Carabas

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.

I'm playing go with an old friend, and off to my left there's a woman who's thanking me on her hands and knees. I've just told her about the arrangements I've made to get her and her unborn child out of their current situation. I'm looking at the board, not at her, waiting for my friend to make his move - I'm smiling throughout this scene, since it irritates my friend. I haven't looked at the woman throughout the conversation. This was business, although I did take a personal interest since the father wasn't human. As she starts to leave, I tell her I'd like to see the child when it's born. Take it to a specific temple - I don't mention this last part, but there's a particular fox demon who lives behind that temple, a relative of mine, and I think he would take an interest in the child.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

The spirit of a certain man has been released and possessed someone, and since I and a friend of mine are the ones who bound him in the first place, a woman's asking me how we managed it the first time. I'm telling her it won't work again - we were relying on his trust in us. We prepared a meal and my friend put sleeping drugs in his soup. Scene changes to show that night - the three of us are having a casual conversation. I'm arguing against some point he's just made, and to illustrate my point, I compare it to chess players - although the point of the game is to defeat your opponent, it doesn't follow that a chess player would hate everyone else who plays chess, just because they intend to defeat them.

There's a monk who needs to buy a certain rare, extremely expensive book, and he intends to raise the money by selling off a different rare book. He can't do this himself, so he sends a fox demon to take care of it. She can't read the script it's written in, but she compares the characters he wrote down for her with the characters written on the covers of his books, and she eventually finds the right one and takes it to a fair that's going on. There are many specialists here who'd give her a good price for the book, but she goes to a bookseller she recognizes, a place she's been to many times. This man doesn't know the values of things, so he gives her very little for it - it's the equivalent of buying a book for a dollar when it should be worth millions.

The monk's disappointed - not in her, but because the book's gone and he'll have to start over in terms of raising the money. The fox demon gets annoyed at him for what she perceives as insulting the bookseller - she thinks the bookseller is a very good man, since he's sold her many novels for very little money. The monk is thinking about how much he looks forward to the end of his life, except that he's concerned about how she'll survive.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm speaking German with a man who'd promised to (acquire or translate or something similar) a certain book, but now he's fleeing and has to go back on his part of our deal. I don't really mind.

Two paired images of people on thrones. The first is a blonde woman dressed in gold robes, surrounded by abstract shapes woven out of gold wires, on a balcony overlooking beautiful green fields, rivers, wide blue sky. She's saying, amused, that although she was meant to be associated with style and worldliness, instead "I'm merely back in the desert, healing women at an oasis."

The second, a sad and tired-looking long-haired old man, first in a dark wooden room full of cabinets and herbs, then overlooking a mountain. A pair of ravens leave him and fly up the mountain over a trail, croaking - grey stone, grey skies.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Two fragments:

I'm trying to convince the radio to put out an important broadcast to keep people out of the (either Dallas or Houston) area, it's an emergency, but they refuse to disrupt the normal services.

A man saying to me, "You're afraid that this is the real world. It is. I trust you."

A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

"Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

"What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

"La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.