Carabas

I'm traveling with a woman who most recently has been climbing these giant stairs cut into the mountains, leading a very large group of people, guided by her visions and signs. Now she's reached an old shrine that's of great personal importance to her. But that's not what she was looking for - she thought her visions were guiding her to a place where all these people could be safe. Now it seems it was just something personal. She believes she's led them all this way for nothing.

I'm extremely frustrated by all this, because the place I've been trying to guide her to with those visions I've sent her is still further on - I wanted her to see this shrine first for personal reasons, because I like her and I thought she deserved to know this part of her past, but it's not our final destination. Unfortunately, the stairs end here; there's no easy path after this point. How am I going to convince her to keep going now that she's doubting the visions? I'm almost tempted to just suggest scouting ahead myself and then conveniently 'finding' the place - but I need her to be the one to discover it, not me. I'll think of something, but I need to talk to her privately, and there haven't been many opportunities for that on this pilgrimage.

Right now she's busy talking with a priest I dislike - I'm not fond of priests on general principle, but this one in particular irritates me. She's apologizing. She's saying she shouldn't have rejected the idea of divine guidance - maybe if she'd believed, she wouldn't have gotten them lost like this. The priest reassures her, saying, "You delivered what would not be prayerful."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Still in that same mountain range, but this time I'm working separately from the main group, it's just me and a couple of her soldiers. I'm talking with a slave trader - he's got a group of people I've been looking for and I need him to release them. He says he can't possibly do that, they're an extremely sought-after species. He shows me a cage with a human man and woman instead, and a falcon that comes with the woman, and says that he'll give me one of them as a sign of good faith - he'll even trade me all three, the two humans and the falcon, if I'd be willing to give him one of my soldiers. He has a buyer who likes that specific shade of skin. Incredulous, I tell him this isn't a negotiation. He's going to release the people I came for, I'm not going to give him anything, and I don't care about his humans or whatever else he's selling.

But then he takes the hood off the human woman - white hair and a young face. I know her. I'm shocked, and she looks just as shocked to see me - I'd thought she was dead. Last time I saw her, she'd sacrificed me to her people's gods. It didn't work obviously, I can't die that way, but there was no way she could have known that. When my 'death' didn't stick, her people reacted very badly. I'd seen them holding a funeral for her later, but I'd been watching from a distance - they must have held the ceremony without a body. I'd just assumed they'd killed her. I'd liked her a great deal, sacrifice aside.

I'd been accused of a crime I didn't commit. The charges have been dropped now, but people have formed their own opinions about my guilt or innocence. On the sidewalk I'm confronted by a group of men in dress uniform, most of them middle-aged. They call me monster, and disgusting, and one of them says, "He saw what you did," indicating a younger member of their group.

A liar, that's interesting. I wonder at first whether this is the actual criminal and if he'd been trying to frame me, or whether he's just someone who heard about the case and was trying to get in on the limelight. But he looks genuinely afraid of me, to such a degree that I realize what must have happened - he must have seen me eating. But in this era, accusing me of being a vampire would be too ridiculous, he wouldn't be taken seriously. So he came up with something more believable to accuse me of, to get me locked up. It wasn't a bad idea, I've been considering burning this identity since this mess started.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running along a mountain path, mentally shouting Nadja's name. She came to us under a false identity, and then she disappeared in order to avoid being found out. But there was no need for her to disappear like that. I've tracked her to these mountains based on rumors of "the witch of the crags," and once I sensed traces of her, I started calling first the assumed name we knew her by, then her real one, Nadja. Following her mental trail, I reach a cliff. Without hesitating, I jump over the edge.

Snow-covered mountain peaks far below me, as far as the eye can see. I pause to check if I'm still asleep enough to take control of the flight for a while - yes, I am. Forgetting about Nadja, I turn upward, enjoying the view for as long as it lasts.

