trans_9 | Meditations [Open]

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Meditations [Open]

Rhiow sat in the middle of the main concourse of Grand Central Station, occasionally turning her head to speak into her omnicomm. She waited patiently, her tail curling slowly as she switched it, for people to arrive.

She hoped they would gain as much strength from the mantra as she did, but she was certainly willing to explain some of the theology behind it in case they didn't understand the more pointed references. It came from The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, of course, which was the strictly feline rendition of The Book of Night with Moon.

She twitched her ears back and forth and waited.

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Nura knows that the worst is yet to come concerning the Nightmare King. She knows that it will all hit the fan eventually, but she can't help but feel that all the pain she foresaw can be prevented. After all, predestination is bunk.

"Hello, Rhiow," she says as she walks up to the cat. "I am here for the meditation lesson."

"Thank you for coming," Rhiow said. "I only hope I can help a little. Do you have time to wait for others? The meditation is rather long, and I'm sure there will be some questions about the content of it." She put her whiskers forward. "Some of it is fairly idiomatic."

"But anyway, Dai stihó," go well, "Have you been aboard long?"

Nura nods. "I can wait. I'm fairly patient." She decides that sitting down so that she can be in better eye-level with Rhiow is a proper way of conversing.

"I was recently popped."

"What a horrible time to come to the ship," Rhiow said. "Not that any time to come to the ship is really a good time." Her ears laid out to the sides for a moment, thinking of people she missed.

"I'm sorry, I don't believe I got your name."

"Nura Nal-Dox." She smiles charmingly. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Nura. You have the fortune of having a name I can pronounce, unlike almost half the people on the ship." Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a short smile.

"And your world? I come from one of the many Earths - it seems there are over a few dozen on this ship."

Lyle is a bit late to show. He's been throwing himself into his work harder than ever, and it's only as his mind begins to tire under the strain that he stops. Catching up on the new omnicom posts sends him down here. If nothing else, the walk will stretch his legs and shake the cobwebs out of his head.

He walks into the concourse quietly, lest he disturb the person who lives there. Looking down from the entrance, Rhiow is easy to spot despite her size. She seems to still be waiting, so he takes the stairs down and approaches her.

"Dai stihó," she called, her ears swinging forward at his arrival. "Welcome to Grand Central - a little subdued, but it makes a nice meeting place. It's kind of hard to miss."

"It's impressive." Lyle looks around. This sort of architecture hadn't really survived to his time. It's quite a few steps to reach her, and he gets a good idea of the space as he walks.

"I've experienced attacks similar to these before, but I'm afraid I haven't had any real training against them."

"Oh, really?" She laughs at that, mouth forming a jovial smile.

"I am from Earth-Prime. There are a few alternates to my Earth on the ship." She smiles wistfully.

Katara had rushed to the Grand Central Station, although it took her a moment to find Rhiow. She was taken aback by the sheer size of the place and the frescoes that adorned it. She couldn't stop staring at everything: it reminded her a lot of the station she and the gang had stopped at before going into Ba Sing Se. She was going to have to look up this place when she had the chance.

She was surprised, however, to find no one here but a cat....was that cat the one that had put up the post? If that were so, she was going to again have to readjust her thinking about who she spoke to, and what they looked like.

"Did you put up the post?" She asked the cat.

"I did," she said. "Dai stihó, I'm Rhiow. I'm glad to see you found the place all right, this City is a big place for being contained in a ship."

If one could really call anything 'contained' on Stacy, that was. Rhiow wasn't sure how something her size even functioned - the power requirements must have been incredible. And she was a bioship... alive. How did she live? What did she eat?

Rhiow shook herself and began washing her paw, using it to scrub behind her ears. "I'm glad you've come, though. I've been getting a fairly decent response to this so far. Hopefully it will help."

"I'm not sure how much I can offer," Rhiow said. "The mantra isn't a shield - it won't keep him out of your head if he's very determined to get there - but it's..." She switched her tail slowly. "I suppose you could call it a foundation. The first step to resisting mental intrusion is to train yourself to control the way your thoughts effect your moods."

She twitched one ear. "Sorry, I didn't mean to get technical before we were even introduced. I'm Rhiow."

"I have yet to encounter any alternates of my own universe," Rhiow said. "But then, I haven't seen anyone from my own universe at all, to my knowledge." Her tail began to move a little slower at the thought. It was her devout hope that the others had been rescued by Stacy - that there were several wizards in the pods and she was not the only one on this errantry.

"I'm Lyle Norg. A pleasure." He sits down on the floor by her. "Really, anything you can tell me will help. I'm a scientist, not a telepath. I'm a bit out of my depth here."

