Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

The woods are dark and deep, but not particularly lovely. If anything, they feel dangerous, as if something terrible might come lurching out from behind any given tree and tear into the nearest warm body. What that terrible thing might be is anyone's guess. A cat with hands? Slenderman? Stegosaurus? Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf? All of the above in a horrible mob? It's anyone's guess. But every dreamer will be absolutely convinced that there is something unspeakable out there, and that it's after them.

The dreamers have two things on their side. The first is that there is actually nothing dangerous lurking in these woods (with the possible exception of other dreamers). The pervasive terror the dreamers are feeling is just that: a rift-given feeling, nothing more and nothing less. That snapping twig or rustle in the undergrowth is almost certainly just a squirrel or something else equally harmless.

The second is that no dreamer is alone. They all will be reunited with - or introduced to - their dæmons, a source of comfort in this dark, intimidating wilderness. However frightened the dreamers might be, at least they have someone with them who definitely doesn't want them dead.

[OOC: as ever, any and all are welcome! You don't have to be in the game to join the fun. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. And the party only stops when you want it to; feel free to backtag forever.]

Comments

[powerdealer]

Sephronia is keeping pretty quiet throughout this, so Seth thinks it's probably just Daniel and Aliyah who really lack the filter. Sephronia leans more towards merely voicing things Seth's already kind of thinking and wants to say but can't quite bring himself to share. At least that's happened a few times so far. Like just a while earlier when she revealed to Johnny that Seth has a thing for Daniel. Seth is very glad she doesn't consider it a good idea to tell Daniel the same thing. Though he can't pretend that thought doesn't have him a little bit worried.

"At least these two are kind of self reliant," he points out. "Johnny's was a little rabbit. But I also met a wolf. And apparently Gabe's a damn griffin, so."

[peacefulexplorer]

"Gabe's a griffin?" Daniel halts, frowning sharply at some distant point between the trees. "No, okay. He's an archangel, so that - that actually makes sense." Sort of, anyway. He imagines it has something to do with the whole celestial origins thing, which stirs up a few memories of the other curiosities he's run into here and there.

"Some of these soul-animal things, these bits of ourselves? I guess they can get pretty intense," he remarks, watching Aliyah sniff at an innocuous root with a concentration that's not fully warranted. "Like okay, get this - met a guy with this big red cat that had wings. And an anatomically correct Lycian chimaera. I guess they're representations of us, you know, reflections of our inner selves."

Daniel's uncertain of the meaning of having a snow leopard as the physical extension of his soul, but he doesn't particularly mind it either. Aliyah operates in good synchrony with him, right down to the scintillating, blazingly perceptive stare.

And then there's the matter of her name. Whether it's something the dream picked out or a fundamental fact of Daniel, he finds its meaning to be unsettling and reassuring in equal quantities.

[powerdealer]

Daniel seems to have about the same reaction to Gabe being a griffin as Seth did, although his was a bit muted, a bit more resigned. Of course Gabe would be a griffin, that's perfectly ridiculous and impressive, both scary and kind of beautiful. He wonders if griffins have a tendency to make innuendo-filled comments a lot. Probably not.

Seth frowns at the news of someone with a literal chimera, though. That's... That doesn't sound like someone he wants to bump into. "Did you get his name?" he asks, trying not to sound worried.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Um. Wait no, hang on, I know this." He has to shut his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose to concentrate. Dreams are not temporally linear and that makes them infinitely more frustrating - that little encounter could have happened before or after this one, or even contemporaneously because dreams here are just like that, ever-diverging and tangling and splicing into one another with shameless abandon.

"Er. Wait. Wait wait wait." Yes, okay, this is good. He's remembering. Well, sort of. "Zagreus? Yeah, Zagreus. I remember, I asked him if that was, you know, as in the Dionysian god but he said there was no relation."

His recollection of that meeting runs thin at that point. Daniel gives his head a firm shake but the action stirs up nothing more.

[powerdealer]

Seth frowns at the name. It does sort of ring a bell, and he doesn't think it's because of the Dionysian god. But he hears a lot of names, many of them very strange, so it's difficult to remember the context. Finally he just shakes his head, giving up.

"Well, noted. Don't think we've met. And I don't think I want to if his soul is a chimera," he says.

[peacefulexplorer]

Daniel shrugs and makes a noncommittal noise. That's fair, especially seeing as he can't really remember how amiable that exchange had been.

"Glad I ran into you, at least," he says with a nascent grin. "As opposed to, say, Lucifer." Now that would really not be a fun thing to run into.