It's a Waste of Time, Chasing in the Dark

[applesaucemod]

Tonight, the dreamers will find themselves in a forest. Or an office. Or a suburban living room. Or a castle tower. Or a grocery store. The dream is a patchwork of assorted settings, each one blurring inelegantly into the next, most of them only claiming half an acre or so. The hodgepodge makes for quite a sight.

Or it would, if the dreamers could see anything. Natural light is in short supply. In fact, there isn't any light at all, not even a faint twinkle of starlight; you might as well be deep inside a cave. No matter how good their eyes might be, the dreamers won't be able to see their own hands in front of their faces - not unless they can fashion some sort of light source out of whatever they might manage to find. The dream isn't inclined to make things easy; any appliances or electrical light sources the dreamers stumble over won't be plugged in, and any walls, however solid they might seem, won't contain any wiring. A small fire might be the best bet - presuming you can find any means of lighting one.

But there's good news. Each of the dreamers will find themselves with a second set of dubiously useful eyes, because they'll be joined - again, or for the first time - by their dæmons. Granted, said dæmons won't have much more luck seeing in the total darkness than anyone else, but at least no one will have to feel alone.

Just… move carefully. You wouldn't want to trip over someone else's dæmon by mistake. Imagine how awkward that would be.

[ooc: y'all know the drill. Characters don't have to be apped or in the game to show up, and dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the player's discretion. This particular dream isn't a power nerf - a character with the ability to create light could still do so - but the range will be extremely localized, as if the darkness is a solid thing that doesn't want to be pushed back.]

Comments

[boneshaker]

Born with it? He wrinkles his nose at that. The implications of that are - well, fuck, if he thought there were class issues where he's from. If it's just a piece of a person's randomly selected genetic makeup, that's a whole new thing to segregate by, and he wouldn't be surprised. Not the sort of thing you just casually ask about, though.

Fortunately the rest of what she's saying is totally fascinating, so his wariness is short-lived. Sounds about the same, practically speaking, as what he does - but equally as limiting and finicky as what the more elitist handlers do.

"Man, that's something," he says, examining the knife curiously. "I've never heard of a sunlight focus." Then again, no one's ever heard of a trash focus either. And the way she's describing it, it sounds like she doesn't work with sunlight directly, rather it fuels her transmutation.

"I take energy from my f- affinity," he says, "and I can do, like, simple spells. But it's a lot more about the thing I work with. Like if you could use sunlight to fight."

[rae_of_sun]

Right. If. Sunshine presses her lips together and stares down at the knife, remembering what she did with it, remembering what she did with her hands. The surrounding darkness suddenly feels less like a benign annoyance and more like a looming threat. Anything could be out there.

He could be out there.

"Hey," Dom says sharply, and she feels the prickle of his feet moving across her neck until he can tap his foreleg against her faintly glowing necklace-scar. "Sheer." Her knife, too, is brighter than it had been a moment ago, warming her palm like a hot cup of tea.

Gods. Get it together, Sunshine. It's just a damn dream, and the more of a show she puts on, the more of an explanation she'll owe.

She inhales, and her scar fades. The knife stays brighter, but she doesn't have it in her to tell it to cool it. It can stay that way, if it wants.

Right. Let's just pretend that didn't happen. "What do you work with?" she asks, risking a brief glance up at Castor.

[boneshaker]

What - He steps back a little as he spots a little spiderweb of light shining out on her skin. Her bee seems to scold her for it, but that's actually fantastic, like if she could do that more, she'd be a little beacon.

But it's not his place to suggest. It settles back down and she obviously doesn't want to talk about it. And he knows well enough what that's like.

Case in point. It's not that he's ashamed of what he does, far from it, it just usually involves a little more explanation than he'd like, especially with fellow users, especially since this one follows different rules entirely. But if it'll help push away whatever she's pushing, then he can deal.

"Well," he says, sucking air through his teeth. "It's kind of a long story, but the short answer is... trash."

[rae_of_sun]

Well, he's not pressing her for details on the light show, for which she's absurdly grateful. She wouldn't consider her counter-affinity a state secret, and if he does end up in Manhattan, he'll probably find out about it sooner or later. But now is definitely not the time. Or place. It's especially not the place.

Instead, he shares his affinity, and she immediately understands his initial reluctance. Her first response is an incredulous snort, because sunlight might be rare but refuse is frigging unheard-of. (What would that even mean on a counter-affinity scale? A resistance to cleanliness? No allergies or autoimmune disorders?) But, okay, no need to be rude. It's not like he was born with it. He chose garbage. And actually...

