OOM - upstairs, room 1701D, further Slenderplot nightmare warning

[visible_sariel]

Every set of starship quarters are different, according to the personality of their owner if not to their layout.

But the lights in these quarters, whoever's they are, are low enough that those sorts of differences aren't visible. Not all that much is, to be honest.

The corridor beyond is dark too, matching the interior for gloom, and the door between rooms and hallway is wide open.

It's not closing.

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[visible_sariel]

There are tentacles in the shadows.

There are willow branches in the shadows.

There are

clickclick click click clickclick click click

alien shapes in the shadows. One of them is tall and thin. The others are not.

The hiss of escaping atmosphere is getting louder, and if it takes a little longer for a moving foot to regain purchase on the earth--well. Failing gravity will do that.

Someone's blasted a meter-wide circle and X into the grass. It's charred at the edges, weeping ground water and mud.

That spotlight's straight ahead, and it's glaring off something metal. Something table-shaped. Something with a swing arm at its midpoint.

And a figure pinned to its surface.

click click clickclickclick click clickclick

[balancingminds]

He runs towards the person on the table shape, he has to do something. There must be a way to get them free.

The figures are pressing in on him and he can feel the world trembling, but he can do this.

[visible_sariel]

That swing arm has a blade at its end.

The blade has a jagged edge.

click clickclick click clickclick clickclickclickclick

The alien things clattering and clicking in the shadows might not be familiar, but Charles may well recognize the person in the spotlight's glare. He's met her before, after all.

Her eyes are open.

She looks sick-terrified-dazed-revolted-furious.

Something tall is looming at the table's head.

[balancingminds]

The blade might not be real, he's not sure of what's real and what's not.

Reality doesn't matter, someone is trapped and they're going to change her, they can't.

He tries to find out how to get her away, there has to be a way.

[visible_sariel]

The world lurches

we are being boarded

with the sound and sensation of a tractor beam latching onto a starship's hull.

The ground vibrates with it, vibrates out of time, and somewhere down a corridor--since when were there hallways again? Since when were they back inside?--something explodes in a blast of arcing energy. A figure falls with a gurgle at the foot of the console, disappearing amid a nest of lashing willow branches.

Or are those tentacles?

Sariel's on her feet, nightgown blood-streaked and legs bare below the ankles. The table and associated instruments are nowhere to be seen.

The ship lurches again, turns her first step into a stumble.

[balancingminds]

Change is how the world works, it shifts and moves, he's lost track of the boundaries and reaches for Sariel, "We have to run."

This place isn't safe, they have to find another, somewhere.

[visible_sariel]

"We're being boarded," Sariel says, sharp, urgent. "We can't just run. I have to get to my station." A siren blares a red alert warning, as if emphasizing her last word.

Or maybe it's emphasizing Charles's.

The shadows are still clicking. Dreams can be influenced from multiple directions, after all. A dreamer doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Speaking of vacuum. The view from the nearest porthole is pitch black, infinite.

Utterly starless.

[balancingminds]

She has a certainty about her station, he needs that,

"Yes, your station. We need to be safe."

He doesn't want to look around, everything will change again if he does that.

[visible_sariel]

"What about you?" Sariel asks. She's apparently unaware of just how out of uniform her blood-spattered nightgown makes her. "If you're--" She squints, just slightly, just for a second, at Charles. "You're a civilian? You should get to your quarters! What are you doing out he--"

The floor vibrates again, rattles with the force of something striking a distant portion of the ship, and now even the unusually low lighting's flickering.

[balancingminds]

"We're going to be safe," The small hold he has on his ability asserts itself and the lights stabilize.

"To your station, please."

[visible_sariel]

Maybe it's his phrasing that quickens Sariel's stride. Maybe it's the continued wailing of the red alert claxon.

Somebody's scratched a circle and X symbol into the comm panel she heads towards. "Here," she says, and raises a hand to the terminal. "we'll go this way."

One second. Two. Something beeps. Something else chirps. "I can't remember how to enter the coordinates," she says, sounding somewhere between sheepish and a sort of let's-get-it-over-with candor.

And if that's not history repeating itself, what is?

A shape looms a short distance down the corridor, ghosting out of the doorway to a set of quarters. The wide open, yawning doorway to a set of quarters.

The shape is tall and thin, and wreathed in branches.

Wreathed in tentacles.

[balancingminds]

He follows her and keeps watching that figure as she talks, "We just need to get out. It doesn't matter how, out. I can't hold together for much longer and I don't want to bring you down with me."

The console doesn't make sense, it looks like something from the movies. Maybe if he focuses then he can do something more.

He rests his hand on his head and focuses, exerting every bit of his remaining control to get them out somehow.

[visible_sariel]

"The ship is being boarded," Sariel says, and if there's a hint of impatience there--well. Dream logic assumes that he's a crewmember, or at least familiar with the Enterprise. There are families on the ship, after all. "We can't just--"

Dreams can be influenced.

They hit ground in a spray of sand. The sky is intensely blue above them, and somewhere out of sight beyond a line of local trees, the ocean hisses to itself.

[balancingminds]

When the ship hits, he falls over the console and loses his focus.

Clouds cluster in the blue sky and he stares up as he can feel everything shudder. He doesn't know what's real.

[visible_sariel]

The ship is nowhere to be seen. Was it ever there?

Sariel's still on her feet, still in her blood-streaked nightgown, still barefoot in the sand.

Or is it snow?

There's a shape in one of those clouds, or rather, a shape forming out of one of those clouds.

It's a circle, and little by little, wisps of--that's too gray to be true cloud, it looks like fog, are crossing it slantwise.

Crossing it in the shape of an X.

The surf is still pounding against the shore. Or is that snow hissing against a battered landscape, or the sound atmosphere makes when it streams out a breached compartment into nothing?

One of those local trees is a willow. Its branches are waving.

[balancingminds]

"I just want to get out,"

He says to the sky, he doesn't have much left and feels like he's coming apart.

[visible_sariel]

The air in Castries is thick with bonfire smoke, but that smoke is tinged with the bloody tang of iron.

The Belgian snow is thrown into their faces, not muffling the rattle of gunfire in the air any more than it hides the unbroken rosary lying in a red-tinted drift at their feet.

A star looms larger than life on the Enterprise's viewscreen, and it's looming all the more with time.

A sword whistles through the air of Sherwood forest, and a figure without a face crows about capturing a prize for his lord.

The Milliways grounds are soaked with multicolored blood, and gravity and atmosphere are tangibly failing, air streaming away as the world tilts, lightens, drains away toward the end.

Alien language crackles through the darkness, a near-constant, ever-changing series of clickclickclick clickclickclick click clickclick, while a metal swing arm angles closer, the jagged-edged blade at its end brought into vivid relief by the blinding spotlight above the table.

A figure with too many limbs and no face at all blossoms out of nothing.

He's holding a longsword.

He's holding a blade with a jagged edge.

He's not holding anything at all.

one two following you

[balancingminds]

Charles is in his room, but he's not sure if he's awake or not.

There was too much at once, this could be another part of the dream. He turns on the light and stares up as he tries to focus on reality.

[visible_sariel]

Elsewhere upstairs, Sariel Rager wakes up with a stifled yell that abruptly turns into a violent fit of coughing.

There's a piece of old-fashioned paper clutched in her hand, and an equally antique pen rolling across her floor.

The paper contains a single freehand sketch of a circle crossed with an X. She knows that style of drawing.

It's her own.

The clocks in the bar proper read 3:33 A.M.