(Dreaming) Uncharted Territory

**CyledyrWyllt** · Jan 24th, 2014 02:07 PM

After drinking the unpleasant liquid, each changeling soon finds it hard to keep their eyes open. After a moment of warm, misty confusion, they each find themselves within the landscape of their own dreaming mind. Every detail of their personal dreamscape is under their control, each of them can see an opening of some sort that emits a warm, flickering firelight. The more they think of Betony Rue, the more they feel themselves drawn to the firelit portal, whether it is a door, window, or even simply a hole in the ground. After stepping across the threshold, the intimate familiarity of their own dream abruptly fades and they each know with unerring certainty that they are now within the dream of the Witch Queen of the Leaden Mirror. Confirming this fact is the sight of the ogress herself sitting in a rocking chair by the fireplace in what appears to be a close approximation of the front parlor of the boarding house. Although she looks up and acknowledges each new arrival, the Dread Lady appears to concentrate on her knitting until everyone has arrived.

Jan 25th, 2014 05:49 PM

Mal surfaced into a dusty, ashen wasteland under a comfortingly stormy sky. Mal liked storms. She couldn't really work out why, there was just something... homey about them.

It was a very harsh, uncompromising sort of dreamscape. She was no artisan. No crafter of cunningly designed dreams. She knew there were things in her psyche, things lurking beneath the sands she refused to face, so she dreamed of blasted wastelands under raging skies. The occasional twisted spar of iron jutting up where a particularly unpleasant nightmare lay impaled, out of sight, out of mind.

She could see on the horizon an unusual glow. Not the bright flash and stab of lightning, but a warm, persistent glow, like the dawn.

It was never dawn here, just a sort of perpetual half-light.

Driven by curiosity and the knowledge she was supposed to be doing something, not just dawdling in her dreams until morning, she trudged across her dream, the thousands of miles to a theoretical horizon vanishing in a puff of dream-logic as she found herself standing on a doormat that most definitely did not say 'Welcome', in front of a ragged cleft in a rock that seemed to exist purely so it could have a ragged cleft in it.

She squinted against the warm light spilling through the gap inside. Her breath caught in her throat, a tremor rumbling beneath her feet as her eyes met the Dread Queen. Feeling her own control of the dreamscape unravelling where the two dreams overlapped, she hurriedly squeezed through where the proverbial Angels fear to tread and stood within the Witch's dream, taking a moment to screw the lid tightly on her own fears and compose herself.

It was looking quite unlikely that this train would have any brakes...

Jan 25th, 2014 10:34 PM

OOC

The place Jason now found himself in what was was... hopefully a dream. If it wasn't a dream, then common sense had decided it was time for its lunch break and left. If it wasn't a dream, he certainly didn't want to experience any nightmares...

He really didn't want to try analyzing his dreams for some kind of meaning. Aside from the activity just not appealing to him, the Hunterheart found himself actually kind of frightened by some of the implications. It was just a long hallway. A very, very long hallway.

There were mirrors all along one side, all in various states of being. Some seemed pristine and bright, others seemed long neglected and filthy. Some were shattered and when he looked at them, he swore he heard yelling or crying, or even both depending on the mirror in question. Every mirror was accompanied by some kind of noise and displayed an image, but neither was clear, no matter how perfect the mirror looked. The images were always hazy and blurred, the sounds were muffled. The only thing that was clear was the yelling and crying.

Above the mirrors was an iron chain, running the entire length of the hall above the mirrors. The size of each link changed at certain intervals. The mirror that was by far the most damaged, some large shards missing entirely from its frame, had a broken link above it. Screams echoed in his skull when he looked at it, his head pounding with such pain that he couldn't focus on it for long without turning away. The chain seemed to continue after that point with a different material, plainly no iron, but impossible for Jason to name off-hand.

After a short walk, he found himself at the end of the hall. The mirror at the end of the hall seemed to be neatly split in half, as was the chain link above it. The end of the hall seemed to be a dead-end. With a sigh, Jason doubled-back in the hope that he may have missed something. After all, the hallway was dimly lit and he had really only focused on the mirrors his first time through.

To his surprise, he did find something. On the opposite side of the hallway, the one without mirrors or chain which had appeared to be nothing more than a blank wall, there was a door. There is some ethereal nonsense going on because I swear that damned thing wasn't there before. Although he wasn't really conscious of it, Jason did have control over the hallway, at least to some extent. It was only the way it was because he hadn't bothered to change the place from the way it from when he first entered his own dreams. If he really wanted to, he could probably just get rid of the whole thing. But this door seemed out of place, beyond his grip. It made him uncomfortable.