"... That's totally thor," she says. "Talk about constant access." Trash is everywhere, all the time.

[boneshaker]

He grins, both at her comprehension and her slang, peppered with adjectives he's never heard but whose meaning he can easily ascertain. "Yeah, that was my thought exactly," he says. He's a little relieved at the darkness, hiding his growing enthusiasm. "Like, where I come from, anyone can learn to do magic but like... it kind of depends on what resources you have. So rich folks get to play around with fancy shit like fire and lightning, but people like me... metalwork and stonework is pretty common, but I went in a kind of... different direction."

"You just wanted to scandalize all the rich kids," says Persis.

Castor can't help but grin. "Yeah," he says. "I'll admit that's part of it."

[rae_of_sun]

This isn't her first brush with the whole 'anyone can learn magic' concept - that's how it works where Spike's from - but it still throws her a bit. She can never decide if such an egalitarian approach would make things better or worse, practically speaking. In Spike's universe, the fact that anyone could do magic seems to be tempered by the fact that a significant percentage of the population doesn't even believe it exists.

What would the Wars have been like, if magic was as accessible as algebra?

Maybe her dubiousness is just a side effect of growing up in a universe where magic makes weird demands and goes rogue and isn't always biddable. It's hard to get all starry-eyed over the thought of some magical utopia when you can't even buy a charm without knowing, in the back of your mind, that it's probably going to go a bit nuts one day and have to be taken out back behind the proverbial woodshed.

Castor's universe isn't sounding that spartan on the egalitarian front, anyway. Setting aside the question of why something as basic as fire would only be available to the elite - he's carrying a lighter, after all - she gets the gist.

"So it's just about money, not the physical properties of the material?" she asks. Gods, this is the nerdiest conversation she's had in a while. "Like, when I transmute things - when anyone back home transmutes things - some materials are easier to work with than others. If it's denser, or if it's been heavily worked by people already, it's more stubborn. So, like, cloth is easier than stone, and a stone carving is harder than an unaltered rock."

"Strap in," Dom mutters to Persis. Then, to the group at large, "Should we sit down or something?"

Sunshine gives him an unimpressed look. "Like it makes any difference to you."

[boneshaker]

"Not all about money," says Castor. He smirks at Dom's dry remarks. He thinks Persis, for all her proverbial eye-rolling, is just as into this conversation as he is. Sunshine's brief explanation of properties is already fascinating, both similar and different to how things work in his experience. "We could sit," he concedes. "It's not like we have anywhere to go."

He does so without hesitation, and Persis settles down into his lap.

"It's a little of both," he says, moving his hands around expressively and without much purpose. "The problem with the fancy shit - like fire, for instance - it burns out quick and it's really hard to control. Lightning they sell in fuckin' bottles, some weird jacked shit that self-sustains. That's way expensive, and super impractical. It's like breeding in. The more you draw from the same source, the weaker it gets - it's a racket, really. The rich people keep buying more of it cause it keeps burning out. Fire - I mean, people can make that themselves, but you have to do it with paper and matches like anyone else, and then you just have that one source, and it's not gonna last. Entropy always gets to it eventually. You can spread it out a bit, but try that without burning your whole condo down. It looks impressive but its utility is like... basically just showing off. Light shows. I work with entropy. Garbage is eternal. It's everywhere, it's malleable, and it's subjective as shit. No need to buy anything specifically designed for me. And it has more uses than you might think."

"He really likes talking about this," says Persis. "He pretends it's such a hardship but look at him go."

"Not every day you meet a user from another planet," says Castor with a wry grin.

[rae_of_sun]

Well, why not. Sunshine sits. The ground here isn't the most comfortable, but standing indefinitely wouldn't be comfortable, either. She looks down at her knife and gives it a little mental nudge - maybe just a bit more? - and when it obliges her, she sets it on the ground between herself and Castor, like a tiny campfire. Its glow might be weaker than a real fire, but at least it's constant.

It's weird, listening to Castor describe his universe's version of magic-handling. Utility seems to be the big difference. The big magic-handling families tend to be rich back home, too, but the correlation is reversed: they've earned more because they can do more - and because they go back umpteen generations in a relatively straight line. Money tends to flow through the same carefully controlled channels as genetic predispositions. The end result of that more literal inbreeding tends to be diminished skill (go figure), but the point is rarely - if ever - something as straightforward as pyrotechnics. And even if the general competence level takes a dive, it's arguably worth it if it means avoiding a bad cross. A third-cousin who can barely twist a charm is less embarrassing than a third-cousin who went on a homicidal spree.

