station72 | (OPEN) I Was Deep In a Dream and I Didn't Know It

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(OPEN) I Was Deep In a Dream and I Didn't Know It

CHARACTERS: Ilde & You
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Pick a day.
SUMMARY: Just Ilde things, here for the rest of downtime, whatever you want to do with it.
WARNINGS: Will update if needed.

EARTH I.

Ilde lives in the garden. She is the barefoot girl in the white dress, always somewhere amongst the tiers of the Circle Garden. She speaks to the plants, she waters them, and there are even several plots that she has tilled in herself, visiting the slowly sprouting tendrils every day to be certain of their progress. She does not sleep any longer, but she can be found resting amongst the plants as well, tucked out of sight behind a frond, or up on the highest tiers of the garden where few bother to trek. Solitary and quiet, on most days all one might pick up from her as she works is the repetition of a poem,

( Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not unfrequented Garden-side... )

EARTH II.

She has many broken eggs to visit in the Nesting Deck these days. Some of them known to her since she first awoke with her own brood, others who came and went in the span of their stay on Concordia, and so many more that she will never know. She tries not to linger over it excessively, does not make it the majority of her hours to stand in the great aerie and pine. She can do nothing for them, all she can do is wait. Sometimes she brings flowers from the garden and other trappings; ribbons and braids, little tokens, but mostly she sits with the pods. Murmurs to them too softly to hear, recites poems, sometimes sings.

And sometimes, she goes back to her own pod and returns the connection to the port at the base of her skull. Preventative medicine, she hopes, so that she will not slip back beneath the dark waves herself. The coma, falling out of sync with the symbiote, was far too vulnerable. Too cold. Too lonely. And there were hosts depending on her yet to be here, to be watching; wide awake.

AIR I. -- Ambient

She can be found drowsing in the circle gardens, never quite completely unconscious. She comes from a world of walking shadows who hunt and feast on unwary humans, she does not like to be completely off her guard. She will, however, lie out in the grass and listen to something that is not quite music, arrhythmic chiming and instrumentation that twines with natural sounds such as birds or water or wind. Those who who know her well know this is the kind of noise she favors.

Lying with her eyes closed, and the her hands folded neatly across her stomach, she will daydream. Filling the gardens with psychic fantasies: birds and creatures she has seen, either in books or memories or Concordia's menagerie, raindrops, rainbows, clouds in soft colors that stir at the touch of a gentle wind. Her visions move with the music, everything fluid in its shapes and its colors, just like her odd music. You can watch, but should you choose to tap in alongside her daydreaming you too can feel the wet of the rain, see the many colorful birds taking shelter in the leaves of the garden...

AIR II. -- Opera; Basing off of The Magic Flute, but not literally that because...alien multiverse.

She had been introduced to the concept of the opera in Concordia. The grandness of it all was very foreign to her, there was no theater such as others knew it in the burned world... However, she found the basic concept accessible enough: the tale told through song. She found the idea of different voices representing different characters novel and interesting. She is much more attentive to the opera than she is to the more ambient music, sitting up and alert as she picks apart the words.

"The Queen of the Night has just told her daughter that she must kill the high priest... He is unworthy." [ X ]

There is an eagerness in her voice as she explains the story, there is a familiar fairy tale aspect to the theming of it, but it also has something more arcane and complex, some alchemical logic just under the surface that delights her.

AIR III.

She likes to weave things together. It is busy work for her hands, mindless work when she just wants to sit in peace and do nothing, think little. She has always spent a vast amount of her time simply doing nothing, being calm, breathing slowly. It was how she had survived her time in the palace of the mad Godking. She would hide away in the garden, sit in the dirt, and recite her poem. It was an ancient ballad, written long before the world was scorched, and the little book of verses had been from Dreus's own collection of things saved before the fire flooded everything; he himself had taught her to read it. Its words filled her mind, and kept thoughts out.

Her woven totems are made from all manner of junk and scrap she finds around the Station, string and strips of cloth in different colors and textures, wire and tubing. She doesn't take the task terribly seriously, and thus doesn't see much need to find fine materials. Sometimes they are simple braids, marked with beads and bobbles. Sometimes they are elaborate webs which she makes by looping strings round and around some other object she's found. It keeps her peaceful, and if asked she will say,

"The weaving makes me think of all of us."

