A Day Late and a Dollar Short

[applesaucemod]

As far as dreams go, this seems surprisingly...normal. True, the dreamers of Manhattan and beyond will find themselves stranded in the middle of the ocean on a fairly deserted rocky island, but it's nothing so unusual as the labyrinth from last time, and no one appears to have become an animal or reverted to an insane past (or future) version of themself. Besides, well, rocks and grass, there's nothing here but an abandoned lighthouse, the doors and windows broken, and the spare furniture worn by the weather. You can go up the spiral staircase to look at the view, but there's nothing to see but the endless ocean. One might almost think tonight was a night for simple socializing via the telepathic current.

As if anything to do with the rift is ever that simple, you silly bumpkin. How quickly each person realizes what is unusual about tonight's dream will depend in large part on their personality. Some might go the entire night without noticing (except from the distress of others, naturally), but some will find out the instant they open their mouths to converse with another dreamer. You see, each and every dreamer will be completely unable to tell a lie for as long as the dream lasts. The truth might be evaded by omission, but any attempt to say that which is untrue will result in the corresponding truth emerging instead.

Good thing it's just a dream and everyone's going to forget in the morning, right? Right??


[Mod note: As usual, players can choose to have their characters remember or forget anything that happens in the Dreaming. As per usual party rules, both members and non-members are welcome to play any character in this post, regardless of whether that character is currently in the game. Unlike usual, tonight's theme is not optional; all characters will be subject to the enforced truth-telling. Have fun!]

Comments

[stronglikebear]

"Not where I come from," Yuri confirms. "There are some in New York now, but they're from other universes. Some of them are okay, but some not so much."

Hey, Sunshine, some people's vampires are different.

[rae_of_sun]

That earns him a highly skeptical look. 'Okay' is not a term she's ever heard anyone use in relation to suckers - even when it might apply, like with Con, though that's perhaps due to the fact that she's the only human she knows who's okay with him. And, again, he's the exception to what is still a pretty hard and fast rule.

Or maybe she's still having some issues with the idea of a habitable New York. Major population centers did not fare well during the Wars, and her universe's NYC is one of those too-numerous places so well and truly wrecked that not even the wilderness will take it back.

"Count yourself lucky," she says, making a face. "We'll be lucky if we aren't all under the dark in a hundred years." Which, if she goes on with the magic-handling, might be something she gets to witness firsthand. What joy.

[stronglikebear]

"'Under the dark'? Do you mean like turned into vampires? Where would they get blood?"

Yuri's pretty sure he's seen a movie about this. In fact, he knows he has; he really enjoyed it. But yeah, does she have a problem with the idea that maybe not all vampires are like the ones in her world? Yuri's even ready to accept -- okay, he might be ready to accept -- that weres from other universes aren't like him. So what's so weird about vampires coming in different flavors?

[rae_of_sun]

She might be willing to concede that vampires come in different flavors... if she was also willing to concede the whole other-universes thing, which currently ranks as less plausible than 'really weird dream' when all is said and done. It's clear that this guy has no idea what real vampires are like, which might otherwise tip the scales in the other universe's favor, but her universe has its own little old lady brigade: people (of all ages and genders) deluded enough to think that the Others are harmless, cute things that live in gardens and wear harebells. While some Others might masquerade as such, that doesn't mean they are that way.

"I mean the suckers are going to be running the show. They're not going to turn everyone - they'd need someone to eat, as you said - but..." she hunches her shoulders in an irritated shrug. But it's not like anyone will still be able to kid themselves that the vampires aren't in charge. But they might just keep humans in camps, for all anyone knows. It's not a pleasant thing to contemplate, so she tries not to, but it's also pretty godsdamn hard to forget.

[stronglikebear]

Doesn't she lump weres in with these 'Others,' though? Yuri's not exactly going to take it well if she starts going off about how everyone non-human (and he'd argue with the idea that he's not a human to begin with) is to be distrusted. Sure, he's a vicious beast once each month, but it's not like he can help it.

"Wow," he says. "Are there that many of them? I mean, back home we've got a lot of weres, but we're still a minority."

[rae_of_sun]

Everyone does, not just her. And Sunshine's probably more open-minded than most, given her relationship with Con. Besides, most weres aren't anywhere near as bad as vampires. There's the part where they're normal people for most of the month - and those who get ahold of the drugs are normal people all month. And not all weres are created equal. A werechicken or a werecat isn't going to be the sort of nuisance that, say, wererats and werecoyotes can be.

Trouble is, vampires are bad enough that their badness tends to rub off on anyone who isn't strictly human. That's why demon crosses tend to try and keep things as discreet as possible. Even if their partblood heritage only manifests itself in a relatively harmless way - like growing in a second row of teeth, or hovering a foot above the bed every night after you fall asleep - people are still going to look at you sideways for being fractionally one of them. Hell, even peris don't exactly shout it from the rooftops.

