Carabas

Earlier, was just lucid enough to deliberately fly upward with the intent of getting a wider view, instead lost visuals and wound up in a completely different scene, losing lucidity.

Standing on a ladder outside a suburban home, the wind shifts, hot and dry, a sense of the desert that's going to claim this place and incorporate it into my people's territory. I'm the one who led them to this place, but I feel conflicted now. I excuse myself to the man who'd been holding the ladder, and go inside to take care of some loose ends. There are too many signs of how personal an interest I've taken in this world, learning their language, getting much too attached; I should dispose of that evidence.

Elsewhere, among the troops, I'm speaking to one of them on behalf of a man in this world, Adam, trying to make sure they take care when they process him. I say I've never seen a dreamer with power like his before. Which is true, but I'm also being careful to phrase it in practical terms, downplaying any personal attachment. I have to stress the importance of him as a resource not to be wasted. The man I'm speaking to agrees that they'll be careful, but I don't think he's really paying attention, just brushing me off. I end the scene flying back to that suburban house, desperately searching for Adam.

The following scene focuses on a brother figure chiding me for hanging onto a ghost.

I'd been looking at a map showing three islands that had been conquered by someone else; I'm unconcerned about the islands themselves but am considering their influence over the surrounding sea routes.

Now standing on the deck of a ship, I'm speaking to a military leader from another ship, part of the group that conquered those islands - he's a passenger, not the ship's captain. He addresses me as Enchanter, which amuses me. I express my surprise that he's willing to deal with me if he recognizes what I am - I was under the impression that his people thought of my kind as demons. Isn't he worried that he's risking corruption with this conversation?

He indicates that many of his attitudes have changed since coming to this region. He describes how he'd arrived with four of my kind sealed on his ship; while on the central island, they'd broken free and in doing so, as he puts it, "bound themselves to the chains of ghosts." It's a reference to the past of that island - once they were no longer sealed away, they became entangled with local legends, automatically embodying the locals' beliefs. The way this man sees it, they are no longer themselves - by breaking free of their seals and into this world, they've trapped themselves in these roles, living out ancient history. He sees this as a negative thing. I don't. It's the way we work.

I've broken into a building for a specific purpose, but it's not been going well. I killed someone while trying to stop him from raising the alarm, I hadn't intended that. Still standing over him, to my right there's a room with three men in 19th century dress uniform speaking. They're the reason I came here, and I'm certain I won't be able to finish what I came here to do now that they've seen this - but they're not reacting. On further examination, there's some manner of barrier between that room and this one, invisible from this side but seemingly solid from theirs. I lean through for a moment while those men are facing the other way, feeling no resistance, and find that from their side, it looks as if I'm leaning through a mirrored wall. Interesting setup; I'm thinking about why the owner of this home would need such a thing.

Then I focus on the men speaking on the other side, the reason I'm here. One is saying, "What do we do about Shaw?" Another replies, "Escaping-"

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Revisiting that one-way-mirror setup, there's a vivid yellow tint to the air on this side of the mirror, and I'm looking at an image of a white rabbit hanging from a noose held in a man's hand. I'm hearing a man I think of as some kind of instructor saying to me, "...exists in the past."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I recognize from a previous dream leading a group of people out of some tunnels onto the surface. There's only a narrow ledge to stand on here, the top of a cliff, and it's raining, windy. Last time I'd described him as pale; this time there's something wrong with his skin, but I'm not focusing on it. I'm looking at his eyes; there's a red ring filling the outer half of his iris, that's new. Someone's saying in response to a question he just asked, "Perhaps we could talk on the way there," like they're in a hurry to get away from here.

Earlier, he'd been having a conversation with another man in those tunnels, taller, with white hair that's mostly fallen out. This man's arguing against him leaving with that group of people and going back to civilization, saying that either he'll spread corruption like a disease, or else he won't but he'll be blamed for doing so anyway. Previously, they'd unknowingly allowed some kind of corruption to spread before their own symptoms started to show, not realizing they were the cause.

There's a human woman who, when looking at a particular vampire through a mirror, would see a reflection of him that no one else could see - or rather a sort of different version of him, seen far off and from a distance, performing different actions. She's never been sure exactly what this means. He believes that she's been seeing something like his soul, or another side of him - he saw it as something like a hope for salvation. Right now, though, he's leaving town; he's loading luggage into a car, and both he and his sister are dressed in a drastically different, more formal style than she's ever seen them wear before - she thinks of it as out of character. But it only seems that way to her because they're destroying the personas they've been using with these particular identities and creating new ones, and she's never seen them do that before.