And how they are connected.

WATER I.

In the burned world where Ilde Vilmaine had been born, there was little water remaining. What water was left was hidden deep underground, the wet luscious temptation that lured fools into the darkness where they would be beset upon by all kinds of monsters, not just the shape-shifter shadows who stalked the aboveground, but also all kind of mythical beasts whispered of in tales. It was all she had been able to think about, when she had first seen the Station's pool. How beautiful and yet how unsightly its opulence was. It had awoken a fear she had never known before, the thought of drowning in its still, perfect waters. Strangled to death by its vengeful nature. The fire in her quenched. Some absurd alchemical symbolism that she struggled to rationalize, or perhaps it was some equally absurd fairytale of a spirit who filled its pool with souls. (Was it so absurd in a land like hers, with magic and flesh-hungry umbra?)

She stills of those things when she looks upon the water, sloshing gently in the confines of the pool, but the emotion is gone. She had surrendered it, allowed it to be supplanted with memories that were not her own. When she enters the water, the vast expense of black is what she thinks of, and that is how her mind stays as she swims.

There are many reasons she prefers to swim alone, and that is merely one. The other is her vast displeasure at having the deep ugly twist of scarring that goes from around one shoulder, all the way across her back, down around a thigh, ogled while in her suit.

WATER II. -- First come, First Serve

She goes in, and she does not come up.

FIRE I. -- Wildcard Physical Training

She is always looking for someone to spar with, and she has been taught very well not to pull punches. She has a preference for weapons, but she'll put down her knives if you prefer to fight empty-handed.

She also very much enjoys competition at the range.

She will play agility games as well. She doesn't know much about sports, but will play if you explain the rules.

FIRE II. -- Serious Business Psychic Training. Please See OOC

Ilde is a Rho, and this is right for her. Her mind -- its strength, and its creativity -- is her jewel. Her symbiote feeds on the immaterial, drinking deep from the black well of her memories, all the ugliness and terror that she has suffered in her short life, and it inflicts those emotions on to others. She no longer likes to sleep, in part, from her many nightmares, but they make a valuable weapon in the waking world.

She has been practicing a trick, with this grisly imagination of hers: summoning the God who burned her world here, for all to see, and for all to know. So that she will be understood, when she tells the others about the place she has come from.

It cannot be done imperfectly, it will not satisfy her. It will not make her believe that they truly know what it felt like, and so she has been building him in her mind, layer upon layer. Even the smell must be true; the sickly sweet stench of his madness. She has practiced on other hosts, once or twice, but after all the strain she had put herself through on Concordia, she is ready.

One must consent to her vision, connection to her memories is a vital component. Memory sets the stage, but can build her little more than a scarecrow. Perhaps intimidating at a glance, but hollow inside and smelling of rot. Only her symbiote can make the terror real.

Real enough, for a moment, just long enough to truly know him, as she had known him...

Dreus Fenn has the stature of a goliath. A mountain of a man who had always appeared before her in nothing more than his loose knee-length trousers and a sash around his waste. The mere sight of him is aggressive, like he has the strength to crush every part of a man with this bare hands: he does, she has seen him do it. His sweat slicked skin shines with a twisted inner light, displacing the world in a hallucinogenic halo around him. His eyes from within his close shaven head have an unnerving intensity before he is even near, as if he slices inside of your thoughts, razor sharp so that the sting of it takes a moment to become aware of, and then burgeons stridently through the temples.

It is a mere insect bite compared to his nearness, the asphyxiating heat that radiates from his body is infernal, like being boiled alive. It is oppressive, an overbearing shock to the system: low oxygen, overheating organs, it initiates a helpless drowsiness. The cloying scent of him -- sickness and overripe fruit and large sharply perfumed flowers -- curdles the stomach, both caustic and candied.

