Carabas

I'm talking to the thing which is possessing/has become a part of a friend of mine. It's attempting to be threatening, and I'm attempting to stall. We're talking about why it would bother possessing someone at all.

Although I don't say this out loud, I'm thinking that for me the appeal is what I think of as different flavors, the experience of different personalities/perspectives, when from the outside they pretty much all seem alike. And I'm also thinking that travel is the more obvious reason, the one that it would expect me to guess without having any personal experience with possession; and I think that sure, visiting Hawaii and seeing some pretty scenery is always appealing, but then there's the way humans will get up close to an active volcano, which is the really interesting part - meaning their thought process, not the volcano or even the danger itself.

But the thing possessing my friend says that what it likes is the conversation; that we've been talking now for two minutes without pause, and it's enjoying the novelty. I don't get the appeal, but whatever works for you.

A woman made a deal with one of my kind, a short man in a black suit who irritates me, and so he's placed his mark on her wrist, a symbol in the shape of a sword, representing "Iudex," the judge. This will allow him to possess her, though she was unaware of this. I'm furious. He's well within his rights, but I deeply dislike him and his people who bear that symbol; I'm going to destroy his mark. It's not difficult, any changes to the lines in her skin will do the job. I ask her to choose the method (a knife) and if she wants me to do it for her or if she'd rather do it herself (she asks me to do it), three horizontal cuts distort the symbol sufficiently, and then I set out a bandage for her.

A young woman's walking quickly through the woods just before dawn - the trees are sparse and thin, lots of fallen leaves from past seasons covering the ground; she's wearing simple dark clothing and a white cap, from maybe around the 1500s. She's very nervous. I follow her as she steals a black hen - she's thinking about some dog as she does it - and makes her way to a well.

But just as she reaches the well, an older woman grabs her and shouts, "Witch! Possessed!" This woman's familiar to me. Painfully thin, red hair so short and strangely cut that I suspect it's growing out after being shaved off completely, wearing a nightdress as if she'd just seen my witch and jumped out of bed to stop her, but I don't believe it's a coincidence that she's here; I believe hunting witches is something she's done before.

The scene changes. Three men - two middle-aged, one older, all still looking like it's the 1500s - are discussing the woman who'd been caught as a witch, and her mother. Her mother had been the same, accused of "magical transformations," but she'd died years and years ago, and the daughter had been raised by another since she was a child, changed her family name. The last these men had heard of her, she was to be married to some knight. They frame this marriage as a very good thing, that she had a good life that she's thrown away; but I hear them say this and I think indeed she was married to him, and that had gone very badly for her, and that's why she summoned me.

Later. Different scene entirely, my IRL home, a pair of men attempted to break in and I turned them into cats. Cat burglars. They made for very angry cats but I was pleased with myself for the joke, and my sister had been wanting a white cat anyway.

I'm occupying someone else's body, and I-the-character am not entirely clear on the body's identity. A woman greets me in Korean, and following her expectations, I enter an elevator. I-the-dreamer am aware that the body I'm occupying owns this building, he's the president of a company, and this is his private elevator to his penthouse suite. There are no buttons inside the elevator; I-the-dreamer am aware it uses facial recognition, I-the-character am surprised when it starts to move.

The elevator opens onto his suite. There are a number of people in the bed, clearly after a party; the body's owner recognizes one of these people, the rest are strangers. I order everyone out; only that one exception stays. He's sitting up against the headboard, wearing an animal's pelt draped over his head, a wolf or a coyote. (It occurs to me after waking up that we were both wearing something else's skin.)

Another man appears, and he grips this man by the throat. I recognize him; he's the reason I-the-character occupied this particular body, in order to meet with him. He speaks to me, believing he's speaking to the body's owner. I-the-dreamer switch to third person because I want to see the expressions of me-the-character.

Speaking in English so that we won't be understood by the man with the animal pelt, I-the-character chide him for being "so eager to sink your teeth."

He says, "Not the only thing I'm good at. But surely we'll still eat this-"

I'm talking to a little boy, elementary school age, while possessing the body of his older sister. He's upset with me/her because (prior to me possessing her) there was a baby photo of him that she'd shown to others. But she'd been using an edited version of the photo, cropped so that he was the only thing in the picture. The original photo was from the crime scene where they'd been found, and he'd been lying between the bodies of their parents. He's upset that she would take this image, remove the ugly parts, and present it to others as just a normal baby picture.

This takes my host completely off guard. She hadn't thought of it from that angle, even while she'd edited the photo to make it acceptable to show to others. She's emotionally attached to the photo as a whole, it's something to remind her of her family from "before." She used to look at it and dial what used to be her mother's number, listen to the answering machine - there's no answering machine at that number anymore, but she'll still dial and hang up just out of habit, the familiarity of that number displayed on her phone.

