New Dream Adventures of Raven Knight

01/15/12

Backing Up
I am at work, somehow I ended up back working at a data center at a hospital again. Not the job I was looking for. I am feeling quite depressed that it seems my years of school have all come to naught. What a waste. I sit at the computer, staring at the reports detailing that all systems are functioning normally. I am at least glad for that. I can sit there and be depressed in peace. I am sitting there when a coworker comes in early for his shift. He asks how the backups went last night… oh, shit! The backups! I forgot totally about running the backups! How could I have managed to do that? I jump from the seat and rush out to put in the backup tapes, maybe there's still time to get them done…


Caves of Darkness
I am in a dark place, I am in a cave of some kind. It is pretty dark, but somehow I can still see well enough to find my way. I follow the cave for a while, not sure where I have to go to get out of the caves. Where is the exit? Is there even an exit? Well there has to be an exit, I got in there somehow… so I turn around and head in the direction it seems I just came from. That's the best chance of finding an exit. I come to a large underground chamber, and in the chamber there are strange creatures. I finally identify them as trolls. The trolls are lumbering around aimlessly, they don't seem to know what they are doing and are thus doing nothing. A troll sees me and lumbers right up in front of me. It does not attack me, instead it stands there and looks at me as if it has never seen a human before. Maybe it hasn't… The troll bends over and picks up a shiny rock and hands it to me. It smiles, or looks like the troll equivalent of a smile, and then walks back out into the large chamber and wanders around with the others.

I was in a strange town, I didn't have any idea how I had gotten there but that fact didn't occur to me at the time. The town looked like something I would expect to see in an RPG or fantasy movie. I was dressed in the white robes of an Assassin's Creed Assassin' which was a good thing since the sun was shining very hotly and the white robes helped keep the direct heat off. That certainly didn't make things comfortable, however, so I was looking for a public place to get in to so I could cool off a bit, I ended up going into a tavern of some kind, though I didn't notice the name.

The inside of the tavern was quite a bit darker than the bright exterior, so it took my eyes a couple minutes to adjust so I could see clearly. There were lots of people in the place, all talking amongst themselves, making it impossible to determine what any one person was saying. I walked farther into the tavern, I noticed that there were quite a few people looking at me, I wasn't sure why that might be, so I ignored them and went over to the bar and ordered a beer. I wasn't sure why I ordered a beer, I don't even like beer, but I opened it Nd took a drink. It was better than I expected. The bar tender asked if there was anything else I needed, I thanked him and said the beer was it for now... I asked how much I owed him, he said I owed him nothing, I thought that was odd, but I stepped away from the bar.

I was feeling like a character in a video game, which was how I looked, so I thought I should find a quest to go on. This was a tavern, there should be some kind of quest available in here... So I wandered around the tavern a bit, eavesdropping on some conversations to see if there was anyone who sounded like they needed help. I wasn't hearing anything interesting at first... A man was speaking lovingly to a woman, telling her not to worry, his wife would never find them there... A woman getting quite angry, talking to her friend about how she wanted to kill her cheating husband, a couple of women were kissing as lovers... None of this really got my attention, these were all personal matters, so I continued looking. I was starting to worry that I might become obvious when something caught my attention, someone was talking about their daughter having been kidnapped. I sat down at a table close enough to listen in on their conversation.

The mother and father were both talking to a rather creepy looking guy, the mother and father looked like pretty well-off individuals, more so than most of the people in the tavern. The creepy guy, on the other hand, looked like he had crawled out of the city dump, or more likely the rats had thrown him out for being too disgusting. As I listened, I found out that the couple's daughter, 15 years old, had ben kidnapped and would most likely be sacrificed to some nasty called a spider demon. At the mention of a sacrafice, the parents looked horrified. The creepy guy seemed to savor that reaction... Then he continued to say the girl would be alive for a good week yet, since that was the gestation period for the little ones. Apparently there were many spiders controlled by this spider demon, and they would feed on the girl for the entire time while making sure to keep her alive, they would lay their eggs in her, when the eggs hatch in several days, the little ones atr hungry. But no worries, the girl would make a ready food supply, if she was lucky she would be too delirious to feel the excruciating pain as the little ones ate her alive from the inside. By now the mother was in tears... The father was begging the guy to tell them where the girl was being held, offering to pay any amount, but the man said he just wanted to be sure the couple would know their daughter would be dying a very slow and painful death. He walked out, leaving the parents too stunned to react.

I wondered if those horrible things the man had said were true, he also seemed the type to make up a horrible series of lies just to watch the parents' despair and pain... But if there was any chance that was true, I had to check it out, and I had been looking for a quest... So I followed the man from the tavern and onto the street, somehow it had become night while I had been in the tavern, and even stranger was the fact my Assassin's robes had turned black. They were adjusting to keep me hidden in any situation, which I thought was pretty cool. I saw the man moving down the street at a quick pace, he definitely knew where he was heading, and I followed him. I wanted to stay close enough not to lose him and still far enough back that he wouldn't spot me, although my robes kept me well hidden so there wasn't really any threat of that. I followed him for quite a while, he clearly knew where he was going, though I had no clue. He left the town and made his way through the darkness as if he had been there many times before, he had no trouble navigating the narrow trails through the rocky landscape with little to no difficulty while there were a couple places where I nearly face planted due to tripping on a rock I hadn't seen. The man disappeared into a small cave, glancing around to be sure no one was following him before disappearing inside. I noticed that he looked directly at me but gave no indication that he had seen me at all.