But beneath the heat is the soothing sweet touch of his undiluted magic. He seeps of it, a power that he cannot fully contain inside of his body and so it permeates the air like a drug, only consciously identifiable by a slightly strange taste in the air. Like ozone, an odd humidity, cool and bright just at the back of the tongue. It warps things around him, make them more beautiful, ethereal and shimmering from within the depths of a perpetual heat stroke. He balances you there, dizzy and suffering but given just enough succor to accept. He dazzles, he fulfills, he gives strength where strength fails. A distracting counterbalance to how his corrupting flames blaze, spoiling meat and hearts.

And then he speaks. Deep as thunder, his voice hypnotic whether he speaks in a carefully soothing rhythm or in a maddened frenzy. His orations echo from every direction, filling every crevice, and once heard... Will never be forgotten. Like a coiled snake, it waits in the darkness for you to be unsuspecting that it remains. He speaks in a cadence that seduces, an unnatural charisma that exudes from his deep sonorous voice. The richness of his tone evades all resistance, his words and the images behind them echoing in the depths of the subconscious. They ring there, resonating so perfectly, pitched just so.

His eyes are fixated with their hateful, irascible, heat, their manic intent, and they make it impossible not to listen fully...

"Bow down."

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Cathaway draws her heels in slightly to make room for Ilde there, twitching the skirt of her wrap aside with an easy flick of her wrist and a small chime of the charms there. "Think of the Station like the child of your mother's sister. Do you know the word cousin? It's related to us, but it's not the same as us. It channels our thoughts and energy, and with close enough contact it begins to bend to a shape that we prefer. That's why the Life Support deck has rooms, and why there are spaces for beings like us to live. The kitchen didn't come pre-installed."

There's a sensation of something like laughter under his skin, in the shape of her words, but it's not audible. She smiles. "It's in the Station's best interests to keep us safe and supported here. Without us, we believe it would become...inert." Die isn't the right word. Not really. "Comatose, maybe. We believe it would go into a stasis period if it wasn't supporting hosts. All life desires to somehow self perpetuate."

Ilde does not know much about family ties, she had never known her parents, let alone their own, their siblings. All she knows of such things is that in the burned world they were all Dreus's children. However, she thinks on the shadows, the creatures cast into the world by the flicker of the pyre that was the Godking. Some were nothing but hunger, shapeless, thoughtless, hunters only. Others were so near to being people of their own, some even had enough conviction to resist their maker. She thinks of Ba-Rahmy, the fairest of them all, chained up in the palace where his father tortured him, unable to die until Dreus did. Would he ever?

Ilde makes a soft hum, reaching out absentmindedly to flick one the charms at Cathaway's wrist, she likes the sound of them. Peaceful chiming little things.

"Can we do anything, to please it? To know it better?"

Perhaps she is falling deeper in, she could have referred to herself there.

The charm in question, a small gold diamond with black lines laced through it, sways under the touch and clinks faintly off the small alien bird hanging next to it.

"Be kind to it. We must treat it like we would a precious friend." She thinks - very briefly - of Steve Rogers and his thin wrists, Sam Anders who sleeps now but would quietly prefer to be dead, and Angel whose close cropped hair will go soft and downy and curled as it slowly grows unattended. Or maybe Ilde thinks it. Or maybe the proximity to the girl encourages the her thoughts to drift in that direction, a compass needle meandering toward some magnetic pole.

"But otherwise, you simply continue to do what you're already doing. Be open to it, and the Station will be open to you."

This idea is not so foreign to Ilde. It was the same way that one tended to a garden, and in her opinion each garden had its own mind and personality as well, passive but present if one chose to take the time to understand it all. It really only reinforces a selfish concept of each of the other hosts as a kind of plant... Some to be grown, some to be tamed, some to be pulled up at the root...

"I want more," she says softly, almost non-sequitur but there is a pulsing desire beneath her questions of what can done, to be better.

Cathaway laughs. It's a small sound, clear like river water across stones worn smooth. It doesn't belong to her either - not really. The sound seems strange in the woman's throat, not quite organic to the shape of the body or how it's meant to project. Maybe an old version of Cathaway laughed differently.

