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    1. Reworking a deal

      by , 01-26-2016 at 09:28 PM
      A deal has fallen through. Sort of. I've got a prince in my debt, but that's pointless - what I needed was for him to eventually become a king, so that a little further down the timeline, he'll be able to ask another king for a favor. But the princess I'd intended him to marry has now been burned and beheaded due to a minor demonic possession incident, so now he's useless to me.

      I find another kingdom that will work, a desert. Two daughters. In the throne room, I meet the younger daughter, but that timeline doesn't interest me. The eldest is locked in the dungeon, and I take the prince to meet her instead. I recognize her, though she doesn't recognize me - I'd met a version of her in another world. She'd been a he at the time. The prince had known her in that world too, and I think that could work out either very well or very badly. She's a lot angrier this time around, something of a freedom fighter, turned against her own father. This is promising.

      Updated 01-26-2016 at 09:30 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    2. Two escape routes and a rose

      by , 06-01-2015 at 07:05 PM
      I'm walking through the basement of a tower, grey stone walls. There's some kind of chaos going on on the main floors above me, a distraction while I was taking care of something in the dungeon on the next floor down - but now that it's time to go, I want to avoid getting caught in whatever's happening on the main level.

      There's two people waiting for me with two different escape routes - neither of them knows exactly what I was doing here, neither of them knows me personally, and neither them knows about the other. There's a person I work with who'd arranged for a man to meet me by the stairs up to the main floors, but I'm having second thoughts about trusting him. And there's a woman waiting by a wooden door that leads elsewhere; she's not involved at all, she just wants to escape whatever's going on upstairs and is willing to take me with her, recognizing me as a friend of a friend. I believe she would be more sympathetic to what I was doing here, if it came out.

      Deciding to go with that woman at the wooden door, I'm doubling back, passing by the stairs leading down to the dungeon. I debate whether I have time to go back down there - there had been something else I'd wanted to look into down there, though it's not a priority. I start down those steps, but it becomes so dark I can't see, and I have a vague impression of massive chains. I can hear a woman's voice crying. I decide I don't have time to be fumbling around in the dark, and I head back up the stairs.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      A man is looking at a wall recently painted green in an attempt to emulate some other place, and talking to someone about a man he knows, saying that while he wasn't looking, the man went and got married to people so unsuited - people, plural, meaning both the wife and the stepkids - people he'll have to keep secrets from.

      I'm watching light play over the features of the man in question in an interesting way. He's looking at a signet ring with an image of a rose, which he's just removed from a hiding place in the base of a lamp. I'm hearing a kind of tinkling sound like a music box repeating a single measure over and over again.
    3. Little fangs

      by , 05-27-2015 at 06:13 PM
      In some small early 20th century village, I'm the youngest in a family of three sons, and for years now it's been expected that I'll marry the neighbor's youngest daughter when we grow up - we've always been good friends. In the previous scene we'd all been sitting around my family's dinner table; now I've gone to meet her down by the river, which is so full of plants it gives the impression you could walk across them like a bridge. The girl's here waiting, but before I go to meet her, I'm distracted by another girl, a stranger, standing in the center of the river. The observer side of me thinks, I have to remember this.

      Her hair is probably blonde, but it's so matted and dirty that it's hard to tell. She's dressed in old-fashioned men's clothes, a shapeless and colorless coat over a blue velvet waistcoat with a pattern of rosebuds. Then I realize that while I've been focusing on remembering the details of her appearance, I've been missing the conversation the character side of me is having with her. I drop back to focus on what the character side of me is doing.

      Years later, but near that same river. One of my brothers is handing me a silver pocket watch that belongs to our father, and telling me that he's in Madrid - they've known this all along, apparently. My brothers got me to come back here on the pretense that our father's missing - I'm annoyed but not surprised to find that was a lie. There's a woman here, somehow connected to that girl in the river but not the same person, and something about biting down on a chain, and her little fangs.

      I'm carrying one end of a wooden box through what looks like an abandoned house, with that woman holding the other end - it's not particularly large or heavy, just large enough to be awkward for one person. I'm looking at our hands on the box, close enough to be nearly touching. Her nails look thick and discolored, greyish; there's blood ingrained around the nail, but I'm thinking that the blood's not what's causing the dark greyish appearance, since there's blood all over my hands too.

      That woman is kissing me and holding me in place, not letting me turn my head to see what's going on, telling me not to move when I try to. Something is very wrong. There's other people here; the observer side of me recognizes this moment and I switch to third person to avoid it. The scene still continues in front of me, they kill her, but I don't see much of it, focusing on remembering the earlier scenes.

      Updated 05-27-2015 at 06:15 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    4. Futures

      by , 02-06-2015 at 10:47 PM
      There's a teenage girl who's come to me to learn her futures. I've spread them out like cards on the table, and as I hold my hand over one depicting a man she could be married to, she says she wouldn't mind that one so much, that wouldn't be so bad. I have the impression that she doesn't feel she has a choice in any of this - she might want to know what the options are, and she might have her own preferences, but someone else will be making the decision, not her.

