Dream: Oct 28 2018

So... it starts out where I'm a ghost, who is apparently Crow if he'd been a human.  I take part in a ritual performed by some humans, and it fails because I'm impure.  A human girl messes up on purpose because she is the only one who knows I'm a ghost, and so that my partner retains her protection from the local spirits.  I scold her, since now she doesn't get any protection, and she just grins and says she's not expecting to live to be 200 like the others, she just wants to have a good life.

The elders come out and investigate, and deem the ritual glitchy, but since it mostly worked, they just apologize to the girl who failed on purpose and to me, and we act gracious about it.

I thank the girl after we have privacy, and look to my partner, who is oblivious, and asks me why I think two failed the ritual.  I tell her I don't know, even though I do know (I left the waters because I saw something dangerous I wanted to protect her from).  She goes to hug me, and I back away, then flee the neighborhood with an apology.

I can touch and interact with the world, but any time I do, it's obvious I don't belong among the living.

So, I travel.  At some points, between different planes, always searching for smoething but never finding it, and sometimes with companions.

I and my companions shove a bunch of fighter-y types from their plane and into a lower one, and Beryl appears.

She's upset.  She curses me with a glowing finger (the last knuckle on my left pointer), and then banishes me back to my native plane, though doesn't tell me that it is my native plain.

I'm bored and wander.  I go looking for animal companionship, but I can't find one special to me.  Instead I find a unicorn and a bunch of lost pets, which I dutifully return, and the unicorn leaves on its own, which I assume means someone stole it, but in the end, I'm left searching.

I discover a girl who is complaining that one of her newborn kittens died, and I go to comfort her.  She's a warty child, and very abusive toward me, but I don't realize until later.

I learn to pass through open pipes and to be invisible more often than not.  In doing so, I attract the attention of one of the people from the ritual, who has become an agent of purity.  He's pissed once he sees and recognizes me (I was visiting the abusive girl), and enters a sort of berserk fury.

This is baaaad because he's stronger and faster than me, and my only hope is being able to outsmart him, but he knows about me traveling through pipes.

My friend from the ritual, the girl who failed on purpose, was running a temple with a labyrinth underneath.  I fled there thinking I could lose the dude, but he nearly caught me many times until I saw why she told me to go into the basement.

There were open pipes everywhere.  I started using them, and the guy started lagging behind a little.  I took the gamble and took one of the dozen that led up and out, and in his anger, he nearly got ahead enough to close the pipe.  One touch from him directly would have destroyed me, but thankfully I slipped past him and back out into the open.  The girl was gone, but I still fled.

I end up going to China, where I invite myself to a party thinking it'll help calm my fear.  Thankfully the lord hosting is bilingual, but he's also prone to long stories.  There are three short, u-shaped tables, each with a single maid responsible for feeding the guests.  I take the last and lowest table, since I don't really need food, and sit on the end nearest the opening, which is where the lowest of low of the guests sit, and I sit there, since unlike the rest, I'm actually just a commoner.  The rest of the guests just think that I'm a very low-ranked noble, and that's why I speak like someone common, but they're wrong.

The lord comes out and sees people pigging out and complaining about the service of the maids, except for me.  I'm hungry, after watching everyone else eat, but I don't complain, since I don't really _need_ to eat.

He walks between the walls and the tables, and takes the one seat lower than me, just shy of where the servants sit.

Everyone is shocked, but to break protocol further than this would be strange, so the maids stay where they are and keep working furiously to feed everyone, but the places that the lord and I are seated are the ones most often forgotten because we're out of line of sight.

He starts telling stories, and I notice the stories relate to the tableware.  I lift it and start to turn it over in my hands to follow the illustrations to the story, and the lord asks me to paint along with him, giving me a brush, just telling me to do a wash over the bowl itself.

I do as instructed, and more details emerge not just on my bowl, but on the others, who are now listening and paying attention, and more shocking, the illustrations shift after the first go-around, and everyone is completely enraptured.

The next story isn't so pleasant.  It's about a girl born without a nose or emotions, who can never sleep at night, until in madness she and her mother stay up and butcher her younger sister together, with the noseless girl being the one forcing her mother to help.  The noseless girl sleeps well for the first time.

The other people suddenly ask me to stop painting, and I notice that my brush has blackened, and so has the bowl, which has grown.

The lord stops, since he realizes that they're asking me, and by extension, him, to stop.  The maid reassures everyone that it's not a good story for eating, but I comment that it was fascinating, especially with the bowl as a visual aid.

Another maid, this one old and crone-like, says "If you're that morbidly curious, the bodies remain in my home."

I humbly decline, and the meal ends.  During the after-feast mingling, we all end up drinking, and the lord keeps asking about the Japanese pronunciation, since he can't ever quite get it right, until suddenly he claps a hand on my shoulder, and I'm so startled that I excuse my drunk-ass self.

The first exit I take leads me to a catholic cathedral, where I recite a few things that I thiiiiink I'm supposed to.  I stumble through, clearly drunk off my gourd, until a little girl covered in warts takes me by the hand.  I'm too drunk to think anything of it, and the girl seems not to realize.  She leads me to where she, her mother, and grandmother live.  Her mother is as warty as she is, and after the girl tells me to find the landlord and gives me a little plastic bag of Disney stuff (she likes to pretend they're on a Disney cruise), I depart, then go invisible along with the little bag from the girl.

I carry it around and keep watch, hiding my glow-finger at all times, until she's crying over something, and inconsolable.  I put the plastic bag over my face like a mask, letting only it be visible, and make funny faces through the plastic until she cheers up, but she realizes who I am and almost says it before I poof from sight.

I act as her sort of protector for a time, dodging sight of all, until I finally decide to go check in on the mysterious grandmother.

I'm shocked.  It's my partner from the ritual—the one I wanted to protect.  She's ancient now, and can see through my invisibility.  I close the door behind myself at her request, and she apologizes for everything.  I ask why, and she says her daughter put me through so much pain.

I flashback to the warty girl who lost her kitten and who kept gaslighting me, nearly driving me mad.  I gape, ready to leave this place, but she grabs my arm despite being bedridden and otherwise unable to move.

"No.  Don't flee.  My grandchild is..."

That was right.  Her daughter hadn't seen me, didn't know I was there, but her granddaughter was in constant danger.

"There are no rituals anymore.  Please protect her."

I nodded silently, and felt her heart stop beating before she released my arm.  I hurried from the room and went to find the little girl, feeling like something was wrong.

I found her, and her warts were fading into white wisps.  She was stuck in the air, and her mother was screaming at her and telling her she was trash.  The little girl was bleeding.

I shoved the mother away and wrapped my arms around the girl, and the story reset, playing through again, but this time instead of grabbing the girl, once I shoved her mother from the room and locked the door in her face, I watched.

The warts left completely, and the knife shot from her arm.  The stab wounds closed, and she drifted downward, then touched me, and it repeated again.

This time, I didn't do anything, and when she touched her mother, it was her mother that disappeared with a scream.  I took physical form and she smiled at me, but didn't touch me, and said she loved me.