trans_9 | Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

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Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

Nighttime.

Or, at least, what passed for nighttime on the meatship.

A time when most of the crew was already fast asleep, dreaming away pleasantly throughout the night.

...Or, perhaps not. For you see, tonight, something particularly strange is happening.

Now it is not all that unusual for someone to have a nightmare, especially not on the ship.

Yet tonight, no one will sleep easily, for the Nightmare King deems it so.

Everyone's dreams will have a tinge of horror to them. Nothing so out of the ordinary to rouse one's suspicions, but at the same time, no one is left out.

Pleasant nightmares, meatship.

[ooc: And thus begins the start of the Nightmare King's spree of insanity. He's starting out subtle, of course. The nightmares won't be anything more than your run of the mill bad dream, but he is giving them to everyone. Posting in isn't mandatory, but if you want to have fun with your character's nightmare, go right ahead.]

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"Ugh. Now I'm not so hungry for tofu anymore," says a voice, and if Leon looks, he'll see a young man, bald, swathed in saffron robes, with some very odd tattoo work, standing on the roof of a Gas n' Gulp.

And he'd really been craving some tofu, too.

He sticks out his tongue to the side in disgust.

"You need to get down from there, kid!" Considering all the fires strewn about, being on top of a gas station wasn't the safest place on earth. Not that being down on the street and being surrounded by killer tofu was any safer.

"I'm definitely going on an all-steak diet after this," Leon remarked, mostly to himself. Though, honestly, when was the last time he even had fresh meat of any kind? Granted, he could carve up a piece of Stacy and roast it, but that didn't seem very appetizing. Still, this diet of slop, slop, more slop, and occasional canned food was grating on him. He did not want to eat that stuff for months on end.

He will take your word for it, Leon. Your dream, you know it better than him.

The teenager jumps down from the roof and runs over.

"You have to get out of here. You're getting too close."

But then he's intruding, reaching out for them, making it harder for the borders to be guarded. He and Seer can't do this alone anymore--there's too much to be done. They're going to need help.

"He's trying to pull you in, more and more."

Leon was going to remark about he wasn't getting too close. He was actually doing a good job of keeping the killer tofu at bay, and the few pieces that did get too close were quickly disposed of. But it was the next sentence that caught his attention more.

"He who? What the hell are you talking about?"

Apparently whoever 'He' was, was listening in, as the conversation was immediately disrupted by the ground starting to shake. It wasn't from an earthquake, though. From down the street, a huge wave of slop was rolling in to what was left of Raccoon City, taking out everything in its path.

"...shit. Come on!" Leon simply grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him along as he went looking for some kind of safe ground.

"You have really weird dreams, you know that?"

Seriously, Leon. Food eats people?

Leon tugging the boy along is quickly changed to the boy pulling Leon along, because he quickly outpaces him somehow.

And somehow, with him tugging Leon in his wake, it's like they can both run faster.

"I have a weird life to match." He's faced plants that eat people. Killer food isn't that far out of the realm of normal.

But that this is a dream explains some things, like his suddenly ability to run 60 mph. But it doesn't necessarily explain this kid.

"Though bald, tattooed monks have never shown up in a dream before. I'm not sure I want to know what the hell that means."

"It means the crew has people watching over them," says Aang. "I'm holding him back, long enough for you to fight him. I've been trying to keep him out of your dreams as best as I can."

"You're not creepy enough to be the seer, so I guess that would make you Aang."

And just like that, they weren't running anymore. There was nothing to run from. The flood of slop had vanished, there was no more zombie tofu. They weren't even in Raccoon City anymore. They were actually in interrogation room two, just a dimly lit room with two chairs, a table, and a mirror.

The temperature had dropped, considerably. Leon himself had turned cold, quite literally now made of ice as if his name was Bobby Drake. Yet, strangely, while on the surface, he was cold to the touch, there was a rather visible flame inside him, one that burned white hot.

An interesting contrast.

"A lot of people have been looking for you. Where are you now?"

Aang looks around the room somewhat nervously, and what Leon hasn't realized is that he's inadvertently keyed in on something deeply buried. Old fears. Blank walls, empty rooms, questions, needles--

But he stays calm and perches on the seat, drawing his feet up.

"I'm trapped where he's trapped."

There was an unconscious shift in the background of the room. Pieces of the walls shifted and moved around, but seemingly formed a more solid structure as they did.

"In Escherville," he stated. Which made sense, if Aang was supposed to be the warden, he should be in the prison. "How did you end up there?"

"Something bad happened. They lost contact with the team studying the stone. They couldn't reach them with the thingies."

Leaning his staff against his shoulder, he mimics typing into a device--maybe one similar to their omnicoms.

"The com-bajas." Comm-badges. Words like that and "computers" and "artificial intelligence" didn't register at all with him.

