numenviscera (numenviscera) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2023-11-27 18:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | #july 2018, jane, jane x vex, vex |
Who: Jane & Vex
Where: Dreamland
When: Morning, Thursday July 19th
Warnings: Vex's brain
If Jane had ever visited Vex's dreams before, he was blissfully unaware of it. Tonight she was there by his invitation. He really had no idea how this would work - or if it would work - but the idea was that if he was lucid and could get some control of his dream, he could show her the faces he'd seen in his visions - the ones he still hadn't identified. Jane could draw them and then they had something to show the others.
Falling asleep on time was trickier than he'd initially planned and he had to text her and postpone a couple of times because he was too wired after being out and about watching fireworks and drinking. Maybe drinking hadn't been a great idea before a dreamwalking session but it was a pretty standard practice for him so he didn't even think twice about it.
He finally fell asleep around three am, conked out on the couch with the tv running in the background. Ideally he would have had Lem by his side but she was with Nic. The good thing about this whole get-up was that they could always try later and try differently if they didn't get the results they wanted.
Jane was more than ready for what she was about to see tonight. Vex was an interesting character, to put it mildly, and she had a feeling his dreams were like taking a trip on acid. Not that she'd ever done such a thing, of course. She had enjoyed dreamwalking, for the most part, but now it felt like she was using it to do something useful. She couldn't set things on fire like Shane, or change gravity like Diego... but she could do this much.
As days passed, she felt like the best thing to do would be to just send Shane back into the facility and repeat history. But that meant nothing. They would come back, just like before. There was nothing to say that wouldn't happen even with a well thought out plan. Jane was kind of okay with that. Why not spend the rest of her days fighting those fuckers? What else would she end up doing that would be that exciting? Plus, Jane wouldn't say it out loud, but she liked having their little ragtag group of misfits. If they defeated AIR, what then? Would everyone leave town? Go on with their lives? Shane would take his boy toy back to Chicago. She'd rather he stay.
As she waited for Vex to fall asleep, Jane lay in her bed, her eyes closed. She pushed herself into some dreams, exploring the town so to speak, until she could find Vex. There was nothing terribly exciting to involve herself in and she found herself getting impatient with Vex. She had received his texts, of course, but knowing she had to keep her brain open for him meant she couldn't get too involved in the dreams of others. If she did, she might miss her window for Vex.
Finally she found him and Jane grinned as she worked herself into his subconscious. He looked taller in his dreams. Huh. "It's about time. Jesus. I was about to just go to sleep myself. You ready to try this?"
Vex was infinite in his dream, staring out at a landscape that moved and writhed like a living thing. There were loud rumbles in the distance that might be thunder or growling, it didn't really matter which. Maybe both. Vex was always in a different state of mind in his dreams, wiser and more receptive to the truths and when Jane showed up, he scarcely noticed her at first. Then he turned his head to look at her and turned his head to look at her and turned his head to look at her and the whole landscape turned its heads to look at her because she was an intruder. No, not an intruder. He had invited her. That memory came back to him like a faraway dream, operating on skewed logic that didn't really have a place here. "Jane," he said as he remembered and the landscape echoed her name all around them, sang it like a melody, distorted it into a nightmare, whispered it sweetly on the wind. He remembered her, although he didn't remember why he'd invited her. Small and shadowy figures crawled out of the earth, crawled up his legs and to his shoulders and reached for Jane curiously. "What are we trying?" they asked, peering at her with black eyes.
Jane was a bit in awe of what Vex's mind looked like, though she really wasn't all that surprised. As with most dreams she wandered into, it fit with what she knew of Vex. She eyed the things crawling up his body before her gaze found his. "You're going to show me the faces of people you've seen in your visions," she told him simply. "You're going to try and pull them out of your memory... if you can't, I'm going to try and do it for you." Jane paused and looked around the landscape again. "Were you drinking before you fell asleep?"
