ph_logs | [OPEN] And I'll dream each night of some version of you

[OPEN] And I'll dream each night of some version of you

Who: Alice Dyer (

closureisformovies), Samama "Sam" Khalid (

huntingtruths) & you!
What: Alice and Sam arrive back from their canon update
When: Early May
Where: Around, locations in prompts
Warnings: Reference to gun violence; typical horror protagonist things; specifics in headers. Magnus Protocol Spoilers up to Episode 40.
Notes: Open prompts for both Alice and Sam will be down in the comments! Body of the post is meta/closed to Sam.

It's just her luck, really. Goes to talk to some spooky external— thing and don't even die because it's dangerous, oh no, that'd be too logical. She was prepared for that risk. Getting accidentally shot by her overeager bodyguard she didn't ask for? That's the level of absurdity that her life is made of, these days, so of course that's what happened instead.

(Gwen Bouchard, when she fucking sees you again...)

The memories hit when Mortanne welcomes her back and with it, the fact that Sam was here, too, the first time, so if she's here again, then surely— maybe— she almost doesn't dare to ask but she does and Mortanne says yes, and, well, after that it's all she can do not to cry with relief.

She's alone on the ferry, except for ferryman. It's the most nervewracking few minutes of travel of her life and she spends it shifting from foot to foot, scratching at her arm, pulling at her hair—nervous, scared, anxious, excited, she doesn't know. She just knows that Mortanne wouldn't lie. So she pays her fare, steps off the boat, and then stands on the dock to wait.

She's not going anywhere until he turns up. She doesn't care how long it takes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Let me guess: whole world taken over by those— Fear— things?" A beat, as she steps to walk away from the market at his gesturing and expects him to just keep up. He's got a few inches on her his legs can manage. "And before you accuse me of some kind of foresight shit: Sam got yeeted over to what we're pretty sure is yours and Gerry's universe. I'm going off what he said and what Gerry backed up."

"I..." Trailing off for a moment, Jon gawks at the back of her head as he starts off behind her, catching up without too much trouble. While it's a relief for the normalcy of everything, the edges of his mind still strain for that wide, accessible everything. It feels like he should've known that. (But, then again, isn't the fact that he didn't a relief in and of itself?)

"Yes, that'd be the one. Fear apocalypse, personal hells curated to terror. I'm sure you've heard more of it than you'd care to," Jon half-jokes. "How exactly did Sam get there from your universe?"

A beat. Unbidden, the recollection comes, leaving Jon making a face.

"...Ah. Wait. Was it a... tear in reality on Hilltop Road, by any chance?"

"Yep," her lips pop on the word, in a way that somehow lacks all the associated pep and instead sounds deeply exhausted. "The Hilltop Centre was what it was called. Old shopping centre. Magnus Institute had some outreach centre there and in its basement was— something. Tear in reality sounds as good as anything else we've called it. I've been calling it the portal to hell."

She can't say she disagrees with her past self's theory even now. Maybe it isn't literal Hell, but given what happened to their universe, she feels like it's close enough.

"According to him, his new girlfriend wanted to shove him through as a sacrifice to— balance things? Or something?" Her face scrunches with lack of understanding, steps slowing on and off as she's distracted by thought. "She only didn't get to 'cuz the monster that apparently kills people by making them recite their worst nightmare until they die of it beat her to it."

He doesn't especially love the sound of monster that kills people by making them recite their nightmares, considering. Of all the things he should share, that, he thinks, should be held a bit closer to the chest, unless absolutely necessary. ~~He doesn't need to be going and making a worse name for himself in town just yet.~~

"Not sure about the 'balancing,' but the rest of that sounds... plausible. Back in our side of things, it'd been a halfway house, a few normal residential homes, student housing..."

He hems and haws for a moment, trying to figure out exactly how much to give her all at once. She's familiar with this sort of thing, isn't she? She can probably handle the short of it first, and the long of it as they go along. That'll probably be fine. It's fine.

"Also happens to be where the rest of the entities of terror escaped our world after the point of connection was severed. Brought the whole ordeal to a close. At least, as... far as I'm aware."

"Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. Sam didn't get into all the gritty details but it sure sounded like there was still plenty wrong over there. And Celia sure seemed desperate not to go back."

Though that might have as much to do with the baby as anything. Ugh. Every time she remembers Jack exists it complicates all of her feelings toward Celia that she wants to be very simple—anger, betrayal, those are easy. Sympathy and understanding isn't something she wants to be feeling even a little, goddammit.

She kicks a pebble rather too hard and sends it sailing into a flowerpot. Whoops.

"Gerry said your lot are sorted into like, fourteen? Groups? Or whatever?"

"Started to get a fifteenth one, if you'd believe it." Is it a joke? It's dry enough that he might be trying to joke, but honestly, he doesn't even know. His attention follows that pebble into the flowerpot, wincing gently at the clack, before stowing his hands in his pockets.

"Did he give you the explanation of all of it? He's the one who originally told me about the ordeal, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's gotten into it already." A beat. "If he has, and I get into this whole ordeal, I'll be expecting you to give me your word to keep that stolen pear to yourself for it, by the way."

"Wh—" oh, shit. She does still have the pear in her hand, she didn't even realise. After blinking dumbly down at her own hand for a moment, she snorts and groans. "Yeah, yeah, fine, I won't shove my illicit pear in your face."

Illicit pear sounds wrong, somehow. Anyway.

"Not sure if he gave me the whole spiel but he gave me enough to get the idea. Eye, Flesh, Buried, something about spiders and the dark and so on. And I'm gonna guess death's in there somewhere 'cuz that's just, like, common freakin' sense."

[ OOC: don't mind me glossing over the Fearsplanation(TM) rq to get to the meat of it sklndfsfs ]

"Well, that's the short of it at least. God, alright, let me just... pick a place to begin."

And as soon as they've found somewhere to sit (at Jon's request; this is something far too intricate to try to sort the pieces of while walking and dodging the odd pedestrian), he lies out each piece of each Fear. Eye, Flesh, Buried, with expanding on Web, Dark, and End, and adding Lonely, Hunt, Slaughter, Corruption, Desolation, Vast, Stranger, and Spiral to the mix. Even a note about the Extinction, for what it's worth.

He hates feeling like a living encyclopedia for all these things, but he imagine Gerry does, just the same. Perhaps it's about time that someone shares the burden with him.

The explanation of what the Fears were is the easy part. Now, for the part he dreads - how it all came to be.

"...I don't suppose you'd want to revisit this in parts, would you?" He half-jokes, settling his elbows against the picnic table that they'd parked themselves at. He knows the stalling isn't making a fantastic case for himself, but he doesn't need to be able to See it to know that this isn't going to go over well. (In fact, he's going out of his way to try not to Know, lest he try to find some other less-than-honest way to spin it.) "I know it can be... a lot. I might have fared a little better if I'd had time to let it sink in for a while, myself. Not that their reach is nearly so strong here, but..."

Alice is a surprisingly good listener, for all that she can be such a loudmouth. There was a time she paid close attention to every case she got and, in these last few weeks, some of that keen attention has come back, drawn out of the jaded haze back to the forefront by her fear for her loved ones. So, she pays attention. If this is going to be useful to know, she'll take it in.

Even if it is fucking horrifying.

"Do you really want to drag this out over multiple days?" she asks, because, well, she's not sure she would. "...I just wanna know the broad strokes of what the hell happened. 'Cuz whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's affecting my world too. Two of my best mates died cuz of it and so did I, trying to investigate on my own. I don't want to keep flying blind and let more of my friends die too."

"...Fair point," Jon agrees, albeit reluctantly. She's got a point, of course - anticipation of breaking the news of this over days and days sounds like a great way to give the two of them a terrible week. Best to rip it off like a band-aid.

