And the Boats Drift On [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

The water is calm, and the night sky is filled with stars. The only light is natural: a patchy, bioluminescent glow coming from the water below, and the bright swath of the Milky Way above. It's not much, but it's more than enough to see by.

The dreamers will find themselves sitting in their own little rowboats, each stocked with two oars, a length of rope, some cushions, and a little picnic basket full of snacks. There is no visible shoreline, but it won't take the dreamers long to realize theirs are not the only boats in this shallow sea. Anything stirring in the water, be it fish or paddle, causes phosphorescent plankton to glow a bright blue, so there isn't really anywhere to hide.

Feel free to paddle around and visit the other dreamers, perhaps tying your boats together and sharing your snacks in an impromptu picnic. Or you could go for a swim - the bioluminescence makes it difficult to see the bottom, but it's not too terribly deep, so the risk of drowning is all but nonexistent. This setting, unlike the last one, isn't actively out to kill you. Or you could simply lie back and look at the stars.



[ooc: Same drill as always, folks. All are welcome, regardless of whether or not your character is in the game. Characters may remember or forget dream shenanigans at the player's discretion.]

Comments

[rae_of_sun]

Thanks to said bioluminescence, Croach isn't as hard to spot as he might be otherwise. Her boat rocks precariously as Sunshine turns toward him, and she braces herself against the sides in a mostly futile effort to stop the vessel from swaying.

"Hey, Croach," she calls back. She's surprised - and vaguely indignant - to see that he's just paddling around in the water instead of in a boat of his own. It's one thing to put someone in a rowboat in the middle of some weird endless ocean, and quite another to just put them directly into the weird endless ocean. How long as he been swimming like that? "Do you want to climb aboard?" How he'd manage it without tipping her into the water is anyone's guess, but she has to at least offer.

[bagropa]

"I am comfortable," Croach assures her, treading water several small units of distance away. "My vessel was similarly unstable." Under the surface, the water glows faintly blue around his legs and arms, and Croach takes note of the imaginary miniscule creatures producing the glow, as well as the fictitious high salinity of the water and its pollutants. Whatever is producing these sensations, it is highly accurate to reality. "Is this another human dream?"

[rae_of_sun]

Ah. Dream. Of course. She totally knew that.

"It's not mine." Well, it's probably not hers. She has some weird dreams, but they tend to involve blood and vampires or sun-dappled fur and new-old senses, or retreading familiar ground from her own universe. Giant oceans are definitely not a recurring theme. If anything, she would have guessed it was Croach's, since he seems a bit more comfortable here than she is… except for the pesky fact that Mars, as far as she knows, is pretty much the polar opposite of this place in every conceivable way.

So, maybe they're gate-crashing a third party's subconscious. Seems possible, though there's the question of where this dreamer is, if it's not either of them. "Have you seen anyone else around?"

[bagropa]

Well obviously she could not sense it with her laughable human senses. "Well it is not mine," Croach interjects under his breath, appalled by even the suggestion of the idea that his mind is responsible for something so laden with symbolic imagery and metaphor. "There are other humans present," he declares somewhat cautiously, "and other beings, but I have not encountered them, and I am unable to discern much of significance about them. This environment is not conducive to tracking accurately."

[rae_of_sun]

The pluralization stirs a few vague memories hunched in the back of her mind. "I think… this has happened before," she says, though not with a whole lot of certainty. "Dreams with a bunch of people in them, I mean." She remembers an overlarge bee with sudden clarity, and she's sure she met - or at least saw - more than one person in that dream. "Maybe there's some kind of recurring group thing."

And wouldn't that just be spartan? The thought of sharing her dreams with just one other person is enough to put her nose out of joint, let alone the thought of sharing a dreamscape with everyone and their carthaginian dog. Sighing, she goes back to rifling through her basket - carefully, so the boat doesn't rock too much. The faint, mirrored glow from above and below would probably be enough to see by even without vampire vision, but it's also dark enough that she can just barely make out the golden lacework of the light-web beneath her skin. It's a little surprising when she finds her own cookies in the basket, because it's not as if she packed it herself, but she's not going to complain that the dream's giving her good stuff instead of some substandard mass-produced swill.

"Want a cookie?" she offers before considering how she can get it to him. Tossing it in the general direction of his mouth seems rude.