Based on DA. There's this kid whose father had been an apostate and a friend of mine; I've been his guardian since his parents died, but I'm not around much. There's this old dwarf woman who's been acting as his tutor, and she's been telling me that the kid's started to show signs of inheriting his father's magic. Strange dreams, mostly. She's worried he'll attract a demon, get himself hurt - she wants to send him to the Circle to be trained. I completely refuse. His father worked hard to stay free of the Circle, I can't do that to his son. There must be someone else who can train him. In the meantime, we say nothing to the kid about any of this.

But we don't find anyone else, and eventually the old woman informs me that she's written to the Circle about him. They'll be sending templars to pick the kid up.

So I take the kid and we leave town. I don't explain why, and he thinks it's just a short trip. As we're walking on a path through the woods, he's telling me about a fennec he'd found out back, and how he's been trying to befriend it. But as he talks, his voice changes, goes deeper, and he starts saying strange things; I stop and turn around to look at him, and find the features of his face are shifting slightly, starting to resemble a sloth demon. That fades away, his face and voice returns to normal, but he's frightened - and he recognizes that was the beginning of possession.

He'd watched a friend of his become possessed once; he says he'd rather be killed than go through that. He runs off into the woods. I follow, but I don't find him.

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.

Someone I was traveling with has been possessed and physically transformed by the thing possessing them. I'd left them alone in the motel room where I thought they'd be safe while me and the other person we're traveling with, a young woman, were out.

I can see a woman I think of as Morgana watching us through the mirror - she's very beautiful, but thin to the point of starved, hunching over, tangled hair, filthy. The girl I'm traveling with immediately assumes the possession is Morgana's work. I'm not surprised she thinks that - from the little she's seen of Morgana, it would make sense for her to think we're enemies. But I can see what caused this, and it's not Morgana. One of the markings I put in place around the room to keep the kid safe has been destroyed. It must have happened when the girl fell earlier. This is my fault - I'd tried to protect her by keeping her ignorant of the details. If I'd explained things to her, she would have known the significance of that marking. Morgana's never been my enemy, not really; she's here to help - but I don't want her variety of help.

I'm arguing with Morgana over which one of us is going to handle this. Her voice is harsh, raw - partially from the situation and the tone she's using, but I also have the impression she just doesn't use her voice very often. She's just pointed out - correctly - that if the creature comes into direct contact with me, the corrupting effect I'd have on it would likely just make things worse. I'm saying, "I don't know what I'll do to it, but you don't know what it'll do to you." She takes corruption into herself, sealing it away and making it safe for everyone except herself. That's why she's communicating through the mirror instead of here in the flesh - she arranged to have herself sealed away a long time ago. She's been altered so much already, I don't want to see her do this again.

In response, she says, "I know I betrayed you. I'll prove to you I'm useful. Prove to me-"

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.

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

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.

I've spent the past few scenes in this huge house, and I'm currently walking through a door that I expect to take me back to a place I'd been in earlier in the dream - there's a character I'd intended to meet up with again. Instead, I find myself in a room I think of as resembling a sanatorium - there are long rows of beds on each side of the room, with a few curtains here and there for privacy. On each bed there's a woman in a hospital gown, writhing like she's in a bad demon possession horror flick.

I go lucid and try to remember if there are any lucid tasks I'd wanted to perform of the ask-a-DC variety - no, there aren't any. But I believe dialogue is the only lucid trick I can do right now. So I ask something of the various women and get short, boring answers - I don't remember what I asked or what those boring answers were. The last one I asked gave me a longer answer involving a reference to an earthworm - I noted her response as nonsensical but phrased poetically, which I thought of as a step up from the straightforward and boring responses from the others. I'm now mentally comparing them less to demon possession horror flicks and more to Greek spirits - Furies or such.

Towards the end of the row of hospital beds, there's a woman who's much older than the others. She objects to me - calls my behavior intrusive. She takes my hand in hers, saying this will help her see me - representing that this should be a two-way conversation, rather than just me one-sidedly questioning them. Closing her eyes for a moment, she asks what's blocking me. My first instinct is that she's referring to meditation, mysticism, that sort of thing. But since she didn't say so specifically, I go with a safe response: I talk about general life concerns. She cuts me off and clarifies that she was indeed asking about meditation and mysticism and such. I, sounding annoyed, say I was getting to that - which is a lie.

But we continued talking about general life concerns anyway - specifically career things. Everything we said on the subject sounded sensible (even after I woke up), and she pointed out a good solution that I disliked - I thought it sounded like more effort than it was worth. She quite reasonably laughed at me for that - for wanting a perfect solution to just come along without any effort.

A woman has another woman tied to a tree, and is spreading caviar on her face to attract animals to eat her. She's interrupted by some panic among the people she's working with. People are transforming into creatures - from what they're shouting, I have the impression that it's mostly insects, but when I switch to first person, the only transformation I actually see is a bird emerging from a woman's shoulder and flying away. Mostly I just see panicked people running away.