She's standing on the sidewalk, talking to his sister, and she's saying, but what about those visions of "the man in the glass" - how can the two of them just leave her without finding out what her visions meant? The sister says those visions were just illusions that he's ready to move on from.

I'm in a fortress that's been evacuated, watching a woman who's been advising me as she treats this survivor we'd found lying unconscious in the hall. Now that she's conscious again, my advisor comes to me and says we're in luck; the woman's the head of a noble house and she considers her loyalty as being to the throne itself, not to any particular claimant, so she's willing to pledge her sword to me. I'm aware that there was some previous meeting that had declared me the legitimate claimant to the throne, and that's what's determining this woman's decision, not that we've saved her life; if the meeting had declared in favor of someone else, she'd be supporting that person instead.

The character side of me is surprised by this statement about pledging her sword; I say to my advisor, what, again? I'd had to find three noble houses to declare their swords to me, I'd managed it, there'd been a ceremony - that part's done now, isn't it? My advisor can't believe I'd say such a thing; exasperated (rightfully so, the observer side of me thinks), she explains that I need all the swords I can get, especially now as we're making for Hightower - I have a mental image of entering a military encampment and seeing the top of a round tower of brown stones in the distance. I see her point now that she's said it, and I think about the route between here and Hightower, and all the noble households located along that route. I hope we don't have to repeat the actual ceremony each time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm part of a group of people protesting some issue, focusing on a sort of police force in a particular community but with broader implications. Trying to figure out how best to handle this, I enter the mind of the man in charge of the police force, trying to see what would sway him, what approach he would listen to. I find that the problem isn't our approach, it's that nothing coming from this source is going to sway him - even if my group convinced every last person in the community to unite and speak up, this man sees our community as a problem to be solved, a situation to be managed. If the police force is going to change, it needs pressure from someone else.

I travel to the mind of that man's superior, a political position. He's more sympathetic to the issue in the community, but he won't act just based on sympathy; it's important to him that he make "impartial" decisions about where to focus his limited time and resources. If public opinion among the area he serves as a whole was pressuring him to focus on this issue, or particularly influential groups or political powers, then he would focus on it. He considers this the most responsible approach.

Following the trail of political influence, I eventually come to the ruler of the country. He would be surprised to be asked about this issue at all; he considers it outside of his jurisdiction. This is the church's responsibility.

I come to the leader of the church, the equivalent of a pope. She also believes this isn't up to her; this is an issue for each nation to decide.

I'm disembodied, following a man as he walks out of a stone fortress through a side door. He's upset. I'm trying to mentally push him into making a choice that he doesn't see yet - there's a group of people staying at this fortress, and when they leave, I want him to leave with them. I need him working with them, and he'll be much happier as well. It only hasn't occurred to him yet because that would be desertion, which I think of as a minor nuisance. He's in a position of command in this semi-military, semi-religious order, a position he'd never wanted, and I've been mentally pushing him to focus on all the ways he feels trapped here.

The fortress is surrounded by an evergreen forest, and there's a little snow here and there. He stops right outside the door, believing that he's just getting some air. He's thinking about that group traveling through that I want him to leave with, and thinking about how his order can't show emotion, contrasting it with that group. He's looking at something on the ground that I can't see, and he's thinking that he'd be crying right now if he was capable of it.

I push him to walk further from the door - he thinks of it as walking aimlessly, but I have a direction in mind. There's several tables set up from something going on here during the day, mostly empty now. He looks over the devices assembled on one of them - he doesn't understand how any of them work, but he feels like he's spent all day protecting this stuff from overly curious onlookers, and managing the nobility, and running errands for the great and the good - it seems completely ridiculous to him that this is his life. It's the opposite of where he ever expected to be.

He keeps walking. I make sure he focuses on the little pool of blood on the stone ground here, a dozen or so dead crows around it, deliberately placed in a certain formation. One of his men had called it "a battlefield for crows" earlier. He has absolutely no idea what this disgusting thing is for, it's just one more thing he's had to keep people away from today. As he's looking at it, he sees someone standing at the edge of the woods. He's startled; at first glance, it looks like the man who used to be in command here, who'd moved on a few months ago and left him in charge. He feels relieved - and by feeling the extent of that relief, he's just now become really aware of just how much weight's been on his shoulders since that man left. But then the person moves and breaks the illusion. It's not him.

