Smoke & Mirrors: Laura's Dream
6/6/2006
09:01 PM
Logfile from GarouMUSH.
Currently the moon is in the waxing Gibbous Moon phase (70% full).
It is currently 20:49 Pacific Time on Tue Jun 6 2006.
Currently in Saint Claire, it is clear outside. The temperature is 66 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). The wind is currently coming in from the northwest at 7 mph. The barometric pressure reading is 30.03 and steady, and the relative humidity is 54 percent. The dewpoint is 49 degrees Fahrenheit (9 degrees Celsius.)
Greek House: Upstairs
The 2nd floor has much the same theme as the first floor; simple light-and-dark contrasts, Greco-Roman touches here and there. The hallway is fairly short, leading to a handful of doors on either side.
Contents:
Laura
Obvious exits:
Downstairs
A long day's become a long night, but the herbs Laura has been preparing for weeks now are finally ready. She rinses her mortar and pestle, then grinds the ingredients for a potent hallucinogenic tea. The mix is poured into boiling water, taste tested, then carried to her room. Very methodically, she closes and secures the door, dims the lights, then lays down. She waits until the tea is cooled, then drinks it in one quick gulp. She lets herself fade into the sudden dizziness that takes over.
The smoke and hallucinogenics take some time, despite their potent nature. Surroundings change colors and walls warp from their normally straight, solid state to something much more psychedlic. The ceiling bends down like a drop of water struggling down from its leaky faucet, before it swallows up the Fury with a mentally imagined splash. In moments, it seems, the mind's imagination takes her back to that which is foremost in mind, the caern. The caern's pristine nature is made so much brighter, greener, more real. It feels like the Umbra, but it's not quite the same, in this floating, dreaming world.
There's a figure in the caern, a young looking, lanky pawed wolf. At first, the colors of it are as many and as shimmering as the rippling body of water underneath the falls that drop from the caern's cliffside. Then, as it looks up sharply like a deer caught grazing, its colors darken and completely disappear into black and formulate into a light absorbing figure instead. The Fury's body, dreaming as she were, feels almost light as a feather, but substantial enough to bear a sense of reality as well.
Laura's meandering mindset locks to the caern. If anything, it seems as though she dreamed the trip to the Fury House and remained at the Center. The idea that she forgot to retrieve Alesia occurs to her. Her dream-mind is fluid, loosed by the drugs she's taken. When she spies the wolf, she wavers. It's as though she's trying to study it from all angles while standing still. With little hesitancy, she glides nearer to the suddenly-dark thing.
The sound of the wind is only overtaken by the sounds of burbling and water splashing, cascading down. The wolf at the falls, as she gets closer, is less of a 'young' looking creature now, with dark tangles of aura emitting off of it like smokey ribbons. The creature looks to Laura with a sort of curious gaze, if it can be called such. Hard to look curious when one has mirrors for eyes. The tail behind it lifts with a feeling of warning, though it does not retreat away.
Laura wavers to a stop, cocking her head almost to her shoulder as she looks at the creature. With a thought that's more complex than the usual shapeshift, she shrinks to her wolf form, the better to meet the shadow-creature on its own terms. It takes her a moment that's more like a minute to remember how to speak in this form, and when she does, it's a little disjointed. Hello/Greetings, she relays, watching the mirror eyes and the set of the tail.
The wolf is hard to read, given the utter lack of markings, and lack of light reflection providing insight. In its own enigmatic way, it replies in kind, but with the feel of a spirit's voice. *Greetings, Child of Pegasus.* Its voice is everywhere and here all at once, internal and external.
*Hello, Child of the mirror,* she replies, her own eyes shuttering briefly. She straightens her mind out just enough to continue. *What do you watch, here in the Heart?* She opens her eyes again, taking a deep breath and opening her wolf senses. Her posture remains easy, light, showing very little tension.
*You are the first and only,* the wolf answers, without opening its jaws. Somehow, it feels feminine to the mind and heart in its communications, but that could just be an echo of the Fury's own gender seeping in to the internal aspect. *I watch all that is shown, and see nothing of my own.*
Child-Holder sways nearer. *What do you remember?* she queries, all curiousity. Her Rage ebbs and flows, never cresting as she steps nearer the wolf-shaped spirit. *What is your name?* Her ears cock forward and back, seemingly at random, not reacting to the spirit's words any more than she's reacting to the wind.