I'm looking over the meat at a butcher's stall in an outdoor market, examining it very closely. The butcher's explaining something to me, but I'm not really listening - I've come to the conclusion that this isn't what I'm looking for. I duck underneath where some of his larger cuts are hanging and into the alley on the other side. I can hear him shouting at me, and Dieter saying something to him, but I'm not paying attention. The trail of what I'm looking for is much clearer now.

I walk into a house. On the floor beside the bed there's the dead body of a very large man, with rats swarming over him. The rats' behavior is unusual but familiar to me. They scatter when I come closer. Behind me Dieter asks, "Is it plague?" Plague wouldn't affect either of us directly, but it's still something to be concerned about. He came in too late to see the unusual way the rats were swarming. I don't answer him - I'm focused on something I can feel hidden in this room, somewhere in the chest of drawers. I make some comment about how the dead man had had a family, and "Three charms. One for each."

There's a teenage girl who's come to me to learn her futures. I've spread them out like cards on the table, and as I hold my hand over one depicting a man she could be married to, she says she wouldn't mind that one so much, that wouldn't be so bad. I have the impression that she doesn't feel she has a choice in any of this - she might want to know what the options are, and she might have her own preferences, but someone else will be making the decision, not her.

With that in mind, I move to one of the futures on the outside edge, the more unlikely options. It's labeled Dreamer. I see her lying on a couch with an arm thrown over her head, looking at the ceiling, wasting away. Her clothes are glowing green like an absinthe advertisement. Since I think of her as wasting away here, I conclude that this is a future she wouldn't want and start to move my hand away, but that vision version of her stops me. She sings, "I listened to my dreams." This is important to her. It's not something she regrets. "They taught me how to feel." Behind her there's a glass window opening onto a balcony, from which I can see a river and the stars. There's a whale swimming through the clouds, adding to the fantastical nature of her possible future.

A human wandered into our territory and due to an accident, got stuck here. He's spent the past few days trying to figure out a way out of this, but right now he's relaxing with us. He's taken some of the things out of his luggage and has been showing us how they work, and now he's putting on a demonstration. He's a performer, a dancer, and he's showing us what he'd been working on before the accident got him stuck here. A woman's joining him, he gave her a costume to wear, a white dress. The man directly to my left is in charge of starting the music at his signal; he's been spending more time with this guy than any of the rest of us except the woman he's dancing with, so he's learned how to make records work. The rest of us are sitting around on the rocks in a circle, watching.

In the center of the clearing below us, he and the woman take each other's hands as if starting a formal dance. He repositions her closer to him, and she 'laughs' and 'says' that they're going to be dancing right on top of each other this way - in quotes because we don't use sound to 'talk,' though the laughing expression/gesture is the same.

He starts to lead her through the dance. The dreamer side of me recognizes this as a sort of mix of an old court dance with modern sensibilities; the same could be said for the dress he gave her to wear, a sort of fantasy version of medieval clothes, very much a costume. From this perspective, it's clear that this was a dance designed for a specific performance, but the dream character side of me is under the vague misimpression that this is just how his people dance to celebrate things. Either way, I'm enjoying watching.

His actions are oddly tentative, uncertain, more so than hers though he's the one teaching. I find that hesitation fun to watch, too. I'm also aware that this is the moment when he started to doubt whether he wanted to leave at all - so of course his immediate reaction was to become even more determined to get out as soon as possible.

(The next two dreams after waking up and going back to sleep were also on the subject of dances and concerts.)

I'm at a formal party midway through the 20th century, and everyone's talking about the mysterious disappearance of the leading lady during intermission tonight. I'm as baffled as anyone, though in a slightly different way - I killed her, but I left the body in her dressing room. Someone else removed the body, and I need to find out who and why.

We pair off and start to dance, and I focus on a man who's not dancing, just watching the rest of us - he's in some position of authority in the theatre. I switch to third person, and now I see the scene as he does - he 'saw' that leading lady emerge from between two of the dancing couples, a pale woman dressed in red, black hair pulled back tight to her head, with a haughty and sort of mocking look on her face. That attitude doesn't square with the way I remember her at all; it's clear to me that the version of her he's seeing is his own hallucination, not an actual visit from her spirit.