Disembodied, I'm watching a teenage girl walk into my home, an old Victorian in a small city. The door wasn't locked. She's been sent here by someone who told her I can help her, but apparently he wasn't specific enough about exactly the kind of problem I would help her with - he'd emphasized how important it was that she get off the street tonight, so she's gotten the misimpression that I run some kind of homeless outreach thing. I'm thinking, amused, that she's not far wrong.

A girl who's just recently started staying with me walks out of the bathroom wearing a towel, and she says oh, hello to the girl who's just walked in, assuming that the girl must be a friend of mine. She tells the girl I'm 'out' right now - they know me by the name Nick. They chat a little back and forth, neither of them realizing their mistake, and I'm thinking this is a good coincidence, that a girl her same age was around to meet her first, and that they get along well; this should put her at ease.

The girl who just got out of the shower gets something to drink out of the fridge, and as she's doing so she holds up a particular marked bottle, asking if the girl wants any of this. Oh, damn it - so much for putting her at ease. It's blood, but the markings don't actually indicate that. Offering it was a reasonable thing to do, given the people she's seen just drop in looking for me; and since she's assuming the girl already knows me, she's also assuming the girl's already familiar with what's in that bottle. The girl says sure, takes the bottle, and opens it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm on one side of a wooden barricade, and an old friend of sorts on the other side is calling to me. He's telling me that he's taken my advice, and he's decided that I was right - all those people without any magic, their lives do have value after all. As he says this, I'm looking through the gaps in the barricade to the soldiers lined up on the other side. I recognize them, or rather I recognize their uniforms indicating the lord they serve, a man whose help I've been trying to secure for a while now. They're unnaturally still. It's clear my old friend is controlling them directly. I'm not going to have much luck with that lord if I kill off his people, not to mention the people on my side of the barricade who would never forgive me - we're going to have to run.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'd convinced a group of fox demons to give up their human forms, their physical forms. Now I'm returning to the lake where they live, and they're gone. There are markers like graves standing in the places they'd been when they gave up their forms, stakes of white wood with names written on them - or what they used for names, more like descriptions really, they changed them fairly often. I read each of them. I kneel down before one with a name I recognize - it had belonged to a child. For the sake of protecting one human man, I caused this.

FMA. I/Mustang left the military a while ago; right now I'm looking out a door at the rain. I see a memory of similarly looking out another doorway at the rain, standing at the door to a balcony on a tall tower, and then retreating back inside to adjust my plans. In the present, I put on a hat with a wide, floppy brim and head out into the rain.

As I'm walking up a mountain road in that rain, I pass an old man driving his truck down the road. We wave to each other like we do every day. I'm thinking, as a soldier who was for all intents and purposes an embodiment of fire, I was useless in the rain, so it held a different significance. But as a person - I'm thinking of both me and the old man in the truck - you just put on a hat and go to work, rain or not.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in the same mountain range from yesterday, traveling alone at the moment, standing just inside the entrance to a cave. I've come to a very old friend to ask him for his help. He's not happy to see me. He's sitting in a sort of stone throne and saying slowly, emphasizing every word, "I am not well."

I can see that. He wears this silver circlet that sort of glows, a contrast to his dark hair and coat; looking at how faint that glow is, I'm thinking that there's barely anything left of him. Nonetheless, there's enough of him left to do what I need done.

I'd been accused of a crime I didn't commit. The charges have been dropped now, but people have formed their own opinions about my guilt or innocence. On the sidewalk I'm confronted by a group of men in dress uniform, most of them middle-aged. They call me monster, and disgusting, and one of them says, "He saw what you did," indicating a younger member of their group.

A liar, that's interesting. I wonder at first whether this is the actual criminal and if he'd been trying to frame me, or whether he's just someone who heard about the case and was trying to get in on the limelight. But he looks genuinely afraid of me, to such a degree that I realize what must have happened - he must have seen me eating. But in this era, accusing me of being a vampire would be too ridiculous, he wouldn't be taken seriously. So he came up with something more believable to accuse me of, to get me locked up. It wasn't a bad idea, I've been considering burning this identity since this mess started.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running along a mountain path, mentally shouting Nadja's name. She came to us under a false identity, and then she disappeared in order to avoid being found out. But there was no need for her to disappear like that. I've tracked her to these mountains based on rumors of "the witch of the crags," and once I sensed traces of her, I started calling first the assumed name we knew her by, then her real one, Nadja. Following her mental trail, I reach a cliff. Without hesitating, I jump over the edge.

