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.

I enter a lecture hall and speak to the man who I believed summoned me, dressed in black with a small white owl on his shoulder, but it turns out the owl is the one that called me; this is news to the man in black, and he's not pleased about it. The owl speaks in a pleasant woman's voice and changes into the shape of a four-sided mask, one face for each direction; three of them are simple stylized masks made of wood or similar, but the fourth is an actual face - it moves, it has eyes - just in cartoonishly distorted proportions. She's been sealed/trapped/stuck/reduced to this. She introduces herself as Loki Laufeyjarson, which is not the name I was expecting her to say but I roll with it.

She talks about each of her masks - in the one that resembles an actual face, she says she'd taken this form and scorned high heels (meaning an artificial way of gaining the height she feels she should have had anyway - 'height' is not really the issue she's talking about). In one of the wooden masks, she talks about using this form for dealings with a magician, and she suspects that magician of having a hand in her current unfortunate circumstances.

She returns to the form of the owl sitting on the man in black's shoulder, and we're now in a yard behind an estate, surrounded by partygoers. The man speaks of my payment and I dismiss the small amount of money he offers; I tell him I expect him to provide me with food and lodgings, pea soup and three packs of smokes a day. (Neither of those are things I'd want IRL, but I wasn't being my IRL self here.) I'm already leaving, stepping over an ornamental pond; it's a demand, not a negotiation. He's irritated, but she accepts immediately. I walk off into the trees along the border of the property.

In earlier scenes, symbols of eyes and blue lotuses above the entrance to a cave, and drinking a polar bear's blood from a glass while wondering about parasites.