(no subject)

[songbird9.livejournal.com]

Who: Shaderic and Song
What: Inception gone wrong
When: A few days ago... at some point. Before the RG quests.
Where: Earth, Shad's Airforce Base
Status: Incomplete, to be continued in comments


Kurtis Derischa drove quietly up to the main gate. He was a little nervous about this. Doing research online? Sure, he'd done that. Make arrangements with family over facebook? Well, he'd done that too. But schedule a meeting with someone he'd met on livejounal? Especially one that apparently survived the end of the world? He wondered if he was a little crazy, to file the paperwork for the pass of a person he'd never met in person.
In a moment, he'd reached the Visitors Center. Before he got out of the car, he smoothed down his shirt. 'Man, I'm acting like I'm picking my girlfriend up for date'. Ten steps later, he was inside the brick Visitor's Center. He looked around, not really knowing what to expect.

Song didn't look like some wild, otherworldly renegade sorceress at first glance. She was of average height and in her twenties, though she'd been mistaken for younger. Her colors arian, her figure Italian (or so she'd been told), and her clothing very plain. In fact, perhaps the only thing that did give away some oddness about her was the way she moved - an exaggerated grace in the poise of her arms, a jerk of her head more falconesque than human, and a subtle flow and flex throughout her body that suggested a focused awareness of herself more keen and free than what was commonly expressed.
She was playing the role of silent observer here, and hadn't yet said one word more than what was asked of her. She kept herself out of the way and met the eyes of every passerby in search of her stranger friend.

It took a second to notice the woman sitting in the corner. Her hawkish face almost scared him with it's intensity. Deciding that sticking his foot in his mouth would probably be the best course of action, he spoke. "Er... Pardon me, I'm here to meet some one. Umm, would you be a miss Song?"

She'd had an eye on him already, so the shift of her full focus was not so great. When he said her name, she stretched her lips in a way that could only be recognized as a smile by what it did to her eyes.
"That's me." Her voice was perfectly amicable and ordinary, with the faintest touch of a midwest twang. "You Shad?"

"Ah, Kurtis Derischa actually. Shaderic's my username." He breathed ou a sigh of relief. It seemed like he wouldn't be making a fool of himself today by asking random people who they were. He fished in his pocket for a second, before producing a small folded packet. Carefully opening it, he revealed a rather complex looking piece of paperwork. "Just one second, I have to run this by the front desk". With a quick turn, he moved over the counter. Even though when he spoke it was a little awkward, his legs moved quick. A moment of small talk later, and the senior airman on the other side signed off on the papers. Since they were in an excercise right now, all people coming on base had to be accounted for. Doing an about face, Kurtis walked back on over to Song. "Come on then, I'm parked outside." He said as he offered his hand. "Also, umm, do you have anything you like to be called, or do I call you Robin, or..." He trailed off awkwardly. Seems like he wouldn't get away today without seeming at least a little uncouth.

She watched him go through the official motions with an aloof and distant gaze, but smiled again and accepted his hand when it was offered, standing a little too quickly. "Song is what I'm used to. Only family and strangers call me by my real name these days."

They shook hands, and Kurtis disctreetly favored his hand for a second afterward. Song had one heck of a grip.

[timeskip]

The dream spell was disceptively simple. There were no magic words spoken or fancy arm waving. Any sign of effort was only due to the fact that Shad wasn't asleep, and thus the dreamstate had to be forced on him, but even that was a smooth and swift transition. The real effort of the magic was not in the casting but in holding and controlling it.
To Shad, it would seem as if he had suddenly dozed off. The waking world faded gently to be replaced by something new - an open meadow, green as early summer basking below a sky painted with distant stormclouds. Only one other living creature inhabited the field, and that was a palomino horse which stoodunder a small, lone tree some distance away and appeared to be watching the clouds.

Kurtis stared. "What the... how the... " He closed his eyes and exhaled. "Of course. Magic." What did he expect? He had agreed to this after all, to see the proof right in fron of his eyes. If it astounded him, well that only made sense, didn't it? Still it really was something. Still that left the question of where Song was.

The meadow persisted in its picturesque strangeness, giving no obvious sign of the woman who'd created it. Birdsong hung in the air and meshed with the sigh of the breeze, soon joined also by the muffled beat of hooves in grass. The horse was meandering closer. There was a complexity and truth to the creature that made its surroundings seem all the more unreal. The Ancient Greeks compared horses to the ocean, and this one defined that in the curve of its thin legs and the gentle bob of its head.... a flow and flex throughout its body that was completely natural in a beast but had stood out when expressed by a human.

He eyed the horse. Something about it bugged him. It was the only other living thing he'd seen. Suddenly, he remembered one of his sister's books. It was a classic swords and sorcery novel. The writing in the series was solid, but after awhile he'd found the series a little predictable. Still, that didn't make the Heralds of Valdemar series any worse. Kurtis quickly applied the knowledge gained from knowing his sister all his life. Girls like horses. Horses fit into fantasies. Therefore, in a fantasy, a girl might be a horse. As logic went, it was way out in the shaky branch of the tree. But, hey. It was a dream. Why the hell not? "Er, Song? is that you?"

Had she been psychic, she would have been highly amused by his deduction. Her childhood of dressing in white and riding stickhorse Companions aside, though, she hadn't expected the realization to take too long. As far as she was concerned, she was making it easy for him.
The horse tossed her head, stomped a little, and generally seemed to be benefitting herself more than him with the enjoyment of her inhuman form, but very soon let the illusion go and resumed her natural appearance. There was no flash to the transformation. It was nothing more than the act of changing one's mental image of a being from one shape to another.
All horsing around over with, her grin could be described as sheepish.
"Sorry about that. It's my favorite aspect of dreaming, and not many seem to get the hang of it, is all."

"..." Temporarily stunned by both being right and Song's transformation, Kurtis was temporarily speechless. A horse became a woman. Stamping down on his internal monologue of 'What the hell, what the hell, what the hell' he decided ask her about the experiment. "So, umm, weren't we going to do an experiment?" Mentally, he cursed himself. He could be so down to business. He was actually inside a dreamscape! Who knew what was possible? And.. it still would be a good idea to get on with the experiment, though. There would probably be plenty of time later to find out just what the limits of this place were.

She did not entirely hide her amusement at his reaction, but she made a polite effort, raising a hand to cover her smile. "Yes indeed we were, and for that I will need you to make one of these yourself." She spread her arms to indicate the entire field. "What we are trying to do is create a dream within a dream. It might be easier to dream ourselves to sleep... if that makes sense... so that we may be dreaming while sleeping inside this dream." Her smile evolved into a grin.

Kurtis pinched the bridge of his nose, massaging it under his pushed up glasses. He was beginning to think she enjoyed confusing him. 'OK, just break it down.' He was asleep, and would be going asleep whilst asleep. No, that was still pretty confusing. On his third mental attempt, he got it. They were in a mental realm. And would be casting the spell to enter another mental realm, while still inside the first spell. Sort of like a proxy dive in Ar Tonelico. Except without the sexual undertones. "OK, I think I get it."

"Right...." There was a pause in which she seemed to be working things out in her own head, which probably wasn't very encouraging. "Actually, this will prob'ly work better if you go into the next level and I stay in this one at first to make sure it worked. I'll come in to check on you after you've had a moment to establish your own dream. Assuming it does work..." She plopped down casually onto the grass and looked up as if waiting for him to join her.

"... Alright then." He lowered himself to his knees, then shifted his weight back, so he looking up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and tried relax. Tick-tick, tock. Did it suddenly get colder? Tick-tick, tock. And where was that sound coming from, in the middle of a- he opened his eyes. This was not the field.
It looked sort of like a library, in that there were shelves and books. But they were scattered everywhere. In the back of the room, was a massive clock, it's gears and pendulum working away. It was kind of neat, how the front seemed to be glass. You could see into it, and gaze at the spinning cogs and swinging weights. Even if he couldn't understand how it worked, it was still pretty cool to look at. Tick-tick, tock. And then there was how the beat of the ticks seemed to be off. He looked up at the massive face. The hands all seemed to be moving forward. There were at least a dozen of them, all turning at different speeds. He couldn't help but wonder just what the clock was tracking.

Song waited in her field, watching Kurtis intently. In the waking world, it was a very subtle feeling when her subject was asleep and dreaming. Her, to her surprise, it was much more evident. There was a forceful shift in her own dreamscape, not in apparance but in the mental feel of the place. There was a strange heaviness, a sense of looming which she could only assume was the weight of the other dream world attached to this one. Diving into Kurtis' world was as easy as thought.
She didn't notice, at first, that she'd brought a few tufts of grass with her.

He was so caught up in looking at the clock, he failed to notice Song's entrance into his own dreamscape. When he turned around, he yiped like a like a little girl. After a few seconds, he was back to breathing normaly. "So. Um. Welcome, I guess.' He said, unsure of how dream ettiquette was supposed to work. He took a step towards one of the bookshelves, recongizing a title. "Hey, that's my book." Which was right when he tripped on the floor, which now that he bothered to look at it, was very uneven, and had odd shapes and depressions in it. "Um, is it normal to be tripped by your own subconcious?"

Song was fairly occupied in looking around the room herself. There was something almost sad in her eyes - nostalgic, perhaps?
"I don't suppose you have any books in here with titles like "Of Song and Silence; a Story of... oh, I can't even remember." She watched him only vaguely for a moment, her interest in his predicament taking its time to rise. "That looks like a tree root there."

He replied "Seems that way. And I don't think I have anything like that." Righting himself, Kurtis took another look at the shelf. "These look kind of like books I wrote. Or will write, anyway. I really need to work on them." Looking closer, they didn't look so much like books, as portfolios stuffed with pages of writing, drawing, and post-it notes. He pulled one labeled 'Jester' off the shelf. Flipping it open revealed a picture man in a blue coat. He seemed to have a very casual edge to him, even as his hand glowed blue. "Hey, it's Bloody Blue."

She glided close enough to peer over his shoulder. "Oh, I writer. I had some stories myself that I was trying and failing to get off the ground. Now I'm only working now and then on my Refugee autobiography. Was going to call it Song of Twilight, but... well, I'd rather not be mistakenly associated with Miss Meyer. Nifty ceiling." Coming out of the blue as it did, the last comment was accented by her sharp look upwards at what was indeed a somewhat cloudy sky painted on the ceiling of the library.

"Yeah, I can see that with your title." He looked up at the ceiling, himself. It did look interesting, but it was pretty high up too. Considering that most of the things here only went a couple of feet above his head, why was the ceiling so high up? He noticed some stairs, going around the room, but they looked pretty rickety. He didn't think they would support his weight very long, if at all. Looking down at the book again, his eyes were drawn to the glow around the hand of his character. Kurtis closed the book, and looked at his own hand. 'No, that's stupid. That's really stupid. There's no reason, at all, why that should work.' Five seconds later, he held a small glowing circle in his hand. "Wow."

She crossed her arms and tried to catch the boy's eye with a smug little smirk. "Don't limit yourself. Didn't I tell you that? This is your mind. Dream a dream and what you see will be."
Distracted now, she wasn't watching to see the clouds billow and move across the high ceiling.

He bit his lip, trying to force down a wide grin. The circle grew, spinning as it took on new turns of complexity and was filled with curving runes. Then, second circle seemed to just float off of the first, and he caught it with his other hand. Shoving his hand inside the new circle, he withdrew a small vial. "Behold, the signature move of the Azure Lord." He said it so quietly, it was almost a whisper. He popped the stopper on it, as punched the first circle, which was now suspended in front of him. "BLUE BREAKER!" He shouted, right when it impacted. His voice cracked partway through, but that didn't matter. A beam the color of the sky shot forth, going straight through the wall. It only lasted a second, but it went clean through, melting the stones it touched smooth. He turned back to Song, smiling widely still. The smile said everything. 'Yeah, that probably wasn't what you had in mind, but I'm a guy. What were you expecting, unicorns?'

That earned a hearty laugh. "Hey, I've got no complaints with flashy destruction. If you'd caught me in a more aggressive mood, you might have had a dragon instead of a pony to deal with back there."
It was at about that point that the walls and bookshelves began to creak and rattle, straining and cracking as if something were pulling them apart from the inside.