563/See You, Chuck...

See You, Chuck...
Date of Scene:	09 September 2014
Location:	Staren
Synopsis:	Mizuki suspects John is inside Staren's head. She dives into his dreams to Initiatiate Investigation Protoc@! AND IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS!@!#^%#! Staren finds he's mentally time traveled to before the Tolkeen war. He must prevent it -- but as if getting anyone to listen to a little kid wasn't hard enough, there turns out to be far more going on than %#@ Pleased to meet you. I'm the message. I want to help#_!@%######See you, Chuck...
Thanks to:	Wuyin Tsai
Cast of Characters:	Staren, 183, Wuyin Tsai
Tinyplot:	Dawning of an Endless Night

---

Staren has posed:
Staren's House, Lazlo Outskirts, RIFTS Earth

    Staren explained things to Mizuki and to his parents ahead of time: To check for the dream parasite (his parents are understandably concerned, but can see that action is being taken,) Mizuki will be visiting and jumping into his dreams. To accomplish this with maximum convenience, Dawn has been programmed to radio Mizuki when Staren's medical sensors show that he is asleep, and she will be allowed into the house.

    So it is that late tonight, Mizuki receives a message: <<Staren is asleep. We are ready when you are.>>

    The warpgate is actually a few small towns (and a lot of farms) over, about 15 miles away from the edge of the city. Mizuki presumably has transportation. It is a warm-ish Canadian summer night, which is to say, it is cool and yet still comfortable without a coat on. The house itself looks a bit out of place. A 20th century ranch-style house, painted white, sits in the middle of a field, belying the underground facility beneath.

    The front door is opened by a purple-haired woman in a plain black dress, a servant android being controlled by Dawn. She smiles. "Welcome, Mizuki. Right this way." She's led through the living room, kitchen/dining area, and then down the hall. A little black bundle of fur silently hops up to her and sniffs at Mizuki, hopping around her feet. She looks like a rabbit at first, but the face is that of a predator, with forward-facing eyes. She is amenable to being picked up and petted, otherwise following the intruder curiously.

    One of the doors in the hall opens to Staren's bedroom. The walls are pale and there is a soft blue carpet. Bookshelves and a dresser line the walls to her left, there is a closet to her right. The bed is in the far left corner by the window -- between here and there is a desk, against the left wall and positioned so that if Staren were sitting at it he would be facing the door. A desktop computer sits there, off. It would be covered in dust if the androids didn't clean regularly.

    The bed currently has dark blue sheets on it. Staren is lying on his side, facing the window.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    When Mizuki receives the message, she pings Dawn in return. "Ah, thank you. I will be there shortly." Fairly shortly, anyway; she had always thought that someone as scientifically minded as Staren would have lived in a world, or at least, city, with more... technology and urbanization. She's surprised by the number of farms as she soars along, but once she gets tired of the visuals, she does the more practical thing and weaves in, out, and around clouds to avoid being spotted by the locals. Just in case -- she doesn't want to start any uproars. Not tonight, anyway.

    So it comes to pass that, after one of the longer autonomous flights since she has been making use of the warpgates for transportation, she alights right on Staren's doorstep.

    Which is, in and of itself, mystifyingly quaint. She quirks an eyebrow just in time for a... synthetic being? of some variety - if her guess is correct, that is - greets her at the door. She is quickly ushered through the house, and eventually, the hall, stopping only briefly to give the not-rabbit a few gentle pats on the head. Didn't want to leave them hanging! At the very least, though, Staren's own room is more telling of his character: the computer, bookshelves, desks, and clutter all strike her as things that are very... Staren-chic. Allowing herself a momentary smile at that, she finds a spare chair, provided that there is one, and sits.

    There aren't any flashy motions to hint at what comes next. Mizuki simply bows her head, and soon enough, she's there. Whether Staren would immediately see or sense her would depend entirely on his own, typical wield over his dreams, as well as how distracting the contents of this particular dream happen to be. But whatever the case, she can now see almost all of what's going on, Staren willing.

    Well. In terms of manifest content, at least. She doesn't suddenly know everything about him or anything.

Staren has posed:
Meanwhile...

    Staren is sitting at the computer at his desk. He seems to suddenly snap out of a daze and looks around. He tries to check the time but his cybernetics seem to be on the fritz -- he reaches for his coat pocket and suddenly realizes he's not wearing it. And when he stands up, he realizes that everything is... bigger.

    A rush to the mirror on the back of his door confirms -- he's a kid. Has he been turned into a kid somehow? He rushes out into the hall. "Mom? Dad?"

    "Oh for crying out loud... You're supposed to be in /bed/, Staren!" Delilah shouts back. Staren creeps to the end of the hall to see her on the living room couch, hastily disentangling herself from a scruffy teen wearing a lot of denim. Delilah herself looks like a teenage version of Yoruichi in tight jeans and a midriff-baring T-shirt. She looks right at him. "/Bed/! It's late, and I need to..." she shares a glance with her boyfriend-of-the-moment. "...study. We have, um, a test in the morning!"

