Carabas

As mostly my IRL self, I'm following a news story about a court case. The girl on trial is a minor, but the people involved in the case keep talking about her as if she's an adult; there's racial connotations. Her outlook is not good. As not-exactly-my-IRL-self, I'm thinking this is an injustice. I've allowed them long enough to work this out themselves, they've had their chance; I'm going to step in and remove her from this ridiculous trial. There's a connotation here that this means dropping everything going on in my life. I'm nearly out the door when IRL-self stops to wonder exactly what I think I can do.

I'm standing in a dimly-lit, brown-toned library where I'm meeting Mazikeen for the first time in a long time. The dreamer part of me is critiquing the way the dream is representing her half-alive half-dead status; the parts of her without skin are tinged green, and it crosses over her body, so that her left arm and right leg are dead. I think of this as a clumsy representation of the life/death mix. The character part of me is remembering seeing her a long time ago, when she'd just been made immortal and she'd been elated about it, saying that she'll be able to continue to serve as long as I need her. I'm wondering whether she'll think what I'm doing now is worth serving - or rather, what I'm not doing now; I've abandoned certain ambitions.

I'm listening to a man die while I remain in hiding. I'm thinking that maybe I should have moved sooner and saved him, even though I'd have risked being seen - but I don't have any particular emotion about this, except maybe a little irritation at myself. I've been sent into this old stone ruin of a fortress, and I'd intended for only five particular men to be spared. Now I'm down to four. It's not ideal, but I'll have to live with it.

I couldn't hear her very clearly from my hiding place under their bed, but the woman who stabbed him said something to the effect that he should have recognized her. Some personal revenge thing - none of my business. Now I'm seeing the sort of smoke haze of colors passing before my eyes that I associate with life leaving a body. I watch it dissipate in the air, and I'm irritated at the waste. Waiting around is pointless now - and the woman should be directly above me. I stab up through the mattress.

When she dies, my perspective shifts. I'm floating in the void, with this massive black slab of a door in front of me, as wide as it is tall, some kind of geometric symbol across it. It's standing on this sort of grid far below, like a chess board where all the squares are black, with the door as a line across the center of the board. There's a few gravestones occupying some of the squares of the grid - that's new. I realize immediately they represent the previous targets the door sent me after - one of them must represent that woman whose death brought me back here. The door's saying something in my head about bringing it wisdom for the dead.

A Takarazuka production of Elisabeth with a new scene, in which Death is kneeling before young Elisabeth on the throne, kissing the underside of her wrist. Both of them are dressed in red; at the beginning of the scene, Death had been disguised in long red robes.

Just a name: Sven Odinson.

I've got some government job in which I'm part of a team of people in suits protecting someone, and we're currently in a hospital, when I pass a room where a team of people in red uniforms, EMTs maybe, are preparing for something. Something about them catches my attention as odd, and I mention to a coworker the possibility of a disguised threat. She agrees with me.

Something about political opposition to dances in cathedrals by night.

A zombie apocalypse setting, in which someone was approaching the house I was holed up in and we nearly shot each other, wrongly assuming each other to be zombies. She tries to convince me to come with her to some camp and I agree only because I'm fairly confident about being able to escape her along the way if it seems necessary, whereas if I start a confrontation with her here and now I'm fairly confident she'll shoot me. She's traveling with someone who joins her then and gives me a checkup, and she takes a very long time to find my pulse. When she finally says "Found it," I say, "Look at that, I have a heart. That's one for the books."

A little girl saying "(something) to read hearts, death to solve the mystery." A choice between two different goals, reminding us to match the approach to the goal. This is a girl who I and the people I'm traveling with met a long time ago, and at the time she just seemed like a tragic figure, sole survivor of some massacre in which she watched the deaths of everyone else in her castle and the surrounding village. When I'm thinking about this, I see a memory of one of the people I'm traveling with standing in a pool of water with her, up to his neck in the blood and gore surrounding this girl. The journey we're on somehow involves the spirit of a certain place - either we're searching for it or it's opposing us or something - and we met this girl fairly early in that journey, but now that we've met her again, we realize she's more than she seems; the tragic figure we met originally was at least partially an act, and I strongly suspect she is that spirit.

Now she's saying, "Sure you shouldn't just make perception your goal?" That's following on the death-to-solve-the-mystery thing she said just before. One of the guys I'm traveling with says, "Sorry, our goal is to take the cat out of the box." A Schrodinger's Cat metaphor; we don't want to just find the answers for ourselves, we want to eliminate the mystery completely.