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deercountry2022-03-02 10:45 pm
hearthebell) wrote in deercountry2022-03-02 10:45 pm
Entry tags:
Someone Kick Me Out of My Mind [L Lawliet, Open]
Who: Lazarus Sauveterre (L Lawliet) and YOU
What: Dreamwalking!
When: Following the events of Fated Leviathan, where most of the people he's on good terms with perished. He's playing the odds and trying to find a way, in dreams, it all could have turned out better, or at least with a lower death count.
Where: His body is technically in Cassandra, but for roughly the first week in March, your dreams are fair game. Either that or choose one of my starters, no harm no foul. I worked hard on them!
Content Warnings: Drug use to induce sleep, intentional evasion from detection while on sleep drugs. Various probable types of dream-violence and disturbing scenarios, including tiger attacks, environmental exposure, and nuclear detonation and fallout. If new prompts bring new content I'll update this.
[It was astonishing. It was visceral, and horrific, and then it was over. The carnage and receding waves were quiet enough, but there was a roaring in the ears of the survivors, or maybe it just sounded that way to the man who was perfect at his job in every way and still failed to keep those he tried to protect from death.
He leaves his things, taking only the clothes on his back and his anxiously bobbing orca whale omen with him when he starts off at a brisk pace toward Trench from the ruined aftermath of the beach's battle. He wants distance from it, and his steps take him to Cassandra, where he takes care to ensure that he's able to sneak into the Pale Sanctuary and conceal himself to swallow a fistful of herbs, and fall, and slumber and brace and dream in the way that he can take hold of the power he couldn't, there on the beach when the fighters were falling.
The tents are in their rows, the waves rear toward the sand. The players are arranged like chess pieces before him, and he can nudge Paul one way, Chara another, playing with Palamedes or Kaworu. They are just pieces, just pawns, but the arrangement could make all the difference, in the end.
The waves crash; the pawns die. L scrabbles in the sands of the dream, forgiving and elastic, rearranging them and bringing everyone back.]
Again!
[And there they are, back, affable and fierce in different measures. Yuri has made cake; Gideon is training by the waves.
More die, this time, including those that L saw alive and well when he left. Among them, a certain orange-haired and cheerful volleyball player is lying motionless and pale on the blood-stained sand.]
Again!
[This time, he moves his position. This time, many of the same die, and he does, as well, a casualty to shrapnel piercing through the tent.]
Again...
[And so it goes, for a hundred, a thousand iterations. L is tireless and determined, but some resource is waning, and his omen tugs at him, concerned for his sanity.]
No, Lycka, I...!
[She knows better, as she tends to in cases like these. Her jaws pull him by his jacket from his own dream into another, and this is where his fixations end, and something else entirely begins.
Who are you? What are your dreams like? If this Paleblooded, lost soul has chanced into your unconscious visions, what might he find, as his body languishes in Cassandra and his omen picks up the pieces of his fragmented mind?]
1. The Wild Jungle
[The air around you is heavy and humid. Unseen in the dense bush, the circle of life is rapid and repellent. Thrums and screeches announce the arrival of swift death, in various measures that one might or might not notice. A jaguar's kill, the soft extinguishment of a beetle, and they all weave themselves into the teeming tapestry that surrounds you in this quintessential rainforest.
You might be standing to fight, or running away. It doesn't matter, because a thin man with shaggy, dark hair who looks wide-eyed and younger than he should is beside you, closer than either of you want. He hands you a blunderbuss, an old weapon with a flared muzzle.]
The infrasound is what does it; the tiger is the voice darker than night.
[And, in fact, a growl chills and freezes you, splitting your chest asunder with a sound so low that your ears don't register it, but the atoms of your body react with cold, foreboding dread.]
2. The Stormy Desert
[A crack of thunder splits the sky above you before you've managed to recognize your dream's locale. You might hope for rain; so do the scorpions and long-tailed mice, the snakes in their dens and the cacti in their proud and stoic stature.
It won't rain. You can wish, and cry, and curse, but only the thunder will growl and thrash. The lightning may strike, so watch your head; stay low to the sand and find shelter if you can.
If you do, along the side of a cliff facing the west where the sun set rosy before the clouds rolled in, there is a young man with sunburned cheeks. His eyes are red, as though he's been staring at the sun, or it's been raining somewhere private and inward.]