She puts a hand on his shoulder and begins to dance along to the song with the rest of us, though he's not moving with her. She circles around him, saying that she knew from the start that this wouldn't work. She sings along to the music: "-won't let me leave you, but amore, that's to blame."

A man came across a woman seemingly sleeping in the forest, but when he approached her she spoke quietly, asking him to kill her quickly and to leave her mother alive, so that her mother could continue to feed the others. He's shocked by this, but that's because he's under the impression she's human. She's a wolf, she only looks human. She knows he came there to hunt them.

She's speaking to her mother, also human-appearing, and says she wants her next lesson to be that lesson - the implication is she's decided to marry that hunter.

The hunter speaking with two other men, also hunters, one of them saying, "You can't stay married to that madwoman."

The hunter sitting in the forest, chanting a prayer or a spell that talks about the eyes of the wolves. Although the rest of the dream had been in English, he's speaking Spanish here. As he chants, the forest around him seems to change - the shadows become darker, the moonlight becomes brighter, patches of glowing fungi appear around him. He's amazed and enchanted by all of this. He's not aware of this, but from my disembodied perspective, he himself also looks different - his eyes are faintly glowing gold, and there's a sort of shadow over him, as if looking at a photograph of him overlaid with a photo of something else. Behind him, a pile of vines and undergrowth heaves upward into the form of some great beast - he's delighted by everything now but I'm sure he'll be afraid when he sees this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm talking with a wizard from another world over tea. He's brought some of his people here as a sort of emergency hideout, and he's concerned about them picking up bad habits while they're here, to the extent that he's got them camped out at the bottom of the hill instead of in the house with me. He describes my form of magic as 'lax' and not something he wants spread to his people, which I find ridiculous for all sorts of reasons - for starters, when we'd first met he'd been seeking my help with some murderous wannabe dark lord type. I'd put a compulsion on the man to prevent him from taking human lives, which seemed such an obvious solution, I can't believe he couldn't manage it on his own. And really, as far as I can tell his world's form of magic just requires you to say the right nonsense words in the right order to express what you want, so if you're going to talk about laxness and discipline, that seems lax as hell to me.

But in any case, while we're talking about the arrangements for his people, two guys from my world come into the room. They're trying to avoid getting into trouble with their boss - they'd claimed to be unable to carry out some duty on account of being busy elsewhere, which was a lie. Now their boss is on his way to the house and will certainly sense their presence, and since I've already got a portal open, I wouldn't mind if they ducked through until the coast is clear again, would I? Fine, fine, I wave them through. That wizard objects strongly, but for crying out loud, those two aren't going to corrupt your world's magic system in a few hours, it'll be fine.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

In the American western desert, me and an older man are standing next to a car, watching a group of police vehicles pull up. We're going over a few last details before we talk to them. At the moment I'm telling him about a body I'd left floating in a pool of a private home. I see a mental image of it as I describe it, struck by the way his legs had stayed bent underneath him even as he started to float in the water. That older man says he already knew about that one. That's everything then.

He says there's a saying, "The liar does two steps worse." Do I know why that is?

I say I don't know, but then I look where he's looking. His family's just gotten out of one of those police cars - his wife, his daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend. They're looking around, haven't seen us yet with all the confusion around the scene downhill. It's clear to me they're the meaning of that saying. Lie to the people you care about and you lose them even if you're still physically present - you've separated part of yourself from them.

A woman is standing in my home - I'm not physically present at the moment - and looking into a mirror that's showing her various visions. Currently it's showing her the man she loves with a very beautiful young servant standing underneath a tree, carrying out an affair. This isn't a surprise - she was already aware of it.