Snow-covered mountain peaks far below me, as far as the eye can see. I pause to check if I'm still asleep enough to take control of the flight for a while - yes, I am. Forgetting about Nadja, I turn upward, enjoying the view for as long as it lasts.

I'm giving a woman a ride somewhere in a carriage, and when she's gotten settled I knock on the wall twice and we start moving. I go to lower the curtains on the windows, and as I do I catch sight of her fiance out on the street, obviously looking for her. She's already made it clear she doesn't want to be found at this moment. As I'm looking at him I'm struck again by how incredibly dull he seems. I say to her, "On God's green earth, what do you see in him?" I gave up my chance with her so I have no right to judge the man she chose, but still - him?

She says, "On God's green earth, I won't let you steal my plan. I can't." Either she has drastically changed the subject or else I've drastically misunderstood their relationship - either way, I have no idea what she's talking about.

Just then, her fiance spots us - I should have lowered that curtain - and he shouts her name, Ephigenia. He is being ridiculously overdramatic, people will think I'm kidnapping her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Disembodied, I'm watching my son be interrogated by a pair of policemen. We don't have any legal ties under my present identity, at his insistence - he's old enough now that we look the same age, so adopting him again wouldn't have been practical, but I'd wanted to arrange something, and he'd refused. I'm particularly annoyed about that now, when a legal connection would come in handy.

They've accused him and his sister - his biological sister, I didn't raise her, hadn't known she was alive until just now - of murder, and he's been repeatedly telling them he's innocent, but they've just produced an audio recording of what is clearly his voice stating that "we" - he and his sister - have been waiting for this since he was nine years old. As I hear the recording, I see a mental image of him at the moment he spoke those words, with a man tied up in front of them. Up until this moment I'd believed he was innocent. Back in the interrogation room, he's insisting that the voice on the recorder isn't his, but he's clearly fooling no one. They've been letting him tell his story, knowing he was lying the entire time.

I've heard enough. I remove my awareness from the interrogation room. Back in my body, I'm standing in my son's apartment - a tiny studio with a mattress on the floor, cluttered with random piles of clothes and other things. He wasn't doing well. I'm extremely annoyed about this situation - he'd betrayed me, he'd made it clear he was going to cause trouble for me, but for him to simply be removed from the situation like this by unrelated people, that doesn't sit right with me.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running - as fast as I can manage, which isn't very - along a snow-covered mountain path, trying to hold my throat closed as much as possible. I'm wearing black leather gloves, the blood blends in very well. This isn't the first time I've had my throat slit, so at least this time I know my voice will come back eventually - just the memory of how frightening it had been the first time I had my throat slit still makes me uncomfortable. It's still incredibly inconvenient until it heals. One of my least favorite ways to 'die.' I'm thinking about the man who 'killed' me - a soldier on the same side I am. I don't know why he did this - he enjoys violence in general, so I'm hoping it was just something personal and not something larger I'd have to worry about.

Thinking about that man's possible motivations prompts a scene change. I'm peeling an orange as a visitor goes upstairs to meet with that man who'll slit my throat. I can hear the sound of an opera recording on the phonograph, and I warned the visitor that it's best not to interrupt while he's listening to his music - I didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure opera is the only thing that man loves aside from violence - but the visitor ignored me. Shortly later I hear the visitor scream.

I'm looking at a painting with the artist beside me. St. George and the dragon - I recognize that the dragon is meant to be myself. After noticing that, I recognize who St. George is meant to represent too. I say to her, very slowly and deliberately, "George can't save you." Whether I can do anything for her either isn't certain, but "George" definitely can't, despite what he believes.

As Louis, being seen as a vampire by someone who I didn't want to see that, fleeing the scene, and Lestat finding this much more funny than I think is appropriate.

Discussing a military operation, looking at a map of what is essentially much of India and Southeast Asia, although at this point in time - meant to be 6th or 7th century or so - the countries and their borders are significantly different than in the present; we're primarily discussing a trade route at the moment, but I've also been having a disagreement with the man in charge about our manpower. While discussing the trade route, we receive word of 500 archers spotted approaching from the north, in addition to the army we're already facing. I am significantly less confident about our ability to handle this than the boss is.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

As some manner of religious authority, I'm performing a ritual to help a group of people, a sort of blessing or summoning, making something sacred. At the start of the ritual I have to offer up whatever spiritual virtue I possess as a sacrifice; this will leave me vulnerable until the ritual's complete, so I'm relying on the two people who asked for my help to accompany me. With the offering made, we step through a portal.