    Staren's eyes widen a bit as he realizes two things. 1. OMG with an adult's insight he knows /exactly/ what they're going to be doing on that couch how did he not realize that and 2. he remembers this night. Clearly, he has gone BACK IN TIME.

    Staren turns and heads back to his room. Back in time. This is over a decade ago. Shortly before unification, if he remembers correctly. This means he has to fix /everything/. The war. His friend's father in a coma. Wireless. Can he remember what the deal was with the Oblivion orb? Event after event rushes to mind. He paces in circles. How is he going to fix it all...

    With a sudden realization, he shakes his head. Stuff he was involved in comes later, and he'll be personally involved to deal with it. Now... Now, he needs to focus on the other stuff. Telling his parents to visit grampa more before they're seperated by unification. Should he tell Delilah not to join the Confederacy? Is that going too far?

    No, /focus/ Staren. The big thing, the thing that's going to be hard, is stopping the Tolkeen war. Well, changing it. But how is he going to make anyone listen? His head computer is on the fritz. It probably doesn't have data from the future.

    His uncle's stories. That's it. If he can remember where any of those pre-RIFTS ruins are, he should at least be able to get someone to /listen/ to him. Yes. He'll find Mr. Clarke and tell him where he can find a buried missile base. When they go look and find it, /then/ they'll /have/ to listen to him!

    Jaw set with purpose and determination, Staren puts on his sneakers and grabs a coat and heads for the front door--

    "Oh my GOD kid, what... where do you think you're going?" Delilah is /pissed/. Her boyfriend rolls his eyes at Staren.

    "I gotta--" he starts,

    "/BED./ /NOW!/"

    "But you gotta listen to me, I've traveled back into the past and I've gotta stop the war between the Coalition and--"

    With a growl, Delilah gets up, grabs the collar of his jacket and hauls him back to his room. "I don't have time for games tonight, Staren. Me an' Jake gotta .../study/. You're supposed to be in /bed/."

    "But you don't understand--"

    "I don't wanna /hear/ it! It is /past your bedtime/. I let you stay up an extra hour playing videogames, now you gotta go to bed or I'm telling your parents!"

    "But--"

    "T-t-tch! Not a peep! /Bed/!" And she gently but firmly pushes him back into his room and shuts the door.

    "Duh... buh... wha... but I..." Staren stammers lamely at the door.

    Man, why does time travel always have to be such a /pain/?

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    And naturally, when she arrives in the dream itself, she doesn't see fit to interrupt until it has reached its climax. True to authorial style, she watches from the shadows, both out of curiosity regarding Staren's past... and because she needs some time to formulate a fittingly sarcastic and humorous entrance. She needs to find a sweet spot here: what is just innocuous enough to get him to play along for a while, but not hate her for the teasing later? No trifling thing, that. But she has an idea! So, when he is left dumbstruck, staring at the door, she makes her entrance. She appears from nowhere right in front of the couch, naturally.

    "Staren." Her hair is flowing and her dress is weaving with the errant, imaginary winds that she's conjuring. But the more disturbing thing? She has never looked this serious once since Staren has met her. So just when her presence might be about to convince him that this -is- a dream, and that he -doesn't- need to worry, she turns the tables. "We don't have much time. There's no time to explain it all now, but as you've no doubt realized, you have travelled back in time. Now, it is up to the two of us to save the Multiverse. Twilight is waiting for us." She throws out her hand to his, the sleeve of her dress undulating mysteriously just as her hair had been before. "Take my hand."

Staren has posed:
    Staren's room has a couch too now, apparently. He doesn't notice because dream. Staren turns and stares at Mizuki a moment. He opens his mouth to speak when she does instead, so he listens, ears rotating forwards to face her, tail twitching nervously. "I... um..." he moves as if to gather things from his room, then realizes that pretty much all the stuff he would take, he doesn't have yet. He grabs only a single object: It looks like the flipphone abstractum he uses as a scanner, except this one doesn't have the crystals on it. He pockets it from his desk, then runs back to Mizuki. "Why aren't you a kid? Wait, no, you're ages old, of course you still look like that. What about Twilight, is she a filly or still grown up? How did you find my world? We haven't unified yet! Oh. I guess my world is kinda easy. What about Equestria, though? Or did she not go back to her /own/ past? Wait, would that make her someone else now? I mean, stuck in someone else's body?"

    The torrent of questions is unceasing. Staren, don't you know what 'no time to explain' means? He does take her hand while he's speaking, though.

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
Jake appears to be a completely normal teenage boy, who is, also completely normally, awkwardly irritated at the interruption in ...'study' time. He isn't the oddity, here.

