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]

"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."

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"I've never thought that it was shameful," Roxie says. But then, that's a part of her... lack of concern. Blood might linger on her hands, but never in her head.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana begins drawing in the sand with her finger, allowing her unconscious free reign. Acceding a little to real liminality, the drawings move in a half life. A worm with a single rider (undulating realistically), a hybrid weapon that was half crysknife, half lightsaber (it buzzed and shimmered), and...a scarab. Metaphor for death and rebirth or some piece of her Atreides talent, the thing Darwi feared?

Dangers ahead. The scarab seemed to beckon her. I must go with the scarab...

She became suddenly serious. "Child, what do you know of prescience?"

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"A little." Roxie looks down at the drawings. "I've had prophetic dreams sometimes. The difficulty is in the interpretation more than the receiving."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Hmmm..." Sheeana considers sending her away. The child wouldn't appreciate it but this was the Atreides talent. Dangerous territory. She pointed at the drawing in the sand which shimmered in the candy colors of the desert sunset. "Prophecy is dangerous. I am distantly related to the line that once doomed our universe with visions. The Spice causes it." She pauses, reaches her decision. "This has been most interesting, Roxanna the Red Evening before the Gentle Dawn, but I must ask you to leave now. The presence of too many others can make this very dangerous."

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

"... Very well," Roxie says, tone polite (though inside the sudden rejection has left her confused and disappointed). She shifts in place, cloak adjusting around her, readying herself to leave.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Bene Gesserit training reads the feelings on the girl's stony face like an open book. "I look forward to your company in the waking world." She calls as the girl vanishes.

[toariversodeep.livejournal.com]

There is a half-transparency, just long enough to nod—

and she's gone.