This takes us to a dark and dusty room, a place I'm familiar with. I summon light into my hands, with an effect much like a dim flashlight. In the middle of the floor there's a large trunk full of false panels, something a stage magician might use; at the moment it's lying open so that all its tricks are clearly visible to anyone who might pass through. I didn't leave it like that. There are a few objects on the shelves of the room that weren't here the last time, indicating that someone other than me has indeed been using this place. This is something to worry about. I close the trunk properly, and we continue.

A brief memory gap - after the dark room, we came out into a field at night with a river off to our right, and what we did here I can't remember; but then we came to the cliff at the opposite side of the field, and the view here was so fantastic that I briefly went fully lucid to enjoy it. I'm looking down on an immense lake so still that I can see stars reflected here and there. In the far distance, there's an immense grey statue of a falcon submerged in the lake so that only its head is above the water - but that small part of the statue above the water is at least the height of a two or three story building.

Continuing the storyline, this is certainly the appropriate place to perform a sacred ritual, so I begin a prayer - something about the lake filling with stars. But before I get very far, that river off to our right rises in a flood. The two people with me are afraid, but I'm thinking this is convenient - we'll just ride that water down to the lake.

The river sweeps us over the cliff, which is great fun, and when I sink under the water of the lake I can see a group of hammerhead sharks swimming far below. They don't seem to care about us. Surfacing, although we've all separated, we're all making our separate ways toward that falcon statue.

Along the way, however, I bump into a seal; it considers me and then swims on. And then into a shark; the same happens again. And another shark, and this one seems more interested in my presence; and another that I have to physically shove away; and so on; I'm not concerned about my safety - though I am worried about the other two - but I become so busy fending off sharks that I can't continue to the statue.

Julia's walking with this teenage girl, maybe ten years younger than Julia. They're talking about concepts of 'home,' and the girl's first association is the one night she spent on the couch in Julia and Jamie's apartment. This bothers Julia a lot. The girl says something about her parents who'd died when she was young, and mimes a salute - her father had been a soldier. Julia hadn't known that before - she wonders if that was part of why the kid sort of latched onto Jamie as a father figure, and part of her reaction to his death. Disembodied, at that reference to how Jamie's death stirred up the kid's old issues, I'm thinking about how Julia's managed to bring me back from the dead just to give me something new to feel guilty about. The tone of the thought is fond, though.

A couple brief images of Jamie and the kid like snapshots - I'm in Jamie's POV. She'd been part of this group of kids I was working with, and she intimidated most of the people around her, generally angry at the world. She reminded me of somebody.

At the McKittrick Hotel, I ran an errand for Hecate, and in return she's granting me access to a certain flight of stairs. I hand her written note to this effect to the doorman, and he removes the rope blocking off the stairs. He looks bored. He warns me that the things I'll see up there are just ghosts, so don't take any of it too seriously. I tell him I know. I'm still looking forward to seeing something new.

At the top of the stairs, everything is airy and bright, and there's the dead body of a soldier in dress uniform sitting against the railing that overlooks the ballroom, arms spread and head dangling forward in a way that reminds me of a scarecrow. His name's Jeremy. A woman in white walks up to him - there's something careless about her. Jeremy gets up from the railing, and they begin to dance through the rooms of the hotel. There's no music.

As Rumpelstiltskin, disembodied, I'm watching a woman lead a prisoner, a teenage boy, into a dungeon. She's complaining about how tired she is of hunting people down and dragging them back here across worlds. We're standing (well, 'standing' in my case, lacking a body at the moment) in a stone hallway, at the top of a staircase blocked by a door of iron bars. She locks that door behind the prisoner, and when she leaves he just sits down right there at the top of the stairs rather than going further down. He looks very confused. I'm aware he's not the only person in the dungeon, there's several people down at the base of those stairs, some of whom I feel personally responsible for, and I wonder for a moment if they've been fed today. I sometimes forget how often my guests need to eat. Then I remind myself that right now, it's not my responsibility to keep them fed - the people who took them prisoner will take care of that, they need their hostages alive. There's someone in that dungeon I want to take back, but I've got a few other things to see to first, while I'm disembodied.