The oddity is the shape at the window.

It's visible from where Staren is standing, and where the dream-people are, and where Mizuki makes her entrance. It's behind her, right outside, with eyes that gleam like black marbles in the light from the interior. A light passes by outside, seemingly a car passing Staren's country home, and the shape of its body is very briefly visible.

The dog -- no, the /hound/ watches them all, its nose to the glass and its gaze unblinking.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    As the deluge of questions cascades on top of her, her stoic look slowly shifts into a smile, which then gives way to a snort. Her dress and hair cease their dramatic movements, and Mizuki hides her mouth with a sleeve as quickly as she can. "I..." She seems ready to try to rebound from that, but after but a cursory glance at her 'victim', she thinks better of it. "... my -goodness-, even in the face of impending -doom- your inquisitive spirit persists." She gently swipes a finger by her eyelid to draw away some fluid that had collected there. Laughing tears, probably. Poor Staren. "Please, be at ease. There is no world crisis, and you've not gone back in time. You are -dreaming-, of course, and now that dream may become lucid due to my intervention." A teacup appears beside her and she sips from it, pouring the rest from one cup to the other... via zero gravity conditions that float the tea. It's pretty clear that she's run through this whole 'you're dreaming, here I'll prove it' thing with a number of people before already. "This means that the rules of my world apply! But. Erm." She clears her throat, suddenly looking more serious again. Not too serious, though, and the shift is distinctive enough for it to not seem a 'boy who cried wolf' thing yet.

    "Nevertheless, there is a pressing matter that brought me here. Just in case: do you recall that John fellow? And the hypothesis we formed regarding his 'origins'?" She nods a few times. "Well, I'm assuming that you do -now-, at least. Anyway. I am here to help you locate 'him', 'it', or what have you... and expunge it, if need be. Otherwise, we may simply saunter out of the dream world full of happy thoughts and renewed energy." She claps her hands together. "So, all of that out of the way: come. We've much... searching..." She turns around, where something immediately catches her eye -- a visual beyond the window. She squints before looking to Staren and asking,

    "Do you see... what I...?"

Staren has posed:
    Staren blinks at the comment. "Of /course/ it does! Knowledge is how we're gonna /save/ the Multiverse! ...What's so funny!" And she tells him. He blinks at her. It starts coming back to him. He tries to remember what he was doing just before he was sent back... hmm. Right, yes, the plan was for Mizuki to do this. Of course, what if, knowing that, he dreamed her up? It seems pretty unlikely, but even in that case, going along with it won't make anything worse.

    Staren wrings his hands and looks up at Mizuki. "So how do we do that?"

    Staren follows her gaze.

    If John is still there, he steps back in alarm. Because especially right now, that's a big dog! "What is... you mean that's him? How do you know it's not a dream figment?"

    If John isn't still visible, Staren just looks at the empty window and then back to Mizuki. "See what?"

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
It isn't John. It's something else entirely. It /feels/ somehow similar, like there's a commonality there. The more they're aware of it, the more Staren and Mizuki can feel its oddly unnatural presence. Mizuki gets the impression that it both belongs here and doesn't simultaneously.

The hound's breath fogs the window for a second. It turns away from it, walking into the darkness. The dreamed nighttime is darker than the space the hound occupies, making it weirdly visible as it calmly withdraws from the vicinity of the house.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    Mizuki shakes her head. "It is a dream figment, but an incongruous one. And that's how I know." She exhales, keeping her eyes focused on the dreamhound. "It feels like it belongs here in that it has made itself belong. Yet, it radiates an aura of wrongness that, when you have been in as many dreams as I have, you cannot ignore. The John individual was similar; he felt and looked wrong, terribly wrong, but there was this contrasting energy of warmth at the same time. Whatever he is, or whatever he represents, its methods are extremely... invasive, and manipulative." Pause. "All of this is giving more and more credence to my 'dream disease' theory."

    Then the window fogs, and she gradually paces closer. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, but she is eventually able to recognize the bizarre... silhouette? of the dog against the night sky. She follows it with her eyes until she can no longer, and then addresses Staren again. "It's moving. I know not where, or if following it would do us any good, but at the very least we have our first clue."

Staren has posed:
    Staren purses his lips as he considers this. "So... I have a dream disease. What does this mean? Can John read my mind? How do we get it out?" He runs to the window and pushes it open, starting to climb out. "Do you have a better idea than following it?"

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "Unfortunately," Mizuki sighs, "'dream diseases' are as volatile, varied, and unpredictable as they sound like they should be. Hence, I do not know the answers to any of your questions for certain." She quirks an eyebrow as he starts out of the window. "... nor do I have a better idea than pursuing it, so... lead on, I suppose." That said, she follows him outside, trying to find a trace of that contrast on the black background of the world.

