Carabas

I'm evacuating a place where True Blood's Eric and Bill had been staying; Bill's already gone, but Eric's chained to a chair, and I have no intention of freeing him. I'm going to carry him out in the chair. Despite this, I have nothing against him, and I'm asking him if he wants me to bring any of the belongings he's kept in these rooms. I'm kneeling in front of the chair as I speak to him, and I say that I may need him to carry something of Bill's in exchange, to which he consents. Aside from 2 belongings which needed no discussion, he says he doesn't need anything else. It seems a shame, the rooms are full of things he's collected over his lifetime. I pick up a sword he has on display with a hilt that looks like carved ivory or bone, and I say sure, you may not need anything else, but it's better if it can come, isn't it? I put it on the chair with him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: a mention of Louis, a king.

I've heard about a gathering of people I'm thinking of as 'the British' tonight - there's a connotation of a specific politically subversive group in my mind - and I intend to arrange a meeting with the queen, although I'm not as close to her in this reality as I have been in past iterations; I've spent too much time focusing on other contacts this time through. I sit down beside the queen at her mirror. Her daughter, Antoinette, is here as well, standing by the window; she's beautiful but spoiled, self-centered. That's largely my fault - in other versions of this reality I'd devoted more time to her and she'd developed into a very sweet girl. This time around, we're not particularly close, and she notes only that she owes her name to me. In French, I ask the queen her plans for this evening after the party. I don't speak to her in a particularly deferential manner. She seems wary, suspicious, but I think I have enough influence with her to pull this off.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I need to kill a giant snake, but I can't find a weapon. Finally, a woman produces a long knife and beheads the snake herself. But I tell her that it's still alive, you need to destroy the brain, otherwise beheading it is just slow death by suffocation, it's cruel. I point to its eyes, which are still moving; I tell her it's suffering. She doesn't care. It's harmless now, that's all she cared about. I can't believe this. But I do my best to put it out of its misery without a weapon, until finally its eyes stop moving and its skull is crushed. I pick up head and body and carry them outside.

When I reach the door, the storyline changes - at first I was still aware I was carrying something and needed to get rid of it, but I forgot about it quickly and so the snake disappeared. I was distracted by the sight of colorful glowing orbs floating down the river, just through the trees. There's a festival going on all this week, and tonight is the children's celebration. I walk past the women handing out colored orbs for the children to light candles inside and carry down to the water, and as I walk I see a couple kids carrying their lights the wrong way, down to the sea instead of the launching place at the river. Some adults are trying to point them the right way, but the oldest kid says something about their father's ship out at sea.

3rd person. Tradition dictates the pharaohs of this dynasty marry on the first day of the new year for symbolic purposes, but his intended bride is tired of waiting. She cuts her leg with a knife and lets the blood run down into the dirt, a ritual attempt to soothe the drought the land is going through with her own life; since she isn't yet royalty, this is all she can do. Her intended husband watches this and decides to break with tradition and hurry the wedding. However, there's an incident where the couple goes on a voyage with their servants and attendants, and a woman is seen waiting outside at night to meet a lover in secret - it may have been one of the servant girls, but a rumor starts that it was the intended queen.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a student in a small class of maybe 10 undergrads, taught by Mr. G., a favorite IRL high school teacher, in a room based on the chapel building at that high school. We're giving presentations, and as I go back to my seat afterwards, I manage to knock over the display that holds up the TV monitor. I catch it and try to put it back to rights while the next person is talking but fail miserably, I think I broke something. One of the other students comes to help, this short geeky guy who does something very complex with the display, and I just stand back to watch. Turns out he's really, really good with his hands, I'm kind of into it. That was unexpected. I start talking to him and he mentions that he's got some hobby that involves building things, which seems pretty cool to me since I'm pretty much useless at anything practical, but he looks like I'm making him nervous so I back off.

But when the scene changes to show me back at my apartment (doesn't resemble anywhere I've lived IRL - colorful and cluttered, deep blue walls, hanging plants and vines in every corner), he's come along with me and my friends, or roommates, I don't know who these DCs are meant to be but we're close. As we walk in the door, the short/geeky/unexpectedly hot DC is saying to one of them, this blonde girl with all these little braids in her hair, "You're not on the drain, are you?" which is apparently some kind of drug. "I would never," she says, acting all offended - waking me can't tell if she's serious or not, either way dream me thinks it's funny. We came back here to get high anyway.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'd been flying down through the levels of some mansion and heading outside, planning my night, weighing the appeal of being alone vs being seen, but when I fly out the door, True Blood's Ginger is at the gate. She wants to come back to work at the club. She'd taken maternity leave but lost the kid, and tried to come back to the club pretty much immediately afterward, but the boss told her to take the paid time off anyway - I don't know why she's so desperate to come back, she doesn't work for tips so the money's the same. But she convinces me to let her in, and she tells me where to find the key to the gate. I go get it, but it's got some kind of trap - when I uncover the key, a dart shoots out and hits Ginger.

Flashback. First time I'd met Ginger, she'd been hysterical, claiming someone, a priest, had been kidnapped by these two guys I knew well and was being held in their barn. The guys tell me the priest was there, but perfectly fine. Giving a sermon, in fact.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

3rd person, following Julia. She's waiting by a statue at the gate to a city park, sometime around the turn of the 19th/20th century, and she works in a country estate as a maid or a nanny or a governess or something - anyway, she's just come into the city for the day. She's meant to be meeting one of the other servants there, but the woman she's meeting is late. Julia doesn't really mind, it's helped her make a decision actually. She's been thinking about how much fun she had on an earlier outing with me, just watching (??? something involving birds, seemed like a very ordinary everyday event for most people but something she hadn't done before), and thinking about the drab grey dress she's wearing, and always wears, covering her ankles, and generally thinking about taking chances and breaking out of her shell and so on. She stops waiting for her friend and, thinking about how much she's got to do and counting up how much money she has with her, she first goes to buy postage and mail a letter she'd already written but hadn't decided whether or not to send until now.

Her thoughts about money derail the storyline - a guy at the door of a restaurant convinces her to step inside and she finds unexpected fees piling up on her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Just a fragment of dialogue (phone call woke me up): "-chance to take hold. Valerian root," in a male voice, possibly mine.