I have dealt with them. There are many ways to pretend to humanity while wearing human skin and not all of them involve being physically different at all." Which is the kind of thing the Gom Jabbar is supposed to filter.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"But sometimes they're not mentally different, either." Roxie frowns a little—not at Sheeana, but in general. "I've caught a few that were... I'm not sure how to completely describe it. Hiding. I could only tell they were there at all after they did something publicly."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana chuckles a little. "I knew one that settled so completely into his role that he forgot what he originally was." Oh old head priest Tuek...The only priest she had ever felt menace from, reduced to such a pathetic condition. "Killing is sometimes necessary. Blood on your hands is only shameful if it was for no good end."