open | merry & bright

[exequy]

WHO: Anyone!
WHAT: Everyone lives happily ever after, forever, for real, wait don't look behind that curtain—
WHEN: Late Haring
WHERE: The mountains
NOTES: No one is late to this. Feel free to get around to it in January. Or February! And if you have questions you can ask me here, but for any question that's "can I do this within my character's dream?" the answer will be yes! You can do anything.

The snowstorm that blows up around them in the mountains isn't unexpected and isn't a disaster. It only dashes some thin hopes that it might not come on so strong or so swiftly. But they've almost reached what they're aiming for — a cave along the cliffy coastal road that's associated with the disappearances of several caravans and now said to be home to a rift — and there's a village up ahead, glowing warmly through the snowfall once they're near enough.

They're not the first waylaid travelers here. The one little inn is full to bursting, with just enough room for Riftwatch's contingent to squeeze in at tables if they get creative about the seating, the lower floor so packed that body heat and the little fire combined make things outright toasty. The beds are all spoken for, but the innkeeper, a warm, upbeat woman with frizzy hair escaping a bun, says not to worry. She's not turning anyone out into the cold. Blankets on the floor is better than that. If anyone finds it too uncomfortable to sleep curled with old blankets on a creaking wooden floor surrounded by the snores of colleagues and strangers — no, they don't. It's comfortable. It's warm. The sniffles and rough coughs from the other side of the room have the rhythm of a lullaby, and the snow-covered roads and the rift and the missing are all problems for a tomorrow that does not immediately come.

They wake, each of them, in a world where there is nothing of significance left for them to worry about. Not the road or the rift or the missing. Not the war; that's over now. Not poverty or obligation or illness. Between them and the life they've always wanted, the way has been cleared of obstacles, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the comforts of a well-earned easy life — and if something is a little off, no it isn't. Shh. If the victories feel hollow, or the details blur, or the seams begin to show, the world will tighten around them like hands around a wounded bird who needs to be kept from thrashing, whispering that they don't need to worry. Everything will be fine. Just hold still and let it take care of you.

The first to pull free of the delusion on their own will find themselves in the twisting grasp of a lucid dream that's trying very hard to snare them again, stumbling out of their happy endings into the worlds of others'. They might be pulled beneath the surface for a time: the entity saying, all right, if that didn't work for you, maybe this? But the more of them who congregate together, with their incompatible wishes, the more the fabric will begin to fray, until at last it rots away altogether and they find themselves waking on the floor of a cold, abandoned inn, covered in moldering blankets and lingeringly queasy from half-rotted food eaten at least a day earlier, surrounded by the bodies of the inn's other occupants in various early states of decay.

And after, because rest for the weary really is just a dream, they do have to go find that rift.

ooc | Final confrontation with the spirit that allows breaking out into the real world will happen via a log in here I will link when it's happening. But you're also welcome to say your character wasn't involved in that part and went straight to waking up!

Comments

[portalling]

The brass and red is an unintended echo; Stephen’s new hands are the same gleaming gold of his sling ring, the Staff of the Living Tribunal, the Eye of Agamotto, all cast in geometric angular shapes.

“Viktor,” Stephen says in welcome. He doesn’t need the bright beaming smiles; the friendly collegial warmth between the two men has always been subtle enough, painted mostly in the way they would perk up in conversation, heads bent over an intriguing problem, voices animated in intellectual patter, hands gesturing.

Today, the sorcerer cocks his head and surveys the greenhouse around them. Remembering twining vines, florid greenery. Another life.

“Or is there something else I should be calling you? The man at the door knew who I was referring to, but he simply said an audience.”

i promise my next tag will come less than two months later

[grindset]

While Viktor's scrutiny relaxes away from those fresh augmentations, it persists; the doctor's curiosity, his interest, is noted with private approval.

With a gait kept slow for want of urgency, not ability, he moves near. There's a fluidity to it. A sense of ease in limbs wrought anew, sculpted in flexing strips of some alloy yet unnamed in this world. Here and there, in the gaps between sinews, a dim glow. The faintest distortion, like a buzzing echo barely offset, as he says,

"My name will suffice."

He now lifts his gaze, shares in the survey of the structure surrounding them with eyes gone strange: pale, opaline. No trace left of that warm gold.

"Your emergence is timely—many changes are underway, and we have need of your skillset."

zooms

[portalling]

For the first time in years, the chronic pain in his hands isn’t just a low hum in the background, but it’s gone, fully gone as if it never was, and his fingers move with the same grace and fluidity that brings Viktor striding over. (No longer hobbling, no longer looking like he’s on the verge of being knocked off by a stiff breeze; it’s a marvel.)

And so Stephen’s distracted. The comment, too, catches on on his pampered ego, a man who likes to be involved, to be essential, isn’t that how all these super-teams worked anyway —

“Of course,” he says, his new fingers curling into a fist, admiring the solidity of it, before he raises his gaze to the other man. “What do you need?”