In Dreams Part 1

Doctor Psycho has chosen the most interesting subject first, the Cheshire. Edgar has accepted that magic is more than mere metaphor only in recent years, having seen the evidence of it. The Cheshire mythology is a mythology of madness, chaos, whimsy and darkness combined. Edgar rather enjoys all those things, specializes in them, even.

Knowing that Vorpal resides in Titans Tower, Edgar finds a secure location not too far distant, an anonymous little motel. He might even order entertainment later on. The night clerk knows a few willing girls that could pass for attracted, in a degraded way. Edgar rather liked degradation, though. It appealed to his aesthetic.

Finally, he lays down on his bed and closes his eyes, directing his consciosness from his body and seeking out Vorpal's dreaming mind, using what he knows from the profile to separate the lesser dreamers from the Cheshire's more potent consciousness.



It hasn't been a particularly pleasant day by Keith's standards. While he had a good chat with Gar and they - more or less- established what exactly was going on, he had been called in for work at the last minute. Freak accident, Jimmy broke his leg, and won't you please mind taking over the rest of his shift through the holiday? We'll make it up to you.

They seldom did. But money was money. He's tired and more than a little grouchy, but fortunately he gets back to the Tower at a time when everybody is in their beds. It wouldn't do to take it out on anyone... especially Raven. Who knows what she might do, if he got cross with her?

It is after mechanically taking care of food and hygiene that he collapses onto his bed. At first he makes the pretense of reading- Simone de Beauvoir's "All Men Are Mortal" opened and propped up on his chest, but he's too tired even for that.


When he opens his eyes again, the landscape around him has changed. He is laying down on some sort of vegetation the color of young copper, atop a small hill. This hill seems to be woven out of copper as well, but the blades of grass are soft and do not cut. The hill itself, however, is cut off several feet down at the incline and only a few lanky columns extend downards, grounded on the earth below at a vertiginous distance.

"Here again? Huh." Keith knows this place. Around him, the Sea of Tears laps at the red shore, and trees stretch high into the sky. There is something decidedly wrong with their foliage, though- their leaf patterns give one the impression of the sulci, gyri and fissures present in the brain. When the breeze blows through them, their whispering sounds like the buzzing of bees.

There are other hills that do make it all the way down to the ground- but they have holes in them, perfect circles of varying sizes, through which one can glimpse entirely different panoramas- a house with no walls but floating doors and rooms, A corridor made of flesh with mouths that sing in disturbing tongues, a pond.

The young man stands up and begins to walk. "I know you're in here, so you had better show up already."

This wasn't directed at Edgar, whose presence he ignored, even though it might seem that way.



The man appears in the bough of a tree, accepting as he does, the Cheshire theme. Well, a man is presumed, one would think, the inky outlines of the being seeming to wrap around the tree like a snake made of black smoke, a vaporous apparition. It wears a white porcelain mask, akin, in some ways, to a Guy Falkes, but with a different countenance, leering more crudely and with a pointed beard. A Guy Freud, if you will. The eye sockets reveal the only fleshly, mortal seeming, blue eyes that stare quite blandly.

"Who is it you're awaiting?" he asks, his voice deep but not overly dramatic - while dreams lend easily to drama, it can be tempting to overdo on the special effects. There remains something to be said for subtlety. "Does someone else stay here with you, Keith?" he says, addressing by name both to confirm the consciousness he's dealing with and to establish his own bonafides as someone who knows something.



Keith stops for a moment when the voice addresses him. It takes him a few seconds to locate the Freukes, but when he does he is met with a curious glance.

"You're new. Must be another person he pissed off at one point or another."
It is as if the question hadn't been asked. Or rather, it was processed, but he seems determined to remain a distant observer. "Cheap pranks again? Come on. At least Charlemagne was more interesting."

In the forest, two pairs of eyes shine in the darkness created by the trees- green and greener, respectively.

"Alright, let's have it. Who are you?" Keith peers at the man in the tree. "And what's your history with 'him'?"



Edgar Cizko forms something more of a shape: arms, legs...the shape of a suit, a three piece of the cut he favors. He adds a bit to his stature because he can, because the man he sees himself in has stature beyond that of the body in which he is trapped. The mask remains, however, as he sets a black gloved hand on the limb, as if to steady himself. An affectation, projecting vulnerability, uncertainty. He can only fall from the tree if he chooses to do so. But feigning a touch of weakness can be so simple, so advantageous, and only costs you in pride if your pride is tied into the opinions of others.

Edgar has no such problem.

"A curious party. You must be used to those. Curioser and curioser, as it goes. Perhaps I drank something from a mislabeled bottle and found myself here. Maybe I was just looking for a friendly face." The mask turns to look at the glowing, shimmering eyes. "You can call me Doctor. Introduce me?"



"That's not for me to do," Keith says, arms crossed and a smirk on his face. He's not bothered by the red hair falling across one side of his face. For some reason his hair is never quite the same when he dreams, nor always under his direct control.
Well, that last part is true when he's awake as well.

"They introduce themselves when they wish." The youg man keeps on walking towards the forest. The tree that the Doctor is in, though, follows him along. This is perfectly normal, by Keith's demeanor.

"Doctor? Doctor of what?"
The eyes move, at times closer and at times farther away in the shadows. Clearly Keith has seen this behavior before and knows that they mean to guide him somewhere. Where, though, he never knows, and he has stopped asking.

