Carabas

Based on F/SN, as Emiya, I've just found myself in a timeline where I'm acting as Servant to the white-haired version of Sakura. I'm thinking that I've been through this type of timeline before, and there are only two ways events play out after this point, neither of which I want to go through again. I'm trying to think up a way to avoid repeating those same patterns, to create a third possibility instead. At the moment, I'm helping Tohsaka climb up into some passageway, to either hide or escape from Sakura.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a series of extremely loosely IRL-based scenes (although I thought of all the locations as IRL-based, the only thing that actually resembled IRL was my own identity), I'm walking into the lobby of a hotel where I'm living, heading for the stairs. I pass a woman working at the front desk, a woman with straight black hair in a bob. Looking at her, I think that she reminds me of the woman who appeared in a shared dream with my IRL sister years back, in which she'd been my sister's roommate. Her hair's longer this time. When I make eye contact with her, I become lucid. I immediately start floating. I remember my intention to try summoning Julia today (usually my most common recurring DC, she hasn't reappeared since my first and last attempt at deliberately summoning her), and I start to do so, but then I change my mind about the method - rather than try to summon directly, it's easier for me to 'summon' by traveling. Since I'm still moving towards the stairs, I decide that Julia is at the top of those stairs. It's a spiral staircase, gold railing, huge, in the center of the room; it reminds me of a pillar and also of DNA. As I focus on it, I become aware that I'm waking up. I can feel the bed against my back, and the image of the staircase has frozen, as if I'm no longer moving. It gives me the impression that it's melting - not the staircase itself, but the visual image, like a filter being applied to a photo. I lose visuals. I spend some time trying to force the dream to reform, and have the feeling I'm getting somewhere, there's a brief sense of something shining in the darkness, but I eventually have to admit that I'm now too awake for this.

Except it's a false awakening. I spend some time in that same hotel lobby, looking through my backpack, trying to find a pen with which to write down that dream, before waking up for real.

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.

There's a kid who's gone down to the docks and started talking to a homeless woman there. He's already seen the events that are about to happen, and he wants be sure he's near her at a certain moment. She's fishing with a stick with a string tied to the end of it. She says to the kid she's "not fishing, just putting out bait."

There's a private party, all women, that's rented out the restaurant at an inn. There's some drama going on and the cook got stressed out and overwhelmed, he took a break in the garden out back and someone else, the former cook, is filling in. He's not human; he's something large, bulbous, vaguely frog-like. At the moment, the human girl acting as a waitress is standing in front of him saying "Um... um... um..." and he suggests what she's trying to say - that the other cook's just about recovered, so it's okay for him to go now - and when she nods gratefully, he takes off his apron and lumbers off. The boss, an elfish creature, walks over to him. In the boss's POV now, I say to him, "You knew staying here would change the way she sees things." That is, the illusions that make the humans see us as human were bound to eventually stop working on her. "Why didn't you say something to her before now?" He sort of grunts.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a little girl who's seen a glimpse of a woman in her house that no one else saw. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking she reminds me of the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, although this one's not particularly old, and she may or may not have a face. I like her. Now the girl's in the bed that she shares with her sister, both of them under the covers, except for her hand. She feels a touch on her hand, snatches it away under the covers, and asks her sister if that was her. The answer is no. The girl peeks out from under the covers and sees that there's no one there. But the moment she puts her head out from under the covers to look around, the rest of the covers are ripped off the bed, and the woman, who was standing by the head of the bed out of sight, says "Finally."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man's holding a vial of some kind of virus. He's meant to add a second vial holding some blue liquid to it for some plan that's about to be carried out, but there's something wrong - this isn't the fake that had been prepared, it's the real virus. What happened to the fake? The scene changes briefly to show it back at the lab, where the real virus should be. I switch to the POV of that man with the vial and decide we're going to have to go ahead with the plan, it just means that what we're about to do is less of a bluff than I'd like. I add the blue substance to the vial. Something red like blood forms on the top as the two substances mix.

In a scene I think of as "Five days in," a man is meeting up with someone named Hugh. Hugh's sitting on a dock with blood around his mouth, one arm slung casually over his dog, greets him with "Hey man," and generally is completely relaxed and sees nothing wrong. The man meeting him is bothered by seeing 'immortals so much older than me' losing control.

A fragment involving a city made out of pieces of every road built in the past century.

I'm someone who's investigating a woman, and my partner and I are searching her apartment. I'm going through old chat logs on her computer. As we leave, walking down the stairwell, we talk about something I found in those logs. I'm saying to her something about "the desire to feel someone else can understand your experience, your point of view. The internet can be great for that." I'm thinking that I'm starting to understand this woman we're investigating, to know how she thinks; I can relate to her. I'm also thinking that the internet's never worked out that way for me - but then I think, feeling alone in something is a universal human experience in itself.

Connecting directly to that feeling-alone-in-something thought - we get to the bottom of the stairwell and walk out the door, and outside, we're in the ruins of an apartment building where I used to live. Everything I can see is covered in debris. We're standing in front of what used to be the indoor pool on the first floor - there's no water, there's a layer of debris at the bottom, and there's no wall or ceiling, the pool is the only recognizable part of the building left. This is a memory of where I was when my wife and daughter died. I climb down to the pool ladder, trying to recreate the moment. But I'm shorter now than I was then, the perspective's wrong. Getting the right eye level means putting my feet on a different rung of the ladder than before. It's not quite right.

Looking around, I find something in the debris. It looks like a cartridge for an old video game console; from the pictures and words on it, I get the impression it's not a game itself, but a soundtrack. My partner takes it from me and looks it over and says, yeah, if you don't know what you're doing it'll just be a soundtrack - but this contains a hidden emulator.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fantasy setting loosely based on ancient China. As a disembodied observer, I'm watching a man teleport into a large tunnel or cave, only to immediately crumble into dust. I'm thinking, whoops. Let's retry that.

Earlier, a woman showed that man a dark green and glittering substance kept in a small, rectangular, light green bottle, and explained that to use it you simply rub it over the palms of your hands and clap them together. Having seen him crumble into dust, I can tell she was tricking him, deliberately leading him to his death, but I'm also aware that this substance really is something of value - this man only asked her about it because he's seen her use it before. There's an old man listening to their conversation, and when she's left that old man catches the younger man's eye and takes the bottle himself, tucking it into his sleeve. The scene skips ahead to a moment when those two men are surrounded and need to escape in a hurry; the old man produces that bottle, rubs the contents over his hands - which causes them to look claw-like - and claps his hands together. Both men are teleported to that tunnel - this time around, the original teleporter lives, and the old man crumbles into dust.