maskormenacelogs | (open dreamshare log) (muffled twilight zone playing in the distance)

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(open dreamshare log) (muffled twilight zone playing in the distance)

WHO: EVERYBOOOODYYYY (yeaaah) (rock your booodyyy) (yeaaah)
WHERE: DREAMSPACE
WHEN: The night of November 1st (slightly forward-dated to give people more time to play out threads mmk)
WHAT: DREAM SHENANIGANS (event info here!)
WARNINGS: None up here, but players please tag the subject lines of your dreams if they have NSFW or triggering content in them.

It's Saturday evening. What are you dreaming about, imPorts?

Some of you might find strangers intruding on your regular dreams. Others might find themselves suddenly in the dream of someone they've never met before. Or perhaps someone they're close to...? Either way. Seems like you're in for a bumpy night.

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Elsa leans forward as well, the snow parting in front of her. The cold and ice and snow are not things she fears. They are her allies. What she fears are the things that were after them, those strange monsters that she's never seen before.

And while she doesn't fear it, she feels anxious about whatever it is that Annie is running from, or to.

She wants to ask how much further, but feels that might be a pointless question. So she keeps her hands tight in the horse's mane and presses on forward, the snowflakes swirling by.

Hooves pounding, they're on the downward arc, Annie's mount locking knees and dropping down onto its hocks as it slides forward and down, whinnying in distress at first, but then in amusement. Trust her to end up on the mount that can laugh as they slide down into a meadow of blue flowers in green grass, starkly quiet, smelling like late summer, touched by a mountain breeze. The cold becomes starkly less evident, a gentler affair all around.

The unicorn leaps forward, slowing to a canter before it trots in a circle and tosses its white mane, bowing down to let Annie off as the sounds of the pseudo-Titans far off dies down.

"We can rest here for a while," she says, sliding down off the unicorn, patting its shoulder absently with her hand. "The storm won't come further in while the sun's up."

Elsa holds on tight as her steed slides down similarly, though without laughing. Once it stops, she also dismounts, looking around the meadow.

It does look considerably calmer here.

"That's a relief."

There's a moment of silence while she looks around, before she looks back at Annie.

"What were those... those terrible things?"

Annie looks back over to the grey and lightning ridden place they've come from.

"The ones who didn't wake up. People who died as Titans." Died in a longer term sense than Ymir, though Annie had no way to know that information. "They felt too close."

She shivers, stirring a chill breeze through the warm meadow. Butterflies, deep black and bright blue, take off from the wildflowers, rising in a whirl that circles up and up and up over their heads, into the clouds in the sky above.

Elsa watches the butterflies, before turning back to look at Annie's face. She studies it carefully for a moment, before saying softly, "A titan is what you are, isn't it?"

So is there a chance Annie could have been one of those?

"They're dead, yet they walk around like the living."

If one could call it anything like the living.

"It's half of who I am." Half because she's also human, but she doesn't deny being a Titan - being a Shifter is to walk between both worlds, and understand something of the precarious nature of her own situation. The shadows of the butterflies fall over her back, until even the shadows are eaten by the sun.

"They're asleep. Most the people who've been turned into Titans are trapped in their own minds, without a way to get out. There's always a chance of slipping. You need to stay in control to remember who you are."

Eren had slipped. Annie looks away from the wastelands, starting up a narrow path through the field. "They don't remember much of what happens if they ever wake up. Small blessings... or what a mind does to save itself. Who knows."

Elsa follows along. It's not like she has much choice.

She understands not being in control of a power, and she now understands not being in control of one's own mind, too, and it was an experience she would never wish on anyone. The terror of seeing and knowing you did things, horrible things, and had no way to stop it.

"I wouldn't blame them, for forgetting. It's better for them, that way."

She glances down at her hands, rubbing them together, before she looks back up at Annie.

"Do you ever wish that you could forget the things you've done?"

She's referring to the attack they mentioned in the announcement specifically, but she words it vaguely enough that it could mean anything.

Annie is quiet as she walks, following the path as it curves around toward the treeline. The breeze has died down, leaving them surrounded by scents more familiar to late spring and early summer. What season it might be seems to be something entirely in flux.

"Yes. It'd be easier if I could... but it's not the answer I would want in the end." She glances down at the ground, lifting her hands to examine them for a moment. "I need to remember."

She glances back over her shoulder at Elsa. "What is it you wish you could forget?"

Elsa also looks at her hands, watches as snowflakes swirl around them.

"The last thirteen years or so would be nice."

She smiles wanly, but it falls almost immediately.

"...I hurt my sister... and my whole country. It wouldn't solve anything, like you said, but it would be nice, to forget that."

"... We can both admit as much." Annie brushes her hair back behind an ear, turning to face forward, walking under the mottled light cast by the trees. "Is there anything you can do to make reparations, moving forward?"

