Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

[daemonomicon.livejournal.com]

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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[venominsilicon.livejournal.com]

In reality, Gauron's asleep in one of his lofts down in the city. In his dreams, however, he's headed back down to Weapons and Possessions, to take another look through their contents - strange, because his dreams haven't involved being on the ship since about a month after he got here.

When he gets back into the meaty portion of the ship, that's not the only thing that's strange. The walls have a sickly look - a yellowish tinge, a translucence to their outermost layer of skin. The faint scent of pestilence and decay lingers in the eerily vacant corridors - one he recognizes well; it brings back memories of his childhood, spent in the Cambodian countryside amongst the stench of dead bodies. There's another scent, too - one he can't place, but that he knows he's picked up recently.

Almost before he realizes it, he's through the main area of Weapons and Possessions, and in the hangar instead. He's drawn almost inexorably toward one of the escape pods; as the doors slide open, he can see a version of Earth through its canopy, and somehow, he knows it's his own - though that's far less important than who's inside it. Waiting for him are his adopted twin daughters, Xia Yu Fan and Yu Lan.

"It didn't take long for their lies to fall apart after all," Yu Lan remarks, glancing meaningfully past him back at the ship's rotting interior.

"Sensei, let's go home, before they try to drag us down with them." Yu Fan is smiling slightly, in seeming relief that he's still all right.

Even in dreams, however, his instincts are still sharp. Trapped in a small, enclosed vehicle with the likenesses of the only two people he trusts in the world? That's got "trap" written all over it. "You two go ahead. There's a few things I want to grab out of Weapons and Possessions, and I need to arm Codarl's self-destruct sequence."

"It's already done," Yu Fan replies.

Yu Lan gets up and starts toward him. "Come on, Sensei, we should--" She stops when he draws his gun, aiming it unhesitatingly between her eyes.

"Sorry, but you know the drill. Now go on, and I'll catch up with you back on Earth." If they ran into him unexpectedly in a place like this, he'd expect them to take the same precautions, after all.

Yu Fan snorts. "If anything, we should be the ones holding the gun to your head. How do we know you're really our Sensei?"

"You're the one who's been cooperating with the liars and idiots and weaklings aboard this ship," Yu Lan continues. "They're pathetic, all of them, but you're still playing along."

Gauron couldn't help laughing aloud at that. "You think I give two shits about them? I'm only playing along because they're convenient. This way, they're there if I need a shield. And when they fall apart, I can still climb over their corpses to come out on top. I'm not in any hurry for this to end, though - I've been just about everywhere on our world, but this? This is an adventure, and the more I can bring back from it, the better."

Abruptly, there was a slurping sound behind him, and he realizes too late that the girls had been just a distraction. He glances back over his shoulder; there are blackish-red veins starting out all over the floors and walls. They twisted into a likeness - a half-exploded, half-melting one, like a poorly-plastinated corpse - of Stacy's humanoid form.

||Gauron.|| And when it tried to speak, its entire face twisted and writhed; its voice cut in and out amongst mechanical-sounding static. ||VI... olence against crew me--ers is not permitted. You ha-- received a Vi-Vi-Violation. You have 1 Violation. 15 Vi-- --ults in Punishment.|| The last word, however, was perfectly clear, and full of malicious glee.

When he glances back, the girls are gone; at least that left him with only one enemy to face down. "Understood," he ventures, holstering his gun; however, the thing before him didn't seem at all placated, and as the clotted vein-tentacles slither toward him, he notices they're tipped with sharp spikes.

[venominsilicon.livejournal.com]

However, there's nowhere to run. More blackened tentacles are already writhing out of the walls to intercept him, stingers dripping with venom, and he can't shoot his way through all of them - it was a hell of a long way to the mecha hangar, where he might stand a chance. But it isn't in him to give up, and he realizes there's one more thing he could try that might actually help.

He takes a deep breath, trying to remember how the wider dreamscape of the ship felt, as though he could enter it on his own, or the memory would at least carry his message a little better, and yells, "Roxie!"

The tentacles were getting closer, and after a few seconds, there was no sign he'd been heard. He was running out of options, and the best one left was to toss a grenade into the mass of tentacles, hit the deck, and take off once it had detonated. It buys him more space than he expected, but still not enough, and he soon finds himself dodging tentacles by uncomfortably narrow margins. There were only so many of them he could shoot, and even when he tosses the second grenade - the only other one he had on him - it's nowhere near as effective. The tentacles quickly rush back in to fence him off from the newly-made clearing, and when he tries to vault over them, one catches him by the ankle and brings him crashing back to the floor.

"Roxie!" he yells again as the tentacles close in. Even in such hopelessly tight quarters, he manages to dodge several of them and hold a few more off before the sting of one finally lances into his chest, right next to his shoulder; he's all too aware of the grotesque sensation of it injecting something solid beneath his skin.

He awakens with a jolt, his shoulder still throbbing, and finding himself hissing belatedly, "Roxie - hey!" Slightly embarrassed, he opens one eye, finds himself still in his loft - but the pain still lingers, as does the blunt, bitter, vague not-scent in the back of his sinuses that he only now remembers from the last time he'd approached the Nightmare King's domain. When he pulls open his plantsuit, though, there's not a mark on him - well, aside from the multitude of scars that were already there.

Just some piss-poor attempt at freaking me out, he decides as he lies back down, staring up at the ceiling for a moment while he decides on his next course of action.