The scene in the mirror changes, showing her an image of herself in a shop. There's no sound but the shop owner seems to be repeatedly asking her something that she refuses to respond to. When he approaches her, she throws out a hand to tell him to back off, but her nails brush his throat and cut it open, covering her with his blood. She looks shocked, but quickly recovers and hurries out of the shop.

This second vision reminds her of my instructions to her. She has to eat a human heart tonight if that young and beautiful body I gave her is going to become hers permanently. And regularly after that, but that's not important, that's just basic dietary needs - the important part is this first time, making a deliberate decision.

She steps through a portal back into her world, the courtyard of her own home. But as she looks around things look strange to her - most notably, the sky is covered with grey clouds that seem unnatural to her. It's as if she's seeing both her world and mine at the same time, and she wonders if this is how I see her world all the time. I'm thinking, you're getting a bit mixed up about which world is yours now.

I'm giving a woman a ride somewhere in a carriage, and when she's gotten settled I knock on the wall twice and we start moving. I go to lower the curtains on the windows, and as I do I catch sight of her fiance out on the street, obviously looking for her. She's already made it clear she doesn't want to be found at this moment. As I'm looking at him I'm struck again by how incredibly dull he seems. I say to her, "On God's green earth, what do you see in him?" I gave up my chance with her so I have no right to judge the man she chose, but still - him?

She says, "On God's green earth, I won't let you steal my plan. I can't." Either she has drastically changed the subject or else I've drastically misunderstood their relationship - either way, I have no idea what she's talking about.

Just then, her fiance spots us - I should have lowered that curtain - and he shouts her name, Ephigenia. He is being ridiculously overdramatic, people will think I'm kidnapping her.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Disembodied, I'm watching my son be interrogated by a pair of policemen. We don't have any legal ties under my present identity, at his insistence - he's old enough now that we look the same age, so adopting him again wouldn't have been practical, but I'd wanted to arrange something, and he'd refused. I'm particularly annoyed about that now, when a legal connection would come in handy.

They've accused him and his sister - his biological sister, I didn't raise her, hadn't known she was alive until just now - of murder, and he's been repeatedly telling them he's innocent, but they've just produced an audio recording of what is clearly his voice stating that "we" - he and his sister - have been waiting for this since he was nine years old. As I hear the recording, I see a mental image of him at the moment he spoke those words, with a man tied up in front of them. Up until this moment I'd believed he was innocent. Back in the interrogation room, he's insisting that the voice on the recorder isn't his, but he's clearly fooling no one. They've been letting him tell his story, knowing he was lying the entire time.

I've heard enough. I remove my awareness from the interrogation room. Back in my body, I'm standing in my son's apartment - a tiny studio with a mattress on the floor, cluttered with random piles of clothes and other things. He wasn't doing well. I'm extremely annoyed about this situation - he'd betrayed me, he'd made it clear he was going to cause trouble for me, but for him to simply be removed from the situation like this by unrelated people, that doesn't sit right with me.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running - as fast as I can manage, which isn't very - along a snow-covered mountain path, trying to hold my throat closed as much as possible. I'm wearing black leather gloves, the blood blends in very well. This isn't the first time I've had my throat slit, so at least this time I know my voice will come back eventually - just the memory of how frightening it had been the first time I had my throat slit still makes me uncomfortable. It's still incredibly inconvenient until it heals. One of my least favorite ways to 'die.' I'm thinking about the man who 'killed' me - a soldier on the same side I am. I don't know why he did this - he enjoys violence in general, so I'm hoping it was just something personal and not something larger I'd have to worry about.

Thinking about that man's possible motivations prompts a scene change. I'm peeling an orange as a visitor goes upstairs to meet with that man who'll slit my throat. I can hear the sound of an opera recording on the phonograph, and I warned the visitor that it's best not to interrupt while he's listening to his music - I didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure opera is the only thing that man loves aside from violence - but the visitor ignored me. Shortly later I hear the visitor scream.

