Seren

Seren-Eline

Dreamers

Dreamers are a tribe of several hundred people split into different “splinters” they are nomadic tribals who never stay in one place for too long. They live their lives entirely in The Canopy, spend their days hunting, crafting and travelling and their nights Dreaming. Theres is a simple life, but a very different one from most and to understand a Dreamer you have to understand where they come from, what they can do and why they do so.

Dreamers were not always tribal, their people not always nomadic. Before they took on their new name and learnt Dreaming they were simply servants of gods. Made, or at least kept to worship them in droves in a god’s vision of perfection. There was no suffering, no hunger but there was also no strength, no freedom, and no escape. The people were their gods’ idea of beauty. Dark skin, “perfect” features, they didn’t even scar so as to not ruin this. But heaven is not heaven without a choice and those perfect people in time came to realise this.

It was only through the efforts of the first to call themselves Dreamers, and the first Dreamwalker that they were set on this path, after managing to overcome the gods that had enslaved and controlled them. Now nothing but stories and tales passed down the generations, but there is no doubt that it happened. Somewhere those ruins still lay, overgrown and a shadow of their former glory. Some stories say not everyone left, that some of the weak still hide in the ruins to this day waiting for their dead gods to return and save them. But they won’t, dead is dead even if you claim to be a god.


Culture

Dreamer Culture is all about strength, the strongest lead and encourage others to also be strong. A Dreamer can only keep what they are able to defend, as if you’re unable to stop someone else from taking it then in their eyes you never deserved to have it in the first place. This rule is absolute everywhere except when it comes to food, where there are a few extra rules enforced by the strongest of the tribe. The children and young always eat first until they’re not hungry. Then everyone else has enough to sate their hunger. Only then is the rest fought over, when everyone has enough to survive the rest is a free for all. These fights are as dirty as can be, ranging from simple kicks, bites, wrestling to throwing pollen in someone’s eyes and running with what you can grab. There is no such thing as honour, only strength in all its myriad forms.

The tribe is always on the move, unable to stop for either running out of food or simply growing weak in places comfortable enough to settle down. Several times in their history splinters have settled down for a season or two, only to have everything they gathered taken by another tribe, which forced them back into the stronger nomadic lifestyle. Dreamers have to be strong to survive The Canopy where they live, and all the creatures also fighting to survive in it, and while at first there may have been other approaches, only the strongest one has survived this long. A path of internal strength that keeps driving them onwards.



The Canopy

The Canopy is what Dreamers call their world. One interconnected Canopy of endless trees fighting and vying for all the sunlight they can get. It is not a canopy made up of one tree, or a handful, but more than you can see. In all directions branches from different trees overlap, knot together and fight each other for what little sunlight there is. Further down the branches are thicker, stronger, in some places enough to allow four or five people to walk shoulder to shoulder on a single one. The higher you get the more wood gives way to leaves, capturing more of the sun up here. The branches grow thinner and thinner, until reaching the very top where nothing but the smallest of birds can perch without risking breaking something from simple bodyweight.

The ground is a long way down, in most places further down than can easily be seen.  In some places over a mile, and the lack of branches on the trunks around there – where sunlight is scarce and there’s no reason to bother growing such things the climb a dangerous one. All that waits on the ground is a cold, dark death with no promise of ever climbing back up to the safety of above. For these reasons, and the fact you can only just get a glimpse of the dead, sun robbed world below from the lowest of branches it is not even considered an option for the tribe. No Dreamer has ever touched the ground and they are all unaccustomed to walking on something so flat, with so much lack of give and variety. Dreamers walk and climb with a gait suited to the treetops, one where you’re always braced to climb and leap, lest the “ground” you’re travelling on splinter and give way. This is more of a risk either on smaller branches where bodyweight and impact are an issue, or very low where everything is colder, darker and more prone to rot.

The very world around them is growing, alive, changing with what seasons there are in this giant of a jungle. The tribe themselves are nomadic, always moving never settling down anywhere, yet despite this they have never reached the edge of The Canopy, or even anywhere close to it. Their world is one of wood, leaves vines and all the creatures that call the place home. Bones, feather, skin and wood are common materials but even stones are rare – only gathered from the stomachs of specific species of birds.

When you think of a jungle, you might not think of mile high trees, waterfalls falling from the treetops and branches thick enough to run along without having to balance carefully. The jungle the Dreamers call home is not like other jungles, it is gigantic, expansive and their entire world. A world they call The Canopy. Lake Trees are the lifeblood of The Canopy. Their branches interweave by both nature and design to form a bowl to catch rainwater. Down their sides water literally runs and in some places falls as a waterfall. The lakes are small but alive, filled with all sorts of greenery and even a unique, hardy strain of fish that can survive the rare periods of drought without water. And something about this water allows the trees to grow to such monstrous proportions.