While he'd picked up Daligig cultural practices and the like quickly enough (like any nomad that was used to spending time with different peoples could) even with all the time he spent with them, he'd never gotten very good with technology. One, he lacked the patience to sit and learn how to use it, two, something had seemed intrinsically...off about it to him. Why use a talking-box thingy when you could just scoot over to the other part of the ship and say hi in person? The only times he'd used them had been when the distance was too great or there was no time, and he'd only had to learn how they worked minimally for that.

(Cartoons, on the other hand, he'd found vastly entertaining, but he still didn't know how the screens worked).

"They sent a team in, and because by then I'd worked with them a lot, I was part of that team. At that time, the twisty-building place wasn't as creepy. They said the twisty buildings and angles and grabbity wells--whatever that is--helped hold it in all the way. It used to just be a room on the inside--I saw it once. But when we got there, it had changed. There were a bunch of rooms, like the inside of a castle. And after a while, a whole castle, like it was growing. And it kept getting darker and darker. We tried to find the last team but they were gone. I was supposed to protect them while they tried to make sure the Nightmare King stayed in his stone, and while they looked for the old team. Then it went...bad, and we couldn't get out. And--"

He breaks off.

"I don't want to talk about the rest," he decides.

Edited 2010-01-18 02:12 (UTC)

There were a lot of details that he picked up in that. He sorted through that for a moment, giving Aang a chance to settle himself. The question was what direction he could take this in. As pressing as the Nightmare King was, this kid might hold the answers to a few lingering questions.

"Alright, we'll leave that alone for the moment. Have you ever heard of something called the 'Ohm'?"

"The World-Eaters," Aang says quietly. "They have a lot of names for them in different places now: The Devourers, The All-Consuming, The Endswarm, the Fallen Children of Iitha."

His fingers fiddle with his staff.

"I know them."

More nervous fiddling.

"I've fought them. On Lelotha."

That meshed with what little intel they had on the Ohm so far.

"The people you were around... were they called the Daligig? And did they ask you to help them fight the Ohm?"

He fiddles more with his staff, bouncing it back and forth between his hands/

"'Asked' isn't really the right word..." he says somewhat evasively.

Leon's hand, reached for the staff. oddly, that hand was made of flesh, while most of the rest of him was still made of ice. His eyes were also decidedly human.

"Aang, what happened?" he asked gently. "How did you end up on this ship?"

Aang draws the staff back, away from Leon's hand. That isn't something he's allowed to touch. As much as he knows he's not supposed to care about material things, it's different in the Dreamlands. It's just like his orange glider, that got broken, and the reason that it's like that one instead of the blue glider he had later is that it's not really a staff, not really a solid object.

His real staff, he would let other people hold. They could steal it--even break it. Material things are fleeting, immaterial things are not. But in the dreams it is an immaterial thing, it's a reminder of his people, something he carries with him, something that gives him strength. It's a set of beliefs, the embodiment of precious memories, of a people long dead--now from a world that's lost altogether.

And those are his. Those he won't trust in the hands of just anyone. He has to be careful the Nightmare King doesn't set a trap for him, after all. That isn't to say that he won't let Leon touch it later, but he wants a sense of him first, before he trusts him with something that precious.

"I woke up. In a room."

He looks everywhere but Leon.

Leon withdrew his hand. Something had obviously happened to this boy. He wasn't going to push him too much, yet.

"Were you covered in some kind of slime?"

"No. Not slime."

Aang looks around at the room.

"Hey, you know, I bet this room is small enough for me to go around in circles on the walls and ceiling with my air scooter. Wanna see?"

Subject change. Definite subject change. He's evading.

"You can show me later." He had to take a moment and think about how to approach this.

"Listen..." He moved closer to Aang, but still kept a comfortable distance from him. As he did, his clothes changed. Gone was the ice, and now he was wearing the dress uniform of the Philadelphia Police Department. It was his father's uniform, and always the one he thought of as his idealized version of what a cop should be.

"...my name is Leon," he stated, realizing belatedly that he hadn't introduced himself. It never occurred to him to do so to someone wandering around his own mind. "Where I'm from, I'm a cop. That means its my job to protect people and help people whenever I can. Do you understand?"

"You're like a guard. But not like the Dai Li--the good kind."

He goes on, "That's my job as the Avatar, too. I maintain the balance between the Nations, and between people and the Spirit World."

Interesting he would phrase it like that.

"So I've heard. And you know that this is a very important job that we do," he pointed out. "But, here's the thing. Right now, I need your help."

"How? I'm already trying to do all I can to hold him back. I'm not sure how much else I can do," Aang says, even though he seems regretful, as he says it. It's not that he doesn't want to help more--it's just he's not sure he can.

"One day, I woke up on this ship, and I have no idea how I got here. Everyone else that I've met doesn't know how they got here either. The people who were on this ship with you, they were long gone by the time I woke up. No one else can give us answers. And not knowing is scary," he explained.

"If you can tell me how you got here, it might give us a few answers about why we're here. I know you don't want to talk about it, but if you can be brave, if you can tell me what happened, I might be able to help everyone else. Do you understand?"

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