Carabas

In the previous scene, I'd been doing shots with a man who drinks live snakes, one every day. The bartender gives me a dead one, since it's my first time; it'll go down easier. Now I'm walking around half-submerged ruins where I've been before. There's meant to be a door here, though I hadn't seen it the first time around. Now that I'm searching, though, I spot the fold in reality that's hidden it, pull it through so that it becomes solid. It's set in the base of what had been an empty stone arch.

The other side of the door is an in-between place, and I go slightly lucid in order to pause and enjoy the view. It's a stone bridge hanging in space, pale stone, low and sloping walls on either side, and something like coral growing over it in patches. This space has the quality of light seen from underwater, and floating above there's some enormous, amorphous, diaphanous shape, jellyfish-like. It's all very pleasant.

Along the bridge I run into two women with the tails of snakes, mermaid-like, who are frozen in place, and whose verbal words don't match the meanings I hear - the verbal words are friendly, the underlying meaning is to get me to come close enough and stay long enough for them to kill and eat me. I find them pleasant, too; I can't blame them for being hungry, this place sees so little traffic, and I don't intend to stay long enough for them to kill me, so they're effectively harmless.

When I leave the in-between place, it takes me to a scene where an Egyptian woman with a clipboard is consulting a guest list. I have to wait in line behind some snake-haired triplets while a dead human woman talks to the woman with the clipboard, trying to justify why she belongs inside, citing the royal status of her lover.

There's this vampire who went through a bit of a rock star phase in the 60s. During that time he had this assistant who would occasionally arrange for the vampire to wake up with one of his groupies locked in the same room. The vampire resents this. He compares it to throwing a live, venomous snake at someone - neither the snake nor the victim has any choice in the matter, the snake is used as a tool.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

This woman, thoroughly soaked by the rain, just completely drenched, has just been put into the back seat of a car. The man who's just gotten out of the car and insisted she take it is now standing in the rain. After just a moment the woman gets out of the car again, makes this sort of exasperated sound, drapes her coat over his head to keep the rain off, and gets back in the car. The coat is thoroughly drenched so this does absolutely nothing to keep him dry, but he gets this big lopsided grin.

There's another guy standing in the rain with him, and my first impression - before the woman had gotten back out of the car - had been that the two men were enemies of some kind, but that the first guy was obliged to go along with him for something. But looking at the second guy again now, on second thought I'm thinking of him as a friend.

The scene changes to show the woman and that first guy again, parting at a rural train station sometime in the 1800s. I'm thinking about how during the scene in the rain, they hadn't remembered each other from this time. Part of immortality - it's important for them to forget every so often.

False awakening. I try to write down this past scene, and write that there were three different ways things could go for that pair in the rain. The best route for them is associated with fire.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm a man passing a large arched opening in a stone wall, and as I look at it I remember that someone had asked me to fetch something for him from down here. I hadn't intended to, but since I'm here anyway I might as well. I go inside, into an immense underground stone dome with a dirt floor. It's empty, and large enough that it's difficult to see the other walls, but I'm aware there will be a door off to the right leading to a place where things are stored. As I'm walking, I hear a voice accusing me of enjoying blood. I don't see a physical source of the voice, but I expect he'll show himself eventually. I sort of laugh at the accusation but otherwise ignore him and keep walking. The voice continues: "If you are one of the evil dogs, care to know as much as I do?"

Shortly after passing a man whose head is a snake, three creatures are presented as things I'm meant to fight. But they seem harmless, and when I walk up to them, they disappear. Past them, I walk into a hidden door set into a tree, and spend some time walking through a series of rooms. The passageway I'm walking through makes a large circle, and when I get back to the start (there were a lot of scene changes along the way, so this "start" wasn't actually the same place as the tree-passage from before), I notice a flight of stairs heading down that I hadn't seen before, with small, glowing blue arrows hovering just above the floor, pointing down.

The stairs lead down into an enormous room filled with books and a portrait of a man I recognize as someone infamous named Corvo - he's someone I've heard of often, in the context of being a doctor or a researcher or something similar, responsible for some tragedy or some sinister event; but I personally think of him positively, even though I know very little about him - mostly I feel curious. I realize this was his room, and these are his records.

