Carabas

As Rumpelstiltskin, I'm singing a verse of an old song from my son's childhood, quiet and bitter and angry. I'm in a room that looks like a private gym - not the sort with weight machines, a room for other kinds of training - and I've been talking with a woman about my son. After singing that one verse, I say that the only thing he'd ever wanted back then had been simple things we already had, things like the sound and feel of the wind through the trees.

The not-Rumpelstiltskin part of me wonders why I'm telling anything personal to this woman - as Rumpelstiltskin, I don't like her or trust her, though we're working together. But I'm so full of rage about my son and the people who've influenced him, and I can't take any sort of action about it right at this moment. I sing the next verse from that childhood song, and that woman puts her arms around my neck, leans her forehead against mine. I'm too focused on my rage and that song to pay much attention to what she does. I don't mind her getting that close to me, but I'm aware any expression of sympathy from her is just an act, not something she's really capable of, any more than I'm capable of feeling sympathy for her.

A powerful old dead woman who I'd known when she was alive has possessed a young girl I know, a friend's kid, in high school. She's essentially holding the kid hostage in order to make some demand of me, and I'm refusing her. Another girl, a friend of the possessed one, can't understand why I won't just give in to the dead woman's demands and save her friend, she's very distraught. There's some weapon or power source that used to be sealed away in the ground, and I'm threatening to reseal it, so the dead woman won't be able to access it. She thinks I'm bluffing, because that'd be bad for me too, but I'm willing to do it. She says to me that I don't appreciate the strain she's putting this body under; she's using magic constantly at a level that may seem reasonable to me and her, but which is unsupportable for a kid like this, she'll burn out if it continues.

As the same character, I'm walking across a high school gym, intending to get some coffee. It's after school hours, and there's a group of kids here playing basketball. They keep disappearing and reappearing, teleporting short distances. I'm thinking of it as one of those games with rules that only kids understand, and thinking how great it is to see them given a chance to just come together and play around like normal kids. In the hall on the other side of the gym, I meet up with a guy in a suit and trenchcoat who's also watching the game. He says something along the lines of "I can't believe you (pl.) were able to find so many."