"My world ended," Jon starts, simply, but more quietly than before. "It ended with a letter, from my employer. An arrangement he'd set into motion well before I'd arrived to start working at the Magnus Institute. Simply waiting for an appropriate candidate to finally light the fuse. These entities, these Fears, when they harm you, mentally, physically, by any other means... they mark you. And he'd ensured that, by the time everything came to a head, I had been marked by all fourteen. A sort of... great unifier, a catalogue of fear, spearheaded by the Eye. The letter was an incantation, to let them stop existing on the outskirts of our world, and come into it."

He takes a moment to take a breath, gently wringing one hand over the more heavily scarred one.

"Every Fear created... a pocket nightmare, I'd say is the best way to describe it. Personalized terror for everyone trapped within. Crowds of people united in their fear, supplemented with false people to make the scale of the nightmare feel that much larger. There were only two options left to those who'd survived, who'd been able to move between those pockets and not get tangled into them. Wait for the Fears to funnel the world's victims to the End, the only thing left that would truly kill them, and..."

Another breath. This one's shakier. He shifts his shoulders in a sort of shrug. A gesture that says it couldn't be helped, but with all the guilt that shows that he isn't certain that that's true.

"Cut them free. Send them through a crack in the world, to go wherever else they may see fit."

Get a job, end up ending the world. She hates how much that feels like it could easily be where things at home are heading, if things keep spiralling the way they are, but what the fuck is she meant to do that she isn't already doing? They're flying blind. Even Lena's gone now and she was only useful by sheer force of comparison to Gwen's useless arse.

"...and that's the crack we saw. Under that Hilltop place. You sent them through that thing."

Jimminy fucking christ on a cracker why is this her life.

She groans and drags her hands down her face, then thunks her head against the table twice before sitting up again like she didn't do it in the first place, templing her fingers against her mouth.

"Y'know, there's a part of me that feels like I should be yelling at you. Like, seeing red, totally tearing you a new arsehole, the whole nine bloody yards. Or, y'know, yelling at any of your mates who didn't tell Sam what they did to end their apocalypse. But the stuff we've been filing at the OIAR goes back way further than that and there is no chance in hell it's only in fourteen categories. I could kill a man by dropping our filing binder on his head."

"To be entirely honest, I was sort of expecting you to, but you won't see any complaints otherwise." A beat, and Jon makes a little face, uneasy and concerned. "Though it doesn't inspire much confidence that it goes back further than that. I'd hoped that, if anything, they'd need some time to get ingrained into a new world, but..."

He trails off, pursing his lips, looking like he's trying to reach for that information. It's just out of reach; whatever the Fears are up to in their new shapes and forms, they're not inclined to share. Whatever blend that the Eye has changed to in that world has no ties to him. Nothing can be so simple, apparently.

"I'm shocked that there's another organization working into that sort of thing. There's no OIAR that I'm aware of, back in our world. Does yours just... file and collect them, maybe take some brief shots at investigation, as well, or...?"

She pulls a face and shrugs, making a non-committal noise. "No investigations. The full name stands for Office of Incident Assessment and Response, but there hasn't been a response department since before I even got the job. Until everything that happened recently, all we did was read or listen to the cases that the data crawlers picked up and sort them based on this ridiculously granular sorting system. There's a CAT number, an R rating, and then the DPHW—which I think is four separate categories that we just don't know the names of, four numbers that each change depending on the case. There's probably a pattern if you look at it closely, but we sort so many cases that you'd go insane trying to look for it."

Sure, in hindsight she could maybe pick out some cases that have different subject matter but similar numbers, but what the hell would that tell her? She doesn't know what the categories stand for. The closest they've got is—

"I figured out as much as the system requiring specific cases to boost specific categories, a while ago. It was saying we needed more 'W', which for some reason spat out Mr Bonzo's apparently murderous arse, but that's it. We don't know anything about how it really works, and most of our leads died with our IT guy. And the higher ups are no help, Trevor Bloody Herbert MP ducked in a few weeks back and was asking us about how it worked—when he wasn't making jabs about how diverse our office was."

Uggggggh. Tory twat.