Staren has posed:
    Staren doesn't have broom or wings, but he does have hovershoes, so he skates over the grass after the dog! He's affixed the smartphone thing to his face -- most of the top half is a transparent plastic screen, which Staren has switched to infrared to follow the dog with.

    That works on dream hounds, right?

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
The window opens easily and quietly. Staren pulls himself into the night, and Mizuki follows. The hound keeps walking, a leisurely pace through the countryside.

As soon as they set foot on the ground, things get strange. Three steps forward, and they find themselves elsewhere. They're standing in a forest, a dark, wet and dreary place, where the light of the moon filters through the branches high above. The forest is utterly silent, save for the sounds of their passage and the ground the hound treads upon.

It keeps going. In the pale moonlight, the hound is more easily visible: it's the size of a big dog, with narrow but powerful limbs and black spines like a porcupine's rising off it's back and sweeping backwards. They're pressed low as it stalks through the wilderness. There's a sense of being watched, but from afar.

A square of light shines in the far off distance.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "Mmm~." As they almost literally teleport to the forest, Mizuki... smiles. "The variability of dreams is something I adore. How environments can change so quickly, and one can experience so much so fast." She seems ready to become lost in another of her reveries, but she nevertheless continues on after the dog, studying it to the best of her ability.

    ... though, her gaze does linger to the moon now and then. Sigh... so beautiful. Even if it's just imaginary, the moon in her world is imaginary, too.

Staren has posed:
    Staren blinks and looks around when the scenery changes. For some reason, a dark, wet, dreary forest makes him nervous. Like, more than normal. Some fragment of remembered dream... Still, that dog is the only lead they have! Staren skates after it! Though, he slows for Mizuki to catch up when he notices that odd feeling. "...I feel like we're being watched. But is it one of my figments, or his that's watching us?"

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "It hardly matters. Truly, the heuristic of finding where one thing ends and the other begins is a moot point in worlds of dreams. Even invading elements like myself must be composed of the thoughts of the dreamer. To some extent, we are both at your mercy, whether we are 'your' figments or 'our own'. Or at least, that is the way it normally works from what I have observed." There's a brief silence as she walks onward, catching up to Staren. "At the very least, don't waste time fretting over whether he is watching you, or you are watching you; it is both at once. More important to focus on catching the white rabbit for the time being." She chuckles. "Or in this case, the noctiluscent dog."

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
The moon is strange. It doesn't look /quite/ right. It looks like it's... diminished, somehow. Shrunken. Like it was further away, or like it was a piece of hard candy that something had been sucking on for a while.

The second comparison somehow feels more apt.

The hound accelerates as Staren starts to close, matching his speed with ease. It leads them up a rise and along it, giving the pair a view of a mushroom-filled wood at the base of the hill on the left. Familiar-looking armored shapes, glittering in the moonlight, burn it out with flashes of plasma fire that don't seem to do much more than prevent it from spreading up the hillside. On the other, a lake of too-dark waters rests, its surface still and black like a dish of obsidian. Dark avian shapes rest in the branches of twisted trees reaching out over it.

The hound starts towards the shore of the lake. The light, in the distance, gets a little bigger. It's hard to make out what it's from. A structure, maybe?

Staren has posed:
    "A mushroom forest? What am I, Little Nemo?" Staren quips as he stops to briefly take stock and glance around for any new hazards in this terrain. And then... the lake of inky blackness. "...I think I might have caught this from a lake like that... shoot, we need to warn the others after this!" Staren blinks, then he skates downhill. "Wheeeee! Let's go, 'Princess Chamomile!'" The reference may or may not be lost on her.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    Mizuki conjures her sword and holds it up in profile to the moon. She licks her lips. Yes, a lollipop is indeed fitting.

    But that aside. There's another prevalent light in the sky she has begun to notice. Another trend she's starting to see. She looks to Staren. "I believe the dog was just the first piece of the puzzle. I believe we've been lead to the door, and that the door is the incandescent mass that looms ever on our periphery. That light. Don't become distracted, now --" But no sooner has she said this than has Staren begun sliding down the hill shouting the name of a princess that... yeah, it's totally lost on her.

    But what isn't completely lost on her is the possibility presented by that distant luminescence. Rather than sliding down with the mini-catboy, Mizuki sprouts her wings and soars ever closer to try to get a better view of the origin of that light. She doesn't get too far from Staren, however; she wants to be able to turn around and reach him quickly in the event of danger. But wait. Waaait.

    She really has been in physical realms for too long, hasn't she? That doesn't matter in the least! The fabric of the universe is beyond malleable in dreams - if she so chose, she could be Staren's side in seconds no matter where she was relative to him beforehand. So she decides to soar on further, a bit more boldly than before. While he inspects the lake and the forest, she shall see what this mysterious something is...