I've been collecting scorpion venom. What for, I don't remember. But I have so much. What's the point of finding a cure when everyone is already dead?
3.The Grimy City
[The crowds are mostly faceless; when they aren't, they're grotesque, likely to sport the visages of rats or roaches rather than anything remotely humanlike. They actively shove you and trip you, doing their best to jostle you toward the entrance of a subway, and no matter how strong you are the impulse is incredibly difficult to resist.
You walk (or tumble) down the subway stairs. The tollbooth is manned by a young man with unruly dark hair, who seems determined to hear his headphones in spite of your desire to gather the attention of the one human-seeming creature in this dream.]
What? No, I can't hear you. Speak louder, please, I'm losing you!
4.The Nuclear Wasteland
[A brilliant flash lights the daytime sky; you might be blinded, or perhaps you had the good fortune to blink at the time. A roiling cloud rises in the sky, top-heavy and triumphant, blossoming into boiling and dusty vapor that will fall back to earth and condemn everything still living.
Perhaps you're staggering. Perhaps you're already feeling the fallout on your hair and shoulders. Perhaps you are sitting, forlorn and accepting, as the sirens blare and the screams fade. Regardless, someone has seized you bodily by your upper arms, hauling you into a shelter, spinning the vault's circular lock and wrapping you in a desperate embrace.]
I'm so glad. I thought you were lost... I thought I was the only one left.
[And he holds you, and holds you, with those frail and thin arms that clutch with the strength that only a dying or very guilty man might possess.]
V. Wildcard
[What did you dream about? If L is there, let me know and prompt this option to the moon and stars!]
What: Dreamwalking!
When: Following the events of Fated Leviathan, where most of the people he's on good terms with perished. He's playing the odds and trying to find a way, in dreams, it all could have turned out better, or at least with a lower death count.
Where: His body is technically in Cassandra, but for roughly the first week in March, your dreams are fair game. Either that or choose one of my starters, no harm no foul. I worked hard on them!
Content Warnings: Drug use to induce sleep, intentional evasion from detection while on sleep drugs. Various probable types of dream-violence and disturbing scenarios, including tiger attacks, environmental exposure, and nuclear detonation and fallout. If new prompts bring new content I'll update this.
[It was astonishing. It was visceral, and horrific, and then it was over. The carnage and receding waves were quiet enough, but there was a roaring in the ears of the survivors, or maybe it just sounded that way to the man who was perfect at his job in every way and still failed to keep those he tried to protect from death.
He leaves his things, taking only the clothes on his back and his anxiously bobbing orca whale omen with him when he starts off at a brisk pace toward Trench from the ruined aftermath of the beach's battle. He wants distance from it, and his steps take him to Cassandra, where he takes care to ensure that he's able to sneak into the Pale Sanctuary and conceal himself to swallow a fistful of herbs, and fall, and slumber and brace and dream in the way that he can take hold of the power he couldn't, there on the beach when the fighters were falling.
The tents are in their rows, the waves rear toward the sand. The players are arranged like chess pieces before him, and he can nudge Paul one way, Chara another, playing with Palamedes or Kaworu. They are just pieces, just pawns, but the arrangement could make all the difference, in the end.
The waves crash; the pawns die. L scrabbles in the sands of the dream, forgiving and elastic, rearranging them and bringing everyone back.]
Again!
[And there they are, back, affable and fierce in different measures. Yuri has made cake; Gideon is training by the waves.
More die, this time, including those that L saw alive and well when he left. Among them, a certain orange-haired and cheerful volleyball player is lying motionless and pale on the blood-stained sand.]
Again!
[This time, he moves his position. This time, many of the same die, and he does, as well, a casualty to shrapnel piercing through the tent.]
Again...
[And so it goes, for a hundred, a thousand iterations. L is tireless and determined, but some resource is waning, and his omen tugs at him, concerned for his sanity.]
No, Lycka, I...!
[She knows better, as she tends to in cases like these. Her jaws pull him by his jacket from his own dream into another, and this is where his fixations end, and something else entirely begins.
Who are you? What are your dreams like? If this Paleblooded, lost soul has chanced into your unconscious visions, what might he find, as his body languishes in Cassandra and his omen picks up the pieces of his fragmented mind?]