A moment after the question, the wolf cocks its head in question. It's like it's pondering the question's deeper meanings, and not yet making a decision on whether there is an answer that would suit its tastes. The creature instead restraightens its head, and its dark smokey 'appendages' reach out from its aura and wrap themselves around the Fury. They don't seem to squeeze or restrain, though they are firm in grip.
Child-Holder solidifies her stance, feeling as though she's drawing in all of her forms to stay as a wolf. She remains calm, holding her Rage at bay. She tries to sniff the creature, though it's sort of an afterthought. She waits, patiently as she should.
Gradually the dark being's aura encompasses the Fury, turning the surroundings black with the absence of light, and blotting out the sky's shining stars one by one. It feels ominous at first, then the world spins. Directionless, but with a feeling of just a second or two's worth of time passing, the lights return again. They wink back on, one by one in lines, as the setting reveals itself to be the city streets. Familiar ones, too. St. Claire's nearby medical center area, and the sight of Hilliard Hospital standing bright and shiny, a picture of sterile health. *Where once we dwelt in dreams of men, my secret hides from view, brothers we who roam free, now in our eyes see you.* The wolf is nowhere to be seen now, leaving the Fury to speculate where it might've gone. As soon as the verse finishes, however, the hospital explodes with glass and fire, the screams of metal bending and something burning crackling away.
Child-Holder flinches, that little bit of reality intruding on the dreamstate. Her fangs flash, her hackles rise sharply. Her other reactions, the ones that involve fleeing, come a few seconds later. She twitches to dodge fire, metal and glass that may or may not be mere products of her imagination.
The boom, the flames, the heat all feel real. The Fury dodges a good majority of the glass and debris that come shooting out of the building's upper floors, tumbling down to the street below. As she looks upon the building again, the billowing smoke roils out of the open windows, freed from their bottled up state to spill out over the city, darkening the skies above and resting heavy in the air. It continues as such, for as long as she stares at the smoke. It twists and turns like a dragon's body, floating and dissipating into the air.
The real becomes the hyperreal becomes dreamlike and settles somewhere in the middle again. Child-Holder watches the smoke above, notes how it moves and copies the motion unconsciously. Despite all of the fleeing and dodging, she pads nearer again, trying to find a focus to discern anything more than 'dark' and 'serpentine' about the coils of smoke rising from the destruction.
In the dull grey and darker black, the smoke continues to rise and settle, choking the air. It spreads like great wings, dimming the sun's glow from the skies. Just inside the smoke it seems, dark shapes fly within. Ominous figures, not completely solid given their ghostly, smokey host. All around, then, the Fury can see these shapes descend from the skies and disappear like they dissolve into the landscape. Some don't fully absorb into the concrete and brick and asphalt. *Where once we dwelt in dreams of men, we turn our eyes to you, delicious hearts and minds we seek, Ah... you will do.* The fires burn down the building, which groans and strains to stand but gives way eventually, collapsing in on itself. In the rolling wave of grey ash and black smoke, a pair of reflective eyes can be glimpsed just out of the corner of the Fury's peripheral vision. It's more sensed than it is seen.
Child-Holder turns towards the glitter, once more adopting a solid stance. *Soul and body fuse in us, Rage and spirit too. Your search will end in pain and death, a caution I leave with you.* She strains for the words, trying to keep her mind from chasing further down the spirit paths as she speaks to the smoke-creature.
A chortle like a brook's burble swirls through the air, completely out of place. Entertained, amused, but the feeling not lasting, the Fury's mindworld blurs away as she just manages to spot the creature whose eyes are like mirrors. It isn't wolf in shape, but smaller, far smaller. Its eyes slit in mischievious glints, and then a waft of a breeze lifts it into the air, to join the coils of smoke rolling into the sky. Then, like someone stopped the merry-go-round, everything halts back into a greenish, picturesque forest somewhere inside the bawn. The setting returns to that of the Fury's normal dreams, made that much more real and intense by the hallucinogenic drugs she has ingested. There are no other disturbance beyond the norm, after that.
Child-Holder's reaction remains one of observation, even as the spirit arcs off into the sky. When it's left and the dream fades, she lets herself loose to drift. The surge of the dreamstate carries her off, though nothing seems quite so vivid and real as the smoke, the fire and the waterfall.
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