asgardmeridiem | OPT-OUT EVENT LOG: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

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OPT-OUT EVENT LOG: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

Who: EVERYONE that stayed in Asgard
What: the Dream a Little Dream mingle log
When: Day 515 ( Sept. 25/26 )
Where: all across the city!
Rating: PG-13. Anything higher than that should be taken to a private log, please!

Day 515 ( Sept. 25/26 ): Progress through the ice blockade will be slow and narrow, as they can't possibly hope to clear the entirety of the forest that has been buried under Thiazi's black ice. Now that they know the source of her magic's corruption, it might not come as a great surprise when cracking open the ice unleashes a strange burst of magic.

At the halfway point between Utgard and Asgard, a pulse of energy will move through the entire city, immediately putting every mortal it touches to sleep. This part of the curse is mandatory and your character must fall asleep; the dream effects of it are not mandatory, and can be played with at your discretion. During this first wave, Travellers will be granted a brief dream - that does not belong to them. They will see, from the dreamer's point of view, every hope and goal and aspiration that the dreamer wishes to complete before the end of days. Whether it's simply confessing their love to an old friend or saving their home planet or perfecting an Asgardian pie, your character will see someone else's ideal resolution before Ragnarok. More on plotting this below!

Upon waking, the Travellers will be plagued with the indistinct whispering of several voices overlapping one another and a slight headache. Both symptoms will gradually increase over time until it reaches incapacitating pain and nausea. The only way to assuage the symptoms is to find the owner of the dream and either maintain physical contact for an hour or discuss the subject of the dream until a full confession has been made. After that, the symptoms will fade and the Travellers will be free to carry on with their day.

There will be other pulses of magic at random throughout the day; these are not mandatory and you can feel free to have your character experience as many or as few dreams as you wish. All dream-sharing will cease by the end of the day, as the blockade progresses past that centre-point of magic.

[ OOC NOTES: This is the mingle log for the Dream a Little Dream opt-out event! Random pairings have already been sent out, but you guys can still feel free to plot with each and pair up anywhere you like. Please remember that these dreams are meant to be positive; details can be found here. Please put [OPEN/CLOSED] along with the time and location in the title of your comment. Let us know if you have any questions! ]

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It's not a dream the Doctor would have expected. He dreams more often here than he would have anywhere else - he suspects it as a side-effect of being more human than he might have once been and thus sleeping more. Not that he sleeps as much as he probably should even so, but that's his problem to deal with.

He almost isn't going to pay the dream any attention, at first. It's the spiderweb that changes his mind. A single city - which he recognizes as being an Earth city, at the very least - perched on a web that could so, so easily be the Web of Time. The web that holds all of existence balanced, and it's disturbing on a level he likely wouldn't even be able to articulate to see the strands neatly severed one by one.

He doesn't have time to dwell on it, as the dream rolls on, and when he finally wakes from his unexpected he's not sure what to make of it. He'd not missed the sense of a life well-lived, but he's never known the people. And yet he wonders, sometimes, what sort of lives his companions might have had if not for him. What kind of lives they've lived after they'd parted ways.

He tells himself that's why he starts looking for the person who belongs to the dream, as opposed to the the headache and voices that set in shortly after he wakes. The only problem is how anyone finding the owner of any single dream, more so when he takes it for John's dream, instead of Sherlock's; when he does finally come across Sherlock in the streets of the city, he pauses only out of a vague sense of curiosity, unasked questions plain on his face as he stands there.

(He's never really expected to need to ask strangers about dreams, and he's not even thinking that Sherlock could be the person he needs.)

There are voices. He took them, at first, for the mutterings of people who passed by, but then he started watching for the movements of lips, and that got knocked right out. The sudden dull pain in his head isn't helping matters.

He's hardly even concerned about the strangeness of suddenly hearing voices; he's been here long enough that the question really is what's going on now. Not to mention when is it gonna stop.

There's a man staring at him.

Hardly surprising. The natives look, sometimes. But there's an intensity in this stare that makes Sherlock look again. The stare is questioning. Perhaps there's recognition in it.

Wouldn't be so unusual. Very few have coped to knowing him when he turned up before, but it was bound to happen sooner or later. And if it isn't happening now... people do love to correct mistaken opinions. He stops in front of the man.

