January Event - Lost in Dreamland

[pumpkinhollow]

**Plain text version here.

Lost in Dreamland

Bedtime Story

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: Unreality, dream logic. Mind the CWs in individual threads, as they will vary! }

It is no secret that in the Emerald Isles, winter and sleep have a deep connection. To some extent, this is true everywhere. The whole world seems to fall asleep under the blanket of snow. Plants recede back into the ground, trees stand leafless and slumbering till spring, animals hibernate. Nights are longer. But the local folklore intensifies this, as Mortanne presides over Winter and the Beyond.

As the tales go, the Beyond is the realm of souls, the place where the essence of a person goes when it separates from their body. And while this primarily refers to death, it can also refer to the half-step between living and dying--- the unconscious mind. Sleep, and moreover, dreaming. And thus, winter and dreams have always been kindred spirits. Connected through their ties to Mother Mortanne and to a hushed and sleeping world.

Perhaps it is for this reason that when you go to sleep on the night of January 19th, 16:55, it is a deeper, more consuming sleep than you’ve ever felt. One that swallows you whole, dragging you down, and down, and down, into a sunken place that is deeper and more terrifying than dreams.

By the time you think to feel afraid, it is already too late to jolt yourself awake.

LULLABY

Beautiful Dreamer, Wake Unto Me

You wake. Or do you? It feels a bit like waking, and yet, it does not. It is similar enough to waking that one might believe it to be so. You feel ground beneath your feet, or perhaps a bed beneath your back. Or something. You feel… something. It isn’t like waking. But it’s a little bit like waking. Perhaps it is not. But perhaps it is as close as you are able to get. Let’s try this again.

You “wake.” Your mind solidifies and reality defines its shape around you. Your eyes focus and you become aware. What are you aware of?

Whatever it is, it isn’t good. Perhaps it seems good at first, but it is not. Wherever you are, only horrors await you here, pulled straight from your own mind. Or the minds of others.

Move. You must move. The dream is a landscape. You must traverse nightmares to escape. Seek other dreamers, and flee. To the center, to safety in false daydreams. To the underground, where the Necropolis will conceal you. To the edges, where you can feel your consciousness break free of this sunken sleep and return to the world of hard objects and light. But you cannot stay here. Gods help you if you stay here.

[ Your nightmare can look however you desire. Laws of reality and physics do not apply. Fuse them, reshape them, choose your flavor. Be liberal with content warnings and respect sensitive content guidelines, but otherwise, there are no rules. ]

Starlight and Dewdrops are Waiting For Thee

If you reach the center of the dreamscape (or perhaps you “woke up” there), you will find an oasis. You find yourself immediately embraced by a beautiful dream. All of your wishes granted, your deepest desires pulled directly from the core of your soul and brought to life before you in vivid detail.

What sort of dream do you find yourself in? What do you dream of? Is it success, love, peace? A life that never came to pass? For your troubles never to have occurred? Do you dream of fame or glory? No matter how beautiful or extravagant, no matter how simple or selfish, the things you desire most are yours.

You cannot escape from here. This is the center, as far away from the waking world as you can go. But the dream entreats you, as do the illusory figures within it. ”Stay,” they croon. ”There is nothing for you beyond here. Only nightmares, only terror. You are safe here. You are loved and wanted and happy here. Why would you ever want to leave?”

Time blends together. It often does, in dreaming, but this feels different. How long have you been here? Do you remember what you were doing before? How you got here? Have you ever even been to a town called Pumpkin Hollow? You can hardly remember.

Maybe that was the dream, and this is your reality. Even as the edges of it bleed together with that of your neighbor, even as fleeting memories come back to you, even as a little voice deep within you screams at you to wake up--- you have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of this place. Here you are happy and safe. Here you are everything you ever wanted to be, living the life you always wanted. Here there are no debts, no suffering, and you shall never die.

You belong here. Surely.

Sounds of the Rude World Heard in the Day

With how far you had to sink into unconsciousness to be here, it’s hard to believe one could go any deeper. But the Beyond is a many-layered place, and perhaps by descending a bit further, a bit deeper, a bit closer to death, you can find another place. Maybe you have a connection to death that brought you here. Perhaps you find your way by mistake. Either way, you may find yourself on a more peaceful journey through the Beyond through the Frozen Necropolis.

A seemingly endless maze of stone walls, mismatched in their depth as if they were patchworked together over centuries. Mausoleums, slotted tightly against one another. Covered marble passageways. Stone statues and carved reliefs depicting gargoyles, knights, Virtues, mages with skull motifs--- necromancers, perhaps? Banshees and dullahans, elves and humans and dwarves and orcs and fae folk of all sorts. All of these things line a network of cobblestone pathways lined with powder snow drifts and crunchy brown grass. Names are carved into the arches above mausoleum doors. Some are familiar, some are not. Fairbanks, Gladwyn, Dirthariel, Leeds, Larson, Endrin, Applegate, Brenning. Above you, white pillar candles float magically overhead, burning bright, lighting your way through the dark pink sunset sky.

