Carabas

As FK's Nicholas, I saw an image of a vase of white roses, bleeding a few trails of red blood - I believed that this was a hallucination, thinking of it as "a bit of silliness" - and then I saw a mental image of Janette lying on a white couch, looking unwell, somehow connected with those roses. Now I'm sitting on that couch, and Janette's lying on her side with her head resting against my thigh, my hand in her hair. We're talking about a particular time in the past when things had been better between the three of us. As we talk, I'm thinking about how easily I revert to this version of myself when I'm around them - without thinking, my body language, my speech patterns change automatically. It's like taking off a mask.

POV shifts to show LaCroix. He's at some kind of charity event. At the moment he's talking to a man near a buffet table, a man he knows in some professional capacity, and a moment comes when he has to either eat or make some excuse. Without hesitating, he puts some item of food in his mouth. As a disembodied observer/Nicholas, I'm incredibly jealous of his ability to do that without flinching. It would make my life so much easier if I could pretend to eat - socialization revolves almost entirely around food and drink, so just imagine how much easier it would be to blend in. After a moment, LaCroix makes a displeased face, reaches for a napkin, and removes the thing in his mouth. He makes some comment about the poor quality of the food this year compared to previous years, and the man he's talking to agrees. LaCroix's posing as a gourmet, picky about what he eats - it's his usual trick, insulting the food wherever he goes. They make a joke about not being able to trust the food in a place that has such skinny staff, and then the man LaCroix's talking to complains that this event has gone downhill in general - disappointing for such a worthy charity. LaCroix makes a comment about the decline of morality as time goes by. He manages to say this with a straight face.

A woman who's been flirting with me - neither of us seriously - is taking my hand under the pretext of palm reading, turning it this way and that. She'd been joking around, but as she's 'reading' my palm, she notices the tiny raised circle on the tip of my thumb that holds a retracted needle and she stops smiling, though she doesn't understand what she's looking at.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been sitting in a lounge room in the McKittrick. There's a host and a microphone, allowing the guests to listen in on his internal thoughts as we eat and drink. He's been sitting in the booth next to mine, having a conversation with a woman, another resident of the hotel. But when she leaves, he comes and sits across from me. He's bewildered as to why I've spent so much time here tonight. Of course the guests are all free to enjoy our stay at the hotel in any way we choose, there's no wrong way to go about it, and if I want to just sit here and watch his story unfold, that's fine - but my stay is half over already. Why don't I go out and see the show?

I'm thinking that I'll come back another time to enjoy the show - but nonetheless I leave the lounge and walk up to the next floor, which is in complete chaos thanks to the work of the three witches. Fragmentary memory here - I remember seeing the boy witch in passing and being annoyed with him, but no context beyond that. In a small room, I came across a woman who I realized has been/will be the next bald witch - right now she's another lost soul who came here on a mission but wound up getting drawn into Hecate's world. By the end of the night she has/will have shaved her head and altered her body language completely, transforming into one of the three witches for the next night.

The last of the three witches and the people under her sway are surrounded by sexual images. I only saw her briefly in passing as she led a young prince off down one of the halls. But instead I come across the naked prophetess who'll be taking this witch's role for the next night, currently in the process of transforming into that role. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me to my knees in front of her, and I'm thinking that it's always a man she chooses for this part of the performance - the other guests in the room with me are all women, and they remain standing, pressing in close around us, watching her with a look of worship. She has a woman standing guard next to her during this dance, making sure none of the guests attempt to touch her without her permission. One of those women watching laughs off this restriction, and to show how ridiculous she thinks it is, she reaches out and puts her hand on the prophetess/witch's thigh with a familiar attitude. The performance comes to a complete stop. In the trouble that follows, I move away from the crowd and into the staff-only halls of the hotel.

I'm at a strategy meeting, impatient about it - I'm so tired of this cluster of timelines. Everyone here at this meeting is suspicious of each other, and convincing them to work together all over again every time I go through these events is getting really old. So I've stopped trying to juggle everyone's egos and am taking the lead here, and predictably, Astra winds up deciding to put me in my place. She mentally reaches into my head. I've been through so many timelines with her, though, I've learned to resist this, so I shove her right back out again. She's shocked. The rest of the room quietly clears out - no one wants to get involved in this. Everyone else has always been afraid of her. I hate that, the way they fear her. She puts up a pretense of being more mature than she really is, since she's possessed so many adults and seen so many of their memories, but she's still just a kid. I'm thinking, please let me find a way to keep her alive this time around.

