trans_9 | 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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Haku's eye only saw a blackness that was like a slick, shallow-edged pit, filled and splattered-over with crawling, oily, hissing magic. Yubaba's corruption writhed like a coil of snakes, eyeless and steaming, streaming from mouth and nose as the cringing, thrashing dragon-shape at it's midst struggled to rise from the clinging tendrils of muck. He coughed, then gave a strangled roar and was pulled back, claws scrabbling against the slick corruption.

No! No, not again!

Sheeana feels a kind of gravity assert its rules on the void and allows herself to drift in towards the well.

Accelerating faster, she hits the corrupted ground with a sensation like all the blood in your body pulsing into your head for two hundred and seventy eight milliseconds.

A Fremen's ecological instincts and a Bene Gesserit's enhanced senses help her sense out the corruption. It stank, clawing at her nostrils with black and oily fingers. Even though she could not feel Other Memory here, she knew what it would say. A Harkonnen scent. Even now, five thousand years later, there is an oily feel to Gammu's sand.

And there she saw the 'worm' too, the one from the Outsiders' 'pool'.

There, and Sheeana's presence was the sense of something alive and close. He pressed deeply into the sucking black goo, and strained against his bindings, half-blind and half mad. There was no traction, and the overall tendency was down and inward. In an effort to free a foreclaw and rise, Haku thrashed, and the whipping of his tail sent an oily splatter across Sheeana's body. The stains dripping like slow blood, the suddenly latching on, wriggling to become finger-long worms in shining black that moved and fled.

Sheeana momentarily recoiled. The Fremen in her smelled corruption. And she could feel them drag her.

But I bring Rakis with me... She concentrated and soon came a strong image from her Rakian childhood: Sandtrout. The great worm's second vector, two foot long pillbug like creatures. They were dry and leathery, segmented, eyeless, noseless, earless, seemingly mouthless. They bubbled from the dirt.

They were known by another appellation: water stealers. And that they did, spreading from the corrupted ground to seal off the oil, forming a cistern around it, a bumpy, dry surface the dragon could climb out of.

Like grasping, reaching viney tendrils, the oily dark megic shredded off his shoulders. If this had been reality, Haku would have been consumed long ago— but the horror was not in consumption, but in the act of being so taken, and so that was the nightmare's focus.

Step by step against the hanging, grasping, pulling weight-pressure Haku pulled himself free, a horror-image of blackness and inch-long worms scattering black and hateful from nostrils and ears, shredding out of his mane and scales like broken elastic or an unraveling sweater. He spat them out, vomited once onto the clean, clear ground, then spat again, and eventually found himself free of them and raised his horned head wearily to gaze at Sheeana.

"Thank you."

Sheeana knelt to grasp that great scaled body and pull him forward and out as much as she could. She stroked it, having been a companion to dragons since she was eight.

"Those are sandtrout. Water-stealers. You'll have to dig it all out again."

A snort, watching the 'water-stealers' among the oily mess. Sheeana's hands were warm against the water-cool scales. They were like shallow scallops, each fitted over the other in a shining mass, smooth as enamel.

"It is a dream-thing," He told her, watching with one green eye only the way her hand moved on his neck. No one had physically touched him since Chihiro. It was not something people did, "They would die, under the hands of one who loved. These dream-selves will die now, because of you."

He gestured with his snout as if to say look. Already the daemon-disguised black slugs were hissing and boiling away at the touch of Sheeana's dreaming mind in the form of the sandtrout. Without Haku's fear to feed on, they were powerless.

"Hmm..." Sheeana felt the scales under her palms. They were like the worm's segments, but smoother, designed to glide through water rather than blend into sand. She certainly was not one to love or indeed form hugely strong attachments to any individual. But it was the Bene Gesserit philosophy to love humanity, the universe itself, to dedicate yourself to its preservation. Maybe that's what they felt.

"It is strange me rescuing you. I am a desert creature. Perhaps it's my instinct to preserve water?" Gentle facetiousness.

I can feel the madness slowly creeping in...

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