I'm standing in a city street in Corvo's POV, sort of - I'm aware that this is me going through his records, his reflections on the past. At this moment in time, he'd been disgraced, along with some other man who I'd also heard of, someone who's walking away from him right now. I have some mental connotation between this man and violence but also think of him as a better person than Corvo, someone who dislikes Corvo intensely but works more closely with him than anyone else, I have the impression Corvo somehow forced him or manipulated him into carrying out a lot of dirty work for him. Now Corvo's looking at the open gates to the city, looking at the crowds of people entering, aware that they're unknowingly carrying some danger that others refuse to listen to him about, and feeling powerless. With the knowledge that this is a flashback, he's feeling an incredible amount of pain over this moment in the past and whatever it eventually led to, and I feel that same emotion so intensely that I have a false awakening or something similar and spend it looking for some space to just calm down from that scene.

I'm looking at a man with the head of a dog, carrying something like a whip made out of live snakes, driving a chariot through a large underground hall. He's a good and trusted friend, and I've given him a highly respected position here, something to do with training or teaching. There was an assassination attempt a while ago, and ever since then he's refused to come above ground, except for twice a month, different days every month, and even then only at specific locations.

A flashback to a time shortly after that assassination attempt, from 3rd person now. The dog-headed man was resting up in a garden in an area separate from the rest of the compound, for the intelligence workers only. There's a woman there, and he's wondering if she's the one who took care of him while he was delirious. He doesn't completely trust her. She's told him before that she was designed by her masters to be a partner for "Riker" - although the dog-headed man doesn't realize it, this is a codename referring to the leader of the compound (my pov character in the previous scene. When I hear the name Riker, I associate it with Dune's Paul). While talking about various things, she complains that "my Riker's" role won't come into play until later, so for now all she can do is wait.

I'm reading cards for an off-duty cop or detective - it's about his case, and it's not official. The Hermit - that's the criminal. The Emperor - that's him. And then a minor card that indicates cooperation between the two of them, and things going smoothly.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking to this alien I'm traveling with and my first instinct is to call her Red - she's red from head to toe - but I stop and think about how nicknames work in alien cultures. Best case scenario, everyone's going to wind up calling me Pink, not sure I'm up for that. Me and another alien head outside on some errand, crossing this huge field, and as we're walking I ask him about nicknames. He says, "You don't want to say my name?", and I don't know how to interpret his tone - maybe bewildered, maybe hurt, maybe I've just accidentally proposed marriage, I don't know. We're still crossing the field, but we've wound up walking on top of/sliding down a pile of giant, motionless serpents.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are these people trapped in a cabin on a mountain by a group of killers, and they're wondering if their two friends who left earlier made it off the mountain okay. The scene changes to a group of people standing around a car parked near the base of the mountain, across a field of tall grass - the killers, a 'family.'

I switch to the POV of the father figure of the group, and I'm looking at the two young boys with us who are new to the family, keeping an eye on them. Not too worried though. Someone spots a figure moving out of the forest and into the field - the figure shouts to us when she sees us, waves her arms to get our attention. I'm thinking, huh, we missed one. We'd found a guy in the forest earlier, I hadn't realized there was still another one out there. That was sloppy.

Me and those two boys go to meet her, and she starts talking about how she needs a lift. Walking her back towards the car, we get to the part of the field near the road where the tall grass is all flattened down from what we'd done earlier, and there are a few things, plastic bags and such, scattered around on the ground. She's looking at the things on the ground and looking a little uncomfortable, she asks what we were doing out here. Having a picnic, one of the boys says. The rest of us laugh. It's technically true.

