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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"It beats death," he stated distractedly. He was mostly on guard, and eyeballing the Sentinels. If they caught their attention, then there was every chance that they would end up in that pile of corpses.

"We should get moving." He really didn't want to be there a second longer than he had to.

There was nothing there for them anyway...

One of the heads of the Sentinels turns. Then all of their heads turn to look at them.

Bad sign. Baaaad sign.

Nori nodded her head, before catching the movement of the giant figures in her peripheral vision. Oh this was bad. Considering standing around was a bad idea, and Nori possessed superspeed, without even thinking she redirected her energy. Once she took a quick glance around and noticed a copse of trees across the burnt grass, she grabbed Julian's arm.

"Timetomove," she replied, taking off without waiting for a response. She had a feeling the Sentinels weren't going to stop and ask questions and she wasn't going to debate with Julian over which one of them was faster.

The ground starts to erupt around them, as the Sentinels raise their hands and start trying to blast them with energy beams.

Nori might be fast, but Julian wasn't limited to the ground. Especially an unstable one.

Twisting his arm some so he could grab hold of her, he took off into the air, using the momentum that they already built up to help get them out of there as fast as possible.

They're moving fast. That's why whatever moves past them on the ground, zipping back in the direction they came and kicking up dust, is an orange blur.

It helps that the blur is moving pretty damn fast, too.

The blur-boy skids to a stop, saffron robes whipping around, goes into an odd stance, kicks the ground, and launches a massive boulder at one Sentinel, knocking its head off and causing the body to fall on another Sentinel. The others zero in on him, however, and start blasting, but he nimbly dodges out of the way.

It take all of a few seconds to happen, as in Nori and Julian will likely only have time to turn around before they see a bald monk, about their age, with blue tattoos come running back in the direction they're flying--away from the Sentinels. Who are still giving chase, but at least there are two less of them.

He has his "D=" face on. Giant metal men that shoot things from their hands are sort of effing scary and that's why he'd only done what he could to buy them some time rather than trying to just fight them outright.

"Flyflyflyflyflyflyfly!" calls the monk.

"Tell me that's not supposed to be one of our 'kids.'" Not that he had much time to dwell on it, nor did he really want to. Getting away from the sentinels took priority.

He flew straight into the tree cover headed straight into the tree cover. He landed a good distance in, where the trees were fairly thick. At least the Sentinels would have trouble moving through there, and it'd be tougher for them to track them if they weren't actively using their powers.

"We have to keep moving." They had to find someplace to hide.

Nori glanced briefly back in the direction they'd come from, wondering if the guy they'd seen would be all right, before nodding her head and starting further into the underbrush.

"If there's a town nearby we can disappear underground." Nori lived on the streets for a while, she knows sewers, while gross as hell, are a good place to go when you're trying to avoid people.

There's a wind that blows through the woods, and then the sound of something scraping against bark and rustling branches, like something was moving through the woods behind them.

Had that Sentinels caught up already or--

--or was a bald monk going to crash through the trees and barrel into the both of them?

"Oof!"

Aang was fortunate enough that Julian recognized him, which is one of the few reasons he hasn't tk punted him into orbit for that.

"I swear," he told Aang as he picked himself up off the ground and dusted himself off, "if the next words out of your mouth are 'Dad' or 'Mom', I will stab you in your face."

Nori groaned and pulled herself up too, rounding on the monk and looking at him narrowly before glancing over at Julian, and back at the monk again.

"Who are you?"

Aang is in a heap with his robes over his face, upside-down in the crook of a tree's roots.

"I never really met my mom and dad," Aang says, shoving his robes out of his face and looking perplexed. At least, he never met them when he was old enough to remember them, but that's how it worked. What? he's a monk.

"But I'm still pretty sure you're not them." He adds, "Although that would be really neat if I had hair that matched my tattoos--"

Seriously, Nori, very cool hair. Aang approves.

The tattooed monk pushes himself up into a handstand and then flips gracefully onto his feet right in front of Nori.