In the distance, you see the achingly thin spires of the Winter Cathedral. An austere grey monolith with ornate carvings of horses and snowflake-shaped stained glass windows. Perhaps you will find some solace there. Otherwise, make your way to the river. A familiar ferryman awaits you--- though returning to reality this way will have a small consequence.

[ Encountering Mortanne here is possible, though her threads will be heavily restricted. You can do a thread here with someone else, though! It’s fine to be here without encountering her. Returning to the island by ferry will cause your physical body to die in the process, leaving you a ghost for the usual amount of time. You can also return to the nightmare and get out through the edge. ]

Lulled by the Moonlight, Have All Passed Away

Should you find the edge of the nightmare, you will be able to push yourself through the iridescent membrane at the edge of consciousness. You float through the seemingly endless darkness for a moment, then another, then a third, senses dull and drifting drunkenly, until suddenly---

Like breaching the surface of water, you return to the solid, bright sharpness of reality. Actual reality, firm and true. You are where you went to sleep the night before, though some time has passed. It might take you a bit to figure out exactly how much, though…

Those who escape the nightmare will find themselves home sometime between 1/20 and 1/30. Those who stay in the dream oasis will be comatose until the dream ends, and will not wake until 2/8. They will find the return to reality deeply unpleasant. What are you willing to endure to keep dreaming a while more?

Comments

[not_a_traitor]

In this dream, Gaeta has never faced his impending death with that kind of placid composure. Mulcahy's acceptance amid so much pain does something odd to the thrashing, panicked animal of Gaeta's heart; his plain admittance of never seeing a deep space starfield makes Gaeta open his eyes, turning to look through the Raptor's glass as Mulcahy might. What was that like, rising above the atmosphere for the first time? Back when it was what Gaeta desired most. Back when space was still beautiful.

This is not a peace he has ever associated with this dream. Even the Eight is quiet, the oversaturation surrounding her dimming. Not gone, but less -- present. Less all-consuming, if only for a moment.

"How can you call me stalwart after all this?" he whispers.

[lovethyneighb_or]

He reaches over to wipe what wetness is there on his friend's face. "Oh, Gaeta. I didn't say those things thinking I was speaking to a stone. Both of us are veterans; we know better than anyone how one must, eventually, fail. No one lives a painless life. But the point is not to never fail. The point is that, again and again, I have watched men and women, with their mangled hearts and tired, incomplete bodies..."

He leans back, marveling again at the stars, and at the miraculous technology of their coffin. What did it take, he wonders, to research it? Perhaps some other war.

"... smile, and love, and sing. Even in the dark, with... blood and sickness thick in the air, they sang. Would that be a good use of the last oxygen we'll ever breathe? Singing?"

[not_a_traitor]

He swallows. With the Raptor's failing life support has come a steady drop in temperature, but this time, Gaeta is no longer the only warm, living body on the shuttle. Shivering, he presses as close to Mulcahy as he can, tucking his face against the curve of his shoulder.

(Perhaps it makes more sense now why Gaeta has always hated the cold.)

"Two hundred people are dead because of me." No louder. "She said she could get them out of prison. I trusted her. I gave her the names, and she killed them all." Fresh tears thicken his voice. "What right do I have to sing?"

[lovethyneighb_or]

"... What a strange thought, Gaeta. Hating yourself for someone else's cruelty. Yes, perhaps it was your mistake. It sounds like you can be very certain of that. But your fault... I believe in this case, you can only push that so far."

He cups a hand on the side of Gaeta's face. "I never blamed the soldiers. Not the men with guns, nor the operators giving orders, nor the suppliers ferrying the bombs. Perhaps some, but not truly. Those I blamed were the politicians and Generals who gave the orders and who told them they had an enemy in a whole nation. Such brilliant liars."

[not_a_traitor]

"But I should have known."

He says it as if he were clarifying a foundational theorem to a new pilot. Not protesting, really; certainly not pushing back against Mulcahy's gentle surprise, which soothes like a warm blanket in the frigid chill of the Raptor. Just trying to explain.

"She was a Cylon. What else would she have done with the names? You kill when you're in a war. You kill the ones your enemy values. It's basic."

Across from them, the Eight whispers those last two sentences along with Gaeta, as if she were the instructor now. When he finishes, she even nods in silent satisfaction that he's finally gotten the answer right.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Mulcahy is quiet for a moment, glancing between the two. His gaze settles on who he knows.

"You remember," he begins, "that I was a priest at a mobile war hospital, yes? Not on the front lines, but very near. We had poor facilities only barely better than the aid stations where the real fighting was happening. After every conflict, thousands of the wounded would get shuttled back to us M*A*S*H units, and it was our jobs to stitch flesh back into men. Sometimes we would get bombed, yes, by the other side: the North Koreans, and sometimes by our own misfire. Dust would fall from the rafters into open patients. The electricity and water would get knocked out. Broken glass would fly from the windows onto the operating room floor.

"... For a time, there was a bomber plane from the North Koreans. Every day at 5 O'clock, he would fly over the camp and drop a bomb. It was a small little shell he'd throw over the side by hand, and always, he would drop it out in the field, away from the tents, the supplies, and the hospital. We thought for a time that he simply had terrible eyesight. But this went on for months, and not once did anything worse happen than that he blew up an empty jeep that gotten a little too close.

