bridgescribble | It's that one where you have to give a speech to a crowd of bears and wasps again

Entry tags:

It's that one where you have to give a speech to a crowd of bears and wasps again

You're having a nightmare, and you aren't alone. Someone is here with you in tonight's strange, dark dreamscape--for better or for worse.

Chased: Bears, tentacly monsters, giant vengeful wasps. You need to escape from it but you can't find a way.
Trapped: Elevator, sinking ship, cave. You're in and you can't get out.
Performance: It's often quoted that people fear public speaking more than they fear death. You don't know the script, you've never seen this Powerpoint, the teleprompter is blurry as hell... forget falling, you're about to die on stage.
Hated: You know those dreams where everyone you know accuses you of something terrible and they all hate you now? Yeah. It's that one tonight.
Disaster! You're on an island and a volcano erupts! You're next to a river and it floods! Never mind how geologically, climatologically, or physically likely it would be in this location in real life, it's happening now.
Haunting past: Your bad memories are just waiting for you to let your guard down, and what's more unguarded than sleep?
Wildcard: There are infinite nightmares in infinite combinations... why not put together your own?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

((Anything but 3 for his own nightmares. Otoh he canonically does dive into the dreams of others to rescue them from theirs so if you need a hand fairy Jesus is here for u.))

It wasn't like Jeremy had any friends. There had never been someone to stand with or for him. When the chips were down it was up to him to defend himself. Yet he knew with perfect clarity that everyone hated him. His power slipped through his fingers like running water, but he was able to feel the strange topography of the world spreading infinitely. It must be a dream, a nightmare, but as the knowledge rose, it was as quickly dashed away. Murderer, the growing crowd intoned. They weren't wrong there, but the body count he had did not seem enough to engender this kind of hatred. You have, you will, kill us all, the crowd added as if understanding his doubt.

"I wouldn't," he said, and at the same time he knew how easy it would be.

Easy, the crowd hissed and pressed in as he tried to take a step back. Some distant part of his mind battered itself, trying and failing to find wakefulness. The rest of him tensed, ready for whatever the crowd might do-caught between believing he should be punished and knowing he did not deserve it.

"Quo warranto?" came a bellowing voice through the crowd, forcing it to part like water for his passing. Ronan Lynch dreamt of light, fireflies the size of a fist and twice as radiant as the real thing dancing in a cloud around his head, pushing the sea of faceless accusers back. Because when the golden light of the dream fireflies touched upon them they were faceless, mere mannequins rather than people. The sweetmetal tattooed along his arm reflected in his dream, scalemail in a deep resplendent blue/green up the sleeve of his leather jacket that shifted like the scales of snake made metal.

"Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur!" He yelled to the crowd once in front of it, him and the fireflies standing between Jeremy and the masses, making a wall of incandescence. A king in dreams declaring his law be followed. His word be right and the ruling.

It was often better to let others fight their own nightmares - if only so they knew they could, but sometimes it took showing them they could be fought. It took giving someone a breather.

The words felt stilted, like the declaration from a king that they were. That was strange, not quite as strange as this new arrival. He looked like he would be at home in Cobalt City among the capes and cowls, but that didn't sit right. Maybe someone who could travel the Coil? It didn't feel like they were in any one place in the Coil. It was all very strange.

Beyond the wall of incandescence, the faceless crowd shifted and seethed, taking on the disturbing shapes of outer beings that Jeremy had glimpsed more than once. At the time they had not seemed very keen on Jeremy's existence and that seemed to be holding out just as the wall was.

The change in the crowd wasn't great, but the space the stranger had made did give Jeremy a chance to get his mental footing back. "Do I... Novi te?" Jeremy asked, his tongue taking to the language as if he had spoken it from birth.

Ronan watched the teeming crowd churning like waves against the breakwater. Be water, he demanded of them. Be seafoam. Be a receding tide.

"No," Ronan answered simply, a glance over his shoulder at Jeremy. Then, in case he was not aware, reaching his hand back in offering to Jeremy: "You're dreaming. This is a nightmare, but you can fight it back."

The crowd complied in so much as taking the shape of a storm-churned sea. Above them the sky opened and stretched wide revealing the kind of star-scape that only orbital telescopes or inhuman eyes would see.

Dreaming. That made things make an impossible kind of sense. Jeremy stared at the hand offered to him for a long moment before finally taking it and using the support to find his feet again. Finally, his power had something solid and not of his own mind to latch onto. Jeremy's awareness gently brushed the young man's mind. He seemed to have a genuine desire to help-which was strange enough.

"You don't know me, being here seems fool hearty," Jeremy said, despite having already taken the hand offered. Being both willing to take the help and cautious about the cost of that help.