"Supposedly I do."

Elsa reaches up to push hair behind her ear, self-consciously.

"But nothing can be so easy as apologizing."

"Apologizing and meaning it isn't easy. But you're right... it doesn't stop there." Sometimes it doesn't get there at all, but apologies are only words without actions to back them up. The pathway broadens, leading into another, smaller clearing with a wood cabin in the midst of it all.

"There's at least that chance for you. I envy that."

She looks at the cabin, then back at Annie, worry etched in her brow, and also a kind of sympathy.

"So you won't get a chance at all, then?"

Because that's the worst thing. Wanting a chance, wanting to make it right, and not being offered it.

"I was never meant to have that chance Mostly, I didn't think it would bother me"

Holding herself at a distance, keeping people away simply by being reserved. The cabin seems like a clam space, but almost too calm, far more so than is natural. It's a pervasive sense of nothing that seeps out, turning the sunshine into refracted light, losing warmth but not finding any cold in the lack of it.

"I was wrong. To no one's real surprise." Except for those who thought her heartless in truth, but there aren't as many of those More who simply can't find what there is to understand in her actions. She doesn't blame them. They're muddy enough to someone who's lived her entire life, let alone to those who've never grasped a larger section of the world outside the Walls, or the world truly held within them.

"Of course. Everyone wants a chance."

She knows that well enough.

She looks toward the cabin, furrowing her brow at it. She's not sure if she wants to keep approaching it.

"You have a chance if you don't go home, don't you?"

"Maybe. Maybe I even have one back home... I don't know." Home is complicated, because it's not like she doesn't want to go home. If she has anything to return to, if there's anything for her there other than death or perpetually being frozen, who's to say? In the here implied by if you don't go home there are different potentials and possibilities she does have.

Those are tempting. They're the most tempting thing in these shitty worlds she's lived between.

The cabin looms before them, neutral for all it's also imposing. That calm continues to radiate. There's also one clam on the roof.

"I'd like to stay."

"Then I hope you get to."

She looks up. She doesn't understand what the clam on the roof is for.

"I think I would like to stay, too. But maybe that's irresponsible of me."

She looks back at Annie, nods her head in the direction of the cabin.

"Is that where we're going?"

Annie comes to a standstill. She doesn't answer Elsa straight away, looking toward the cabin. In the end, she shakes her head.

"You can never really go home." Even when her father asked her to come home, it was to come back to him - the only real homes anyone can reclaim residing in other people. "Even when you want to... you move forward. Not backward. It's never quite the same."

The summer breeze blows through the area, warmer than the neutrality flowing from the cabin that seems so much larger in presence than it could possibly be.

Elsa regards Annie as she answers in the negative, then looks back at the cabin. Annie is right that things can't be the same - that's what she was running from, wasn't it?

"That's not always a bad thing."

But sometimes it is. And sometimes it's hard to say.

"Is that where you lived? Before."

"Once." Where she'd lived before, but it's difficult for her to say if it was the only place. Just the one she last remembered when her father had spoken to her about apologies that were too late.

"I don't want to go back. I do... but I also don't. I'm enough of a coward to wish for something to be possible like that." Even in dreams, she has a certain honesty, and it's painting this scene over in faded blues as she puts in the distance that actually exists. The nothing still seems to thrum out of the cabin, but it's less insistent, not dragging anything toward it like it had been before.

Elsa watches as the scene becomes more saturated, feels the tug of the cabin lessen. She rubs her hands together and thinks of Arendelle.

She doesn't want to go back. She doesn't want to face anyone after what she's done, and how she ran away from her responsibilities. But at the same time, she thinks of what Anna said, about how they could be close, open the gates, have people and parties and warmth in the castle all the time.

She wants that part. Let her country do what it will.

(Is that really right?)

"...You're not the only coward."

She wishes she had comfort to offer.

"What a pair we make." Annie doesn't look her way straight away. Her shoulders fall a little, in an unspoken relief. You're not the only coward.

There's no logic for when the whole of the landscape changes, nor what it changes into. One moment they're there in the saturated clearing with the cabin, the next they're standing on a cliffside made of clouds as the sunset paints the skies in brilliant colors before them. It's quiet at first, but far off, if they strain to listen, birds can be heard. The cry of a falcon. A swallow, calling out as it moves from bush to bush.

"The sun sets, and it rises. I wonder what it is we'll see tomorrow." Their shadows stretch out impossibly long behind them, on a landscape obscured by low-hanging fog, rising no higher than their ankles. They could be anywhere. They could be nowhere. It doesn't matter.

The only thing left is whatever's coming. Watching this sunset... there's at least that tenuous sense of hope. There will be a tomorrow. Maybe one more. Maybe ten thousand more. Time is no guarantee... only chance.

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(open dreamshare log) (muffled twilight zone playing in the distance)

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