"Gonna have to remind me." A hair's breadth of a pause, and then: "Of how we met before. Don't remember the previous times. Apparently memory in Asgard's especially selective."

"That's just the thing," Four answers, "I'm not entirely certain we have."

There has been the dream, yes. But that's certainly not the same as actually meeting someone. It's more like he'd managed to have a look into his life. Into his past (or what is probably his past) and that's certainly something most people would prefer to not have shown to other people willy-nilly.

On the other hand, he probably shouldn't just keep standing there.

"Well, not unless... but it'd probably sound terribly ridiculous. But then again, I've found that this place does ridiculous very well if you let it. On the other hand, I really could have been only dreaming."

And with a life spent as much in travel as his has been, the idea that he might dream of strangers isn't so unusual.

Any other time, he would have brushed it off as nonsensical rambling. But whether or not this universe is the same one he'd called home, the rule about coincidences seems to have held.

At least he sincerely hopes it has.

"Dreaming when?" he asks -- deliberate, leading.

It should have held. He hasn't found much of anything to suggest otherwise, at the very least. Whether or not it's really the case is somewhat harder to tell, but he's willing enough to talk all the same. He's always been good at that.

"Oh, just recently," he answers, with an easy shrug. "Within the last couple of hours, and probably a good deal more recently than even that."

Recent enough that it could easily coincide with whenever Sherlock was dreaming last, although he hasn't got much of an idea as to when anyone else might have been dreaming.

Sherlock's eyes flick to the man's feet, back up again to his face and that brillo-pad of hair.

"And what are the chances?" he prompts. Another one of those breath-space pauses, and then: "That you were only dreaming."

His shoes - or what can be seen of them, given that his scarf alone is very nearly floor length - aren't anything terribly interesting. They are, however, distinctly well-worn, if not to the point of being worn out or even beginning to be so.

The second question, unlike the first, gets a more considering sort of silence, one that lasts just long enough for the answer that comes to not be the first one to cross his mind.

"The chances here... not terribly likely. I don't usually end up asleep when I don't mean to, and almost certainly not in the middle of the day."

Which means that he might not have just been dreaming, for all that he doesn't seem to actually come out and say it. But maybe he's managed the next best thing, even if he's not yet spoken much of what he's actually seen in the dream.

Edited 2014-10-11 07:00 (UTC)

Sherlock's watching his answer intently. Perhaps even a little more than he would under normal circumstances, but he's having to think through the pain in his head and the indistinct whispers (which can't possibly be saying anything of real interest to him, and so are being roundly ignored).

He's also trying to place the man himself. Failing. Apparently those visions of a corrupted dollhouse belonged to someone else. They didn't trade dreams -- he merely got a glimpse at someone else's.

That is, if the man really did see his dream. There's more than one person who could have been dreaming about Sherlock for one reason or another.

"You saw me," he prompts. Still not bothering to introduce himself or pay mind to the fact that they're in the middle of the pavement. More important things are happening.

"Yes," he answers, and for all that it's a single word it's perhaps all that needs to be said. He's not sure why he's seen Sherlock - or even if it it was his dream - but he most certainly has seen him. Which is perhaps not as odd as it could have been, but now that they've at least covered that particular detail, he rather hopes that things will at least be easier overall to talk about.

Unfortunately, Sherlock is absolutely correct in that the dream of the corrupted dollhouse isn't his, and he's noticed the apparent lack of recognition as well - and no surprise, given that he'd hardly have recognized Sherlock without the dream to help him out. More to the point, it's something he can actually do something about, and he figures that introducing himself can't hurt.

"I'm the Doctor."

He offers it without so much a flicker of pause, as if it's how he's been introducing himself for years, or as if it's something other than a title. In either case, he certainly doesn't look much like a doctor. But it's something more to go on, and that will have do.

"Mn." One corner of Sherlock's mouth tics toward something that's neither a smile nor a frown. "Another member of the 'club.' What are you all Doctors of, anyhow?"

His eyes do another brief sweep, as if he might happen upon some clue that he's missed. Outside of his brief interaction with the cross, grey one on the Network, he hasn't had any time to satisfy his curiosity about the strange group of men.

"Oh, a little of everything, on a good day. Or sometimes just when it suits."

Sometimes he just sort of picks something at random, if people get it in their mind to ask him. It is, after all, much more interesting than the actual answer, and sometimes people aren't willing to consider the idea of it being a name.

Unfortunately, this is likely not the sort of thing Sherlock wants to hear, and unless it's a doctorate in unusual fashion choices it's not likely that there's any clues to what he is there. On the other hand, his outfit is one that could almost be fashionable, if a little old-fashioned by Sherlock's standard. His coat - a brown one, today - would probably best be considered a frock coat and seems to be of fairly decent quality besides. Underneath that, he seems to be mostly wearing a waistcoat (not in the same color as the coat, but it doesn't clash too badly) and a cravat - what little of the shirt as can be seen underneath it all is white. His pants meanwhile, are of a similar vein to his shoes - nothing much to write home about, but fairly sensible.

...And then the whole thing is thrown off by the scarf his thrown over the lot. It's a stripy thing, long enough that even looped loosely around his neck it very nearly reaches the ground and looks to be handmade besides. Still, it's an ensemble he looks very much comfortable in. Like he knows who he is and hasn't got a care in the world what anyone else might think of what he should happen to wear.

Edited 2014-10-21 05:45 (UTC)

Not a fully satisfying answer, maybe, but Sherlock can't say it's incongruous. The men he's seen so far claiming the title are quite an eclectic bunch, and even if his scan tells him little to nothing about this Doctor's profession, that isn't all there is to know about a person.

It's also notable that, while he offered his title, and despite the oddity of their situation, he doesn't appear in a hurry to know Sherlock's name. Or to confirm anything he saw in the dream. As if he's all too accustomed to just going up and talking to people, letting the pieces start falling into place when they will.

It's a viewpoint Sherlock can respect, despite his headache.

Getting back to the point: "What did you see?"

He's found that it's often easiest to let the answers fall into place piece by piece. Which might be more to do with his life and how things generally end up happening, but it's long since become habit. Besides, they have nothing but time to spare, here. The war that's looming will still be looming tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

Besides, the way things begin to take shape can be just as interesting as the answer itself.

"You," he answers. "And John. Just bits of people living, really." He pauses there for a moment, and when he starts up again it's with something that almost sounds like a different topic, or could, but for the dream.

"I usually prefer winds to strings, though."

And of those, usually the kind of wind instruments that are made out of reeds and things, instead of something that he'd have to carry around.

Sherlock's gaze goes a little more still, a little steadier as the Doctor describes what he saw. On the surface he appears to be going cold -- someone with vast enough experience in dealing with people, however, might recognize it as shutting down in order to avoid the hurt.

Bits of people living. Him and John. They get some of that here, a facsimile of it, but it's skewed by the strangeness of their surroundings. Sherlock is years away from experiencing it again, if he ever does go home -- the fact that John has, apparently, experienced some of that doesn't make it any better. It only means Sherlock has longer to wait in order to catch up to him.

He doesn't like waiting.

"Just a dream," he murmurs, and starts to step away -- as he does, those voice give a suddenly insistent whisper, there's a spike in the pain in his head. Sherlock blinks hard, his eyes shut tight for a second as he tries to move on.

"Just a dream," the Doctor answers, as if in echo. Another person's life, offered in a way that even he wouldn't normally have seen. And yet, that one bit of life lived is interesting, more so than the rest of everything else. He wanders too much and has had too many people move in and out of his life to ever have a life like the one he's seen.

(He doesn't want one either, and knows it all too well. Staying put isn't in him anymore.)

"But sometimes even a simple dream can make the most difference."

Dreams are beginnings and so much more. Even hope is sometimes nothing more than a dream held onto and he's seen what hope can mean to people - and what a lack of same can.

That isn't quite enough to make him stop. The sudden stab of pain around his eyes, however, is.

And that's enough to give him pause for a second. To turn around and face the Doctor. To offer a swerve in the topic of his own:

"You know John." It's not awfully surprising -- most people around here do, it seems -- but it's notable enough.

"I do."

Not too terribly well, mind, and he's not exactly kept in touch but he does at least know John. Enough to recognize him on sight, anyway, and that'll have to do.

"Not well enough to know much about the people he might know from home, but we've spoken, yes."

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OPT-OUT EVENT LOG: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

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