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
Staren skates down the hill in pursuit of the hound, and to examine the waters. He gets some distance down, and the hill abruptly turns into a dune, desert sands stretching out in front of him. The sky is bright, now, but shrouded entirely in grey clouds. It looks somewhat like the fog that Staren has seen elsewhere, but not quite the same.

The lake is now an oasis, one with inky waters and drooping, wilting plants. Hazy humanoid shapes in brown robes lay prostrate at the water's edge, where black, creeping vines have started to crawl out. Another figure is affixed to a vertical wooden pole out in the water, just above the surface. Staren can see hints of others nearby, figures lurking behind rocks, trees and low dunes, wearing stealth suits and tactical gear and long coats rather than powered armor. They're readying weapons ranging from lever-action rifles to energy weapons, apparently about to spring the attack.

The hound moves on.

Mizuki tries to see the source. She soars overhead, leaving the decaying forest behind her. The ground darkens, and the sky gives no light other than that of the moon. The stars are nowhere to be seen. Ahead, she can see a huge shape rising on the horizon, a blocky, rectangular edifice with that singular light coming from halfway up. She can see the dunes stretch below her, and the clouds above, though the black, starless night persists along with it in a manner only really possible in a place like this. She can see the hound, leaving the dunes and angling towards the edifice. It leaves an inky black trail as it goes, and the landscape begins to transform from sand to rubble.

A little further, now, something seems to say.

Staren has posed:
    "Woah!" Staren steadies himself as the ground changes under him. He takes in the scene... but the hound is moving on. "Mizuki?" He looks around. "Mi... Mizuki? Where'd you go?" Oh shoot. Oh shoot. Should he go back and look for her? Or stay here and wait for her to find him? But his only clue is escaping...

    Nothing for it but to plunge onward. He skates around the stealthsuit soldiers, somehow having a vague sense that they won't interact with him if he doesn't bother them, and skates after the hound.

    He taps a button on the device on his face. "Mizuki? Mizuki, did you by any chance imagine yourself a radio?"

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    Down a rabbit hole, or up and down the endless staircase?

    Mizuki has begun to wonder. All of these cues and atmospheric changes -- she and Staren are just following every little footprint left behind by this 'disease', if indeed it can be called as much. But there really is no guarantee that that edifice will hold anything but more infinite winds, or that going back the way she came would have any meaning either. In fact, no; she knows that it won't. Distance travelled here is an illusion, as is the distance she perceives between the hound and herself. As she had seen before, when Staren got closer to it, it simply sped up enough to keep the same distance ahead. It is like a rubber band. But even if she weighs all of that on the scales of her cerebral cortex now, what good will it do her. Absolutely... no. She smirks. No, there really is not much else to do but follow where it leads them.

    But something inside of her takes great offense to realizing that she has been cued. That she has been lead. It has been so long since she has gone into dreams in this way, where she was partially at the mercy of some other element. Where some other element understood the imaginary and the infinite as well as, or perhaps even better than, she herself. It's humbling, in a way, when she realizes that all of this existential thought can help her in no tangible way.

    But, perhaps, it can help her in an intangible way?

    Yes, there is always the possibility that it could still help. For a brief moment, she stops following the hound, and meditates. How does one rid themselves of a disease like this, especially if it has spread deep? If it is nested somewhere, and the location of the nest is separated from the rest of the region by barriers that reflect people back where they started, just with a different aesthetic? Well, naturally, you decimate the barrier. So she will try. Rather than actually 'following' the hound anymore, she attempts to will herself closer to it. She attempts to imagine herself being at a point within an infinitely short distance of the dog. Right in front of the dog, perhaps, or right on top of the dog. Whatever the case, she attempts to make her mind bend in ways that will make her arrive where she wished to: the source of it all. Whether that is represented by a building, or represented by a dog, does not matter. All that matters is that she finds the seed so that she may tear it out, and cast it into the bowels of the finite, where no such ideas that exist only in the mind can live.

    ... so what did she actually get out of all of that? Meh. Your guess is as good as mine. But why don't we try thought-teleporting to the source. The dog. The 'John'. Whatever artbitrary point happens to represent some part of this disease that can be interacted with in a manner that she and Staren can easily perceive.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    Mizuki's voice, naturally, breaks through to Staren's mind shortly thereafter. "There is no need to imagine a radio when we may simply communicate with thoughts~."

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
Staren tries to chase it, and Mizuki just tries to... /be/ where it is. The world bends, everything focusing down into a single point ahead of her as she tries to project herself to /just/ behind that point. The hound's wake doesn't bend with it, and Staren finds himself skating alongside a trail of growing blackness. The bending dreamscape warps, twists --

The two of them stand in front of a door. They're inside a hallway, with cheap carpeting and cheap lighting and a number of doors up and down it, each with a number on it. The number on this one is annoyingly inconsistent. It's always the most generic apartment number you can imagine, and then the next one on the list when you look away and back. Don't blink, now.