The Canopy like any ecosystem is full of life, not a surprise as the very world around you is made up of plant life. Trees of all types vying for sunlight, parasitic vines, fungus and much more depending on height and season. Some bear fruit, some poison and others medicine. Some plants offer all three in the same fruit depending on how you use them, when you pick them and what is used. Among these live a myriad of creatures, ranging from the smallest of birds and skink like lizards to the largest of apex predators. In The Canopy this would be the Terror Bird.


A terror bird is a giant creature that makes nests high up in The Canopy, an ambush predator that is able to snatch a Dreamer up in one claw. They are massive birds, with a wingspan at least fifteen foot across on even the smallest of them. Talons as large as a forearm able to pierce through pretty much any creature they can grab. Being so large and living so high they hunt by diving, grabbing what they want and then climbing back up to their nests to savour the meal. A Terror Bird is never heard, or seen until it already has you and the only way not to be seen as a meal is if the creature is already full.

Dreamers named them in their early days in The Canopy, a good name for something that by the time you’d seen it had already won. But like how the Dreamers had conquered their gods before, they did manage to conquer the Terror Bird as well. Their Gods had taught them that the trees above were safer, but the birds only reinforced this. A terror bird was simply too large to breach the upper canopy, it’s wings too wide to be able to fly through such a mesh of branches, which meant they were vulnerable from above. Higher was a stronger position always against these beasts, so Dreamers simply climbed higher, learnt how to balance and leap between such frail and irregular branches and got above the Terror Bird nests. With their simple stone and Dreamstone weapons they were able to ambush the ambusher, and use their materials for the tribes own end. Most Dreamers wear the feathers of such creatures, a symbolic representation of beating the old predators with nothing but their own strength.

Most Dreamers will wear a set of feather “Wings” made of these creatures made for their own size, which by reaching back and grabbing the ends to pull over their arms can help them glide small distances, or survive a fall roughly that otherwise should had broken a few bones. There are only a few who go without such a useful piece of clothing – the young, and The Dreamwalker.



Dreamseed

Dreamseed is an unformed seed of one of the many trees in The Canopy. It is only when immature that it can be gathered and used, while the skin of the fruit around the seed is unripe and tough to the touch. This particular fruit grows on one of the many types of parasitic vines spanning between trees, and in this case the seed is only useful if gathered from high up near the top of The Canopy. Something about the cooler temperatures allowing whatever it is in such a seed to be more concentrated. Dreamers never questioned why, only know that it works and how to make use of it.

It is traditional in their culture to gather this Dreamseed once you come of age. A solo trip spanning sometimes several days to pick out the four or five of the unripe fruit that you will need for what comes next. Travelling alone for the first time is a test in itself in such a dangerous world, and to come back is a rite every older Dreamer has done. Coming back and forming your own dagger from the solid central pip sitting inside the fruits takes another few days. Time spent grinding the fruit, the seeds the pulp into a fine power paste and letting it dry, only to knap away at it akin to flint to create your tool.

A dagger made in this fashion is soft by any other standard – softer than flint but not as brittle it is still able to cut skin and inflict wounds, but by any other standard that might be outside The Canopy it is laughable. The reason these specific fruits are sought out of course is for a special property. One that acts as a powerful poison that merely sends you into a deep sleep. Of course in a world like this without a ground falling asleep someone not safe and secure is a death sentence in itself, and the tribe use such tools to hunt – such a thing only considered a strength as you took the time and knowledge to create an advantage.

Most Dreamers are fully immune to such a poison, as they build up an immunity, but when they’re young the fruit is used to create several potions to help ease the young children into Dreaming for the first few times. The level of sleep required only quickly gotten to by either practise or such a plant.



Dreaming

Dreamers sleep as much as they are able. Their children only wake up to eat the one meal all the tribe have in a day, be forced to exercise so they’ll grow strong instead of atrophy and learn the physical skills they can’t learn elsewhere. The elders of the tribe sleep up to 23 hours a day, although none of this is sleep, it’s all Dreaming.

Dreaming began with but a few skilled enough to control their dreams. Lucid dreaming where you are aware and as in control as when awake. More so without anything as inconvenient as reality imposing its laws on you. In time and… with one teaching everyone else, that first Dreamer these separate lucid dreams became one shared one.

When Dreaming became shared, the tribe realised that all dreams were on the same world, projected in normally isolated “bubbles” for each person, or creature dreaming. Most of these were uncontrolled, small pockets of isolated random thoughts. But once it was realised that your own dream could be controlled, and that there was more to the world of the sleeping than your own isolated thoughts, it became easier to reach out to others, to listen to what else there is in this world. The tribe call this the Dreamscape –the landscape of dreams on which all people visit when asleep. In time, and with many years of practise some of the elders even learnt there were those who lived in this space, echoes of the future, the past and those who if they were unlucky might even notice their own small, connected web of thoughts.