The scene skips ahead in time - no memory gap, just a shift to the bottom of the stairs and an awareness that this is meant to be later. A guard's come to feed the prisoners, and when no one comes to the top of the stairs when he calls, he opens the door to bring the food down himself and check on the prisoners. But when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he finds me sitting in the wooden chair in the center of the dirt floor. I'm wearing a hood that hides my face, but I always do. There's two kids beside me, royalty held hostage - one of them's my granddaughter, biologically but not officially, though she isn't aware of that and neither were the people who took her. But they should have been aware that I've always looked after her family. I wait until he's seen me, and until the look on his face shows that he knows who I am, and then I create a ball of fire in my hand. I enjoy this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm returning to a tent in a military camp in some cold, snow-covered place, and there's this man who bows to me two or three times when he sees me, obsequious manner, irritating. I hear a voice as if I'm reading a line in a book: "This was the worst of ___'s nature, he told himself - a ___ who didn't know how to ___." (The blanks aren't things that I forgot after waking up - during the dream, the voice just cut out during those words. The first blank was meant to be the name of my POV character here; the other two had no mental associations.)

There's a man, some kind of ruler, lying in his sickbed, potentially his deathbed. He's speaking to two servants to either side of his bed. Circumstances are forcing him to return to a place he'd once tried to conquer many years ago, but had been forced to turn away from at the last minute. His servants think returning now will be a disaster, given his health. But he's inspired. He says that when he first marched on that place, he'd felt he was approaching the height of his power. As though if he'd reached that place, he also would have reached his dream of creating something that would change the world. I want to use the word 'technology' here, but that gives the impression of some new gadget - what the ruler is after is something as revolutionary as the invention of writing. His statement makes one of the servants focus on the symbol the ruler is wearing around his neck. It's a gold star with 14 rays, arranged much like a jack, the toy, or like a three-dimensional version of a compass rose. I, disembodied, think of alchemy.

There's a white horse and rider walking through a hall of the palace. An extremely agitated servant is trying to get them to leave, but the horse and rider brush him off. They walk through a pair of wooden double doors, into a room where the ruler who'd been in his sickbed is now up and in military uniform, going over maps. The setting looks significantly more modern than I'd thought in the previous scene, maybe as late as the 1800s.

The ruler reacts about as you'd expect when a stranger on a horse walks into your room. The rider asks, "Don't you recognize me?" And his face changes - now he's identical to the ruler. "Though when we last spoke, it was more..." And his face changes again, growing younger. Very little changes, really - skin's a bit tighter about the jawline, mostly. The rider reaches up to feel that jawline, and compliments the ruler on how well he's aged. Perhaps that's the result of easy living. This is sarcasm - an accusation. The rider says "we" expected greatness from the ruler - but what has he done with their gift in all this time?

The rider says, "We convene in the morning. I expect you there." And he leaves.

I'm someone playing cards with three other guys, and one of them mentions the (some surname beginning with T) manuscript. It's this anonymous collection of old medical notes. A few copies have been made of it, but it was never published, so it's very rare. I tell them a bit about that manuscript - I love having the chance to do so, I enjoy sharing stories from the past a great deal.

During the war, it was an open secret that T. was seeing a certain woman. He always used a nickname when he mentioned her to others, but everyone knew. (As I'm saying this, I'm seeing an image of myself playing cards with T. in the past, much like the scene with these men now, both of us in uniform; and then an image of that woman walking down a street.) And she'd often go to his room to make use of his typewriter. (I'm seeing a typewriter that doesn't actually make sense for this time period.) For whatever reason, when he left to return to England those notes she'd been working on were mixed in with his typewriter and his other things. He didn't make it back to England of course, and when his things were eventually recovered, that anonymous manuscript was naturally associated with him. But the identity of the author of the T. manuscript is Florence Nightingale.

This doesn't get the reaction from the other card players that I'd been hoping for - I get some odd looks but mostly they just seem bored. They change the subject, talking about pharmaceuticals. I'm disappointed - I'm reasonably certain Florence is still a household name, recent enough and well-known enough that I'd thought they would find this interesting, even though they were all born well after her death. It's always an isolating feeling when this happens - no one much cares about old dramas. But at least they only see it as the eccentricity of a history buff, and I don't have to worry about them seeing me as a threat.