The hound comes up the hallway. It walks leisurely up to them, and then around them, angling at the door. There's the sound of a chain lock being undone, a bolt being twisted, and the hinge creaking. The hound goes right on, disappearing into the well-lit interior.

"Hiya, Chuck," says John, standing in the doorway. He looks like he did the last time they saw him, but dressed more casually: a graphic tee (with something in Japanese on it), mussed hair and torn jeans. "Do you wanna come in? You let /me/ in." He smiles.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    And the moment Mizuki sees John, she feels as though she has surpassed the first hurdle. She lets her guard down, just a little, and speaks with a sort of heightened confidence. "The difference here is no difference at all: I let a part of you in willingly, and Staren did so unconsciously. Unwilfully." She folds her hands at her waist. "Therefore, we would request that, because Staren had no idea that he was 'welcoming you' in, that you leave his thoughts in peace." She smiles. "So yes, we are requesting to come in. For negotiation. For discussion. For more crypticisms that may yet elucidate the increasingly foreboding machinations of that you pass on messages for." The most overt demonstration of her renewed confidence is, perhaps, when she attempts to give the hound itself a pat on the head. Just something casual, and in passing; every bit as genuinely nonchalant as John himself.

    "But do feel free to start with a little more exposition." She gently rests the point of her blade on the ground, resting both hands on the pommel. "How your being here affects Staren. Why. What 'your' goals are, collectively, if you have any goals at all. As much as you are willing to indulge, I will ask of you." Yeah, now it's her turn to play Staren's question game.

    Ah, but she's not going to ask all of that without giving something in return. For his trouble, Mizuki procures... a toothpick. "Something to 'chew on' physically while we chew on ideas figuratively, if you will. Consider it a tiny gift."

Staren has posed:
    Staren is kind of in a weird state of mind at the moment. He is a kid and isn't, and he's lucid but hasn't really been thinking the right way to warp reality. And so there is a little kid part of him that is scared of him being caught alone in this strange, dangerous place. Not that it should matter unless he loses lucidity. /Can/ he? He's not sure. Staren's suddenly worried about /that/...

    So he's relieved to hear Mizuki's telepathy. Phew. He's not alone here.

    Staren skates along the black road, but does it lead to Amber or to Chaos?

    Then he's inside and skates right into the wall. "Oof!" He steadies himself and watches the dog warily, dropping into a fighting stance as it approaches and passes by... Man, he is /intensely/ curious about what's behind those other doors, but he has to follow this trail... The changing numbers don't bother him. He knows that's normal for dreams.

    And then, John. So it's true. "How did you get into my head? And what are you doing in here??"

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
John stands there and patiently waits, listening to Mizuki use her ability: Mimic Staren. The hound doesn't object to the touch, but the closer Mizuki gets to actually touching it, the more she feels like it might be a bad idea. She gets the impression of intense radioactivity the nearer her hand gets, or virulence. It /might/ not do it...

He steps aside, taking the toothpick that's offered. John smiles. "Well, Chuck, you've done me a favor, so I guess it's only right that one good turn-turn-turn deserves another." The interior of the apartment is... completely normal. It looks like a small, modern Japanese apartment: compact, but designed to appear as if things within weren't taking up much space at all. The hound pads across the room and into the next. John follows it until he reaches the kitchen table and has a seat. There's a goldfish bowl in the center of it, with a tiny sculpt of a sunken island with a little plastic priest at the bottom. The fish is nowhere to be seen.

"You can't really negotiate with someone like me, though. I'm not a negotiator." He smiles genially at Staren. "I'm just the message, Chuck. I'm just the message. Don't shoot me for being me." He nods at the fishbowl with the island at the bottom. "You let me in. Stuck your head in my fishbowl, waited for the earworm to come whisper a few memorable notes. So, I did. You're a real interesting guy, you know that?"

"I like to know things. I thought I knew a lot of things, but, boy, compared to what you've seen, I might as well have encyclopedic knowledge of my downstairs." His voice bubbles with good humor, his red-orange-white eyes sliding back to Mizuki. "It's awful nice. I hope I can see more things. Talk-talk-talk to more people. I'm just the message, Chuck, and I don't like knowing people are being lied to. I'd like them to have a chance to hear me out, too."