I probably shouldn't just sit here and brood over a bunch of broken glass... even if it means walking into a realm controlled by someone known as 'the Dread Queen'. With a deep breath, he gripped the doorknob and entered into a profoundly brighter place. Which was to say, a place with any proper lighting at all, given where he was coming from. As he left his own personal hallway, he felt what meager control he had in shaping the dreamscape slip away and it felt like he had crossed some kind of unconscious border into a place he felt far too alien in to be comfortable.

Why exactly did I agree to do this?

Jan 25th, 2014 11:31 PM

Someone was baking bread. The warm, dry scent brought her through the fog and into a neat kitchen stacked with cook books and hand painted plates, a light dusting of stray salt and crumbs on the counter tops. Taking a visual inventory, she recognized the small, canary yellow stove from her first apartment and the talkative refrigerator from her home growing up; the windows were a mismatch of old a new, her grandmother's cutlery mingling in the drawer with plastic take-out forks. This bit of counter stopped short, that cupboard was too large. Vertigo spun her for a moment, too many doors leading in and not enough leading out.

She had somewhere to be.

Ava took one last deep inhale before turning off the oven. Heading down the oddly long hallway toward the front door, she walked by several doors and entrances to other rooms. The living room from her aunt's house, her father's in-home office, and a few she couldn't quite place but knew she recognized. Continuing on, she went by the open door to the basement and movement from the corner of her eye made her do a swift double take. It was dark, the stairs leading down into the basement obscured by odds and ends and - she leaned forward, staring intently until she realized what it was she was looking at. Water covered the fifth step down, the room below submerged as the surface shifted quietly, lapping at the walls. Unnerved, she licked the corner of her mouth and kept going, not turning her back on the door until she was well past it.

The front door wasn't where it should be and the floor felt oddly soft beneath her shoes; where the bare floorboards gave slightly beneath her weight the faintest shimmer of liquid could be seen, seeping up from below. She mounted the stairs quickly, pacing the upstairs halls in search of where she should be going. Nothing seemed quite right, nothing shouted 'ah, yes! this way!', and she found herself doubting the decision to come upstairs, despite the water.

Bare branches. The words crossed her mind as she pulled a familiar book from a shelf, eyeing it for clues before setting it down and pushing it toward the dark back of the bookshelf. But the back never came and the book tumbled out of sight, through a space that should have been a wall and landed with a splash. She swallowed.

Bare branches, bare branches. Moving down the hall, the carpet squelched beneath her feet and thin lines of water dribbled from the keyholes of the doors she passed. Up another flight of stairs, through a door, down a hall and up again; everything was so familiar, each thing so perfectly in its place and wildly out of it as well.

And there they were, bare branches curved over a dry door with a warm, flickering glow cast beneath it. Ava paused before it, taking several deep breaths and biting her lips nervously. Ms. Jasons was on the other side of this door, Ms. Jasons and a problem that would need her full attention. The water receded as she pulled the door open and stepped through, her hem damp. Unwilling to look at her two fellows, she focused instead on Autumn's Dread Queen but said nothing, not quite trusting her voice yet.

**CyledyrWyllt** · Jan 30th, 2014 04:45 PM

Once all of the changelings have entered her dream, the ogress stops knitting and gently places her handiwork in a woven basket next to her chair. The beasts notice long shadows creeping about on the walls as the smell of gingerbread mixes with the unfamiliar scents of herbs and chemicals. They might even wonder if that is a faint whiff of formaldehyde, but then the odor disappears and they only smell sage and pumpkin spice. Skeletal branches sway in the breeze outside the windows, but make no noise. Only the crackling of the burning logs in the fireplace can be heard now that the clicking of the Autumn Queen's knitting needles has ceased. Focusing her horribly bloodshot gaze on the three of them, Betony Rue openly appraises them.

"I do not know how experienced any of you may be at shaping your own dreams, but you will find that you carry those skills with you into the dreamscapes of others. By observing the general theme and content of a dream, you should be able to decipher clues left by strands of the Wyrd within a dreamer's subconscious. The more you understand what lies behind the fluid appearances presented within the dream, the better able you are use it to your advantage. However, you need to make your alterations to the dream as subtle as possible within the confines of dream logic, for the fabric of the dream will unravel if you use too heavy of a hand."

The Witch Queen appears unsure if the trio of beasts are able to follow her explanation. A demonstration might be in order.

"For instance, you may choose to alter your appearance, or change some feature of the dreamscape."

Betony Rue pulls the knitted shawl from around her shoulders and holds it up in order to block herself from view. When the shawl is lowered, it is the red-furred form of Mr. Tickle standing before them. He holds a cupped hand up to one ear and speaks with the voice of the ogress.

"Listen..."

The formerly silent branches outside are now scratching against the windows. As they listen, the changelings think the scratching sound almost sounds like voices whispering to them.

"THEREISONLYFEAR... THEREISONLYFEAR...THEREISONLYFEAR..."

The wizened's face looks at them shrewdly as Betony Rue's voice is heard from his lips again.

"Now you try."

Oneiromancy: Dream Riding - Please roll Wits + Empathy + Wyrd -2 to any attempt to make a change to your appearance and/or to alter a feature of your surroundings.

Jan 31st, 2014 12:13 PM

Zero Suxx

Her keen nose sifting through the various smells drifting through the room as a matter of course, Mal looked puzzled as to their significance. Formaldehyde? Ew... She sneezed. Repeatedly. An unexpectedly demure sort of sneeze, really.

Sniffling and trying to clear the irritant, she nearly missed the Witch Queen's instruction. It was strange to have something she just had a fumbling, instinctual sort of grasp on actually put into words... It didn't help. But it was interesting and troubling to hear how it was supposed to work.

It cut the proud hunter deep to think she was going to be so much dead weight on what was turning into an exercise of subtle magics and interpretation. The casual ease with which the Witch Queen just showed off did nothing for her temperament, even if proficiency in that sort of thing was... kinda implied by the job description.

And the Muttering trees were just rubbing salt in the wound. She screwed up her face in concentration, determined to share the warm, fireside glow with the great outdoors.

THEREISONLYFEAR... THEREISONLYFEAR...

She peeked through one slitted eye, and was dismayed to be greeted by a distinct LACK of fiery inferno shutting up those stupid, biased trees.

"Damn..."

Feb 2nd, 2014 11:34 AM

1 suxx

Perhaps it was because of all the nonsense that come about in the daily life of a Changeling, or perhaps it was because they were standing in a dream-realm, but Jason wasn't really surprised by the Witch Queen's change of appearance. If anything, Mal's sneezes caught him more off-guard. He listened as the Autumn Sovereign explained the art of subtly manipulating the realm of dreams, pretending he understood all of it while only grasping the basic concepts. He felt reluctant to ask any clarifying questions, afraid to look stupid in front of the others, especially when he knew at least one of them would taunt him for it.

He watched as Mal did... nothing. Nothing changed in the dreamscape, other than the look on the other Hunterheart's face. A slight sneer found its way onto his own face as he decided to give the task a try. He probably wasn't much better than she was at Oneiromancy, so he decided to try something simple first. "Step aside, mutt. You'll only hurt yourself if you try to over-work your mind." It wasn't really warranted, but he got a bit of a kick from taunting her, despite himself not being any more experienced at dream-weaving.

With that he closed his eyes, abandoning his sneer for a scowl as he tried to concentrate, and attempted to influence his surroundings. He had no illusions about being some kind of dream-weaving prodigy, so he decided to settle for a small change to the environment. Something simple, something that perhaps appeared more impressive than it actually was. Maybe...

He opened his eyes, and smiled slightly at his efforts. "Nothing to it."

One of the trees now had the word 'WRATH' scorched into its side. The letters descended vertically along the bark, a faint crackling emanating from them as though a fire was burning low. Jason felt rather pleased with himself, despite not having accomplished much more than defacing a gnarled tree.

Feb 2nd, 2014 03:11 PM

Taking slow, deep breaths as the Dread Queen spoke, the sick clench of Ava's stomach eased as she was given something new to focus on. It made sense, what she said about looking for clues; it was like any sort of exchange, watching someone's face for their reaction or lack thereof. But more intimate, here, where instead of reading a face they were essentially peeking into a mind, pulling back a few layers of armor to get closer. Not that that would necessarily make it any easier, if what she had seen of her own dreamscape held true for others.

That place was a goddamn mess; guess I have some work to do.

She watched as Betony Rue obscured herself and reappeared as Mr. Tickle, a transformation she was actually fairly glad she hadn't had to see. That degree of control, though, to turn into someone else from memory, was impressive; to make a flippant comparison, it reminded her a bit of people who could put on makeup without needing to see themselves. They just seemed to know what went where.

The trees scratching at the window and the whispers that accompanied them were much subtler, something she could understand being easier to manage. At the order to try themselves, Ava spent a few moments looking around. While they were there under a strict 'no meddling' rule, she was certain Ms. Jasons wouldn't have constructed a space for them to be in that could yield anything significant to their understanding of her, not with the level of proficiency she seemed to have. So the Scrivener took a moment to really take in the room, to smell the different herbs she couldn't quite identify and listen to the tips of the branches against the glass.

Mal's quiet word was the only clue she had that something was supposed to have happened, and she shot a sidelong glance to Jason at his goading. Intrigued by his impulse to shut his eyes, she closed her own for a moment and considered; while it certainly wouldn't help her change anything visually, it brought the scents back to the forefront. Gingerbread, herbs, chemicals. Hmm.

Holding onto the scent of gingerbread, she inhaled and exhaled several time before drawing up the scent of woodsmoke, then dampening it down a little. Missing the savory of the herbs, she brought rosemary forward with a hint of sage underneath. The burning-leaf scent of new leather slowly built along with roasting potatoes, onions sauteing in butter; a little red wine worked its way into the potpourri only to quickly be replaced by the smell of petey scotch. The last addition to the mixture was harder to identify, but in her mind was clearly the scent of red meat browning in a hot pan.

Opening her eyes slowly, she tilted her head a little and the overall power of the smells dropped slightly; she didn't want to overpower anyone, especially with Mal's sharp nose.

3 suxx

**Changeling ST** · Feb 12th, 2014 07:01 PM

"You probably felt the strength of the dream resisting the change. It will be even worse in a dream which you are not pledged to enter."

Mal sees Tickle's face contort into Betony Rue's familiar scowl before it turns toward the burning letters and gives Jason a nod of approval. However, when the mouthwatering smell of a Sunday roast fills the room, the little red wizened's eyes light up and he almost shows a glimmer of a smile as he speaks once more with the ogress' voice

Very impressive, Scriveness. Subtlety can be very powerful tool in a dreamer's psyche. I am sure that if we walk into the kitchen right now, we will find a large roast in the oven. However, even I could not tell you with certainty if it is you who created it from the fabric of my dream, or if it was my subconscious expectation that would cause it to appear. In a non-lucid dreamer, we might even find something altogether different in the oven. Depending on what that something is, it could possibly tell us something about the dreamer. This is exactly the sort of subtle dreamshaping that can allow you to learn secrets from the dreaming mind."

After holding the shawl up once more, it is once again the Witch Queen standing before them.

"You may also use such techniques to engage in combat with another oneiromancer within the dream. For instance, I could use something already present within the dream, such as the fiery words on the tree outside, and cause it to attack your dream form by engulfing it in flames. Alternatively, if you find shaping the dream challenging, you may use your memories of your physical skills to your advantage within the dream in order to attack your enemy with the power of your Wyrd. I have heard that Mr. Bates had actually engaged in such oneiromantic duels with Dr. Carlton as a form of educational entertainment. Although a dreamer engaging in oneiromachy will feel the pain in their mind, it does not affect their physical body beyond a feeling of exhaustion... that is, unless it is an attack of truly exceptional power or ferocity. If you find yourself in such a situation, I highly recommend that you relax your concentration on your current dreamscape and allow yourself to drift back to your own dream. However, if you are in an unpledged dream, you will first need to find your way back. For instance, if we find one of the True Fae when we walk the Skein, you will go back the way you came and then allow your consciousness to drift from my dream back to your own."

Betony Rue pulls the shawl tightly around her shoulders as she walks over to the fireplace.

"I am afraid that is all the instruction for which we have time. I fear that every second brings the victim closer to insanity or... worse. I will form the gate now. Follow me closely into the uncharted territory of the Skein."

As the ogress walks over to the fireplace, the other changelings notice that the burning wood turns into dark, reflective obsidian. bowing low, Queen Jasons steps through the flames in the hearth and disappears from sight.

**CyledyrWyllt** · Feb 12th, 2014 07:34 PM

As each changeling steps through the fireplace, they will feel that something is different. Perhaps the air is thicker or the colors are in sharper contrast. One thing is certain, they each get the definite feeling that they are now intruders. Once through the gate, they find themselves in a studio apartment with white walls that reflect the afternoon sunlight coming in from the huge wall-sized window. The wooden floors (along with everything else) are squeaky clean except for a recently used cereal bowl and spoon discarded near the front door. It appears that all four of them have just stepped out of the refrigerator into an unadorned kitchen. They notice a large wooden dresser, an old Plasma TV, a hand-me-down wooden table surrounded by matching chairs, and a single poster of the band "Arctic Monkeys". A gorgeous young woman appears to be admiring her reflection in the mirror over the bed on which she is sitting. She looks over at them with mild surprise as they exit the fridge.

"Oh, hi there... are you friends of Vinnie's?"

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2014-01-31 09:36:21		Malory Grey rolls 2 to Dreamhack! (Wits - Untrained + Wyrd + Pledge - Modifier) (10 Again)		4, 3		failure

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2014-01-31 17:07:09		Jason Shepherd rolls 3 to Oneiromancy (Wits + Empathy (pledge adroitness +1) + Wyrd - 2) (10 Again)		10, 5, 6, 1		1 success

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2014-02-02 12:00:14		Ava Campbell rolls 5 to Oneiromancy (Wits + Empathy (Adroitness +1) + Wyrd - 2) (10 Again)		7, 9, 5, 10, 9, 6		3 successes

(Dreaming) Uncharted Territory

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