But it is genuine, underlined with a flash of easy pleasure and affection delight. She touches the top of Ilde's head, then pats her cheek. "Good. This is a case where thinking on a thing is how it's done. If you feel so deeply about it, we recommend spending some time in the Nesting Deck as well. Connecting yourself to the Station will help nurture the sybmiote's connection."

With Cathaway's explanation of what the Station is, and how it interacts with them, this makes more sense beyond the simplicity of 'it will help nurture the connection', and so Ilde nods peaceably. Sometimes it was... nostalgic to be there in the Nesting Deck, hooked to the Station just like all of her sleeping friends and loved ones. It made them feel just a little bit closer, like they were just beyond a veil rather than a million miles below the waters. Still unreachable, but not at such a dire distance.

All of them together in the Station's cradling tides, dreaming.

"Are there... other things, like to us?" Ilde asks, it is a thought that has begun to sprout inside of her as she has tried to tame Petre, his mind is unruly and in looking at that problem through a critical lens, she sees a much larger concept. "With another plane inside their minds?"

Cathaway tips her head by a degree, a nonverbal question mark in the sway of her pin straight gray hair. "You mean other creatures with a symbiotic telepathic relationship? Or other beings things we can... connect to?"

It's a big series of universes with infinite possibility. Who is she to say what does and doesn't exist?

Telepathic. She had needed the word. She has survived thus far on context, the understanding that they all knew what the symbiote felt like, what its traits were, but she has always lacked the vocabulary to really express it in details. She is better versed in magic and tyrannical dogma, but the symbiote is not that. Neither is it, precisely, machinery. It is an in between thing, preternatural but within a living organic thing.

"Other telepathic creatures," she agrees, pleased to be able to hone in on the concept now armed with the right language. "What will we do, if we are sent to a world where beings touch minds, even ours?"

What will happen to those who refuse to hone, to learn. She does not think they are safe, despite the skill that they call 'shielding'.

"You will have to be very careful and make new allies. It's rare that a universe has telepathy strong enough to actually parse the purpose of presence of the symbiote - most telepathy isn't what we have in terms of clarity -, but it's possible such a universe exists. We hope you won't be required to be there long, but having learned to shield your thoughts can only be helpful in such a scenario."

She isn't usually one to advocate for concentrating on blocking the connection, but there is a tool for everything. No reason to let a muscle atrophy.

"The Prince is better at it than we are. If you'd like to learn how to do it best, you should talk to him."

"I don't want to block it, I want to control it," she says sullenly.

Cathaway's smile flexes patiently. She touches her fingers to Ilde's temple, and her fingertips are tough with callouses. "Keeping the symbiote on a leash is a form of control."

It's all animal instinct, a ridgebacked creature at once both leaning hard against the hand and at heel.

"We might have all the power we care for, but the Prince has discretion. Both are important when you're away from this place."

She purses her lips, pulls back on the temptation for petulance. She closes her eyes, putting her chin down on her folded hands.

( I am no stranger to discretion. But I do not simply want to keep out the others, they are not difficult to deflect. )

She has this idea of breaking through their barriers as well... She has yet to try it, but then no one has tried to keep something from her that she's wanted. Except for Steve. She wants to break him open, she doesn't hide this from Cathaway, but neither does she hide her utter understanding that Steve wouldn't forgive her.

A huff of breath.

( Sometimes the best way to learn how to safely demolish a wall is building a few first. )

"--but yes, the Prince would be disappointed of we didn't confirm your suspicions about how most young hosts understand such a thing."

It's rude. An arbitrary rule that Cathaway has little opinion or preference toward but sometimes silly niceties can become...convenient. Useful.

"I will contemplate upon the subject," she answers peaceably.

She isn't looking to be satisfied, but that statement does please her in some abstract way. It's felt in the sensation of her hand, the cool turn of the air in this place, the gentle murmur of some thought moving beneath the surface of their link. It's a star glittering in the darkness and the sensation that someone else is seeing the same exact thing at the same exact moment, even if they're currently very far away.

Cathaway pats Ilde's cheek, then removes her hand and uncrosses her legs. She rises to her feet in a smooth motion, with the rasp of her wrap and the chime of fine metals.

"We should leave you to your work here."

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(OPEN) I Was Deep In a Dream and I Didn't Know It

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