Carabas

I'm visiting someone, arriving in the yard behind her house, and I find two men doing yard work. I'm surprised, and when I talk to them, one of them complains about being summoned like this - straight out of bed, early on a Sunday morning. (Summoned in the magical sense of the word - he was asleep in bed, and then he was here being put to work.) I go into the house, calling out, "Babe?" There are a few other workers around, and they give me odd looks for the term babe. It occurs to me that the word may be outdated. Or it may be that the woman I'm meeting looks much older than me now, since her hair's white. You have to keep adjusting the way you address humans as they age - it's a headache to keep track of all this stuff.

I find her and ask her about all this work she's having done around the house, and when we step aside from the workers for a moment I point out to her that summoning people on a weekend is rude, and besides, we're supposed to be demonstrating that we're not cartoonish villains here. What does she think she's doing, summoning up people like this? We are supposed to be reformed, we don't get to keep minions anymore. She protests that her helpers aren't 'minions,' but they most certainly are.

I'm taking a little kid home to her family. Initially I'd tried to just send her home with the click-your-heels-three-times bit, but while we wound up somewhere familiar to her, it wasn't actually her family's house. So I'm flying her back the rest of the way - but the kid was so excited about flying, I gave in and kept flying around instead of just taking her straight home. It's a pleasant night flight - lasted a long time and there were so many beautiful views, I deliberately made an effort to remember all of what I was seeing so I wouldn't forget it when I woke up. But despite that, there's not much to describe - a lot of scenes of beautiful city lights seen from far above, and occasionally diving down low over traffic to amuse the kid. The lucid observer part of me wondered why the dream character part of me stuck to following the roads - I supposed it helped with navigation. At one point while we were diving low, we wound up passing underneath this large overhang at a trolley station, and I found it difficult to gain altitude again when shut in from above, so we landed in the trolley car.

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

I'm driving through a familiar IRL location, semi-lucid - aware I'm dreaming but still just automatically following the dream storyline. While thinking about this being a dream, I go fully lucid and remember a lucid goal, one that involves traveling to a particular building, so I set out to find it. I'm at a crossroads, and I think to myself, oh look, there's the road that leads to that place! I drive down that road for a while, and the scenery gradually stops resembling IRL.

Eventually the road curves, and rather than turning with it, I drive off the road, directly through a dry yellow bush, although it gives my car no resistance at all. I drive through the forest for a while, without a road, and I pass construction crews - men in hardhats, bulldozers, and a vast number of tree stumps that they've cut down. I begin to have trouble with visuals, things start going black and I worry that I'm waking up, but I'm able to clearly see a tree branch against the sky as I drive up a hill, looking upward, and I keep focusing on that vivid image, wondering why I can see some things and not others.

I exit the forest, away from the construction crews, and am now at the top of some rolling hills covered in green grass. In the distance, I can see a blue building flanked by white pillars, and I decide that must be the place I've been looking for. As I get closer, I see that it seems to be a school - which is not what I'm looking for - but I keep heading for it anyway, figuring it'll work out when I get there. I cross a bridge, and looking down I can see some land covered by a thin layer of water far below, a sort of web-like network of tiny streams. The place I'm looking for has a vague connection with water, so I think of this as promising.

I park in a small parking lot, a good distance away from that building. You have to walk from here, this place is the official entrance. There are a few other people around heading toward that building too. I hear sea birds. Over to my left, the opposite direction from the building, there's a low wall; I walk over to it and look down into a bay. I can smell the sea air. The bay is filled with fish - some of them are on the rocks instead of in the water, but they seem fine with this, and I have the feeling it's a visual trick to allow me to see them clearly. Similarly, there are giant versions of some sea creatures that would normally be much too small to see from this distance. I think of this as something like an aquarium. I can hear triumphant-sounding orchestral music.

I walk back to the entrance that leads to the building. The 'entrance' mostly consists of a large wooden message board with various things posted on it, including a place where people have left written messages about their visit to this place. I look it over briefly and continue on the path towards the building. At the other end of that wooden board, someone's left a backpack behind. As I look at it, I realize I'm waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a man who's conducted a study of the languages in his country, who's so far cataloged over 300 languages and dialects. He's currently walking down a dirt road with a lot of foot traffic. Ahead of him, some people are setting up a kind of gate. A man who he's meeting here arrives through that gate, accompanied by a small escort of soldiers.

Now that they've met up, the soldiers move on ahead, leaving the researcher and this man a little separate. One of the soldiers says something to the man, and he starts to address him as 'my captain' or something similar, a title involving rank, but he catches himself after the 'my' (or the equivalent rather; this wasn't in english). This man isn't his captain (or whatever the rank was) anymore. Both the soldiers and the man are a little sad about that, though none of them show it, but walking together with the researcher rather than with the soldiers sort of rubs it in. He'd served with this group of soldiers for a long time, and he was just recently forced to resign from his post due to something that was revealed about him. It wasn't any action on his part; it was some inherent quality that he had been unaware of, something he thinks of as something like a taint, although as a disembodied observer, I believe it's not actually a bad thing in itself, whatever 'it' is.

Addressing the researcher, he identifies himself as 'language group 246' - that is, although he doesn't expect the researcher to remember him, they've met before, when he'd participated in that researcher's survey of dialects. He takes some food out of a bag - a corn cob sliced into halves - and he offers one to the researcher, who's surprised but accepts. The man is reflecting on the opportunity for conversation with this researcher now, versus with the soldiers he used to command.

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.

Just a bit of scenery: I was flying through a forest by a river, with a road running through it. A few of the trees had formed something like natural nests in the places where their trunks divided: wide platforms ringed with thick branches and covered with moss, out of sight of the road and with a good view of the river. They looked like they'd make a nice place to rest, but I was in too much of a hurry to stop.

PSoH setting, following Leon. He puts out messages searching for D. Meets up with fellow 'searchers' - for various things - some of them more useful, or sane, than others. He's sleeping with one of them, and at the moment sitting up in bed next to her, saying "don't look at me."

A boy who leaves something broken with friends or family and is surprised to find they've fixed it when he returns, he hadn't asked them to do that.

A wrong turn leads to a dirt road, and then to a moss-covered graveyard, where I get out to walk. My IRL sister L. and I find ourselves stuck with a tour group.