"Then all of a sudden, his flights stopped. Who could know why? Perhaps he said his mission was done; perhaps he was found out. We will never know. But it occurs to me that someone gave him the order to bomb an enemy hospital, and he refused. He was not the only one to refuse."

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta's attention drifts to the Cylon sitting across from them. She is the same model that shot then-Commander Adama in the middle of the CIC before they learned to recognize the Eights. The same kind who slaughtered two hundred detainees on New Caprica, then smiled sweetly to Gaeta's face afterward.

And yet she is also the same model as Sharon Agathon, who swore an oath to the Fleet just like Gaeta did and worked alongside humanity as an ally.

"You're so sure they'll refuse forever," says the Eight -- but there's so little bite to it anymore. She just sounds exhausted. Her lips have gone blue as the oxygen keeps fading, and the light around her has dwindled near to nothing, too; she looks as pallid and ordinary as Gaeta and Mulcahy themselves. "It's only a matter of time before they turn on you."

With effort, Gaeta shifts his gaze back to Mulcahy. "Is it?" he asks, soft and uncertain.

[lovethyneighb_or]

He can feel it. Acutely, he feels it, every word he has spoken, the cost of it. The expense in air. The weight. Every breath is less effective than the last. He will have spent too much to hear Gaeta sing, he thinks, but this is as fine a use as any of air.

Distantly, he remembers that it is not asphyxiation by itself that causes panic; the body does not detect the presence or absence of oxygen by itself. As long as carbon dioxide is getting breathed out, then the human feels nothing; they simply go to sleep, and they die. But a carbon dioxide buildup is panic. He wonders which one they're getting. He wonders if it matters.

"Some don't. Some do," he answers honestly. "I don't believe it's possible to be sure. But that goes both ways. There is no certainty that they will or that they won't. Between the two, I think I would rather be the kind of person who took a chance."

Softer: "That's easy for us to say, of course. But I act hoping that another would share with me the same mercy. I am glad to know that you will."

[not_a_traitor]

Oh, the trust he places in the world. Somehow, despite everything he's endured, betrayals and imprisonments that broke him in uncountable ways, Mulcahy still puts mercy into the universe in the hope it will beget more mercy. The Eight would scoff if she could hear it -- but she sits motionless now, too, unbreathing, a thin trickle of blood running down the side of her throat. Only Gaeta is left to listen.

He doesn't know if he believes what Mulcahy says. Still, he cups the little light of those words against his heart. After all -- Gaeta did believe, once. Maybe he can borrow this faint, flickering scrap until he reignites his own fire. (Oh, the trust Mulcahy places in Gaeta, to guard such a light.)

He closes his eyes. There will be no last-minute miraculous rescue for them. Not in this iteration of the dream. They will suffocate, then drift, entombed, until the Raptor falls into the gravity well of some star or black hole and meets its final end. There is no reason to waste the air on something as pointless as singing.

There is every reason.

Though the lack of oxygen thins Gaeta's voice, and he has to pause far too frequently to struggle in another breath: he sings.

[lovethyneighb_or]

It is, perhaps, like nothing he has ever heard. Gaeta's voice, even struggling, floats through the air on dovelike wings; hovers like light, warming his face; it is, as though having cracked his soul open to Francis in this moment of final vulnerability, Gaeta has trusted him to peer inside, and to know that within him is something of the same Spirit which moved the cathedral-builders in beauty. It is not even like the most trained and beautiful voices from records or films. Not even like those he has heard live, in cathedrals or otherwise. When it is coming from someone you love, from somewhere next to your heart, it passes directly into it; it crosses no distance at all, loses no energy.

(And he wonders, wonders, wonders, against all such vicious self-effacing judgement, against all the wolves that torment his soul, if Gaeta is singing about him.)

(He can't be. He must be.)

(Is he so beautiful to him?)

Death has shadowed them both for so long, and here she has finally come to meet them. Francis closes his eyes and leans against him. With the future dissolved, all he can do is savor this present in the rising fear and freezing cold, in the dizziness and fog he feels beginning to set in. In the heavy smell of blood. When weakness and nausea takes hold, he laces his fingers with Gaeta's, and moves to lie down, looking up at the firmament.

cw: death

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta moves with him. Some of it is because he cannot support himself unassisted any longer. More of it, though, is his desire to stay close to Mulcahy's side. He doesn't want either of them to die alone, and even a separation of a couple feet would be unbearable.

The song fades to little more than whispers, and eventually, trails off altogether as it becomes too hard for Gaeta to breathe. He's having trouble focusing his eyes. Everything swims around them, blurrily, as he looks up through the Raptor's windscreen. He has never seen stars this bright before -- not even his first day on duty, with everything wondrous and brand new, every faint flicker of starlight magnified tenfold. The light swells and pulses with his heartbeat. The whole universe is singing now that he can't any longer.

Maybe if he'd known death could be like this, he wouldn't have chosen a path that ended with a firing squad.

Weakly, Gaeta squeezes Mulcahy's hand. "It's beautiful," he manages in the faintest whisper.

It is the last thing he says.