Staren has posed:
    Staren walks in and looks around. He double-takes at the fishbowl -- not so much in that it's /that/ weird, but it /is/ unusual, and he suddenly remembers he's not recording this so he'd better actually /look/ at it. His head snaps around to look at John when he speaks again, though. He frowns at the comment about not negotiation, but he listens, frowning slightly with his hands in his jacket pockets, tail lashing in annoyance. There is a flicker of pride at the comment about all he's seen, though. "I didn't stick my head in any fishbowl. Now listen here, this is /my/ head, and if you want to keep spreading the message, here's /why/ you're going to negotiate." He points up at John. "Some people would destroy a brain parasite on principle. But I don't know the whole story, so I'll give you the benefit of a doubt /once/, and recognize that maybe you didn't have a choice about coming into my head, or don't understand why I wouldn't want a brain parasite." He lowers his arm. "You're a sapient being." he turns his hand so his palm is up. "I recognize your right to exist as long as you don't cause more harm than good. I will listen to your story. But then, instead of destroying you," he makes a quick horizontal swipe with his outstretched fingers, "I'm going to give you a choice:" He points at John again. "We get you your own substrate to live in, and you move into it and OUT OF MY HEAD, /or/..." he makes a throat-slitting gesture. "You can be destroyed. If you want to keep spreading the message, then take the deal. Once you have a body you can talk to whoever you want about whatever you want. So what's it gonna be?"

    Being a kid really isn't helping him look intimidating right now.

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "Bah, you give me far too much credit." Mizuki waves a hand at the smiling messenger. "I'm just an avid reader, nothing more. And this avid reader is curious as to what happens when you talk-talk-talk to others. What happens to the people, or what will happen." She smiles. "That's why I have a little isolated observation area for your growth back home, for better or for worse. That could end up bringing about an apocalypse even worse than the one my world already faces, but you know?" She makes a shrugging gesture. "In the end, it doesn't really matter. 'You're just the message', as you keep saying, and not to sound like a broken record, but I'm extremely interested to know what, exactly, you serve as a message /for/. And I will find out, eventually, but I might as well try to solve the puzzle as early on in the game as I can. Gives me some leverage if things get out of hand later on, you see. But I fear I'm just talking in circles of my own, now."

    She closes her eyes after that, lapsing back into a phase of deep thought. "But I'm looking at this all wrong. Approaching it by firing a volley of explosives at an impregnable wall." She smiles to John. "I like you, so I'm certain I'll eventually find a more tactful way to communicate with you. Something that isn't a brute force slam of question after question when my better judgment already tells me that your 'signal is too dim' here to be able to tell me most of what I know. But I suppose there is one major way in which you could help me, if I ever came to understand things better." She crosses her arms here. "If you are a message, a signal, then there is a good chance that you can be traced back to your source. Maybe you could lead me to you. Help me help you. Let someone else in, rather than the other way around. I don't see why you wouldn't eventually -- after all, it might make for a good change of pace." She glances to Staren. "I think that would be more productive than destroying him outright, especially when we don't currently know how that could be accomplished."

    Finally, she exhales, making another glass of tea appear and sipping from it for the psychological comfort factor. "This head is already very full as it is." She bats her eyelashes a few times. "Which is why you might find better 'fake estate' elsewhere. In a more vacant head, maybe. More room to spread your message there, yes?"% Negotiating, minus the mention of negotiating. Staren may not get it immediately, but she's desperately fumbling to find some patterns of his speech that she can mimic, and reflect back at him. As a test. At best, for some kind of a result, but she's not counting on it.

Staren has posed:
    Staren has read about that tactic in a book somewhere, but his mind is /so/ not in the right place right now to recognize its use.

    Or is it that the right place is so not in his mind right now?

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
John addresses Mizuki first. He seems quite taken with her. Maybe they're two peas in similarly-gilded pods.

"I'm just the message," he repeats. "I'm not even a story, not really, but I might be eventually. I'm not sure I want to be. I'd just fall into the same rut the long and ancient dead did. It's why you can't really read me," John explains, a measure of good cheer remaining in his voice and a bit of excitement creeping in. "You're reading, but you're not listening. You're hearing, but you're not digesting."

"You're using these --" He leans forward, extending a hand, fingers extended and hovering fractions of an inch from Mizuki's face and eyes. "-- and then this --" He retracts one finger, the other pointed at her forehead, similarly not quite touching. "-- but you're held back by this." He lowers his hand, gesturing at her chest. "Your people aren't. They're a part of you, but I think they want to be seperate. You're much older than you look. Did you hear the one about things you love and setting them free? I could help make some room, Chuck." He smiles at Mizuki. It's a smile that would turn heads in delight if the smiler wasn't some kind of monstrous /thing/. "Take the load off your mind. I did it; you can too."

Tracing him, eh? John spreads his hands. "I became the signal, and I rode it to a little, bubbling well. It's truth, you know. Information is a super weird substance, and some organisms react to it differently than others. I like Staren." The way John says the name is in the precise intonation someone reserves for an old friend, someone whose name they've used in a myriad of ways to a point of just shy of intimate familiarity. "He's taking it all pretty well so far. Most people don't. But you've got to try, eh, Chuck? I don't like breaking eggs, but you've got to have the shells to walk on for a proper metaphor to take shape." He winks. "Come visit sometime."

