[OPEN]bound: Dreambubble Logs

She awoke with a start, her dark encrusted eyes stretching uneasily to accommodate the light.

Well, whatever light there was in a horrorterror's bubble.

She was short, she was stout, her clothes were fucking stupid. Miss Brooks carried herself to a tentative standing position with the usual ritual. Press the ruffles on the dress down, smooth out the hair, touch at her lips to make sure her usual affected scowl was established. Proper form, one of the things she could carry with her at all times. If only her session mates could have done the same. She appreciated displays of power and glory as much as any other embattled follower of the woegothic did, but there was a reason moonjacking was considered an expert-level exploit. She would be sure to add helmsAppraiser to the shitlist, in neat and dainty broodfester, when she returned to the land of the waking. For now let the others deal with the Derse shrapnel raining down onto LOMAK. She had a lead to follow.

To literally sniff out. Darkness always had a certain musty smell to it, when one trained their nose well. Like the forbidden attic of one's childhood. Nostalgic yet forbidding. She took an extra whiff to be sure, and then another just to enjoy. Then she began to walk, seeking out her quarry with animated eyes. Animated as they could ever be, half sunk and hollow from years of sustained self-abuse.

Annalise watched the cacophony of light and laugh with nary a budge of her dour expression. Let the rain fall down, wash away all. Indeed. Those lost to the madness of The Voices were a riotous rabble, so painfully mortal that even their own droll and mundane selves could amuse them. How utterly irreverent of what lay beyond their own fragile shells! Annalise did respect The Voices for how they at least paid some homage to the Glog'oht. She'd exchanged full conversations in broodfester with Rain players in her time.

And the woman depicted in the vision was rather fetching in her prismatic sundress. The ambient light, as nonexistent as it was given the setting of Derse, danced over exposed flesh and made it sheen. Annalise murmured a sigh. Only a wisp of smoke separated her from such beauty, but it was infinitely impenetrable. A barrier in neither time nor space, but a barrier regardless.

She stepped onto the plaza, regarding the echo of marble or some other stone greeting her shoes. At least until it became a more familiar memory, the squeaky clean hallway of a place she'd once haunted what seemed like eons ago. Many an awkward conversation and passive-aggressive comment had seen the light of day within these hallowed walls of drywall and bland paint. She watched the scene for a moment more, then turned to her host with a carefully worn veneer of dour nonchalance. Her sunken eyes scanned his, or whatever passed for his eyes at that moment.

"Freh'dric'k." Her dainty voice carried the broodfester with nigh perfect enunciation, before she allowed her speech to lapse into a tongue more suitable for her mortal throat. "It is a privilege to finally meet you." She offered a curtsy, her many ruffles and pleats briefly scattering in the wind. A disc suddenly flashed in her hand, the 21st century sending it's regards. "It is likely a moot point, but I was told you enjoy offerings of animated Japanese works from time to time?" She offered the disc his way.

"I have found your bubbles, specifically." Annalise's chest proudly rose as her tribute was accepted. Irrelevant as it was, as much as both parties knew it's irrelevance, Annalise was still pleased that she would be received so graciously by so exalted and nobly ignoble a being. "Her name is Lillian? Duly noted." A sonnet for Lillian. A great way among many to pass the ever advancing passage of mortal time. Annalise watched her host for a moment, studied his table with a reverent gaze. Then she nodded, once.

"Before the air turns to something less palatable, at any rate." A 'chat' seemed so mundane a word, but if it was the word her host wished to use it was the word she'd happily choke to death on. "Is this where you post your various interactions with the mortals from? Or is this one of your presumably many avatars?"

"Puppets for the Glog'oht, perhaps," Annalise allowed herself to wistfully reflect. "Not so for the mere mortal, in this land we are the puppets." Well aware as she was that she also fell under the domain of that generalization she dared to step closer to her host. Let her eyes drink in his glory in stark relief, how his form melted out of the shadows of the ever-changing scenes of tomfoolery surrounding them. She laughed as he did, and in an equally theatrical manner. Honestly? She wasn't entirely sure what was funny. But when Freh'dric'k giggled, you giggled in turn. She actually did hide her mouth with her hand as she did so.