There's a lot to take in there, pieces of it that Jon tries to take one at a time. Different categories, a "response" team that is no longer active, whatever the hell Mr. Bonzo is, but---

Any and all trains of thought come to a screeching halt with the last point that she makes, enough to leave him gawking at her.

He sputters a disbelieving laugh. "I--- I'm sorry? Hang on. Did you say Trevor Herbert MP? Was asking you about how that all worked?"

That is absolutely not the part that she expected to get any kind of strong reaction. Alice blinks, then squints. "Uh, yeah? He's the guy that's technically the head of the whole department, except, y'know, we're basically the black sheep of the civil service and he doesn't actually know fuck shit about anything because the government mostly likes to pretend we don't actually exist I'm pretty sure. Why?"

"He doesn't know anything about--- that is--- good God."

Even despite his surprise, he's looking like he might start laughing further at any moment. It's not exactly funny, per se, but with the sheer absurdity of it, what could you do besides laugh?

"In our universe, he was a--- vagrant monster hunter focused specifically on vampires for a time? Sort of took to anything else he could get his hands on after a point, though. Caused his share of problems in the mix of everything else we were dealing with, him and another Hunter. Don't suppose you know if he's got any ties to any Montauks in your world?"

"Not that I know of???" Granted that doesn't mean there isn't, who know what the rich and powerful are really up to, but the name means nothing to her. "Why is your universe so freaking weird? First Gerry tells me Chuck E Cheese is real and now apparently one of our big Tory MPs who doesn't know his arse from his elbow if his staff aren't there to tell him which is which is a vagrant monster hunter?!"

"The old bastard had Gerry in a--- skin-bound book of dead people he'd found! He didn't mention it?? That's where I met him! Got kidnapped by him and everything. And he's the bloody Tory MP. I'd think you were fucking with me if you could make this sort of thing up. I---"

A beat, and another piece of everything she'd said fits together.

"Hang on, I'm sorry, what was that about Chuck E Cheese?"

"I mean yeah he mentioned the book thing but we didn't exactly get on a first name basis with his librarian—"

Why is their universe so weird. She never knows whether she's allowed to start laughing at the fucking absurdity of it all. Which, speaking of—

"Yeah so in my universe Charles Entertainment Cheese is the title character from fuckin Five Night's at Chuck E's. Like he is not a real thing. Freddy's is the real thing. Gerry lost his fucking mind."

It's a rare sound for even those who know him, and the way it catches him off guard, it seems it's just as rare for Jon, himself--- but he barks a surprised laugh.

"And so--- I take it, similar names--- that Mr. Bonzo is some sort of bizarre version of our world's Mr. Blobby? Is that right?" he asks, undeniably relieved to have such mundane, strange things to focus on for a moment, instead of apocalypses and transferred Fears and pending ends of other worlds from it. "Hang on, alright, you've investigated the Magnus Institute of your world, you'd said? That it'd burned down? Any information about Jonah Magnus, or--- Elias Bouchard, maybe? If he'd died in the building fire, it'd have done you all a favor."

"—BOUCHARD?!"

"You're kidding. Does adding Head of the Institute to it make that better or worse?"

Her head is against the table again. The thunk is honestly impressive.

"Ohmygodthey'refuckingcorporateclimbersineveryuniverse," comes out all in one muffled breath. She bonks her head against the table once more then lifts it, propped on both hands.

"Worse! Very much worse! I-I mean I haven't seen anything about Bouchards and the bloody Magnus institute but we've got one running the damn OIAR right now!"

"No," he says, with all the shock and scandalized tone that someone might have while gossiping too late into the night with a friend at the pub. "Not Elias Bouchard, is it!? I can't imagine that the same thing would happen with other members of the family, but even just the last name doesn't exactly inspire confidence as it is."

"No, it's this— annoying arse called ~Gwendolyn~," the tildes are necessary, they're audible in her voice, "and she was just a grunt until, like, a month ago, when she somehow ousted the boss that actually knew what she was doing right after mister Monster Hunter MP visited. Christ I knew her family must all be total bellends but—"

[OPEN] And I'll dream each night of some version of you

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probably about a good spot to wrap!

wrap!