Okay, so it's pretty cool to be suspected of being a fallen angel, but that's about it. Anyone else under the Other umbrella keeps their head down, whether they really need to or not.

"No one really knows how many there are," Sunshine admits. "A lot of people got turned during the Wars, but it's not like there's an Other census." Or that the government would get anything close to an accurate count, even if they could find enough foolhardy census-takers to attempt one. "Enough for us to be losing, anyway."

[stronglikebear]

In Yuri's world, on the other hand, they know exactly how many weres are around. Okay, so developing countries probably don't have an accurate count, and there are sure to be little pockets of weres living in secret out in the woods here and there (there'd been a lot of speculation that the Unabomber was one, which never quite got completely dispelled from the public opinion even when he went to jail and failed to turn into anything under observation. Those crazy weres, right? Surely they're more likely to become terrorists, yada yada).

"We do have a census -- I mean, you don't have to tell your neighbors or anything as long as you're set up with a cage, but I had to register, and I had to put it on my college applications." That's right, cage. Standard method, yo. "That last part sucked, by the way."

[rae_of_sun]

She does offer a sympathetic wince, though she's not sure that weres having a somewhat harder time isn't balanced out by the fact that in his (supposed) universe, there's no looming threat of a vampire takeover. "So you just have weres?" she asks, for the sake of clarification. "No peris or anything else?" Weird.

[stronglikebear]

Somewhat?

"Just weres," he confirms. "Lots of different kinds, though. What are peris?"

[rae_of_sun]

Well, given present company, she's probably not going to bring up the gross yearly mop-up of certain weres that happens in New Arcadia - and plenty of other places, too. If a were manages to stay under the radar, great. If not... well. Best-case scenario involves SOF cages.

"People with peri blood are like Mary," she explains, happy enough to talk about this particular kind of partblood. "They usually have some kind of trick they can do, and it might not be terribly useful, but it won't be trouble."

Now she's once again wondering just what kind of a were Yuri is. Seems rude to ask. All she really wants to do is reassure herself that he's not a wereskunk, but they're getting along reasonably well. If he is a wereskunk, it'd be stupid to risk pissing him off with her nosiness.

[stronglikebear]

"And who decides what counts as trouble?" asks Yuri, not much caring for the sound of it. It doesn't sound like Mary is dangerous at all -- except maybe if someone gets scalded -- but he's faced seen enough oppression to know that the ones in charge aren't always so great at using their common sense and seeing that someone isn't going to go around hurting people just because they're different.

[rae_of_sun]

Sunshine snorts indelicately. "Anything that reminds people too much of vampires is trouble." Which is why she'll admit to being a stuff-changer well before she ever admits to her weird counteraffinity for vampires.

... Or to being able to see in the dark, when she can help it, because that's a sucker trick. Even if people assume it's just demon blood manifesting itself, you don't want people thinking you've got magic-handling genes and demonic ones. That's like calmly announcing that you could go violently insane at any minute.

And she thinks SOF is being overbearing now.

[stronglikebear]

"Are the vampires really that bad?" asks Yuri. He's ready to believe that the vampires of her world aren't up to any good, but it doesn't sound like the 'normal' people there are much better, with all their suspicions regarding anyone who doesn't pass the grade for being perfectly human.

[rae_of_sun]

Yes. "Not all of them." Oh, gods and angels, this again. "Most of them," she adds defensively.

She really doesn't want to talk about this. How in the fresh hell do you even begin to explain things to someone who, for whatever reason, is in a position to ask if suckers are really that bad? She stares down at her hands, reassuring herself that there's no poisonous tracery of black and green threading its way up her arms. Because that's how bad the bad ones are: you touch one, and it leaves you convinced that your hands are ruined. They're bad enough that the idea of them can root itself in your brain and pull you apart even after they're gone.

[stronglikebear]

Yuri nods to himself. Sounds like prejudice on her part, though he's not naive enough to assume she doesn't have a pretty good idea of how her own world works. The whole bit about them taking over the world and putting people in slave camps...well, that's either paranoia or a sign that things are really, really not good in her world when it comes to vampires.

"We're careful when anyone comes through, but you can't really assume," he explains.

[rae_of_sun]

The funny not ha-ha part is that she's one of the least prejudiced people in her universe by virtue of being the only human on chummy terms with a vampire. Okay, Yolande had been pretty open-minded, but even she increased the wards around her living quarters when she realized Con was visiting - flash stark good wards, too (go figure). And she'd admitted that if more than one sucker had been dropping by, she would have assumed the worst about her tenant, even knowing Sunshine's affinity for sunlight.