I'm trying to catch a bus, but the station I've found turns out to be the wrong place - it's a place for repairs only. I sit around the station anyway. There's a guy who I initially thought worked there, turns out to be just another person waiting like me, who tells a story about a dead body that was left unburied. There's a girl listening to the story who slips and falls, hurts herself, and I pick her up and carry her somewhere. She works for my family, who owns most of this town, and she's worried that slipping like that might get her fired - her job involves athletic skill. She's not wrong.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After an IRL-based scene and a memory gap, I'm lying in a bed, watching a dream image form; I have an impression of gold and light and a woman's face, but it's blurred and I'm thinking that I can influence it too easily, I decide I'm not asleep enough for this, it's more imagination than dream. I decide to just let myself wake up instead, and let the image disappear, so there's no visuals. I open my eyes. I'm in a dorm, I'm a high school kid at either a boarding school or a very fancy camp or something, rooming with two other guys, and we go out to the lake and have some competition that winds up accidentally involving other people and getting us in trouble. I fall on top of the rotting body of a snake in the water, and a bit of it gets stuck under one of my fingernails. The teacher or counselor or whoever it is that tells us off for causing trouble mostly just seems amused by us; he refers to us as Vision house, and says it's all valuable experience.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling with two other people, looking for something or someone, and right now I'm making a deal with an old woman I associate with trolls, to allow us to pass. She's sitting on a rock in some canyon, dry earth without any plants, and there's a cloud of dust over some footprints that appear and disappear as if there were invisible people moving around just in front of her. I associate those footprints with whoever/whatever we're looking for, it's why I'm talking to the troll-woman. She agrees to a deal: three for three. She'll allow the three of us to pass if we can win three fights against her people.

The scene changes: we're at an indoor pool, facing the first of her people. Although the two guys I was traveling with are still here, they're standing aside; I have the impression they'll stop the guy we have to beat if he moves towards them, but otherwise, I'm the one handling this. I'm in the water, and I become aware that I have a long fin on my back like a lancetfish, that there's something off, fish-like, about my hands and skin and eyes as well. The guy and I both follow the same pattern of engaging only to immediately back off, until eventually I get him into the water and hold him under. Once this is done, I look at him and think that he looked malnourished. I recognize him as someone who'd been on death row 'before we all came here.'

I'm evacuating a place where True Blood's Eric and Bill had been staying; Bill's already gone, but Eric's chained to a chair, and I have no intention of freeing him. I'm going to carry him out in the chair. Despite this, I have nothing against him, and I'm asking him if he wants me to bring any of the belongings he's kept in these rooms. I'm kneeling in front of the chair as I speak to him, and I say that I may need him to carry something of Bill's in exchange, to which he consents. Aside from 2 belongings which needed no discussion, he says he doesn't need anything else. It seems a shame, the rooms are full of things he's collected over his lifetime. I pick up a sword he has on display with a hilt that looks like carved ivory or bone, and I say sure, you may not need anything else, but it's better if it can come, isn't it? I put it on the chair with him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragment: a mention of Louis, a king.

I've heard about a gathering of people I'm thinking of as 'the British' tonight - there's a connotation of a specific politically subversive group in my mind - and I intend to arrange a meeting with the queen, although I'm not as close to her in this reality as I have been in past iterations; I've spent too much time focusing on other contacts this time through. I sit down beside the queen at her mirror. Her daughter, Antoinette, is here as well, standing by the window; she's beautiful but spoiled, self-centered. That's largely my fault - in other versions of this reality I'd devoted more time to her and she'd developed into a very sweet girl. This time around, we're not particularly close, and she notes only that she owes her name to me. In French, I ask the queen her plans for this evening after the party. I don't speak to her in a particularly deferential manner. She seems wary, suspicious, but I think I have enough influence with her to pull this off.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I need to kill a giant snake, but I can't find a weapon. Finally, a woman produces a long knife and beheads the snake herself. But I tell her that it's still alive, you need to destroy the brain, otherwise beheading it is just slow death by suffocation, it's cruel. I point to its eyes, which are still moving; I tell her it's suffering. She doesn't care. It's harmless now, that's all she cared about. I can't believe this. But I do my best to put it out of its misery without a weapon, until finally its eyes stop moving and its skull is crushed. I pick up head and body and carry them outside.

When I reach the door, the storyline changes - at first I was still aware I was carrying something and needed to get rid of it, but I forgot about it quickly and so the snake disappeared. I was distracted by the sight of colorful glowing orbs floating down the river, just through the trees. There's a festival going on all this week, and tonight is the children's celebration. I walk past the women handing out colored orbs for the children to light candles inside and carry down to the water, and as I walk I see a couple kids carrying their lights the wrong way, down to the sea instead of the launching place at the river. Some adults are trying to point them the right way, but the oldest kid says something about their father's ship out at sea.