I'm leaving too, with several others, at a calmer pace. I look down at my bare feet, and notice that the girl whose body I'm possessing has decorated her toenails in Satanic symbols - not just painting them, but actually growing them into horn-like shapes. I comment on this to one of the people I'm walking with, although I'm careful to phrase it as if I'm the real owner of this body, not something possessing her.

Still in that body, I'm at a club with a woman named Pepper. I'm wearing sunglasses - it's night, but I need them to protect myself from the electric lights. I'll take them off when we're outside. We're leaving, waiting by a coat check or something similar, when we're approached by two men, one of them hitting on Pepper, the other hanging back. At first I'm irritated, but then I remember that I'm using a female body at the moment, and I realize the other guy is playing wingman. I'm amused. Since Pepper seems interested enough, we all leave together.

We briefly stop by my IRL house, and when I look in a mirror, I see my IRL self, although my reflection isn't mirroring my actions. Pepper calls for me to hurry up, calling the name of the girl whose body I'm possessing for the first time - Julie. Outside, it's dawn, the clouds are starting to change colors, so I put my sunglasses back on. There's a large car parked outside - wingman's in the driver's seat, Pepper and the other guy are in the back. I get into the passenger seat.

We drive past several rundown-looking houses, and the guy in the back seat asks me if they're haunted, this being my neighborhood. I say sure, a house that looks like that has to have a few ghosts around. I'm not being serious, just humoring him. He goes on and on about the dead, and he's beginning to irritate me - he's attempting to show off his knowledge, but it's not particularly impressive. He says that he can speak to the dead more easily than others because he still has all his canine teeth - I have an image of one tooth behind another, like adult teeth behind baby teeth, though he's an adult. He says they make a point of telling you that they're dead. And he asks me something about dead and dreams - I didn't catch most of the question, too much background noise, but I assumed he was asking me if I'd ever been visited by the dead in my dreams. I say, sure - I may not know much about talking to dead people, but dreams I can do.

Wingman calls my attention away, asking for directions - left or right here? It's not even really a fork in the road, the road we're on just curves right and another road splits away, but I guess it might look confusing if you're not used to it; I tell him to bear right. The guy in the backseat offers me and Pepper beers from a cooler, and asks if we find him creepy, with all that talk about dead people. I say no, the talk about dead people's fine, it's the way you talk about getting me and Pepper to drink that's creepy. Pepper agrees, but she's laughing about it. I was only half joking. Even the wingman agrees - the guy's phrasing is odd, as if he's trying to get us incapacitated. We hit a bump in the road and he spills some of his own beer on the upholstery; I tell him he better clean that up, although I'm not at all sure who owns this car. I'm certain it's not him.

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."

Fragments, one involving finding an old sketchbook with an image of a character I haven't drawn (or thought about) in years; another involving a song called Sleepwalker.

A man and a woman in an old abandoned house, the woman's become possessed by the spirit of her ancestor who'd lived there. She says she's hungry, which I, 3rd person observer, am certain is a lead-in to her doing something unnecessarily creepy. She catches a rat and starts chewing on it. I mentally compare it to evil overlords using skulls as building material, too over-the-top and nonsensical to actually be creepy. The possessing spirit knows this man, and she's saying to him, "I will say, however, this is the first time I've seen you in anything but pain." When she says that, he thinks briefly of a relationship he has with someone, but he says, "Come on, be serious -" He then deliberately misremembers her name, trying to downplay the authority she has over him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

FMA-based, Al is on some huge vehicle, like a train but so large it has a deck like a ship. An old man wearing armor and automail is introducing him to what appears to be a little girl, introducing her as a 'mechanist' who works on the human soul, something that's commonplace here, and which Al's been researching and is excited to finally get a look at. There's a good chance that she's not human but some kind of automaton, that's often the case for mechanists; Al isn't aware of this. She's thinking the same thing about Al, she expects the inside of his armor to be full of bolts and springs.

The old man who'd introduced the two of them gets his automail caught in some piece of machinery, which is dangerous. Al and someone else, a large man, work together to free him, but in the process the machinery pierces a hole through Al's armor, allowing the little girl to see inside and realize it's empty. Al is very self-conscious about this, but the girl's thinking something about how impressed she is that "he'll continue investigating the secrets he was investigating, not the secrets of his body" - the research he's been doing has no bearing on his own problem.

Ed is on a different train. Kimblee, a prisoner, is being transported in the same car, it's a car for military personnel, and Kimblee's saying something about whether (something happens) or (something else happens), he just doesn't care; this annoys Ed. He gets off the train and heads for a stadium where he's supposed to meet Mustang, and he's supposed to make it look like it's a coincidence that they both happen to be there, since they're being watched.