1. The Wild Jungle
[The air around you is heavy and humid. Unseen in the dense bush, the circle of life is rapid and repellent. Thrums and screeches announce the arrival of swift death, in various measures that one might or might not notice. A jaguar's kill, the soft extinguishment of a beetle, and they all weave themselves into the teeming tapestry that surrounds you in this quintessential rainforest.
You might be standing to fight, or running away. It doesn't matter, because a thin man with shaggy, dark hair who looks wide-eyed and younger than he should is beside you, closer than either of you want. He hands you a blunderbuss, an old weapon with a flared muzzle.]
The infrasound is what does it; the tiger is the voice darker than night.
[And, in fact, a growl chills and freezes you, splitting your chest asunder with a sound so low that your ears don't register it, but the atoms of your body react with cold, foreboding dread.]
2. The Stormy Desert
[A crack of thunder splits the sky above you before you've managed to recognize your dream's locale. You might hope for rain; so do the scorpions and long-tailed mice, the snakes in their dens and the cacti in their proud and stoic stature.
It won't rain. You can wish, and cry, and curse, but only the thunder will growl and thrash. The lightning may strike, so watch your head; stay low to the sand and find shelter if you can.
If you do, along the side of a cliff facing the west where the sun set rosy before the clouds rolled in, there is a young man with sunburned cheeks. His eyes are red, as though he's been staring at the sun, or it's been raining somewhere private and inward.]
I've been collecting scorpion venom. What for, I don't remember. But I have so much. What's the point of finding a cure when everyone is already dead?
3.The Grimy City
[The crowds are mostly faceless; when they aren't, they're grotesque, likely to sport the visages of rats or roaches rather than anything remotely humanlike. They actively shove you and trip you, doing their best to jostle you toward the entrance of a subway, and no matter how strong you are the impulse is incredibly difficult to resist.
You walk (or tumble) down the subway stairs. The tollbooth is manned by a young man with unruly dark hair, who seems determined to hear his headphones in spite of your desire to gather the attention of the one human-seeming creature in this dream.]
What? No, I can't hear you. Speak louder, please, I'm losing you!
4.The Nuclear Wasteland
[A brilliant flash lights the daytime sky; you might be blinded, or perhaps you had the good fortune to blink at the time. A roiling cloud rises in the sky, top-heavy and triumphant, blossoming into boiling and dusty vapor that will fall back to earth and condemn everything still living.
Perhaps you're staggering. Perhaps you're already feeling the fallout on your hair and shoulders. Perhaps you are sitting, forlorn and accepting, as the sirens blare and the screams fade. Regardless, someone has seized you bodily by your upper arms, hauling you into a shelter, spinning the vault's circular lock and wrapping you in a desperate embrace.]
I'm so glad. I thought you were lost... I thought I was the only one left.
[And he holds you, and holds you, with those frail and thin arms that clutch with the strength that only a dying or very guilty man might possess.]
V. Wildcard
[What did you dream about? If L is there, let me know and prompt this option to the moon and stars!]
no subject
He really shouldn't let them meet. Good to know that, now. ]
So I'm not even the destination... just a pit stop along the way. Wrong turn, in this case.
[ It's getting less cute, the kid's insistence that God is inconveniencing him by being too thoroughly trespassed upon. This room is sacred, showerheads and all: this place is the cradle of a civilization. It shouldn't get trampled through for a gift shop. ]
It's polite to give a guy a heads-up before you drop in for a visit, you know.
no subject
Though L's pale, somewhat blank features can have a difficult time affecting emotions and expressions, "bewildered" is all wide eyes and raised brows. He can manage it just fine.]
You're not disappointed, are you?
[It's flattering that a burglar would target one's vault. It's even sort of an honor to be the object of an attempted murder, especially one of passion, because who would try to kill one if they didn't really care, if they weren't really fired up and incensed and obsessed with their rage and their snarling, spiteful affection?
He won't give Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto that. Earning that should be more difficult.
He cants his head, stretches his already-round eyes as wide as they can go. He affects a parody of the child Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto thinks of him as.]
I can be so polite when I try. May I please have the time, in this...
[Crater. This grotesque, nasty, sterile-but-stained place]
...vicinity... to show myself out? It might take longer. I might need more, than I had, if you had not interrupted my process and my extremely vital solution.
[He has a nice voice, smooth and soothing and dark, when he wants to make it that way. It drips with poisoned honey now, a put-upon effort to adhere to tedious rules of etiquette that he could give less than a shit about, but abides because others are stupid enough to care.]
no subject
For a minute there I felt a little important.