The landscape changes drastically as they walk into the forest- the soil is entirely covered in moss, but this moss moves and coils on the ground like a serpent slithering over cobblestones, and the trees are not entirely there all the way- giving the impression of a forest of crystallized bodies, and yet they still somehow manage to shroud the area mostly in shadow. The Doctor's tree itself shifts to accomodate for this new ecosystem, though the branch upon which he is perching stays there.



Edgar Cizko keeps his place, watching with fascination. The creature's imagination seems quite rich, beyond the ken of convention, and he seems remarkably self-aware within it. This is Keith he is facing, not a dream fragment of subconscious, compelled by automated instinct to follow the path upon which he's lead. Yet neither was he totally in control.

Edgar could seize control of the dream, if he liked, shape and weave it to his specifications. But he's here to learn about Vorpal, not torment him, not play with him. Learning requires patience, discipline, self-restraint. Edgar has always been good at learning.

"Dreams. People. Sometimes of pain. Sometimes of pleasure. Do you feel sick, Keith? Do you need a doctor's care?' he says. If, as Keith says, these other elements will introduce themselves, then he will wait. Again, patience. Discipline.



"I needed a doctor's care, when I died. But I got better, so I guess I didn't need it all that much, right?" The Doctor's subject grins. "Gives you a whole new perspective on everything. Being dead, I mean. Suddenly a bit of stuff is a lot more important, and a lot of stuff is a lot less important." He reaches for something from a tree and tears it off. A strange flower whose stalk snaps with the sound of two champagne glasses clicking together.
"I used to be angry a lot. But then I realized we're not unlike Tinkerbell when that happens."

The forest begins to recede, a cobblestone path appearing at first as isolated stones, but then more coherently forming a path.

There is no trace of the eyes, but a village does come into view. This village has tall edifices that stretch up several stories, but their houses are not conventional. There is sunlight, but no visible sun, but nevertheless the rays fall upon tiled roofs tacked onto heads, and those heads are connected to the expected bodies. Torsos sprout from the ground with doorways where their bellybuttons would be, and lovely and well-manicured little yards around them. Windows pepper their bodies here and there, and their skins are a strange mixture of flesh and masonry. These 'houses' are interacting with each other, speaking lively and laughing, or arguing, crying. There is an elderly house-woman who mournfully looks over to an empty lot where only bits of masonry and, well, an ear are left, and a younger house right next to herr that looks very much like a younger version of her with delicate tendrils of ivy clinging to her temples, trying to console her.

"Huh," Keith says, looking around.

The village, outside of its bizarre housing, is quite lovely. It overlooks a bay over which a bridge has been constructed. Not a modern bridge, but something not unlike the Pontevecchio in Florence- a gorgeous and elaborate stone work with arches. Two arches, in fact, massive ones. What is remarkable is the water under said bridge. The lower half of a visage appears, a woman's face, and its positioning is such that the bridge of the nose merges into the column upon which both arches rest, and the eyes- if there were any- would fit right under the arches.

"I think that's where we're supposed to go." The young man comments. The lips of the face are moving, and a faint song floats down to them:

Nine times backwards,
sideways 'round
opens doors you've never found.
Key flies in without a sound.
Key flies out without a sound.~



Edgar Cizko follows along dutifully, having no need to take notes. His memory is close enough to perfect, and it isn't so much about details as about conclusions. Dreams carry the detritus of our minds, the innocent dophins in the tuna net of the subconscious, squabbling their stubby beaks and squealing, despite their not being desired at all. Just an accident, sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy. Which they were, of course, could tell you much.

The Doctor alights onto what appears to be a piece of parchment, rolled on each end like a flying carpet, sitting Indian-style atop it, his hands resting on his knees. He doesn't speak now, letting Keith guide him towards that archway, and keeping his own psychic senses quite aware. Just because those eyes were no longer seen didn't mean they were no longer there.



There is, in fact, something- just lingering on the edge of being detected. Sometimes it comes close, at others it is faint... and sometimes it is two.
The path moves under them faster than Keith is walking himself. This does not seem to bother him too much-
"The Red Queen usually says that you have to run very hard to stay in one place, and twice as hard to get anywhere at all-" The Red Queen's Hypothesis, of course, applied by Leigh Van Vale to explain the law of extinction, "If she were here, this would drive her completely insane."

They cross the bridge in a blur, and the song becomes distorted by the Doppler effect until its words make no sense. But that doesn't matter as much as the fact that they have arrived to the top of a hill overlooking a glorious county that spreads in all directions, as far as the eye can see. Its fields set in greens and yellow-reds in the pattern of a chessboard.

And right at the top of the hill there is one throne, half destroyed and beaten, but a black figure lounges on it.

It looks like Vorpal, only it is not- it is a humanoid feline, strong and sleek, but he is jet black with only a touch of white on his chest, and his eyes glow yellow when they're open.

And to Edgar's psychic senses, someone else becomes present at that instant, something that was only a hint when the eyes were darting in and out of the shadows.

It's Keith. Or rather, it is part of Keith... or something of which Keith is a part. It is at once distinctively individualistic, and ingrained in Keith. The eyes are heavy with memory- thousands of years of memory.

"We introduce ourselves?" the feline drawls, looking at the Doctor with half-lidded eyes. It is unclear whether it is disdain or simple boredom. Keith looks at the Doctor and shrugs, as if saying 'I told you so'.