I'm looking at a painting with the artist beside me. St. George and the dragon - I recognize that the dragon is meant to be myself. After noticing that, I recognize who St. George is meant to represent too. I say to her, very slowly and deliberately, "George can't save you." Whether I can do anything for her either isn't certain, but "George" definitely can't, despite what he believes.

A production of Faust, I'm going over a written list of the scenery needed for each scene. One scene is described as the Altar of Hell, and I have a mental image of Faust being pinned to a circular stone by two demons; that's the contract signing scene. The next scene is set in a field surrounded by trees, and my perspective changes so I see this as the audience would.

Curtain rises on Marguerite and women of the chorus in the field; shortly afterward Faust enters from the right. In response to what the women had been singing, he sings something satirical about the dangers of love and the unfortunate fools who are caught up in it. This annoys Marguerite, and she turns away and pointedly ignores him. The women of the chorus exit, and Faust realizes how angry Marguerite is, so he jokes around in the hopes of getting back in her good graces, teasing her by singing a humorous song that starts with a verse about roosters and hens. She forgives him easily, and by the time he gets to the chorus she's joined in the song, flirting right back at him. The second verse is about deer and hunters, and she playfully leads him on a chase around the stage. As they exit, laughing, Mephistopheles strolls by in the background, keeping an eye on how things are playing out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are four men, or people who were once men and are now weapons, kept chained up in their sleep. Two 'chains,' really - the collars around their throats, but also something much deeper that's never meant to be removed. I'm removing that second 'chain' from each of them. They wake up as I do so, and their first reaction is to moan about the pain, but gradually they regain a sort of awareness. It's interesting to watch - they're becoming aware of how much of their personality has been stripped away from them, but without actually regaining that personality they lost. Their master arrives then, and I expect them to attack him in revenge - that's the whole reason I freed them - but instead they cower in the corner, just looking at the pair of us.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember, I've gone semi-lucid in order to pursue that master of theirs. He's closed himself off inside a tower where I shouldn't be able to follow, with an irritatingly arrogant attitude about it - he's essentially the god of this place, it won't allow me entrance if it goes against his will. Or at least it's not supposed to. The tower's a sort of futuristic art deco confection, lots of spheres and glowing purple lights, and I'm flying around it, demanding that it create an opening. With my next pass around the tower, I find an entrance has been created, opening onto a single room containing an elevator. It signifies that this place is as willing to depose its 'god' as I am. I take the elevator up to that man's private sanctuary - the elevator doors open to show me a vast pool lined with twisted white trees without leaves, and quite a lot of statues, including some of himself. This guy is unbelievable. There's a mansion at the far end of the pool, and I expect his mental trail to lead me there, but instead it leads me off to the right, to another body of water, and I focus on a light at the end of a pier.

A woman's feeling every bone in her wings break in half, one at a time, methodically, starting at the tips and working their way up. This isn't happening now - it's a memory. I'm not even sure it was originally her memory - this woman doesn't have wings now and I don't know if she ever did. But she's feeling the pain of it as if it were happening to her now.

She's strapped to a chair, and a man in a suit has just taken his hand away from the top of her head, ending her experience of that memory. He didn't get the reaction he wanted. He says something to the effect of "I was saving this for a reward, but-" and puts his hand on her head again.

This time she sees a memory of Constantine strapped to that same chair, from the perspective of a woman speaking to him. The woman runs her finger under his jaw - he makes a joke about how he would've shaved, but there's this whole held prisoner thing. Although I'm in third person throughout this dream, and although visually, I'm seeing this particular image from the perspective of that woman speaking, same as the woman in the chair is, nonetheless I feel the sensation of her finger on my/his jaw, unusually vividly tactile.