      With that in mind, I move to one of the futures on the outside edge, the more unlikely options. It's labeled Dreamer. I see her lying on a couch with an arm thrown over her head, looking at the ceiling, wasting away. Her clothes are glowing green like an absinthe advertisement. Since I think of her as wasting away here, I conclude that this is a future she wouldn't want and start to move my hand away, but that vision version of her stops me. She sings, "I listened to my dreams." This is important to her. It's not something she regrets. "They taught me how to feel." Behind her there's a glass window opening onto a balcony, from which I can see a river and the stars. There's a whale swimming through the clouds, adding to the fantastical nature of her possible future.
    5. White Snake

      by , 01-18-2015 at 10:25 PM
      It's some holiday to do with romance, and Bai Suzhen's sitting in a field beside a small river, psyching herself up. Xiaoqing's to her right, encouraging her. As part of her training, Bai Suzhen's been sort of playing celestial matchmaker. She's set up various marriage possibilities for Xu Xian, putting in a great deal of time and effort, and she intends to bring it to a finish today, on this holiday. Of course, as a disembodied observer I'm aware this won't work out the way she planned - today's the day she'll meet Xu Xian in physical form for the first time, and their usual story will proceed from there.

      In a scene involving a giant globe and the phrase, "You were being extremely literal about wanting to travel the globe, huh," 23-26 degrees longitude is highlighted.

      Updated 02-04-2015 at 02:53 AM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    6. The cop, the soprano

      by , 12-02-2014 at 09:40 PM
      A man's talking to a woman he's recently made immortal. She's very upset, talking about the moment when she'd thought she was about to die, and how she'd thought back on all these things in her life - her family, and the man she'd almost married. I see an image of that man lying in a pool of blood with her kneeling beside him - injured in the line of duty; he's a fed, she was a cop. He survived that. She's saying to the man who made her immortal that she doesn't expect him to be able to understand any of this - it's implied that she thinks of him as too inhuman. He's annoyed. He says to her, if she's so fixated on dying, go right ahead. If a year goes by and she's still feeling so "inconsistent," come tell him, and he'll kill her himself. He's entirely serious, but he believes that this won't be necessary - he believes that trying to make her focus on living will just drive her further into this self-destructive line of thought, but that if she spends time thoroughly thinking about death, she'll stop desiring it.

      (Woke up. Back to sleep.)

      The soprano from the other night, looking a little younger here, is sitting in a room with another woman, both of them dressed all in white with long white gloves. There's a mirror on the wall behind them. This other woman is standing up and singing, holding sheet music in her left hand - it's light popular music; she sings prettily but not professionally. The door to the hall opens, and a third young woman says, complaining, "Cora, it's almost dawn."

      Updated 12-02-2014 at 10:08 PM by 64691

      Categories
      non-lucid
    7. Knotted cords

      by , 03-24-2014 at 10:46 PM
      A couple who've been married for about a year are traveling together through another country in a vaguely historical-inspired setting. The husband, who's in the military, suspects his wife is unfaithful. He comes back to their room at the inn with a gift for her: a set of cords for her to use to make knotted ornaments, to hang from the wooden cases he travels with. They both behave as if this is a sincere gift, but he gave it to her to convey something unpleasant: normally, a newlywed couple would have made such things months ago, when they were first married.
    8. Legend

      by , 03-09-2014 at 10:53 PM
      A fragment about a castle where there's a bottle containing the souls of witches, kept as a historical item for tourists to look at.

      Based on Legend, I'm visiting Darkness. He's going on and on about his plans to marry Lili, have her kill the unicorn and so on, gloating. I say to him, no. Her human boy, Jack, he's on his way here, and she's going to have to make a choice. She might have sided with darkness for the moment, but my side's going to win her in the long run. Darkness grants me that point - but "we don't have years." The choice she makes in the moment is the one that matters, not whatever regrets she'll have afterwards.
    9. Witches, vampires, monsters, and divorce.

      by , 08-08-2013 at 08:44 PM
      3rd person. A wealthy household full of various factions is gathered by a very old tree to discuss their leader's potential divorce, and how they can use it to their advantage. But I wind up focusing on a group that's ignoring the family politics and telling a story about this old tree, something like a fairy tale or a ghost story. Two children were transformed by the ashes of a witch's bones. One transformed into the image of the witch herself, the other transformed into something monstrous and deformed, vaguely donkey-like, and this allowed them to 'walk in strange places.' On certain nights a parade of witches (both men and women) passes by this tree, and disguised with the witch's ashes, those children joined the parade.

      1st person. For political reasons, something to do with an organized crime group, I was briefly married to Julia, an extremely influential businesswoman and vampire. Now I've just about gotten things with that crime group settled and there's no real reason for us to keep up the sham marriage, and I'm surprised how conflicted I am about that. I'd gotten used to life as her husband far too easily. I'm thinking about how up until now I've been dealing with a 'tame' vampire, not the real deal. I'm looking over my shares in her businesses and thinking about selling. It'd be enough for me to live on for the rest of my life, if I do leave.
    10. Playing games with knots

      by , 08-07-2013 at 07:52 PM
      (Fragments: I noted down 'veve' and 'garden party' and went back to sleep. I can't remember what either of those were about.)

      3rd person, following a lady's maid in a castle. She's with her mistress, a blonde woman, very angry at the master of the house right now, a man with very long black hair and a very deep voice, and the master sends the maid away to go wait for a delivery of fabrics, from which the materials for the mistress's new wardrobe are to be chosen. The servant does as she's told, thinking of how hard it is for her mistress to adjust to her new husband and the customs of the empire, and while she waits for the delivery she weaves some threads into Scholar's Knots, a game for the mistress to unravel later, to calm her down. She makes the knots that represent the Emperors, and then, although they don't traditionally go together, she makes the knots for the Richards kings, which she thinks her mistress will appreciate. As she weaves she thinks, as a way of welcoming the mistress into the empire, welcome to your first thousand years.