Originally Dreaming was a simple haven, a hideaway from the gods they were forced to serve. Infact it wasn’t until they had such a place to breathe, explore and interact that they realised how confined and trapped they were in the waking world. Over time a whole culture grew in this space, with it the very first who would call themselves Dreamers. A single world built by those asleep, a freedom and control unattainable in the waking world. The waking world to this tribe is maintenance, eating, hunting moving and surviving all to earn the freedom of Dreaming. Not that it doesn’t have its uses in the waking world. Communicating over any distance with your tribe, unable to lie without everyone knowing it’s a lie. Such things form strong bonds.
Lake Trees



Dreamwalking

Dreamwalking is the act of physically entering the Dreamscape rather than mentally visiting it in your dreams as is more normal. Physically entering carries a lot of risk, as the world you’re entering is changed at the whim of those around you – whether those making their own sleeping logic or the local inhabitants who don’t like having visitors. To counter this Dreamers are in one word, Stubborn. They project their own world view on the world around them, so sure of how things must be that that is simply how it is, reality conforms to their vision of it even if they’re not fully aware of this. In the Dreamscape this serves to give them a bubble of protection around them in the ever changing, always moving world.

A small sphere of stability where the air is breathable, gravity is thing that exists and the world doesn’t change on a whim. In the waking world this works slightly differently. This bubble of influence extends around five foot in every direction, and it projects the Dreamers world view on it. A view where being stronger is better, where using things like magic or other powers are seen as a weak, cowardly thing to do, and come into conflict so much with this world view that they simply don’t work inside this influence bubble. A mage trying to cast a spell within five foot of a Dreamer will find their magic not working for seemingly no reason. One casting into it will see their magic falter and die the moment it breaches this bubble. The irony of this being a form of magic stopping magic because Dreamers think magic is weak is fully lost on them, as it is not a conscious thing they do. It’s simply the way things are for them.

Dreamwalking is something new in Dreamer culture. A product of the last generation it has now been adopted as a coming of age rite, which all tribe members have to do at least once before they earn their tattoos – the sign that they are an adult in the tribe and stronger for it. A Dreamer will earn a tattoo, or design of one for every time they’ve Dreamwalked, and their leader – the Dreamwalker themselves is covered head to toe in such tribal markings. They make such a liberal use of this technique that they’ve given up the traditional gliding wings others use to simply disappear in one place, and a few moments later reappear elsewhere. Rather than gliding content to take the risks of Dreamwalking for something so small as jumping a gap.

A tribals first Dreamwalk is taken from one of the Lake trees, to another nearby one. This is for a simple reason – the longer you stay in the Dreamscape, and the less practised you are at it the more heat builds up which is released upon you returning to the waking world. The energy of another world is brought along and found incompatible with this one, simply dissolving in a burst of pure heat energy instead. This is why Dreamers aim for bodies of water like the Lake trees, they act as a heatsink to disperse the energy without doing much more than heating the water.



Seren-Eline

Seren was a typical Dreamer, a tribal of the Eline splinter who had gone through her first rites, gathering the Dreamseed she’d need to create her knife. She had a child, Bevan with Evan of the Tegan splinter. Life was hard, but simple a tale of survival like anyone else in the Canopy. That was until her time to Dreamwalk came around.

Suffice to say her first Dreamwalk did not go well. When she first arrived in the second lake tree there was no one waiting for her, no other splinter to welcome her. Lacking food, supplies or anything save for the clothing and wings she wore and that same Dreamseed dagger she attempted another Dreamwalk. This one lasted a lot longer as she sought, and failed to find any way back the way she had come, the world shifting too much for her to keep track. In time she was forced to exit, and found herself not even in the canopy. A flat world with no trees, and some sort of dry, gritty yellow dirt underfoot. A desert as far as she could see.
Seren has attempted to find her way back to her tribe ever since. Surviving in alien, unknown worlds, causing trouble where her worldview of “take what you want” conflicts with others, and now and then trying to Dreamwalk again. Without any other able to Dream around her, she’s found herself isolated… and in lieu of talking in her Dreams has learnt to listen, just like the elders have before her.

What she might lack in training she makes up with the difficult life that comes with being a Dreamer. Always on the move, always working towards strength and everything in the world only building you, forcing you to become stronger. Nothing but simple animal skins protect her body and yet she is quick, nimble and tough all the same. Bones toughened by years of hard impacts and hands strong enough that she can with some effort climb up basically anything but a flat, oiled surface.
Nothing in the way of a trained fighting style is countered by the simple savagery of her life. When others fight they are thinking ahead, planning for what might go wrong. Seren knows she might die if she doesn’t go all out, so all out she goes. This is made easier when others rely on cheap tricks, or weak magic. In the time it takes them to realise it simply won’t work around her she’d already won, either by putting them to sleep, or putting an end to them.