(Yesterday.)

I'm a man trying to calm a situation down so that I won't wind up in a cell. It would be for a minor charge, but my situation's complicated. There's this woman I made a deal with a long time ago - I brought her to this world ('this world' is for all intents and purposes the same as IRL), and she freed me from the curse that had locked me up back in our own world. But there's a catch - if I'm locked up in a cell even for one night, that old curse will find me again, I'll be trapped again. I think of that as her 'winning' - we help each other often but I don't like her much. I'm afraid of being trapped, but I'm also afraid because if I'm trapped I won't be able to keep up the illusion that makes me look human.

(Today.)

A woman and I had been standing in the middle of a road surrounded by trees, discussing something - a car comes, the driver sees us, he swerves, he crashes. I'm irritated at the interruption, but I go over to the car so I can get a meal out of this before emergency services arrives. The scene changes abruptly - one moment I'm walking towards the car, the next moment time has passed, emergency services have already come and there's a crowd of people around. The woman and I leave and transform into a cloud of bats. In all my vampire dreams this has never happened before, and I pause to enjoy the novelty and absurdity. My perception's different. The sky is a brilliant saturated blue with something shimmering about it, and the air gives me the impression of containing new angles, like unseen tunnels.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I and a group of other people, all of us foreigners in this place, had been talking to a group of women on a small 'island' - just a heap of stones really. We're very frustrated. We're trying to get them to do something for their own good, and they're not cooperating. They end negotiations and vanish into thin air.

Still as the POV character from that last scene, I'm walking around the grounds of some large estate on a hill, with a gated entrance visible not too far away. I'm speaking to a woman all in pale gold - everything's pale gold, her robes, her hair, her skin, the mask that she wears that covers her whole face something like a welder's mask, only revealing one eye. She has her own issues with the people from that 'island' - she's saying they're against her and her plan simply because of her mental illness. She resents them.

I'm sitting on a wooden throne and talking to a man who's going through a bout of existential despair, and he's asking me about coping with vast spaces of time, with immortality - how do you do it? I find this hilariously awful - you're asking me?

There's this machine. I fed it a small living thing to activate it. Now the screen's showing me several options to choose from, words that don't mean anything to me. The one on the screen at the moment is JEON. Swiping between options, I settle on a word that resembles AERIE written partially with Greek letters. The screen changes to show an image of four clocks. I'm aware I must memorize their appearances quickly, because I won't have another chance.

They're very elaborately designed, beautiful things - solid organic lines mixed with jagged exposed machinery; black wood, black clockwork, gold accents. The first is the simplest - a curving tapered pillar with the word MONUMENT in gold at the base. The others have human faces as ornamentation - the third has a woman's face with eyes closed like a mask and a single arm, arranged in such a way that it gives the impression that she's cradling something.

To the left of the screen, a case appears. It has spaces to fit each of the clocks. At the base of the machine, a slot produces several road maps. Without unfolding them, I can see that several places have been circled.

Setting loosely based on China some centuries ago. There's two men standing on either side of a gateway; they used to know each other a long time ago, but not anymore. The one inside's a soldier; the one outside used to be. Currently he's drunk and being held up by two soldiers who work under the one inside. The one inside is deciding whether or not to have the other one executed. In the end he decides against it and says something along the lines of "Get this drunkard out of my sight."

As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that he's going to regret that decision. In a few years they'll be rivals who both want something or someone, and the other man will win. I see an image of that future, where the man currently standing inside that gate is now watching the other man from a distance. He's thinking back to this moment and wondering what would have happened if he'd executed him then.