"I'm Aang. I'd want to get your names too and maybe be friends, but there's those giant metal men with the hands that shoot fire beams and we really, really should try to get somewhere safer than a forest that could get set on fire."

"And this dream just got weirder, which I didn't think was possible."

But Aang was at least right about the Sentinels, so Julian continued to head away from where the machines were. "C'mon.

"This better be your dream, Nori. Otherwise I do not want to know why in the hell I just dreamed up some tattooed up version of Katara's boyfriend."

Nori smiled very slightly at Aang's comment about the hair, although it was gone a second later and she was in agreement that they needed to get the hell away from where they were. She moved after Julian, rolling her eyes at his back.

"I don't even know who that is, Julian."

"This way!"

He leads, and somehow seems to know where he's going. Funny thing, his steps are so light, you can barely hear them on the ground.

As he traipses along, looking back for them to follow, his expression brightens tremendously, and he says "...Wait, Katara said I was her boyfriend?"

Priorities, Aang.

...

"Oh god," Julian facepalmed, "I'm the one dreaming this..."

He dreamed of being naked and in bed... with Nori.

He dreamed of having kids... with Nori.

He dreamed of being one of the last mutants remaining... with Nori.

...that's just...

Ok, fine, if you subtract the fact that she's, well, Noriko Ashida, she's kind of hot. But he didn't like her like that. Actually, despite the fact that they worked well together as a team, he still wasn't sure if he liked her at all.

Though that kiss ~~was kind of~~ IT NEVER HAPPENED

...but why the hell was Aang there?

"You're a figment of my imagination," he told Aang. "Shouldn't you know all of that? She said she loves you."

He was so never going to talk about this dream.

"Can we have social drama after we escape the sentinels, please?" Nori sounded more than a little annoyed at all of this. Which, she was. After the few times she let her personal dramas get in the way of a mission, she's understandably now a little intolerant of the whole thing.

"That's still not the same as introducing me as her boyfriend to people. That's great! Did she--"

Oh right. Giant metal monsters, yep. Gotta worry about those. But hey, they're running, aren't they?

"And this isn't just one of your nightmares. It's both of your nightmares. The Nightmare King's influence is making it so people can cross over into each other's nightmares. It's only going to get worse from here. You're each just as real as each other, and I'm just as real as the both of you are."

Edited 2010-01-28 05:22 (UTC)

Julian was still moving. Though he did pause for a moment when he found out that, apparently, he was sharing a dream with Nori and Aang.

...which made several things make sense. But also meant that he had actually been in bed with Nori. Naked. And he groped her.

"I'm so going to need a shower when I wake up."

He'll dwell on that later, though. They had to keep moving.

"So what's the deal with this Nightmare King guy anyway? What is he, like, the Shadow King? Some psychic bad guy?" Which, if that was the case, they could just sic Jean on him.

Well it being both their nightmares cleared things up a little. It also creeped her out a little, but if this Nightmare King guy was causing it... whatever.

"How exactly are we supposed to fight this?" Point her at something she could electrocute or punch into submission, and she was great. But she was never much of a fan of all the mindgame crap that sometimes came with the X-Man lifestyle.

"He has to be banished. Off the ship. Other people are working on it. In the meantime, you need to try to learn to keep him out if there's anyone on the skyship that can teach you," Aang says, deftly hopping over a low-hanging branch in the trail.

"I don't know who the Shadow King is either, but the Nightmare King is--he's not a person. He's not alive. He's something like a spirit--but not one like me or any spirit I've ever met."

"So basically he's the Shadow King," Julian reiterated. And they had a not-Phoenix Jean Grey and Chamber as their prime telepaths, and no Cerebro on board.

...they were probably boned.

"Thaaaat's just great."

God, Nori hated situations where she couldn't just electrocute the $#!& out of something and be done with it. Groaning a little, she rubbed her forehead.

"Okay, so the more immediate question is, how the #^@& do we get out of this stupid dream?"

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Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

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