trans_9 | I can feel the madness slowly creeping in...

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I can feel the madness slowly creeping in...

It is that time again, meatship.

Once again, the King of Nightmares has deigned to spread his touch to all of your dreams.

This time, however, he has decided to give them a much more personal touch, sending his very own children to visit each and every one of you, slowly sowing the seeds of madness within all of you.

Such a kind and loving king he is, isn't he?

[ooc: Alright folks, Nightmare King is ramping things up a bit. These nightmares are a good bit more dangerous now, and he's sending in his minions to make things a little more real. The nightmares will be of a much more serious nature this time, designed to start driving the crew slowly insane. Characters are more likely to run into nightmare minions in the guise of someone or something that will tug at the edges of their sanity. Also, this time, the characters can have joint dreams, as these nightmares are of a more mystical nature this time. Once again, tagging in isn't mandatory, but if you want to, go crazy (literally)!]

[Additional Note: Any injuries won't be carrying over to real life at this point in the plot but don't worry, we'll get there eventually!]

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Nova heard the beeping, was it an alarm of some sort? Reaching out with her telepathy, she tried to touch the woman's mind, but it was muffled, as if she wasn't fully there. Or at least, her mind wasn't completely fired up yet. When the girl grabbed her arm, she blinked, probably the only indication of her surprise she would allow herself.

When the woman held on to her arm, she slowly withdrew her hand from the helmet. She slid her hand down to the woman's wrist to get a better hold on her, sliding an arm around her waist to get a better handle on their center of gravity. Squeezing the woman's wrist gently, she leaned a little closer, pushing down the sudden sense of surreality she felt. Something wasn't right here.

But this woman was obviously not alright. And she wasn't about to let her simply float out here forever. Leaning close, she frowned, how were they going to get out of here? How had they gotten here in the first place?

"I'm not going to hurt you." She spoke quietly, hoping the girl would hear her.

Something's wrong... w-what? This doesn't make any sense... For a moment Tess thinks that she's simply started to go mad, but despite the fogginess of her mind, things start to click together. The face—she recognizes Nova's face, faintly. With subvocal commands, the suit runs through its database. There. Yes. She's from—the ship?

And that clicks it all into place.

In her room, in the real world, Tess wakes with a strangled cry. Her suit stiffens up just enough around her to keep her from flailing off the bed.

Oops. You might be on your own there, Nova, if that doesn't shake you out of the dream too.

(http://img31.imageshack.us/i/uhoh.png/)

The moment the girl disappeared, leaving Nova stranded in the middle of nowhere, there was a moment of confusion. She froze. Where was she? Where had the girl gone. Reaching out with her mind, she tried to find the girl's. But she couldn't. There was something else here. Something menacing, and malicious. And then it clicked, the conversation she'd had with Alessa. The Nightmare King.

There was a sharp jolt as she jerked up in her bed. Leaping out of it, she was at the door in two steps and flying through the halls. She scanned ever mind within her range, trying to pinpoint that girl's. It was difficult to get an exact read, but she ran on until she could almost feel the girl inside her head.

This had to be the door, she threw her weight against it, trying to break it down, ignoring the pain that lanced through her shoulder. No answer. She began knocking furiously. What had happened in there? Was the girl still asleep? Was was wrong with her mind? Fogged as if there were too many little voices in there. Was she in danger? She kept knocking.

"Come on. Get up. Get up."

Unlike many, Miku hadn't been sleeping. While she was slowly getting back to a more average sleep cycle, Tess had drifted off first, leaving Miku to read little messages on her omnicomm and consider what she'd spoken with the Seer about. ~~And occasionally think about one Steve Burnside, but that was for another time.~~

She was deep into her own thoughts when Tess cried out and jerked in pain. Miku jumped in surprise, dropping her little digital device in her lap and peering in the dim lighting at her dear friend. "Tess-chan?" Miku ventured, waiting for just a moment.

A moment too long, apparently, because then there was someone trying to violently get into their room. "Ah! Ju-just a moment! Just a moment!" Miku called. Tess or the door? Tess first. Miku slid off her bed and padded over to Tess's side of the room. She looked over her friend concernedly, worrying her lip. "Tess-chan?"

Tess slowly sits up properly and groans. She's in her suit, of course—she clicks her teeth and mumbles, then slouches forward slightly. She lets out another soft groan, though this one is less intense than the first. "Feck," she murmurs, and she twists around into a sitting position, finally looking up at Miku. "I'm fine," she says, but there's a tiredness and a confused quality to her that's quite lacking in the bright, blunt bundle of energy she usually is. "Just a... bad dream."

A bad dream. She hasn't had one of those, not one so clear-cut and sharp in her mind, for years. If not for the Friendlies already adjusting her mindset, it would have really shaken her...

Why was no one answering this door? She cast her mind forward again, past the material. There was another girl in there, and they were both awake. But there were more voices in the first girl's head now. Now voices exactly, but something like...humming? Like bees busy working. She could feel the girl's mind changing somehow. What was going on? Was this something to do with the Nightmare King?

She reached out her mind for the other girl, pausing her banging on the door for a moment. The other girl seemed alright. She hadn't been asleep. Fine. Why wasn't she getting the damn door? Throwing her mental voice into the room, she practically growled into their minds.

If you don't open the door, I'm going to break it down. I think one of you is in danger. Seriously. Would she have leapt out of bed like that if she didn't? The thought hadn't occurred to her yet that if something had been done to this girl, it might also have been done to her. A testament to the fact that she was possibly, a nice person somewhere at heart.