Jane was an intruder in his dream, even if she was invited, and as one she seemed to bring some waking world clarity with her because Vex could actually remember now, the living room he'd fallen asleep in, the bottle of whiskey on the coffee table next to him, the TV on, but muted. He turned his body fully to face her, feeling like he sucked some of himself from his surroundings and became more focused on this one spot. "He's been drinking," one of the shadows said while another chimed up, "He hasn't been drinking." Vex just sighed, brushing them off as they became little smoke clouds that soon evaporated. "It doesn't matter in here. Who do you want to see? I'm trying to remember..." Dreams came with their own logic and there were names in his head that he knew on some level had nothing to do with his visions or what Jane was here to see. Jack, Annie, Roger, Dumbo- no, he didn't know most of the names, that much he knew. The boy with the pills, the girl with the rifle, Sarah's death. That last one came unbidden and he turned to watch the massacre with a blank expression. "That one might not be AIR," he muttered and at least there was no sound.
Sometimes alcohol mattered in dreams... or drugs. They definitely affected the subconscious, but Jane wasn't going to point that out. Vex was coherent, and that's all she needed. "AIR," she said, still fairly fascinated by the environment they were surrounded in. "Faces of people you've seen who work for the facility. We're trying to destroy them, remember?" Jane turned back to Vex, figuring if she wanted him to focus, she needed to focus too. But she knew his brain would be a clusterfuck of imagination and she hadn't been wrong.
"I don't know if I've seen anyone who works there," Vex said sadly. "I wish I had a rollerdex in here. We could just look at all the images and see if any of them had some faces in them." It felt a little weird to speak so clearly when his mind still felt so torn apart, especially with Sarah's death happening in 3D right in front of him, but the memory of the vision ended quickly enough and he turned to Jane again. "I've seen more people lately. I've been calling them up. They're not visions, they're... like a telescope into another space, but not another time. I wonder if I can do that in here too." As he spoke, images started popping up around them, like there were small theater screens hanging in the air. It wasn't how he usually had visions and some of those screens showed him and Lem too, walking inside the vision, curiously looking around. Some of them weren't even things he'd actually seen and that was pretty obvious from their content. Vex paid them no mind, already focused on trying to conjure something new.
Jane watched the way Vex's dream shifted and she grinned, liking how chaotic it was. It was also helpful as hell and she took a step towards one of the theater looking screens. Jane definitely had never seen anything like this before. How did Vex get any sleep? Did these dreams wake him up in the middle of the night? What was his mind like when he was awake? He seemed normal enough - maybe a bit quirky - but nothing like this. "Okay, so do you think you can pull some of those up for me? I can take a look, sketch them in the real world. If they're showing up in your visions, they might mean something. They might be people we need to know. If you don't think you can, I'll try to press deeper into your subconscious and pull them to the surface myself."
Vex took a few steps towards the monitors, the meat-ground beneath him squelching wetly with every step. He focused to see if he could lucid-dream enough to make the monitors show what he wanted them to show but not only did that not work, the monitors started slowly spinning, then flickered off and became covered with the kind of dirty and goo he'd seen so much of on the other side. He frowned and took a step back, not liking the direction this dream was taking and not eager to let Jane further into his subconscious either. Then again he didn't really know what that meant and did he really care what she'd see? Jane was a very morally neutral person, he doubted she'd see anything in his mind that truly shocked her. "How does that deep dive work?" he asked as he turned to face her again, the chittering little shadows on his shoulders fluttering down his arms and down to the ground to crowd Jane's feet instead, staring up at her and whispering among themselves about subconscious corruption and something about time bombs.
He never got his answer. The next thing he knew was voices interrupting his dream which quickly revealed themselves as being the TV noise he'd fallen asleep to. Jane looked distorted, then she looked like someone else and then she was gone and he was opening his eyes in the living room. "Fuck." He muttered and considered calling her but he'd left his phone somewhere and didn't feel like finding it. His body was still heavy from the alcohol and he thought maybe... maybe if he fell asleep again, she'd return.