The man in the suit takes his hand away again. From what he's saying now, I get the impression that the woman strapped to the chair loves Constantine, and that this man and the group he's with are using that to groom her to kill him.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

At a school, two boys close to graduation are lying in a field, watching a group of underclassmen playing some sport nearby. There's an underclassman in that game who one of them sort of took under his wing, and now the kid's developed a crush on him. The other boy is saying, great, take him home, get him "thoroughly raunched." The first boy takes this as a joke, says that he's not interested in anyone else, and kisses his throat. The other boy goes distant and pulls away. He resents emotional attachment - the first boy hasn't figured that out yet, but he will.

As Louis, being seen as a vampire by someone who I didn't want to see that, fleeing the scene, and Lestat finding this much more funny than I think is appropriate.

Discussing a military operation, looking at a map of what is essentially much of India and Southeast Asia, although at this point in time - meant to be 6th or 7th century or so - the countries and their borders are significantly different than in the present; we're primarily discussing a trade route at the moment, but I've also been having a disagreement with the man in charge about our manpower. While discussing the trade route, we receive word of 500 archers spotted approaching from the north, in addition to the army we're already facing. I am significantly less confident about our ability to handle this than the boss is.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

As some manner of religious authority, I'm performing a ritual to help a group of people, a sort of blessing or summoning, making something sacred. At the start of the ritual I have to offer up whatever spiritual virtue I possess as a sacrifice; this will leave me vulnerable until the ritual's complete, so I'm relying on the two people who asked for my help to accompany me. With the offering made, we step through a portal.

This takes us to a dark and dusty room, a place I'm familiar with. I summon light into my hands, with an effect much like a dim flashlight. In the middle of the floor there's a large trunk full of false panels, something a stage magician might use; at the moment it's lying open so that all its tricks are clearly visible to anyone who might pass through. I didn't leave it like that. There are a few objects on the shelves of the room that weren't here the last time, indicating that someone other than me has indeed been using this place. This is something to worry about. I close the trunk properly, and we continue.

A brief memory gap - after the dark room, we came out into a field at night with a river off to our right, and what we did here I can't remember; but then we came to the cliff at the opposite side of the field, and the view here was so fantastic that I briefly went fully lucid to enjoy it. I'm looking down on an immense lake so still that I can see stars reflected here and there. In the far distance, there's an immense grey statue of a falcon submerged in the lake so that only its head is above the water - but that small part of the statue above the water is at least the height of a two or three story building.

Continuing the storyline, this is certainly the appropriate place to perform a sacred ritual, so I begin a prayer - something about the lake filling with stars. But before I get very far, that river off to our right rises in a flood. The two people with me are afraid, but I'm thinking this is convenient - we'll just ride that water down to the lake.

The river sweeps us over the cliff, which is great fun, and when I sink under the water of the lake I can see a group of hammerhead sharks swimming far below. They don't seem to care about us. Surfacing, although we've all separated, we're all making our separate ways toward that falcon statue.

Along the way, however, I bump into a seal; it considers me and then swims on. And then into a shark; the same happens again. And another shark, and this one seems more interested in my presence; and another that I have to physically shove away; and so on; I'm not concerned about my safety - though I am worried about the other two - but I become so busy fending off sharks that I can't continue to the statue.

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

A woman's just rescued two men and they're currently escaping through a series of underground tunnels. She's just shoved one of them up a ladder, to a manhole leading out of this tunnel, but apparently that's her limit - she collapses onto the floor, which is a sort of metal grate over water. I can see blood on her face. The other man says, teasing about the way she's been telling him to just let her handle things this whole time, "This is your plan? To lie here and bleed to death?"

She says, "See, I knew you wouldn't be down with the plan."

He picks her up and carries her up the ladder. I switch to first person, from the POV of the man she'd shoved up the ladder before; we've climbed up to the level of the subway tunnels that are currently in use. We walk along the tracks for a while, and just as we reach a platform - currently empty, though I'm aware people could show up at any moment - we hear a train in the distance. I have to help both of them up onto the platform, he's so tired from carrying her, and I'm thinking about how we each keep exhausting ourselves to pull the other two up. I climb up after them, and collapse on the stairs, exhausted, listening to the train.

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.