[ This is a hilarious joke, and they both know it. The magic of Deer Country is too unknown to him, too unreliable; he will not take his chances. He says, pleasantly: ]
Take your time, then. But show some respect. I am the final guardian of this place... even its memory. [ His smile is sharp and cold; his crown of children's bones is still flexing, a slow constant writhe. ] Especially its memory. Try not to break anything.
[ He turns, then, to that door blazed up and down with hazard striping. It opens for him because it always has; because he knows it will. Beyond is a hallway in the same stark metal and fluorescents, with darkened doorways beyond. ]
no subject
Because he was kicked from his own dream so suddenly, however necessary his removal, it has resulted in scrambling to recover nearly constantly with every dream he's since entered. This might as well be a primer for how not to dreamwalk safely, one he'll learn from, but for now, he's still very vulnerable, and figuratively stumbling or hitting his shins from one jump to the next is just the least of it.
He's afraid of any dreamer he drops in on waking up. Some experienced dreamwalkers can probably time their own waking to coincide with the warning signals, but this is L's first journey of this punishing length and intensity. Nearly a full week into his wandering, his body in the waking world is overtaxed, along with a mind that has been running constantly in REM and shredding him in other ways.
If the Emperor woke suddenly and stranded him here until the next time he dreamed, it would be bad for him and prolong something already straining his limits. But the Emperor could be considering this, too, and if he is... he realizes that it wouldn't exactly work in his favor either. Desperate people can do a lot of damage in a tight space with precious things on full display. Desperate people like L can accomplish it triple-fold, at least.]
I see.
[King of Somewhere, and somewhere includes here. It is a memory, so may or may not exist anymore, but he wants it unbroken.]
It's a deal, Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto.
[And a challenge. He wouldn't have thought of this himself, so the things that he can usually rely on will require some heavy improvising, at least. Exhausted as he is, the notion of that kind of challenge gets his blood going, like it always does, like nothing else in the universe can.
He believes that he is intended to follow. He does, though that hazard striping gives him pause. He's bold, not suicidal, and off the map he has no choice but to trust Paul's "Captain."
Still better than anyone's "God."]
You should know that any help you can give me will only allow me to move on faster.
[It's his way of incentivizing the self-serving ask: what am I looking at, sans welcome mats or convenient signage?]
no subject
They aren't really in these halls, anyway. Not really.
He leads them to a crossroads, a set of labeled laboratory doors. Before them is Transference/Winnowing; before them is Diversion. Procedural Chamber. Avulsion! There are other, easier options: he could set them before the psychometry trial, which is toothless enough, if unsolvable. He could let his trespasser roam around chambers that won't likely kill him, and see what he can invent to fill the empty spaces— see how he can bastardize the puzzle into something he might solve. Or he could be a dick and let him walk into an accelerated senescence field.
He chooses a middle road. God leads them into the Transference trial; it's a fun one. It's a classic. And maybe it would do his young friend some good to see what a necromantic construct can look like. ]
This is a puzzle. I helped build it.
[ Two chambers stand before them: Response and Imaging. The door between them is neatly shut. The plinth stands peacefully inert, but ready to wake. ]
Go ahead and see what you can do with it.
no subject
A nuisance, indeed.
Closer in the dim light, signage does indeed seem to exist, and L drinks in the letters and labels. Whatever he sees here, he will not just remember, he will memorize rapidly.
Transference?
If
Godwas going to kill him, he thinks, he would have done it already. There's a reason he hasn't; there's a reason he has chosen this room. The high stakes have his heart beating faster, his cheeks a little more flushed than their typical ashen pallor. He's enchanted, fully, with what he doesn't know and its endless possibilities. He's taken with what he's being given permission to break, eliminating all those possibilities to just one, pristine and golden.A pretty truth to stare at until it starts to bore him, and he needs another, prettier, bigger one to quiet the craving.
If he doesn't live to be bored by the secret, it will mean that it killed him, and there's enchantment to that, too. Not many men can boast that their deaths were considered and chosen just for them.
He rolls his hunched shoulders. Several somethings pop loudly in the dark.]
I have a 50% chance of knowing where I'm meant to go, so...