Miku puffed her cheeks out in irritation as she looked over Tess. Miku hadn't dreamed about her, and thus hadn't invited her into the Manor of Sleep, so it couldn't have been that. She frowned and smoothed her hand over the headpiece of Tess's suit.

"I'll go answer the door, you wake up a little bit, okay?" There's someone rude outside. Even if Tess was in danger, she's awake now, so it will be fine. There was a steely firmness to her thoughts that surprised the young medium. Miku let her hand linger on Tess's shoulder and started for the door. "I told you, I was coming, just a moment, please," she called again and opened the door.

"Thankyuh, Miku," Tess says, her voice quiet and a little creaky. Her throat is dry, ugh. She stretches, wiggling her gloved fingers as she tries to get herself arranged more comfortably. "Who is it?" she calls quietly, not taking the time to actually glance over herself as she stretches again, trying to work an odd, uncomfortable kink out of her back.

(http://img3.imageshack.us/i/armscrossed.png/)

Nova stopped her banging, folding her arms and waiting until the door was opened. She'd caught that thought from the girl after all. Who gave a damn if she was rude? The only time she'd ever felt thoughts as muffled as Tess was from resocialized marines. The girl's seemed slightly different, but if someone was resocializing people on the ship, she was going to find out. And she was going to kill them.

Hearing the girl's voice, she called back through the door. "You don't know me. My name is Nova. I detected your mental distress and came running." A pause. Should she apologise? Probably. But goddamn she didn't have to like it. "I'm sorry for the ruckus. I was worried."

Though the exact reasons behind her distress would be kept only to herself for now.

Miku gave a damn if someone was rude and, from her understanding of the situation, without reason. In fact, it was the very first time she'd ever been so irritated with someone in a long, long while.

"Well, please come in, Nova-san, but Tess-chan is okay, now." Miku said politely, and stepped back from the door to allow the other woman entry. It had to be Tess she was talking about because Miku hadn't suffered from any 'mental distress'. ~~Or maybe Nova-san was mental. Who knew on this ship?~~

Tess stands, finally, though she's still stretching. That voice, it's—

Her eyes go wide. Near-instantly, in the span of only a few seconds, her mindset reconfigures into a defensive posture, snapping out of the haze of unhappy sleep with a sharp self-infliction of a cocktail of neurochemicals. Her blood pressure skyrockets. It takes long moments of silent conscious thought, watching Nova, to convince the Friendlies plugged into her that this isn't some multisequence malicious brainhack being performed through some unknown vector. The hackles raised in her mind slowly smooth again, but the savantic pattern-processing subsystems strewn through her nervous system, now wakened, stay at full alert.

"I'm fine," she says, the conscious parts of her mind trying to figure out the bizarre dream meeting while the unconscious parts of her mind-extended mind, with the way it stretches into a tangled web with the Friendlies throughout her—more intimately examine every detail of the situation, concocting strange patterns and then discarding them when they don't fit any of the methods of thought-injection or mind-twisting she's familiar with.

Nova stepped in, nodding to Miku. She knew the girl was irritated, she even knew that she wasn't the type to get irritated. A simple sweep of her mind revealed that much. But she didn't have the time, or the inclination to bother about someone's feelings. Not at the moment. The worrisome topic was the mind of the other girl. Tess.

When the girl's thoughts jumped into clarity like that, the Ghost whipped her head around, piercing green eyes scanning Tess' face through her armor. The girl's eyes were wide and she was clearly in some distress. The tiny voices in her head seemed to be keening in unison. She didn't speak, though a frown creased her brow as she 'watched' the girls thoughts smoothed over. Slowly she began to hear two distinct sets of 'voices.' One seemed to belong to Tess herself, while the others. Well, she wasn't sure what they were yet. They obviously weren't some form of resocialization. At least, not any she'd come across before. But then, what were they? And why were they in high alert?

A pause when the girl spoke. "Are you sure?" While she was loathe to reveal her abilities, is seemed necessary for the situation. At least, if she was going to find out what was going on. It may not have been the tactically correct move to make, but she had other surprises. So she tilted her head a moment before speaking again.

"I'm sorry for barging in. I'm sure some explanation is in order. To begin with, I'm a telepath. During that nightmare, I felt your mind. It seemed clouded, muffled almost." A pause. "Where I'm from, that's usually a sign that a person's mind has been tampered with. However, now that I listen closer, you seem to have two sets of thoughts. Is that...normal for you?"

And in the middle of this, stands Miku, who managed to look entirely perplexed by the whole business. So this woman was listening to Tess-san's mind? How... odd. And that was coming from the same girl who had to listen to the dead's whispers over and over depending which part of Stacy she had to go through. It was getting easier to block them out, but...

Right. Back on subject. Miku stepped over and rejoined Tess, still perplexed-looking. Her friend came first before her own curiosity.

Tess' eyes narrow slightly. Not quite upset, but close—she's taking what Nova's saying at face value, for the moment (though that buzzy, inhuman train of thought in the back of her mind is still trying to hyper-analyze everything. "It's my Friendlies. Plenty've people got 'em, it's what makes shipsuitin' possible." She glances down at the odd, snug pressure-suit-thing she's wearing. "I'm plenty fine. I was just havin' a bad dream, that was all 'bout it." An extremely bad dream, though it seems like her mood and mindset have already recovered from it. Odd, that—it's the kind of mental whiplash that would normally suggest some kind of disorder.

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I can feel the madness slowly creeping in...

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