Yolande's sharper than most.

And no, it's not paranoia. One of the dubious delights of having SOF interested in you is that they tend to share more when they're trying to win you over. Granted, 'we'll all be under the dark in a century' isn't much of a rallying cry, but it made sense. What else would you tell a reluctant magic handler who seems to have a weird bead on vampires? 'Nah, it's fine, we're not in desperate need of your help or anything. Go back to making cinnamon rolls.'

"Well, if you start finding dry guys around, that might be one of our suckers at work," she says flatly. "But that's about the only hint you'll get unless you happen to meet one personally, and then you won't have much time to, uh, share your newfound knowledge."

[stronglikebear]

"Oh." That is serious. That almost sounds like the story book kind of vampires, all teeth and violence and no sparkles pathos or humanity. Yuri tries to joke. "So we shouldn't expect them to come in looking for a place to stay and an allowance, huh? Because we've got a few vampires like that."

[rae_of_sun]

She thinks he's joking, all right - it's just the second sentence that strikes her as ludicrous. Enough so that she peers at him for a moment, trying to figure out if he was serious about any of what just came out of his mouth. She doesn't get a sense of deception from his shadows, though, and she lets out a huff of surprise.

"You've got vampires asking for that? Are you sure they're not just poseurs or something?" Because in her universe, and outside her own admittedly unique experience, if you've got a vampire talking to you and you're not interviewing them for the ten o'clock news, you're about to be eaten. They're not going to ask you to spot them a few thousand blinks or if they can crash on your couch for a few days, they're going to ask you if you wouldn't mind being devoured... and there's a pretty good chance your under-the-dark answer is going to be, 'no, not at all, please help yourself.'

[stronglikebear]

Yuri snorts. "Some of them, I guess, but that's why Blythe talks to the new people. When she came through the rift she started being able to tell when someone's lying, so it's pretty straightforward. I'm guessing you don't have Twilight in your world?"

Because it's not like he can point to a fictional account of vampires and say, 'yeah, that's one of the kinds we've seen' when her world probably doesn't have that kind of book. Twilight in his world was significantly different, after all.

[rae_of_sun]

Hey, speaking of being able to tell if someone is lying. She feels some sympathy for Blythe, though it's possible that this other woman's 'gift' wasn't so jarring as Sunshine's. Like, maybe she didn't have to spend two weeks knocking things over because her depth perception had gone all screwy and having to hold her reading material perfectly still to keep the text from making a sickening leap into three dimensions instead of the usual two.

"Assuming you're not referring to the time, I'm guessing not." If she knew he was referring to a book series about vampires, she'd be even more certain, given that she spent her younger years reading as much Other fiction as she could get her hands on.

[stronglikebear]

"No, they're books. And they got made into movies. They're kind of terrible, but a lot of people like them." Very helpful. Very clear why he brought that up, too, obviously.

[rae_of_sun]

"Ah." Well, plenty of the books she's read are kind of terrible, too, but that's why she enjoys them. "We have the Blood Lore series. And the classics, like Bram Stoker. Most of it is just hysterical nonsense, though rumor has it that vampires borrow some of those... aesthetics... just to freak people out." Before they eat them.

She mostly sticks to the older stuff, in part because the post-Wars offerings have taken something of a turn. When all is said and done, she prefers her vampire fiction to be overwrought in an 'oh no, mysterious Others' sort of way and not an 'oh no, here's a plausible portrayal of how they might actually take over' sort of way. There's not much guilty pleasure to be had in speculative fiction.

[stronglikebear]

Hey, Yuri doesn't actually read Twilight. He just...saw the movies because a friend liked them. Let's go with that. "Yeah, it's...not like Bram Stoker. At all. These vampires are sparkly and want to be your boyfriend."

And Yuri knows full well how that will sound to her, thus the pause for laughter or sputtering or righteous indignation.

[rae_of_sun]

"Sparkly?" Let's just address that bit, because it's the most ridiculous. And also because while Con is not exactly, uh... boyfriend material, there was still that... ten seconds that went nowhere. Not that she is thinking about that. Sunshine, focus on the sparkles. "I mean, the best they can manage is passing as human, otherwise they just look... dead. To some degree." Or slimy, but she's not thinking about that, either. "They definitely do not sparkle."

[stronglikebear]

"And they angst," supplies Yuri cheerfully. "Like, constantly. And so do the werewolves in the story," so you know it's dumb "which is kind of realistic."

Wait did he just say that. Embarrassed, Yuri colors and tries to change the subject. "And for some reason it's almost always werewolves in this new universe. It's like they think there's only one kind, or maybe one kind per continent."