[No, it's not just that. This is a dream. He's a paleblood, and he can know things that would be hidden to others. He murmurs something in his strange but very useful learned language, a focus for his discernment abilities; the sentiment is finding what is hidden, returning it as though it always belonged to him.]
Kala nedakana shan, dajenet meskares tisketketvis. Piskalet sheffoles nekahr; vantalet visanthranosk. Dajenet! Piskalet!
[Imaging glows gold around the edges.]
I'm meant to be in Imaging,
[He says, unnecessarily.]
no subject
John would kill him for it. It would be too crude. God does not have a cavalier, and if he did, it would not be this slouching and sneering young man. Even here, where none of it matters, he is terrified at the idea of overwriting her.
But Imaging lights up, and the tension drops from God's face and shoulders. He says, mildly: ]
Knock yourself out, then.
no subject
God'sworld, he probably would have been born a necromancer.He might have had a shot at Lyctorhood, certainly the talent for it, but he has such a desire to tamper with things safer left idle. Just as likely that he'd meet a nasty end, possibly at the hands of someone he knew better than to trust, but found it too exciting to resist.
He steps toward the door without hesitating or rushing; in the dream, it opens for him easily. Once through, though, he can hear sounds, haunting and alien, but familiar. It sounds like it's coming from inside the chamber.]
My Omen...
[An orca whale matriarch, Lycka is his better nature, his guardian, his sense of self-preservation and hope gathered up in its disparate cracked pieces and bundled externally.
In other words, here? She's his cavalier.
He approaches the plinth, listening for the source of the clicks and keens, trying to locate her within the chamber.]
She's in Response... It's a partnered activity, then.
no subject
John has decided he doesn't like it much. Call that his pronouncement of the day: here, drowned in memory and a half-step from drowning in emotion, he doesn't like this kid much.
An unkind thought for God to have, but his friend seems suicidally intent on not treating him as God. ]
Got it in one.
[ His Omen as cavalier. Of course that's a local law like gravity; of course that's how it works. This is John's dream. He knows who he holds in his heart as a horrible insectoid thrum of power. Trench has never been subtle, not once.
He is already so horribly tired of this: he gives a hint. ]
What can you see?
no subject
[Centered and gleaming, the glass top of the pedestal is really fairly impossible to miss, or misinterpret as the obvious point of interaction.
It also reads like an obvious trap or trigger, but that's the point of this, isn't it? If he wants to make it through the door of this dream, he has to ring the doorbell.
Fortunate that his response to a live grenade is unusual. He probably wouldn't have a chance, otherwise.
He doesn't hesitate, resting his hand in place. The lid snaps shut.]
no subject
John does not have any creature with photoreceptors in the room to watch it. He cannot quite ride the bodies of Omens, not when they are more soul than blood and more smoke than anything. But the creature is one of his— made by his early-days disciples, which is only one step off being made by him— and so he feels its movements secondhand, tracks its surging thanergy in his mental peripheral vision.
The construct charges. Lazarus is left locked in place. ]
no subject
L is deathly pale as the monster crashes and crushes on the other side of the divider, his hand stuck and the rest of him with it. The mist is thick and he is trapped, with Lycka on the other side to face it.
It will kill or devour her, soul that she is, smoke that she is. A ligththeadedness takes him and his eyes roll back, and in the uncertain shapes between sight and mind, he sees through his orca omen's eyes.
She bites, and gouges. She charges and topples. There's a beauty to the lethal way her form works and strikes. Together, they are more than a match for that skeleton, as formidable and massive as it manages to impose itself on them.
It falls, with Lycka darting and biting, and L murmuring softly with his eyes closed, recognizing the theorems and solving them with forced and harried sighs. the answer is nigh, and so is the exit, and when it appears, he wastes no time.
True to his word, he was just looking for an exit, ragged thing that he is, desperate thing that he is. He even reaches towards the light that will allow him to awaken, probably in a hospital with fluids forced through his veins.
He's like this. Relentless, agreeable to the most disquieting sacrifices. John should know.]
no subject
The door opens. Lazarus passes through it with his insubstantial partner, and John is left a little more alone, because that is how the trial is meant to work.
He lingers there, for a while, in the halls. It is very quiet without anyone to play disciple; there is nothing here but him and his dead, which shift and settle like his own breath. He does not speak again until he wakes, because there is no one to speak to. God doesn't have a cavalier. ]