Now, he turns back to Staren. He looks him over. "That's not what I am, Chuck. I'm just the message. I'm an earworm. I'm the whisper in your game of telephone. 'John,' you say, and 'God,' they say, and you and I both know they're wrong, but how can we keep correcting everyone?" John shrugs helplessly. "I'm me, but I'm not the only me. I really would like the chance to talk to other people, though I think you can understand what I mean when I say I'm a controversial kind of message."

"I'm all about truth, Chuck. I'm all about change-change-change. I want to help people take their lives into their own hands. Throw off the yoke put on them by the old, dead men and the older living ones. Free them from death so they can really understand me. All of me, not just a part of me. I just want to help, Chuck, and if you want to help me help them /without/ you --"

John stops, beaming. He pushes the fish bowl across the table at Staren. The island is the lid to the bowl, now, and there are tiny plastic figures near the center. A hole is open in the middle, where a pitch black fish swims around. The curve of the bowl makes it look enormous from the sides and very small from the top, barely a black spot in the lagoon-like gap.

Staren and Mizuki get the distinct impression that the worst of the infection is right here. The parasite, or whatever you want to call it, is being represented by the bowl and the thing in it. They can do whatever they want with it: put it into something else, destroy it, or just remove it and hold onto it.

"Just don't shoot me, Chuck," John says, earnestly. "After all, I'm just the message."

Staren has posed:
    Staren blinks at the fish. He watches it for a moment. Then he looks back up at John. "Thank you. Listen, I want to help people do all that stuff too. But the thing is, how can I trust you, /or/ your method? I spent /weeks/ studying the method I have now, and I recieved it under much more favorable circumstances. I need details. I need to know more, before I can help you help them. /If/ I decide that's what I should do."

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    Mizuki slides the fish bowl closer to herself, smiling at John. "Well, I guess it's a good thing I didn't bring my revolver with me today." She chuckles faintly. "I think I'll keep this with me. It's nice to watch fish when you're trying to relax, and I could always use more and better ways to relax." She looks to Staren. "And I'll keep it faaar away from you, don't worry. Whatever it is, it won't be harming or changing anything in here anymore." She takes the fishbowl after that, and opens up a rift in space-time with her sword, chunking the fish bowl inside. "Interesting tidbit, Staren: objects with origins in my world can't exit to other places in the Multiverse, but any other objects, even objects that came from other dreams, can still go outside. So that means, once I go and grab this fish bowl on the other side, I can bring it wherever I want. Physically." She smiles. "It'll make extremely valuable research material, I feel. Or an even better mental WMD if I ever run into someone I really don't like. I guess we'll just have to wait and see."

Wuyin Tsai has posed:
"The signal's weak where I'm sitting," John says. He spreads his hands. "I'll tell you what I can, if you want to listen. You can trust me to be straight with you, Chuck. You'll know this, because I'll tell you things you don't want to hear. I could be like Eureka," he posits with a flash of teeth and a touch of humor, "but a voracious abstract instead of a curious one."

"Well..." John looks thoughtful in the instant before Mizuki removes the bowl. "...maybe both."

The apartment is gone. Staren and Mizuki find themselves back in Staren's home, exactly where they started. Everything is exactly the way it should be in this world of dreams.

Except, that is, for a barely-noticeable, fishbowl-sized water stain on the desk. Some things will always leave a mark.

Staren has posed:
    Staren watches Mizuki do this, and John fade out. "...He keeps talk-talk-talking about that, but somehow, he never spills any details." Staren frowns slightly. Then his eyes widen with realization. "Wait, so anything I dream up, you can just... /make real/?!"

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "There are probably some limitations on that, but assuming some arbitrary plot relevance value is satisfied? Yes, Staren."

Staren has posed:
    Staren blinks. "So... just thinking up 'the object that will allow me to unlock the secrets of the multiverse and gain ultimate power' probably doesn't count, even though me doing all that /totally/ sounds like some kind of plot? I mean, you understand... I have to at least /check/. /Immortality/ was just handed to me, after all. I'm not gonna assume I won't luck into anything else. And using it to help people is more important than being prideful or picky about how I earned it."

Mizuki (183) has posed:
    "Just for the sake of intrigue and challenge, I would wager strongly against that possibility. The way things like this work is by being about as capricious as pulling the arm of a slot machine. And even then, there's usually a 'cap' on what may be won."

Staren has posed:
    Staren shrugs. "Had to ask." He looks around the room. "...So. What happens now? Not with the fish, I mean... now now. Do I go back to dreaming, or do we just hang out together, or do I lose lucidity and you lead dream me on a merry adventure?"

Mizuki (183) has posed:
"Why don't we do something tremendously original. Why don't we conjure up a pair of chairs, some fine china..."

"...and have a few glasses of tea."