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

Entry tags:

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! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's one thing to be said about falling asleep in the middle of cooking: it was pure luck the welcome hall didn't burn down. Tris picks herself up from the tiled floor, holding her head. It takes a minute to consider her options. Outside of the kitchens, all over the welcome hall she's seeing people wake up, still half dazed, and she's still clutching the remains of that relief that swept over her.

She has to see Ellie.

Suddenly left with no regard for the rationing all across the city, Tris just barely remembers to turn the stove off and texts her friend.

Can we meet somewhere? Now?

By now, Ellie has some clue about how this is supposed to play out. So when she sees into Tris's mind, she already has a sinking, painful feeling in her chest. She's always planned to tell her everything, but she never wanted it to come out like this, forced, as if she wouldn't have gotten there on her own.

you want me to come there?

yeah.

On the other hand, for Tris it is the first. Not that it's hard to understand the urge of just needing to talk about it. Being strongarmed into it won't gall her until later.

i'm at home.

Ellie doesn't bother to reply. She grabs her backpack more out of habit than need and heads over to Tris's place at a brisk jog, barely winded by the time she gets there. Seems like the training is really paying off. She hikes up the steps, knocking at the door, and shuts her eyes to try to will away the headache, nausea, the sick feeling in her gut.

The second Tris opens the door, Ellie reaches out to gently grab her arm, and the sick, awful feeling lessens. She grins, relieved.

"Wanna go somewhere, or stay here?"

Touching isn't that casual a thing for Tris, but at her exhale she sounds relieved instead of taken aback. As the discomfort seeps out of her, she figures any questions have already answered themselves, so she answers instead of asking them.

"Let's go. Someplace up high?" Nowhere specific, but air would be nice.

Tris grabs her jacket, ready to go. Behind her, the welcome hall room looks just like every welcome hall room in Sigyn, barely lived in and with nothing personal added to it. The only things lying around are weapons.

"Sure, the trees in the yard would be good."

They're also a distinct vantage point. As Tris grabs her coat, Ellie looks into the area behind her, feeling a low pang on the inside of her chest. She's been here a little while now, but it doesn't look like she's allowing herself to make a place her own.

"And keep touching me, you feel a lot better if we stay close."

"Okay." There's a beat as she steps out and pulls the door shut, before she reaches for Ellie's hand. It's normal, right? Friends touching each other is normal. (Except, of course, when you're from somewhere it's not.) The important part is that it helps.

She's overcome fear and discomfort and humiliation and anger and pain, but somehow, relief is more difficult to leave behind. As they walk down the corridor, she tries to face ahead, but keeps looking over at Ellie. She can't shake the feeling of having been in her friend's skin, in a moment she never meant to intrude upon.

"This happened to you before, huh?"

Now that she's held hands with a few others for various reasons, mostly concerning the situation at hand, Ellie feels less weird about it, but it still doesn't mean that weirdness is completely out. Still, the need to hold onto each other mollifies her. If she can keep her hand on Killua's arm for as long as she did earlier, holding Tris's hand isn't an issue.

Ellie's also starting to get used to the sensation of someone being in her head, seeing something that personal -- but she's also glad it wasn't worse. Nobody needs that.

"Oh, yeah. A couple of times earlier, that's how I figured out that this-" she swings their hands a little, "actually helps. But the only thing that gets it to go away is talking about it."

And this is where she gets guilty. She bites her lip, staring at the ground while they make their way out onto the patio, head for the nearby copse of trees.

"Which I was meaning to do anyway, but it just... never seemed like the right time, you know?"

She recognizes the guilt immediately. It's familiar, familiar like the question of oh and when were you planning on telling me? which she's not going to ask. As much as it feels like betrayal, when she's poured her heart out to Ellie more than to anybody in her life, she keeps a lid on the feeling, knowing she is the last person who gets to judge her.

"Sometimes we don't get a say in right times," she says instead, squeezing Ellie's hand.

Another thing trees provide is relative isolation - if they're tall enough, which these ones certainly are.

"No," she agrees, and while she's relieved that Tris isn't mad at her, she knows that it goes deeper than that. She wants to tell her that she almost did, a lot of times. Usually when things got dark and heavy anyway, but Ellie is so used to confronting her demons on her own, she never wanted to drag Tris into it with her, especially when everything was already terrible.

It feels like overexplaining, like excuses. But Ellie really wants Tris to understand that it wasn't a lack of trust. Anything like that.

But she says none of that, because of course she doesn't. Instead, she reaches up into the trees as the branches crackle down to meet them, and she climbs with one hand, the other holding firmly to her friend's. There are good places to sit up here, nice and concealed, and they've got a good view of the area.

Soon enough they are settled, and Ellie has no idea how to begin. It's so monumentally huge.

"Joel isn't my dad," she begins. Tris already knew that, but it's where she has to start. "He's a smuggler, and he and Tess were hired to smuggle me out of Boston."

Climbing with one hand is only easy when Ellie helps. But then they're settled, perching side by side. Tris isn't sure what she waited for, or if she really expected anything. Most people make excuses, or try to apologize. Ellie looked sorry, but didn't say anything.

Now, there's a story. And within the first few words, she's already got several questions more than answers, but she nods instead of interrupting, because questions can wait.

"... those Infected I told you about? A couple of weeks before that, I got bitten."

With her free hand, she reaches out and pulls up her sleeve to the elbow. Her skin is pale and she's skinny, but strong- but the bite is the same as it was in the dream. Gross, healed-over. Spores above and below her skin, mixing with the scars. It might be beautiful, but only if you're really invested in fungus. Personally, Ellie hates looking at it.

"But I was the first one to ever survive it. Everybody else loses their mind within a few days. ... when I didn't- lose it, I went to Marlene. She's the leader of this rebel group in my world called the Fireflies. She used to be friends with my mom, before she died. The Fireflies were the only people still working on trying to find a cure."

Ellie pulls down her sleeve. "Marlene was going to take me to some Fireflies who were coming in from out of town. They were going to take me to a lab out of state. But then she got hurt."

Swallowing, she looks away, down through the leaves. "By the time we got to the drop-off point, Tess was bitten. When we got their all the Fireflies were dead. The soldiers found them. Tess bought us time to get away. She didn't make it."

Scars are distinctive and personal things. Marks left behind by things that they survived. Tris regards this one with a cautious curiosity - she's never seen one like it, and chances are she never will again, either. The knowledge that Ellie could have turned into some mindless, murdering thing sits heavy in her stomach, spreads and unfolds like the leaves of a plant. Tris swallows, listens.

No wonder they'd been so protective of each other. Still are. No wonder that after Ellie fell, she never saw Joel reach the top of the canyon either. In her mind, the scene of her mother running out onto the street to draw away the soldiers repeats itself when Ellie talks about Tess' death, but she shoves the memory away to focus on something else instead.

"Wait. Why are the soldiers and the people trying to find a cure killing each other?"

That doesn't make sense. It's what everyone should want, isn't it? To find a cure? Why would they have to rebel to keep looking for it? Isn't there enough in that world that's out to kill humans already?

"Because nobody in the city trusts the military anymore. I had no idea how bad it was until I actually got out of it. They weren't giving people their rations, they weren't telling them the truth about Infected getting inside the walls..."

Ellie trails off, because this makes her so uncomfortable, and she doesn't feel that she knows everything.

"But yeah, you'd think, right? The Fireflies are rebels. They're the only other armed force in the Zones. ... other than people like Tess and Joel, anyway. They're talking about bringing democracy back, fighting for the people. That sort of stuff."

Shrugging, she shakes her head. "Anyway, ask Riley about it, she knows all about this stuff."

Suddenly, Tris realizes how much the things that she was taught about her city were right. Things do fall into chaos. Everything does go to hell. Tris bites her lip and looks away, not wanting to think about it - the military, the rations, rebels, people who agree to smuggle human beings, and then, well, David. How quickly the world falls apart when things go wrong, and what people are really capable of.

But she has to know.

"So... what did you do then?"

"We just... kept going." She makes a helpless gesture, of sending something off into the ether. Ellie sets her jaw, takes a breath, and looks over at Tris.

"When I was bitten, I wasn't alone. Riley was... she was there. She got bit, too."

Ellie grips Tris's hand tighter, slowly looks away, down into the streets. She has no trouble keeping her voice steady, but she doesn't sound like herself. She sounds like she's telling a story about something that happened to somebody else. Flat, distant.

"So it's not like either of us had anything to go back for."

Tris looks at her, trying and failing not to let the shock show. Riley and Ellie got bit together, but Ellie was immune, and Riley... wasn't. Not a difficult bit of math to do, but it hits no less hard for it. She squeezes Ellie's hand.

Words fail her. She waits to hear what happens next.

"Joel was kinda... fucked up after Tess died." She goes on in that same flat voice, fixing her eyes on a point of concrete, though it doesn't seem like she's seeing it. She's gotten good at removing herself from it. "I guess we both were. He's lost a lot. ... he had a kid, before the outbreak. A daughter."

Ellie shrugs her shoulders upwards, shakes her head, and sighs deeply.

"So... he really didn't want to be stuck with me, he only kept me because Tess made him. He even tried to hand me off to his brother once, I guess his brother used to work with the Fireflies- but then he backed out at the last minute. There were a couple of times we met up with other people, other survivors. That didn't always end well either."

The thought of Sam and Henry sticks in her throat, and she swallows past it. "A lot of times I didn't think we were gonna make it. We started in spring, and when I showed up here, it was almost spring again. We were still on the road. Joel said we got there. That we found the Fireflies, and their lab."

She can only barely imagine what it'd have been like. There's no version of this story possible in her world, but on the other hand, she can picture the people, and the pain. To be stuck with someone who reminds you sharply of what you've lost forever. To meet people only for it to end terribly, time and time again. And the rest of the time, not to meet any survivors at all, just miles of nothing and monsters and ruin.

"So that dream... that's what you hoped would happen when you got there."

"Yeah, that's what I hoped. ... but that's not what Joel says is going to happen."

She picks at her fingernails, scratching across her knuckles. It's a nervous little motion she makes when she's stressed, worried, scared. Tris has seen it before.

"He says there's a lot of people like me. But they can't do anything about it. They've stopped trying to figure out a cure."

Tris had time to grow distrustful of anyone. Blanket suspicion that everyone has their own agenda, because everyone has something that they want, and so her kneejerk response is you think he's telling the truth?- it's plain for Ellie if she looks for it, how Tris starts to say something and then stops. Looks down, biting the inside of her cheek.

"What do you think?"

Ellie's got a feeling of her own in the matter, that much she can tell. On the other hand, after what she's heard and seen of the guy, all Joel wants is to keep Ellie safe, but safe isn't always the right thing to be.

At once, it's both terrifying and gratifying to hear the suspicion in Tris's voice. Ellie digs her nails into her skin until the bite of pain lets her think clearly.

"I don't think he's telling me everything," she admits, quiet. She doesn't precisely think he's lying, but-

"He doesn't like talking about it. ... and when I came here, we were pretty close, but he wasn't like he is now. It's like he got ten times more paranoid that somebody's gonna get between us, or that I'm gonna get hurt. I think something happened in there. Something bad."

Something bad. Tris has a bad taste in her mouth immediately as it crosses her mind that not all scientists who say they want the best for people actually care about people. It's hard not to think of injections and cold metal tables and reclined chairs. Images of the inside of her skull up on a screen. Her stomach turns while her mouth presses into a thin line.

"Maybe. Not all doctors and scientists are good people." If Ellie was somewhere like the Erudite labs, Tris is pretty sure what she'd do.

"Marlene wouldn't let them do anything," Ellie mumbles, but even as she says it, she wonders. According to Riley accounts, Marlene is even more ruthless than Ellie thought, and that's saying something. The first time they met her, she threatened to shatter Riley's kneecaps just to prove a point.

Hell, Ellie had actually shot at her over that one.

"Joel says she was there."

That she was happy to see me again.

Something about that bothers her. When would Marlene tell Joel that? She's not exactly the sentimental type- but now she's tying herself up in knots.

Tris looks over at her friend who doesn't really sound that sure of what she's saying, her brain racing to work with what she's got.

"So I guess it'd be her call what they did," she says quietly, thinking out loud. The people who seem to be calling the shots aren't always actually the ones who do. That, and she knows too little about Marlene to make any calls on her character.

I.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject