Carabas

This kid of no particular gender has just gotten a lift to a particular town, saying "Here's fine," to the person who gave them a ride. They walk into a diner. As they walk up to the counter I'm thinking how feminine they look, in contrast to some previous appearance. They know the waitress, and they greet her in a familiar way; the waitress looks them over but doesn't recognize them and asks if she should know them. They say no. They're happy that she didn't recognize them even after they sort of clued her in that she should.

As they leave the diner, they pass their father coming in. Their father doesn't recognize them either. He mistakes them for being part of some group of out-of-towners who are currently passing through, people he resents, and he complains about that to the waitress when he gets to the counter. The waitress asks if he knew that person leaving, he says no. The waitress says it looks like they knew him - they're still standing outside, looking through the window, staring at the back of his head right now.

Outside, the kid walks past a car. The two guys in the car say something to each other about how that person's too pretty for their own safety, and needs someone to ugly them up a bit - a threat.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man I'm meant to capture - I'm holding a small box which I'm meant to store him in. He's trying to convince me to turn against the people I'm working for, the Head Office. He mentions that they put him in a 7-color-prison - a shield of a particular 'color' prevents the power used by that 'color' from passing through; a 7-color-prison would normally be considered overkill. He mentions this as part of describing to me the cruel way he was treated by the Head Office, trying to convince me that they have to be stopped. But it has the opposite effect; I believe that if he was judged so dangerous as to require a 7-color-prison, I can't trust his words. I put him in the box. His sister was watching this whole thing, but although she's upset there's nothing she can do to stop me - she's an innocent, she's got no power of her own. I hand over the box to a guy from the Head Office who's waiting outside - he's new, young, and looks afraid of the box even as he takes it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've walked into a bath house. This place belongs to a group that I think of with a word that at the time I believed meant the young men of the city protected by Apollo (but the word I actually used was 'lemures,' the restless dead). It's empty and unused, and there are exposed pipes that are turning black. As I look around, I think that this explains the abandoned building next door.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's this kid, high school age, who set out to change himself, improve himself somehow, and I - as a disembodied voice - am asking him what his goal had been when he'd started. He'd wanted to be able to take care of his aging father. He's lost track of that along the way.

The scene changes from a hill outdoors to a classroom - he's popular, admired. This is a recent development, one of the things he's changed about himself. But he doesn't seem happy with the people around him - he seems arrogant, he looks down on them. And he forgets to spend time with his father. I see him with his father at a small table - they joke around with each other and talk the way people who are close sometimes do, with so many in-jokes and understood references to past events that it's effectively their own language. His father doesn't mind that he's so busy. But the kid recognizes that he's lost track of his original goal, and he has to correct his course. He goes to the house that he's been using to change himself, a place that grants wishes of a sort.

Inside the house, which is a Victorian, old and mostly empty except for portraits on the walls, he's greeted by three men. The one who talks to him is short, maybe 5 feet at the most, plain, and with curly red hair. The men ask him to stay and eat and drink himself into a coma with them again. He refuses. They say it's better than the alternative, but let him go on up the stairs. Every time he's come here to change himself, he's had to go a little deeper into this house. The first time, eating and drinking with them was enough.

Upstairs, a creature with a helmet that hides its face and with long metal hooks for hands emerges from the wall. The kid's met this creature before too, and knows how to deal with it. There's a sequence where I see various creatures and people emerge from the wall one by one, and it's implied that the kid deals with each of them in turn, but there's no need to actually watch the process play out since this has all happened before, and how to deal with each one of them is already known. The last one to emerge from the wall is a dashing man, blonde, cheerful, sort of an Errol Flynn-type character, as if he's just stepped out of a swashbuckling flick. They've met before, and they talk for a bit. This man will go up the next set of stairs on the kid's behalf, and arrange for him to get his wish. Other people have done this for the kid before, a different person every time he's visited this place.

My point of view switches to follow the Errol Flynn-type at this point while the kid stays downstairs. In the room at the top of the stairs is a portrait of a little girl - the kid's met her before. The two of them talk, and she emerges from the portrait. Long straight dark hair, a long white dress, and pink satin slippers with rosebuds. She quickly drops the personality that the kid would have been familiar with, and the Errol Flynn-type winds up on the floor in front of her, kissing her feet - fear, not devotion. She states that she collects "shades of the Ampha Berra family" - she opens a panel in her dress, displaying many different shades of bloodstains on the fabric underneath. The Errol Flynn-type won't survive, and she'll change the kid as he asked.