you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

[cestrumnocturnum]

Who: Benji Ryans and You?
What: A transdimensional kidnapping might give anyone restless dreams.
Where: In your head. Or her head. Something like that.
When: Various nights through the week.
Notes: Please see the OOC post. Beneath the cut is a general idea of the setting in which you can tag in, but let me know if you'd like me to threadstart!
Warnings: Possible violence, depictions of ruined New York City.

Of those that know a traditional and contemporary Earth, maybe you can see the eroded shadow of a New York skyline which has had such a hard twenty-first century. The buildings are reduced to the skeletons of giants, ribcages and spines and skulls with gapped teeth. Yellow tape lies like dead snakes and dust covered from where it had once cordoned off areas but now it's all the same corrosive danger, every block this way to Harlem and back. It's war wrecked from the black crater radioactive heart that had cut out the soul of the city some thirty years ago and change, through to the slow decay of street terrorism and citizen warfare.

Night and day casts grey both and presents different dangers. The bright lights of a rebuilt and prospering Staten Island seems like an eternity away, and fences that once defined and regulated spaces have been torn apart, cut open, climbed over. Abandoned attempts at construction are like a graveyard for hope. Unbelievably, some people still live here. Some people even live in the tunnels beneath the pavement of the intact buildings boarded closed. Hazard symbols are spraypainted on the faces of buildings.

They come out at night, the robotic hellhounds that breathes steam out their ribcages, whose eyes turn red when they sense you are near. Needles in their mouths, sharp feet, klaxon howls, seven hundred pounds of steel, and artificial intelligence networked between them that sees herself as a pawn and a herd at the same time but carries out her coded marching orders because she lacks a name.

Tanks in the streets, but these are rarely abandoned. A wind howls through the once crowded city streets. The dream is vivid enough to taste ash in the air.

Comments

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Operative word being 'from', I suppose, but-- yes. I am, too."

Because they all are. America has immigrants too, so why shouldn't Baedal be the same way, even if Benji has only tasted it for a short while. She also doesn't miss it, Wolfgang's ideas of what Baedal can allow, and a hand drifts up to worry the pedant on her chain. The unasked portion of the question hangs between them like the dust in the air, and she nods a little. They might as well be.

Because if Baedal is not a sort of cluster of people's ideas and pasts and prejudices brought together to make something new, Benji isn't sure what is. "We can go somewhere else," she invites, after a hesitant moment. A hand goes back, hooking two fingers against the more rudimentary latch that levers the door open from the inside.

She has to put this one back where he belongs, but she may as well not throw him just anywhere, after what they've both just been through. "Anywhere you remember is nice."

[gramarye]

Anywhere something isn't actively trying to kill them is an improvement. It's increasingly difficult to sort through his memories when so much of them are tainted by tragedy and danger and fear, though; bad things that can, will and have followed him from one place to the next such that even a transdimensional kidnapping is no relief. All his best memories share that same taint.

Most of them, he's not sure are real.

What he remembers is the beach. Hilton Beach in the height of summer; in July, it's 32°C, and the heat has a weight to it that drives people in droves towards the sea. The air smells like barbecue and the tang of sea foam, and tinny music wafts from stereos and pipes out of shops along the promenade, overshadowed in places by the joyous barking of dogs as they hurl themselves into the surf. The sunlight reflecting off the water hurts his eyes, but that he's dressed for the weather in Baedal in March appears to make no difference.

In high school his friends spent most of their time here. It's the most popular surfing destination in the city, in the country, really, and nobody cares if they hold each other's hands; no one says anything about any easy displays of affection, if they mean anything or not. No one calls them homos except each other and then it's just teasing.

It's all the normal teenager things he can remember without dragging something bad in with them -- it's the loitering at the mall, sneaking into gay bars along Dizengoff Street, pushing each other along the beach and into the water, smoking weed in the park at midnight when all the kids are gone, flirting without really meaning it, making fun of tourists. The faces of his friends are more like an amorphous blur, just like the crowds of people are present without actually being there, but even without picking out their facial features it's clear that they're happy and ignorant of the greater forces at work following them like a shadow, the ones he still feels like weights on his shoulders even while sleeping.

These are dreams he doesn't have, dreams about things that really happened when he was sleeping. Euphemisms make that sound more confusing than it is.

[cestrumnocturnum]

She hasn't really been anywhere like this, herself, but has experienced it like this, from the white and blue beaches of Sicily to the chalk cliff faces in Sussex, England, looming over the bright ocean.

But this particular the beach, down to the last details weaving together out of the memories one can only find in their most subconscious moments, is Wolfgang's. Benji lingers a moment, her inappropriate footware sinking pleasantly into the soft sand and raising both her hands to shield the sun out of her eyes, head tilted, before she allows herself to disintegrate, to conform in the crash of briny seawater on the shore and the movements of the people that populate this man's memories.

She considers remaining like that, too, to bask a little in someone else's pleasant dream, but only does so long enough to make sure the setting holds. Then she will go away, like a slinking guilty shadow.