"So, hang on," she says as Dom trundles down her arm and into her palms, "what is it you're doing with magic? Aside from light shows. Ward-cutting? Charms?" Transmutation is comparatively unmarketable, but at least it has practical applications.

[boneshaker]

"Uhh." Well, there's something he's never been asked before. People ask him what he personally does, but not... everyone across the board. Does she have an answer to such a broad question where her world is concerned?

"I mean... whatever they want?" He shrugs. "It's just a thing people use. You have to get documentation to use it, but that's not hard. That's just like a note on your ID. Mine just says 'handler' cause I don't use it for anything specific. There's like... academics, they're all theory and alchemy and shit. There's pop magicians, they're like entertainers, or they just use it to show off at parties. There's a ton of people who use it in their work, like... cops, doctors, architects... And then there's regular people who just kind of... know how to do it but don't get paid to. That's me. Undocumented users are either criminals or hedge witches."

"Successful criminals," says Persis pointedly.

"I am a thief, not a criminal," says Castor, sounding wholly affronted, which he knows is almost entirely for Sunshine's benefit. "If you're my inner spirit, you should know the damn difference between organized heists and stealing a damn watch or whatever."

"What part of you do you think I am?" says Persis. "The part that's like 'this is fine' or the part that's like 'if you weren't such a piece of shit you'd have a real job'?"

Castor stares at what little he can see of her for a moment before looking up at Sunshine's dimly illuminated face. "Sooo," he says. "Does that answer your question?"

[rae_of_sun]

She didn't really expect the question to throw him. Probably because, at least in her universe, it isn't that broad. Sure, there are countless varieties of small magics that come with things like having peri blood - pouring coffee that's always hot, stitching a seam that never unravels - but those are more like singular quirks than full-blown magic-handling (no disrespect to Mary, who is everyone's preferred coffee-pourer for a reason).

But if you have enough magic in your veins to be worth getting registered, the practical applications are pretty much just Other-related. It's amazing how quickly the field narrows when 'whatever you want' amounts to 'not suffering a messy, horrible death, please and thank you.'

Castor's universe, from the sound of things, isn't operating under those... constraints.

"Yeah." She drops her gaze to her hands, and her bee. "That answers it."

Dom looks up at her, as if waiting to see if she's going to offer anything interesting before taking it upon himself. "We're from more of a gritty, war-torn magical dystopia," he deadpans, which earns him an incredulous snort from Sunshine.

"Dystopia?" she repeats. "Gods and frigging angels." Since when did her bee develop a flair for the dramatic? To Castor, she adds, "It's not a damn dystopia, and it's not gritty." Well, some of it isn't. It's not gritty as a rule.

"War-torn, though. You gotta give me that one."

Sunshine briefly entertains the idea of flicking her smug bee right off her lap, but she knows it would hurt her as much (if not more) than him. Instead, she deliberately shifts her focus up to Castor. "We have Others, in my universe. Vampires, weres, 'ubis, ghouls, demons. That sort of thing. Most of our magic-handling is about... dealing with that."

for this tag I'd like to thank Big Al, who also says dogs can't look up

[boneshaker]

He perks up, ridiculously, at the bee's very grim pronouncement.

"Hey, I'm from a dystopia!" he says. He might as well be saying they both own dogs. "And it's definitely gritty."

Persis nips at him, and he flinches and looks down at her, utterly affronted. She doesn't have to speak for him to know exactly what she's trying to communicate. War-torn, asshole. This isn't an oppression pissing match.

He clears his throat and looks back at Sunshine.

"It's, um, mostly just class warfare," he says. "Secret police, government spying on the public, that kind of thing. We, uh, don't really have..." He shrugs. "Well, we got a few, I guess you'd call 'em 'Others'." Who started calling them that? It's so unabashedly, well, othering. He supposes that shouldn't surprise him. It's not like he hasn't seen his share of that. "I mean, there was a genetic mutation a few decades back where people started growing horns. Everyone calls them minotaurs and treats them like second-class citizens, but they're just regulars. And I guess maybe ghosts exist."

"According to some guy you know named Three-Finger Dave," says Persis, sounding and feeling appalled that he is continuing to talk.

"He was right about the last Ikea being a drug nest," says Castor.

"Because he was a dealer!" snaps Persis, and jumps up sharply on his head, digging her little paws into his hair and leaning forward to stare at Sunshine. "I apologize for my dumbshit outer self who can't seem to stop babbling. He is actually extremely curious about these Others. Like 'ubis, what the heck is that?"

