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

[hackitude]

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.

Comments

[lyingheart]

Reiner's voice carries on the wind.

"Sorry won't help them. Come on, get moving. We need to burn the bodies before more people die."

Annie continues moving, still carrying that saw, but it loses it's form, stretching and thin, turning into dark braided rope. Annie turns to the left, tying it around a tree, the knots forming faster and more secure than they should for her apparent actions. She's in gear, subtly different than what would be appropriate for fighting. Climbing gear, with carabiners and the rest of what she knows from her job in Nonah.

She pushes off backward, clipped in, straight down the cliff face.

The lioness is already waiting at the bottom, bite sized lamb still in her jaws.

[observationalhazard]

Hange doesn't bother with the rope. She just steps off the edge and floats down in Annie's wake. She can fly, after all. Reiner's right, of course. That doesn't stop Hange from thinking of the gesture as important for herself and for the dead.

As she touches down, she reaches out to idly pet the lioness in passing. There's a torch in her other hand. She's not sure where it came from.

[lyingheart]

The lioness growls, dropping the sheep. It bounces down the mountainside, bleating each time it touches down on the ground.

Annie seems to reach the ground as Hange does, regardless of how impossible that should be. She lets go of the rope, which winds itself back up the cliffside. The fire in Hange's hand makes her uncomfortable - she moves in a wide arc around the woman, intent on finding what she needs to find here. She slides down the shale face, passing by markers, glancing to the side and frowning. No, not that one, not the others. There's something in specific she's looking to find.

[observationalhazard]

Hange follows, but she's moving slowly, glancing at the markers as she passes them. She feels like there ought to be names, but she can't think of any that belong here. Not Survey Corps members. They have their own memorials already. The nameless multitudes they've killed - well, she can't mourn for them. She can't even remember them. Maybe that's why she feels a bit guilty.

[lyingheart]

There are names on the markers. Unfamiliar names up here, ones that don't belong - Japanese, Brazilian, Irish, African. Names Annie has picked up from history. They pass by Julius Caesar, Martin Luther King Jr. It's not where they stop.

Annie and the lioness don't stop until the names start reading as familiar. Until names Hange will see are ones that make sense to Hange, names from back home. These are all from back home.

She has to slow down. Slow down until she's stumbling to a stop, reaching out and grabbing hold of one grave marker. None of these are precisely right for where they're from, but it doesn't matter. The names n them are shining, copper, and they spell out names they both know.

Eren Yeager. Armin Arlert. Dot Pixis. Levi. Erwin Smith. Touching the letters on any will invite the metal to flow from the marker onto their skin. Names that form circlets like jewelry.

Annie's fingers linger on Eren. Inching across her skin as she moves forward. Not this one, not this one. Something else.

[observationalhazard]

She recognizes a few of them. She's been learning her history, but she doesn't stop. Behind them the markers start to sink into the earth, leaving a smooth expanse of hillside, as if they were never there at all. It's when the names become familiar that Hange has to pause and to run her fingers over Levi's name. Then Ilse Langnar. Petra. Mike. The living, the dead. Or are they all dead now?

The names stay with her, burning themselves into her skin as she trails in Annie's footsteps.

"Who are we looking for?"

[lyingheart]

Annie only shakes her head, the lioness moving ahead of her, sniffing at something in the wind. The lioness changes direction, Annie rubbing idly at Eren's name, and Armin's, and Petras that she picked up along the way. There are other names showing around her throat, stacking like tattoo'd necklaces. Names of people from Heropa. Will Graham. Nah. Minako Aino. Aracely. Kaine. Houka Inumuta. Shinjiro Aragaki. Kanaya Maryam. Kate Kane. Curt Connors. They wind around her arms, slowly becoming bracelets in truth, hauntingly ornate as they wind up beyond her sleeves, disappearing from view.

She can't say who she's looking for, not until the lioness stops. The sheep, dropped earlier, bleats from further down below. It sounds annoyed.

Annie comes to a stop by the marker the lioness chose. There's no name on it at first, nothing to mark it at all other than the shape of what it is. She wants to reach out, but as she does, the lioness inserts her head under Annie's hand, diverting it.

The bell at her throat rings once more, letters burning through like shining ice. Not spelling out her name, as she knew it should have. Spelling out something else.

B E L O V E D

[observationalhazard]

Hange joins Annie in front of the marker. She's picked up her own bracelets - names from friends, names from people she's never met. They're all there and she can feel them, like cold metal against her skin. There's an itching on her shoulder blades and somehow she knows that the names have wound their way across her back. She doesn't understand the message - "Beloved" - and she doesn't know what's brought them here, but does she need to understand?

She settles for resting a hand on Annie's shoulder. She almost feels like she should let the names fall - let them go, shove them off of her arms like so many bracelets.

For some reason, she feels like they would shatter like glass once they hit the ground.

you better laugh at this ending

[lyingheart]

Annie flinches away, arm draping onto the lioness for support as she falls down on her knees, finding it difficult to breathe. Her hand reaches out again, touching this marker, touching the word, and her bracelets, those names, the people weighing her down start to flee. They melt onto the marker, opalescent and eyecatching, names that resolve back into names ornately written, capital letters etched into sharing something of the person they belonged to.

Burnt illuminated manuscripts, crumbling in her hands. The W in Will a willow, running red and gold, dogs sleeping among its roots. The E in Eren an evergreen, the crumbling remains of a wall spread before it. The H in Houka etched into a computer chip, glowing blue rather than olive green, a circuit firing down, tracing the course of the letter.

None of it translates perfectly, but Annie doesn't seem to care. It's not a marker for precisely the dead that they stand in front of. It's for Annie, and it's not for her, as well. Tears well up in her eyes, falling down her cheeks. Where Hange touched her, a familiar crystal starts to spread, taking over at an astounding rate, trapping the lioness with Annie.

The bell peals, and then there's only Annie, standing as she is underground somewhere in the Human Empire, encased in crystal, looking all the world like Hange might remember. With one exception, should she step in close.

A collar around her neck. A bell hanging from the collar, and a phrase, marked out in gold.

Schrödinger's Cat.