"Yes, I know," Katara said. "I never cease to be amazed by what I find in the city anyway. I'm glad I saw this place though. It's so beautiful."

"I hope so too," Katara said. "I've been thinking that we should do this meditation thing, but I've been getting a little distracted. Unfortunately, I had a fairly bad dream of my own...it's what brings me here today. I may have been able to break out earlier than most, but it had me fairly overwhelmed."

Katara had to ask. "I have to know: do cats talk in your world, or are you a person who turned into a cat? You can never tell in this place."

"Oh that's even simpler then," Rhiow said. "I'm a technician, I don't know how to couch this in anything but scientific language, since the mantra itself is fairly metaphysical."

She settled down into crouch, tucking her paws underneath herself. "The Nightmare King works by altering your perceptions of reality," she began. "The fabric of reality is usually much more malleable than people think - time, even more so. By altering the perceptions of a few dozen people in a single location, the fabric of the world around them can be altered as well." She switched her tail. "The more central the universe your in, the more malleable it is. Stacy, obviously, is transdimensional - she operates outside of many of the laws of standard universes. I'll bet the fabric of space-time here is excessively malleable. Are you following me?"

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. "Many things can talk besides ehhif," she said. "Whether or not they all speak the same language is usually what causes the communication barrier. I'm bilingual - I speak the native tongue of the People, which you mostly can't even hear, and I know the Speech, which is a sort of universal language that allows me to communicate with anything living."

And a great deal of things that aren't living, but that's the wizardry.

And that...sort of answered her question, although it left open about a million other ones too. Though right now, a detailed explanation was going to take up too much of their time, and Katara did have a lot of questions. Specifically, she did have one fairly specific one.

"Did you have a dream too Rhiow?" And THAT reminded her that she hadn't even said what her name was. "I'm Katara, of the Southern Water Tribe."

She would never stop being specific about where she was from.

Jamie made his way through the city and into the station in something of a daze, half-expecting at any moment to feel that presence in his mind once again, as he had intermittently the past few days. He was somewhat surprised, upon reaching his destination, to find the vast area empty save for a cat.

He paused, wondering if it was just a random stray cat, or if it was the person he was supposed to be meeting here. He supposed a talking cat wasn't that much of a stretch, considering all the other beings aboard the ship - for that matter, there'd been a talking cat back on the island, too, hadn't there?

Jamie approached the cat tentatively. "Um...hi. Were you the one that sent out that message, or, um..." He trailed off, gesturing vaguely and thinking that, regardless of whether or not the cat could understand him, he probably sounded really stupid right now.

Lyle nods along slightly as she speaks.

"Yes, that makes sense." Well. For a special value of sense.

"I know how you feel," she says grimly. "I feel like a kundrin out of the tar pits with the counterparts." Her shoulders shrug and she slumps a little in her posture.

She then realizes what she's doing. "Sprock it all. I'm turning into a Downer Girl again." She shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the mopey notion.
"Please, Rhiow. I was a member of the Spirit Plane for some time, and I haven't felt the presence of so many demons in so long. I know you have some information on the Nightmare King that is more than useful. Please, explicate."

"Yes, I am," she said, pricking her ears forward as the boy approached. She had seen some of the younger denizens of the ship around, of course, but she hadn't met many of them. There were young wizards, of course, so she was used to the peculiar sinking feeling in her chest that this boy was too young to be here.

She shook her head, dismissing the notion. "I'm Rhiow. Welcome to Grand Central Station."

"Hh-t'hara," Rhiow repeated, her accent thickening around the letters she couldn't pronounce, and she scratched at the plant collar, making the communication rings linked onto it jingle. "I've had several dreams, and none of them good. Bad memories, things that I shouldn't have seen in my world but that he makes me watch..." she remembered the awful dream with the taxi accident and her ears laid back briefly.

"One of these waking dreams, though, I haven't experienced. I did help a couple people out of them."

"So if you view the universe we know as a collection of perceptions, then to control how much influence the Nightmare King has on your mind, you have to control your perception of the universe."

Rhiow flicked one ear, very quickly. "To do that, you begin by managing your emotional state. Most people when put in a stressful or frightening situation panic, which triggers the fight-or-flight response - or in the case of some, the response to simply freeze and shut down." Not that anyone who did that lasted long as a wizard anyway, but she wasn't teaching wizards. "The best way to control the panic is to give yourself a mental foundation of encouragement and determination every day." Rhiow flirted her tail to the side. "That's what the meditation is for. It's to remind you what's important, what you should be focusing on, to school your mind into a state of resiliency. It, in and of itself, doesn't actually do anything - you only get out of it what you put into it."

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