Okay then. Persis is taking the reins, which is possibly for the best. He slouches, looking sullen but feeling only mild embarrassment.

[rae_of_sun]

Sunshine could add that her universe has her share of horned people, but that doesn't seem as noteworthy. Being a partblood - to whatever degree - is so commonplace that it only becomes worth mentioning if it actually manifests in some noticeable-in-public kind of way. Like that poor kid who grew tusks in high school; his family wound up moving to another town. It was an extreme response, as they go. Usually it's just a matter of some clandestine plastic surgery, and no lasting harm done. You can only get so worked up about something that's probably lying dormant in the majority of the population, whether it manifests or not.

As far as the real Others go, Persis sure knows how to pick them. Actually, of all the options, Sunshine's probably most comfortable explaining this one. "Oh, like... incubi, succubi. They're kind of, um, subtle. You don't really notice them so much as you notice whoever they've targeted, because thing-thralls are... less subtle. Like, suddenly your neighbor is sleeping eighteen hours a day and spending the rest of their time looking like they just had fantastic sex." She shrugs. "They aren't even that dangerous if you catch them before too long, but the science types say that your IQ drops about ten points for every month spent as a thing-thrall, so."

[boneshaker]

Castor sits up a little straighter at this explanation, which is both fascinating and incredibly creepy. His eyebrows twitch. It sounds - well. No point going down that road.

"Yikes," says Persis. Nudging Castor's head with a paw, she says, "Kinda reminds me of Jack."

Okay well apparently Persis is going to go down that road for him. Thank you, Persis.

Well, he spared Sunshine the trial of drudging up old things once already; perhaps she'll do the same for him.

He makes a derisive, dismissive sound and ducks his head down, quickly so Persis has to relocate to his shoulder. He rubs a hand over the back of his neck and looks back up.

"I can see how having non-humans would make it extra complicated," he says. "Still, though. Fuckin' vampires and everything." He lets out a weak laugh. Fuckin' vampires indeed. Lamest of the movie monsters, in his personal opinion. "Are they the whole shebang? Can't stand garlic, wither in sunlight kinda shit? I guess that'd be good news for you, huh."

[rae_of_sun]

Sunshine snorts. She doesn't know who Jack is (obviously), but she doesn't need to; the comment pretty well speaks for itself. Castor doesn't seem keen on elaborating, and pressing for all the dirty details would be a pretty sorry repayment for the way he graciously let her own brief freakout slide.

Not that she's thrilled to shift the subject back to vampires. "Um. Well." With her bee-free hand, she absently fiddles with a fold in her jeans. "I don't know what the 'whole shebang' consists of in your universe, but back home, they're... pretty deadly. I mean, they can't go out in the sunlight, but everything else is wishful thinking. The garlic thing is a myth--"

"--a desperate one," Dom cuts in derisively.

"--and they can compel people to say anything they want, so the whole 'needing an invitation' thing doesn't slow them down much. Once you look into their eyes, you're toast."

"Usually."

Sunshine gives Dom a look, but he ignores it. Instead, he trundles off her lap and up to the knife, as if basking. "A sunlight affinity is an advantage," he says. "SOF's frigging desperate to put Sunshine on their payroll."

Yeah, there's one thing she doesn't miss. "Special Other Forces," she elaborates. "Sucker cops. They, um... found out about my affinity, even though I wasn't registered." Gods, how's that for a heavily-sanitized summary. "I'm not sure I'd call it good news," she dryly adds. "I'm a baker. I didn't want to spend my off-time skegging vampires." That's without the added complication of being bound to two of them, to varying degrees.

[boneshaker]

Castor listens to her explanation with raised eyebrows and an increasingly dubious expression. It's not that he doesn't believe any of this, it's all just so... foreign. He appreciates her colorful slang as much as anything, which gives the whole story a realistic flair he ordinarily wouldn't expect from something involving vampires.

"Damn," he says helpfully, once she's finished. "Yeah, I kinda know what you mean." It's not like anyone's tried to recruit him for anything like that, but there sure are a lot of dark-tier organizations out there, and a lot of people who'd hire magic-users for just about anything. Some of the jobs he's even taken.

"Baker does sound a lot better than merc-work," he says, settling back a bit and stroking Persis' fur idly. She seems a little bewildered by this at first, but doesn't really object. It's kind of nice. "I wish I ever had claim to a steady job. Or, like, a talent."

"Other than free manipulation of garbage," says Persis airily.

"Mmhm."