"I would dare argue that you are both. A Titan gave flesh and bone into the synthesis of the world of the living and dead. As did the Noble Circle and many lesser Glog'oht. Many times over." Ah, if only the mortal mind could comprehend that without immediately jumping to thoughts of fear of the alien and unknown! Annalise watched, marveled, in the display of Eldritch business and prowess that followed. How noble, to be able to take on such work with nary a hand raised! Well. At least there was no effort being exerted in the visible vicinity. What it would be like, to have access to such awesome powers of simultaneity. An infinitely expanded domain, bounded not even by the rules of time and space...

Annalise coughed, once. Something of a strong hack, she seemed about as sickly as her poor complexion and weak body suggested. Another cough, she tried to force words out of this one:

"I am... flattered... ugh." She cleared her throat with a tiny sound. How mortifying, to show human weakness in the presence of greatness! "I am flattered you consider me any sort of expert in Angelic domain, as you so colorfully put it..." She made a note to adopt the terminology for her own usage. Expand her canon gospel, and all. "The Archenemy does not seem to be a direct creation of the worldmaker, no? Perhaps all they can afford are the rudimentary troops who lack theatrical expression, who lack any means to even be comprehended. The worldmaker's crucible has never shown any direct purveyance over the winged ones. They are as alien as the beings of this realm, though far less awesome obviously."

Annalise's face strained for a second, lines of worry outside of the jurisdiction of her age furrowing at her seams. The pure unadulterated memes were difficult for her to properly process, delivered as they were in a variety of abstract and extra-sensory audio-visual channels. How one spoke an image was beyond even Annalise's well rounded comprehension of horrorterror dialects, insofar as 'dialects' of language even existed for the Void Shapers. "I'll, uh, try to lighten up. Hashtag 'taking a chill pill'." What colloquial language. She smiled loosely, nervously, briefly. Then it was back to her airs of dourness. Almost thoroughly, her eyes crossed, uncrossed, tied a Gordian Knot to try and follow Lillian's brief period of spatial expansion.

"Well I was able to follow it, at least." Annalise gave herself too much credit, though her confident tone would have sold it to a more mortal audience. "Skaia, I believe, is neither here nor there in the cold war between the Choir and the Others. It's creations have nothing to do with either and are merely exploited by both. How did you put it once? We mortals are like YouTube for the immortal and unknowable. As blasphemously mundane as that sounds." A beat. "Erm, sorry if I put words into your mouth."

Annalise got the brief sense that something wasn't quite right on a meta level. This had to be what Flux players felt like on a daily basis. She brushed aside the feeling of hairs standing on end, literally, she swatted them down where they stood with a nervous hand to the back of the neck.

"If you think it's a great analogy I'm flattered!" And she would be slipping it into every written sentence of literature she produced for at least the next decitimestamp, if not more. "I... well it does actually sound like a very useful ability. Does it work outside of the dreambubbles?" Thinking about practical things again. Not Annalise's forte. She felt her foot slipping briefly from the Knife, but then remembered that this was a dream, literally in some senses. The act didn't matter so much, not out here.

She could smile, so she did. Small, but there.

Annalise was well used to intrusion into her mental privacy, she didn't even flinch. She hated the slimy, licorice-esque taste of Flux contamination all the same, and she openly gagged. Accursed direct sensory feedback into her brain. The damnable taste was ten times stronger when it was directly being fed into her head. The hand clasping at her mouth made no difference, save for maybe being on standby in case she puked. But no, she swallowed- well not really because again, literal food for thought as opposed to for esophagus- it down, swallowed the jagged little pill with only some difficulty.

Somewhere within her mind, sandwiched between her arbitrary ability to speak dubious French and her somewhat questionable English, there was a new lingual skill. Probably also equally as less than satisfactory as all her other stored languages.

""

"Ugh."

"" Correctly pinning the dimensions of the spoken image down was hard. It was like trying to shape one's throat into any geometric configuration that wasn't an amorphous blob. Just didn't work out. Wait. She had this. Take a deep breath, screw up her face into a pretty unattractive shape. Like a particularly bad post-meal adventure. She strained, budged, oh, there it was:

""

"Fff-!" Gulped for air. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding her breath the whole time. "How was that?"