"This is your dream, but this is my world," Ronan said. No boast, just a calm certainty of who he was and where he belonged, an iron-clad sense of self. He was solid but at the same time had an almost hyper-reality to him like the dream things around them, the dream itself. "Force it to change - it can only hurt you if you allow it to."

Jeremy felt the edge of something like a fearful, hysterical laugh start to bubble up. He was able to quickly reign it in before sounding as crazy as he feared he was. "My dream. Does that mean my subconscious or just a reflection of it here in your world?" Jeremy was pleased to hear his voice reflecting the calm that he had wanted.

"Both?" Ronan said with a small shrug. He wasn't sure, and the specifics like that had never mattered to him. It was a real place in that Dreamers, Magicians, they could reach out to one another and exist at the same time within it. If that precluded one of the options he didn't know and didn't much care.

"It works because it works. Dream logic," he explained.

"Not the best option," Jeremy said, looking out at the storm-tossed sea beyond them. "My mind is a terrifying powerhouse... and my subconscious remains the most broken part of me."

Still, he had to try, didn't he? Closing his eyes he focused on the feeling of his form. Leaning on solid feeling radiating from Ronan next to him, Jeremy sought his own calm control. Red light flickered along the edges of Jeremy's body as it existed in this strange universe that spread along the Coil to wherever dreaming minds were. Jeremy guessed that was the unusual kind of place this was, at any rate. And, as Ronan, had suggested he pushed against the angry roil of nightmare-expanding the calm he felt and created something like an eye in the storm. It was a start.

Jeremy opened his eyes and watched the sea beyond Ronan's incandescent barrier retreat. As it retreated it revealed a young boy. Jeremy recognized the boy as himself, as he had been at maybe age ten. The skin on the boy's knuckles was bloody and broken, and he stared across the space and over thirty years at Jeremy.

"Does it get better?" young Jeremy asked of himself.

With little thinking, Jeremy crossed through the barrier to kneel before his younger self. The water was now little more than ankle deep and continued to flow out into the dark. "No," he said. In his dark, young eyes Jeremy thought he saw something small start to break. "But, it does get easier to carry. And sometimes," he glanced back at the man who had come so thoughtlessly to his aid, "people will come to your side because it is the right thing to do."

His young self's eyes gained a look of resolve. Pulling himself up to his full, scrawny, height he nodded once before melting back into the receding water. Jeremy continued to kneel, not quite yet ready to finish the struggle with his subconsious.

Ronan knew what it was like, to be afraid of your own mind. The night terrors no longer hunted him in his dreams, not for years, but he still remembered the sharpness of their claws, the way they tried to tear him apart. Back when he didn't know who he was, what he was, in so many more ways than one.

Talking about your feelings wasn't exactly Ronan Lynch's way, but - he was learning. How to talk to others - how to give help in a way they needed. Especially here. He reached out to press a hand to Jeremy's shoulder, steady and solid.

"I used to dream of feathered monsters that tried to kill me. Any time I'd fall asleep, there they were, ready to rip me to shreds. I'd wake up with wounds they inflicted on me."

Jeremy flinched at the sudden contact. A brief tensing before he gradually relaxed again. He had already taken Ronan's hand earlier, and this posed no more danger than that had. It was probably foolish, but Jeremy only worried about what he might do with that kind of contact. Further, he had gone a long time without human warmth before he had been locked away, so long that he struggled to recognize it when it was directed at him.

It sounded like Ronan had suffered his own terrible trials. "Did you find it difficult to ask for help?" Jeremy asked.

"It was impossible," Ronan admitted easily now. Now that his secret was long out, here in the world of dreams. "I can take things from dreams into reality - that's why the injuries carried over. My friends thought I was trying to kill myself and I couldn't tell them the truth."

He hadn't been, but at the same time in a way he had. Those nightmares were just him.

"Eventually I was able to."

Being able to pull a thing created on dream logic into a world that did not operate under the same rules seemed to Jeremy like quite the ability. Ronan's world was probably not filled to the gills with superpowers and magic, otherwise, it would not have been such a difficult topic.

"I'm glad you had friends and were able to tell them. If only so that now you would be here to save me from myself."

"Pretty sure there's a lot of pithy statements about shit happening for a reason," Ronan said simply, without particular complaint. Sometimes he did wonder how much free will came into it.

"In my experience, that reason is your past. Making a choice without its influence is nearly impossible. Even deciding to go against what you would normally choose is still based on something happening to push you to that contrariness." Jeremy chuckled as he pushed himself up to his feet. "Sorry, I've had a lot of time to think about the nature of free will and how outside actors could fabricate something like destiny."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's that one where you have to give a speech to a crowd of bears and wasps again

Ronan N. Lynch | The Raven Cycle / The Dreamer Trilogy | OTA

Based on dice results, how does this work?

Love it!!!!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject