pharmacy | rubi: dreamwalking opt-in

In high school, Quentin’s mind was invaded by “dream demon” Freddy Kreuger. Over the course of years of fighting to get Kreuger out and survive to wake again, Quentin developed an ability common to Freddy’s victims: dreamwalking.

Dreamwalking starts with total agency in his dreams and expands with practice into total agency in other people’s dreams. Eventually, again with practice and familiarity with a given person’s dreamscape, this ability can grow into being able to act on another person in their sleep and having it affect their body in the real world.

Especially when he’s in proximity to people, there’s a chance that Quentin has wandered into the dreams of people around him. I default to assuming he has NOT been in any given person’s dreams, but I’d also love to open up the opportunity if folks want some psychic mess out there. If Quentin has been able to see your chara’s dreams, please fill out this form:

If you want to turn this ability or any encounters they have in the dreamscape into a thread, feel free to PM here or on Plurk

tenny_boo to plot a little bit.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Character: Gilia St. Loe
Frequency and Timing: Gilia is early to bed and early to rise and works pretty much by the dawn/dusk cycle like the stuffy little predictable sensible worker she is. Occasionally, however, she both sleep talks and sometimes sleepwalks, at those times she speaks in cryptic prophecy in her spooky ocean voice.

Common Themes: Unfurls scroll, I am so sorry. This one is complicated because Gilia receives prophetic dreams of the future sent by her Sea-Spirit patron who doesn't understand a) linear time or b) how humans communicate ideas. So Gilia both dreams of her ordinary life activities, her memories, and bat-shit insane world events. These can include:

The Beginning and End of All Beings and Life Itself! Moments around this can include: a firey feminine entity that dances wildly and rips itself apart in a volcano-like explosion that births the islands of all their lands, the spirits, weird little Cambrian-era creatures on the ocean floor, nursed and grown by a masculine-esq ocean entity and eggs that hatch into three huge black dragons. The moment those little single cells became animals and people that crawled out of the depths of the ocean to the land now it had cooled down. Then some proverbial future point where the land is consumed back into the sea and then reforms back into one being and all things perish in the sudden and heat of all life ending.

Welcome to Fantasy 900s Kievan Rus lands in a vague sense, where yep, it real is the late Iron Age for Gilia's world, some of it is not quite the same, just because they're tech development is a little skewey. (some vibes: x, x, x.) The fantasy part is that there not just images of Gilia's family being part sea monster, but almost all the people of her island display aspects of it, some choosing to be more averagely human on the day to day, other times they show it off and are the full fish-people vibes. But that's not all! There are guards who walk around that are 8ft tall, part stag-spirit with huge spears that are massively imposing, images of people with other spirits of the forest, trees, metals, other elements, concepts like justice, law, battle, and so on, and yes sometimes those three black draons also show up. so that everything is just teeming both with the mundane and this otherworldly nature. (vibes again: x, x, x)

There is a constant singing in the background, of everything, it matches always what's going on and sometimes it is a comfort lullaby, sometimes it is an ecstatically happy vibrant song, or sometimes it is a long keening wail of mourning music. There is one dream that is the exception, and there is bright happy singing and the scene of many people dancing in a huge group that is cut suddenly by the sound of a blade stabbing into soft skin. Then there is deathly silence, every sound simply ceases.

Mundane moments of activity that are fairly wholesome - her siblings bickering at the table, her two fathers holding each of her hands and swinging them between them, her mother's stern guidance about standing up straight, moments of court life of being trotted out with her siblings for this public event or that as she grows up, her maids tending her hair, or dressing her for events, and so on.

Very long exhaustingly boring moments of what being Queen entails - one includes, getting stuck adjudicating a ruling between two farmers arguing who owns which sheep that goes on for what is quite literally hours of trying to figure out what is fair, being presented and handing out harvest grains equally in the community, listening to people complain that they do not like the way the new fence is set. It goes on for endless amount of non-space time.

Being barely 18 and being coronated, where literally the crown barely fit on her head, it was clearly made for a much bigger than she is.

Moments that begin to show her messed up relationship with Godfinn, her second eldest brother. In moments when they are in public, he is her staunch protector, letting nothing happen to her, no one is allowed to get close to her, or bother her for any length of time. This has lead her to have very little friendships outside of her family and low contact with wider perspectives. Then there is the secondary part - what happens when doors are closed and they are talking quietly together, and it's very clear he's an absolute gaslighting narcissistic abuser, but it's always phrased as if to warn her and take care of her and 'get her to be reasonable'. She felt pretty today? Well remember that people only want her power in the family, as the real beauty is the younger sister Elspeth, and she's not clever enough to make up for it, he's only saying it so she doesn't get herself hurt. She felt pride in her work sewing and made a beautiful tapestry? Don't brag, Gilia, it is unbecoming for a daughter of a royal household to show off like that, and it's pushy to others. She felt like she worked hard in the harvest yield and accounting? That's insulting because she has no idea what hard work is, don't be a spoiled brat and an entitled princess. To an outsider, it's a telling pattern that he's worried about her being the next in line to the throne, and he's following a predictable pattern of manipulating and control to keep her dependently needing him as to never be a threat, Gilia however, cannot see it and still has stars in her eyes about her brother, her protector, he takes such good care of her, etc, etc.

Godfinn's subsequent execution/death which plays out multiple times and it seems endless, mostly because it fucked her up badly. He committed treason and had to face the worst punishment for their being, losing the Spirit Bond, and being thrown into the earth. Which he did not do gracefully, at all. He tries to run multiple times until they have to break both his legs and is thrown back, he screams slowly over hours, begging. Gilia's entire family is there to be witness, and Gilia as the Singer, has to keep singing the mourning songs the entire time. By the end he just curses the whole family calls Gilia a conniving whore for stealing the throne from his, lashes out at their mother for doing this to him, hopes the rest of his siblings rott away and die, just in general. The last image is just his eyes staring out of the boggy marsh, petrified as the ground seals around him like a tomb.

The image of a battle scene across a beach, and an army just crashing into a civilian population and slaughtering them, when they are defenceless. It ends with a wave that crashes and washed it all away, and the song just becomes quiet sobbing.

Swimming in the deepest, darkest ocean, where it's possible to see all the bioluminescent sea creatures come to life and weave and move. Rather than frightening, Gilia is in her Spirit-Form, and is drifting freely and happily, at peace with the world and feels beautiful for it.

And most upsettingly, is that all of this will happened overlapping, with no clear beginning or end, concurrently to each other in the same spaces. Gilia will be dreaming of having her hair brushed and staring out the window watching the huge tidal wave looming in the distance over the battlefield. She'll be trying to adjudicate fishing disputes between Godfinn screaming to death in the middle of the throne room.

Overall Vibes: Disjointed fear of existential crushing dread and elevation of pure religious highs and it is a roller coaster every single second from beginning to end.

Has your chara noticed Quentin? So here is the fun bit. Gilia will not necessarily notice him, as she's trying to keep her sanity together and is often just reduced to rocking and praying for peace in the corner of her own mind in order to cope with... everything.

The Sea-Father, however, will. He won't be aggressive, and it won't even be the first or second time, but more like a megafauna waking up, it slowly brings its attention to Quentin more each time. It doesn't say or do anything overt but it does just stare back, waiting to see what he does in the dreams. Any attempt to communicate is somewhat possible but it's not going to make sense back, asking questions will shift the dream to another dreamscape, with things that make equally as confusing sense: fish falling from the sky, whales dying, starfish slowly migrating across the sea bed. It also fills the space with an unrelenting pressure of the entire ocean pressing down as if to test what Quentin is.

rubi: dreamwalking opt-in

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