Visiting the McKittrick, I've been following the taxidermist - a bald man with sunken eyes, looks starved and intense - as he talks to a young blonde man with a heavy jaw who works for the hotel, very earnest type. When it's time for the final banquet, they meet up with two women in clothes from the Victorian era and accompany them down the stairs - but I come to realize their final scene won't be with everyone else at the banquet at all. The women dance down the stairs, floating from one bannister to the other. Standing with them on the bannisters, so close to the ceiling, I'm very aware of Hecate's influence on the floor just above us.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've just walked away from a room where I'd been talking to a woman. Now I'm standing in the ruins of a building, on a street where a lot of buildings have been destroyed. Nearby there's a large brown rat on top of a pile of rubble, and I have a sense of fellow feeling as I watch it. I don't really want to go out into the street - it's much too exposed - but I don't see any way around it. Once in the street, I catch sight of a woman in a white dress two or three buildings down, behind a wall of iron bars. She sees me and jumps up and down to get my attention. "Nick! It is Nicky, isn't it?" I recognize her, we're close. I (or rather my POV character here) use several different names - 'Nick' is for all intents and purposes my (POV character's) real name, but I haven't heard it for a long time, so this is something of a reunion. But I'm debating whether I want to take the time to rescue her from behind those iron bars.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've been walking around backstage at a sort of club in the 1930s or so after leaving the audience of a show on stage in the main room. Talking to various people, overhearing conversations by dancers. I'm just now leaving a smokey room where two men have fallen asleep. I've been looking for someone, a specific woman. There's a disaster or a tragedy that's about to occur here, and I have to find her first.

The show in the main room ended while I was backstage, and everyone's straggling out. In the lobby, I come across a large man I remember meeting earlier. He's putting on his coat. Near the doors, his wife and daughter are waiting for him, and he introduces them to me. I recognize the daughter as the woman I was looking for - she's just a kid. I hadn't been expecting that she'd be a kid in this era. I kneel down to introduce myself to her eye to eye, using the name "Deacon Willfire" - it's the fake name I've been using here in the past, but Deacon is similar to the name I'll be using when she meets me as an adult in the future. She's very shy here, can barely look at me, but I'm aware that meeting me here will make an impression on her, and the similar names will help that memory along when we meet in the future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm in that kid's room, standing by an empty fireplace that's so large I could easily fit in it just by ducking a little - it's grabbing my attention. But I'm also talking to the kid, saying to her, "A 300-year-old vampire for an imaginary friend?" (I'm referring to myself. She thinks I'm imaginary.) "You're trouble for sure." I'm thinking about the way I'm meeting her at various times in her life out of sequence. From her perspective, proceeding through time in the usual linear fashion, I've wound up being someone she grows up knowing, someone who's been around for most of her life.

A false awakening during which I tried to write down the previous dream. The dream I was writing down was a Rumpelstiltskin POV, and I'd written that in Belle's version of their shared dream there had been no corresponding scene with Bae. When Rumpelstiltskin found this out from her, he had a sort of bitter "aha!" reaction to it, as if this proved him right in doubting something. But now that I was 'awake' and writing this down, I thought he was mistaken in that reaction. There was more I wanted to write, but my pen ran out of ink. I went to fetch another and was distracted by various things.

(Woke up for real. Back to sleep.)

There are four servants in a mansion, one who's getting ready to serve guests. The other three have to stay out of sight of the guests, and two of them have stepped out a back door to talk about something.

The other one of those three servants, the only woman among them, finds those two standing around the open door and is very upset at them for leaving it open. They have some reason for it - but while doors are open, the spell that freezes time inside the mansion weakens. Allowing a few minutes to pass here and there means very little to them, but that fourth servant, the one currently serving the guests, is human. He only has so many minutes in his lifetime. She wants to preserve that limited life of his for as long as she can, even if it's only a few centuries. She's furious at them for allowing any of it to slip away.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A car crashes out of a portal onto a hill. The woman inside is unconscious, and when she wakes up, she gives the name of a flight that crashed with her and her husband on it. She believes that she's just woken up after that plane crash; she doesn't remember the car or the portal. That plane crash happened days or weeks ago. But she's taken to the hospital where her husband is still staying.

When her husband sees her, he's shocked to see she looks much younger than before she disappeared. He takes out her compact mirror from her purse - he has all of her things that were found at the plane crash site - and hands it to her. As he does so, I see an image of her at three ages. Her appearance now is a young woman with strangely large eyes, blonde hair worn straight back under a headband, neatly dressed. But I'm also seeing a version of her several years older, with long wavy hair and a loose dress; and at the same time, a version of her that's about 5 years old. I realize that she became younger while she stayed in that place on the other side of the portal, and if she'd stayed longer she would have reverted to that 5 year old image.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

Someone's been describing a group of people to me, and he's just moved on to describe two partners who are separate from all the others in some way. His description focuses on one of these two, but my memory only really picks up when he moves on to the second one by saying "Another one, always in darkness." (Or shadows, or something with a similar meaning). I see an image of him as a tall hooded figure. I like him instantly. The guy describing him says that unlike all the others, this one exists in "both long time and short time." I see him in modern clothing now, living and working at an isolated shrine. By "exists in long time," it means that this guy's forced to go through time the long way around, living through each day one at a time (that is, the way time usually works), waiting for the others to reappear. That seems tragic. I'm thinking that he must be immortal in some fashion, to be able to wait for the others' timelines to intersect with his over centuries. The guy talking references "the swords that take the end of each user's life."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting on a bus waiting at an intersection, looking out the window. One of the other passengers says we've reached Las Vegas now. I see a sign on a building that includes Las Vegas in the name, but the road we're on now is in a small neighborhood, small town atmosphere. The bus is just across from a small store, and there's a guy standing by the door playing a guitar. I'm enjoying the music. So is the girl sitting on the seat next to me. There's an old man sitting across the aisle who looks over at us to make sure we're paying attention to the music. He talks about the importance of paying attention and enjoying what's going on around you, something about being open to messages from the universe and synchronicity and all that. I'm bored with this conversation, but then I think that I've been hearing that sort of thing so often lately, between work and now this guy, it's a synchronicity in itself. (Except since it's turned out to be a dream, that's no longer true. Dreaming about things from work isn't exactly synchronicitous.)

I'm looking at an image of a woman wrapped in this dress made of blue cloth; the cloth also wraps up her neck and over some kind of tall headgear in a way that reminds me of a nun, or some medieval headdresses. The only skin visible is her face - or it would be, except that in this image, she has the head of an elephant. I'm aware this is specifically something added to this image, it's not literally her face. It's representing something to do with the shape. I briefly see a second, similar image, using the head of an anteater instead of an elephant, reinforcing the point about shape.

Scene change. That woman, with her own human face now - or at least, a woman in that same dress - standing in an immense room. A man's come to consult her. His skin has cracks running through it in a way that reminds me of magma. He's aware, as he approaches her, that this isn't the woman he's come to consult - she's a stand-in, a decoy, to protect the real one. He can smell the difference between them. He's about to say something about this, but he's distracted by noticing a different scent in the room. There's a dead body of a man lying on the floor a little way away, and now he walks back to that body and bends down to look at a circular metal medallion on the corpse's chest. He can smell two other people who were here earlier. One is his sister. The other, he asks the woman in blue about - a man he describes out loud only as "a writer," and his voice sounds annoyed. In his mind, he's thinking that this writer left for America years ago, and shouldn't be here now.

Then I have the impression that I'm looking at one in a series of scenes showing an alternate past, of what would have happened if that writer hadn't traveled to America back then, but I only actually see one scene - a group of people, mostly adults, celebrating the 8th birthday of that previously mentioned sister, Julie.

Based on F/SN, as Emiya, I've just found myself in a timeline where I'm acting as Servant to the white-haired version of Sakura. I'm thinking that I've been through this type of timeline before, and there are only two ways events play out after this point, neither of which I want to go through again. I'm trying to think up a way to avoid repeating those same patterns, to create a third possibility instead. At the moment, I'm helping Tohsaka climb up into some passageway, to either hide or escape from Sakura.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a series of extremely loosely IRL-based scenes (although I thought of all the locations as IRL-based, the only thing that actually resembled IRL was my own identity), I'm walking into the lobby of a hotel where I'm living, heading for the stairs. I pass a woman working at the front desk, a woman with straight black hair in a bob. Looking at her, I think that she reminds me of the woman who appeared in a shared dream with my IRL sister years back, in which she'd been my sister's roommate. Her hair's longer this time. When I make eye contact with her, I become lucid. I immediately start floating. I remember my intention to try summoning Julia today (usually my most common recurring DC, she hasn't reappeared since my first and last attempt at deliberately summoning her), and I start to do so, but then I change my mind about the method - rather than try to summon directly, it's easier for me to 'summon' by traveling. Since I'm still moving towards the stairs, I decide that Julia is at the top of those stairs. It's a spiral staircase, gold railing, huge, in the center of the room; it reminds me of a pillar and also of DNA. As I focus on it, I become aware that I'm waking up. I can feel the bed against my back, and the image of the staircase has frozen, as if I'm no longer moving. It gives me the impression that it's melting - not the staircase itself, but the visual image, like a filter being applied to a photo. I lose visuals. I spend some time trying to force the dream to reform, and have the feeling I'm getting somewhere, there's a brief sense of something shining in the darkness, but I eventually have to admit that I'm now too awake for this.

Except it's a false awakening. I spend some time in that same hotel lobby, looking through my backpack, trying to find a pen with which to write down that dream, before waking up for real.

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.

I've just started working in a shop run by two hara, training dogs, and I've been talking over a problem with the owner. The other har is someone the owner purchased, but I'm thinking you wouldn't get that impression from seeing the two of them interact; I think of him as aloof and 'leonine' and that he's 'best left to his own devices.'

There's two close friends who made some archaeological discovery many years ago, as a result of which, the choices they respectively made caused them to drift further and further apart. Now a girl's delivering a message to one of them, who has become a demon, informing him that the other is on his deathbed. He has only a mild response.

There's a woman looking at a 'falling star demon' - a spirit of a star which would have been considered simply a spirit when it was in its place in the sky, but a demon when it falls - and she refers to it as her assassin. The falling star is a sign of her own fate. I'm thinking about whether there are any choices to be made here, or which could be made at an earlier point in the timeline; any options other than her dying here and now.

An old man and a young man have just gone through a portal to another world, chasing someone who's stolen something. The old man asks around after him, but the description he gives, which would have been very unique in the world they're coming from, is almost useless in this one: they're looking for a man about 6 feet tall, dressed "like a warrior." The majority of the men they're talking to here are wearing armor, so that's not very helpful. Bit of a memory gap then, something involving a woman they know and the young man getting into trouble.

The young man's in jail, where another man from another world - not the one they were looking for - is being kept separate, a big blond Viking-looking guy in a large cell full of straw, who seems a little lost and confused. He's being questioned by the jailer, who's talking about that woman who came up earlier; she has a very long series of names, ending with Williams. She's married to someone very respectable, and she's denied that she knows the man in the cell. The jailer is telling him this to try to get him to admit that his story about knowing her was a lie and confess what's really going on, but the man in the cell is completely bewildered. The young man, on the other hand, is aware that there are three versions of Williams, the one that belongs to this world, the one from his, and the one that loves this man in the cell.

Williams arrives in the jail then - the young man believes she's the version from his world. She refers to the young man as Zachary, and she's carrying a fox - when I look at the fox, I'm aware that Zachary is a shapeshifter, and there's some connection to this particular fox. Williams goes to the man in the cell and she calls him "Tin Man," which is a sort of code name, and she's using it to reassure him of who she is and that she really knows him. Zachary believes that the Williams from his world has been posing as the version from this other guy's world in order to get some information out of him. She has him let out of the cell, and when he goes to her, their eyes - the fox's as well - start glowing green, and I have the feeling this means they're about to move between worlds. She looks to Zachary and says something apologetic, and he suddenly realizes that this is both his Williams and the one this guy loves, and that the fox is him - he's looking at their future.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Just fragments for the rest of the day:

An intelligent species of birds that are dying out after losing all their females to some disaster, giving some other species advice in the hopes of avoiding that same disaster.

Walking down a street, four dancers appear in front of us, concealing an assassin among them.

Something to do with prison and hooded figures "finding their own way."

Describing the story of the King in Yellow to someone.