I followed him into the inky darkness of the cave, at which point he finally revealed that he could not see in total darkness by lighting a torch to see by. Of course that made it really easy to follow him through what seemed to be an endless maze of caves branching off in every direction. He finally entered a cavern that was illuminated by torches, that was his final destination. I entered the room to find a scene from a horror movie, there was a girl in there who looked like she was about 15 years old, she was naked and bound to the side of the cavern with what looked like wads of spider webs. That wasn't the worst part of it, either. The worst part of the scene was that there were small spiders crawling all over her, it looked like they were biting her, and there were red welts all over her body where she had been previously bitten, and she was hanging limply from her bonds and crying. When the man entered the room, the girl looked up at him, still crying, she said she wanted to go home, please help her... The man looked at her and laughed, he said he was going to help himself to her, that's what he was going to do, and as he said that he pulled his pants down, I was grateful that I couldn't see what he pulled out. The girl saw it, however, and was repeating over and over, "No… no… no…" and "Don't… don't… don't…" through her tears. That dirty, rotten, filthy piece of shit!

This would stop now. The girl fell silent as I walked up behind the asshole, she was looking at me with wide eyes… I figured it probably looked to her like I had just materialized out of nowhere. Time to take out the trash… but not too fast… that filthy asshole… his sickening chuckles fell silent as I ran my hidden blade into him. He turned towards me before I could even remove the hidden blade, which resulted in the wound getting torn even bigger… He opened his mouth to curse, but all that came out was blood, he fell down to his knees and coughed up blood again, then fell onto his side and twitched there for a short time before coughing up blood one final time and then being still. I noticed the girl was staring at me with wide eyes, I wondered if I had made a mistake by letting her see what I had just done, well there was nothing to be done for it now. What I had to do was get her out of there.

I remembered that in dreams I am able to control insects and spiders, so I ordered the spiders on the girl to get off of her, and I was surprised when they actually obeyed. I was actually considering doing a reality check but I was distracted when someone entered the room, this was a big and ugly guy… I remembered the freak saying there was someone he called the Spider Demon. Well, this guy was definitely ugly, but he didn't look like a demon to me. He proved that he truly was able to control the spiders, however, when he summoned all of the spiders in the room to gather around him. I'm not sure what had happened before I had arrived, but the sight of the ugly demon wanna-be set the girl off on some uncontrollable screaming, I wondered what sick things that asshole had already done… He ordered the spiders to attack me, I hadn't had a chance to cut the girl free yet, the asshole was laughing insanely. The spiders seemed to hesitate, but then started moving towards me, but I told them to turn around and attack the asshole. They immediately turned around and surrounded the asshole, completely ignoring his commands now, and then swarmed over him as he yelled his commands at them to attack me, not him. His yelling soon became muffled as the spiders filled his mouth with web, and they completely bound him in web, he fell to the ground, futilely struggling, looking like a big worm trying to break out of a cocoon of spider web, only his nose and eyes were still visible. His muffled cries of anger changed to cries of pain…

I pulled my attention from the "Spider Demon" and cut the girl free of the spider webs, then carried her out of the cavern. I'm not sure how I managed to find my way through the maze of dark passages, but I somehow did and emerged with the girl into the night. She was still crying, still naked in the night… I took off my robe and wrapped it around her, which left me wearing a non-descript shirt and pair of pants. There were so many spider bites all over her, I thought that since I could control the spiders IWL, maybe I could now use my healing powers IWL… so I focused on healing the girl's wounds, golden energy formed and flowed through her, wiping the bite marks away as if they were nothing more than spots of dirt on her skin, the energy also served to calm her down and relax her, she stopped crying, and now she just looked tired, completely exhausted… so I ended up carrying her all the way back to the town, I was surprised that at no point during that hike did I become tired nor did the girl start feeling heavy. I didn't really consider why that might be. I went down the main street in the town and went directly to the tavern, I wasn't sure if the parents would still be there, but that was a good place to start looking for them.

The first time I'd walked into the tavern quite a few of the people in the room had turned to look at me. When I walked in carrying the girl wrapped in my robes, everyone in the room turned to look at me. I scanned the crowd, searching for the parents of the girl I was holding, and I spotted them over in the far corner talking to a man who appeared to be an adventurer or a mercenary of some kind, I figured the parents were looking everywhere, desperate for someone to help them find their daughter. Now they were looking at me along with everyone else. I didn't really know what to say, so I just carried the girl over to the couple, at which point I pulled a fold of robe away from the girl's face, revealing her to her parents. The two of them were beside themselves with relief, the girl had been sleeping in my arms, but now she woke up. I set her on her feet, her parents embraced her, the three of them hugging and crying tears of relief and saying a bunch of stuff I couldn't understand due to the fact they were crying tears of joy. Excellent. Another sappy happy ending, though I wasn't sure why that was the way I was thinking of it… I turned to leave the tavern, to leave the happy family to their celebration, but the mother grabbed me, she was saying she didn't know how to thank me enough, she didn't know how to repay me, I just said I hadn't done it for payment. Both parents were expressing their gratitude now, the father took off his cloak and wrapped it around the girl before handing me my robes back. He said they looked like an exceptional garment… I felt like I was going to wake up, so I told them I had to go, there were places I had to be. I turned and left the tavern quickly… as soon as I stepped out the door and around the corner I woke.