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

[wingwalker]

A metal beast is beyond Xas's imagination, but not the clash and drag of sword blades, and not the plummet of two grappling bodies from the floor above, half-hidden by shadows, tangled in their own wings without the space to unfurl them.

One, smeared with black blood, lands unbalanced on the edge of a chasm and tumbles through it to the next floor; the other stands, sword in hand, and looks straight at Xas. Through the dark only her eyes glint, then her teeth. Beneath the ruthless cheer, the grin says, stay out of this.

She leaps down after their brother. Xas chooses the stairs.

He springs forward, just a frightened animal, and lands crouched halfway up the damaged portion with his weight spread between his four limbs. The wood protests but doesn't break. Chinatown, he thinks nonsensically - trying to make sense - before more scraping down the stairs pushes him forward again, this time in the clumsy crawl of a creature never meant to be so close to the ground. His feathers hiss against the surfaces they brush.

He isn't aiming for the roof. With his wings useless the sky won't save him from whoever is on the stairs behind him, and might hand him to his siblings and their swords and their single-minded savagery. Two stories further, that's all, and he twists out of the stairway and into the dark. Hiding worked last time.

[cestrumnocturnum]

She relates, the being that is infused in each new angle of dream that Xas discovers beneath his feet and hands, the air he breathes. She relates to seeking darkness, the safety in claustrophobia. It's why she doesn't mind tight spaces, because if nothing else can squeeze in with you, nothing can hurt you. It's when the scenario is open and brightly lit that you have to worry about being seen.

The floor that Xas scrambles into is not small, space around him, but the shadows steal away that sense of depth anyway. They swallow him.

"Who was that?"

The voice comes from the shadows too, a different set of them in a different corner, sitting. The cross of legs, knees drawn to her chin, and there's a rifle on the ground next to her hand. Benji can't help but stare; she's dreamed up an angel of some kind, whose wings are broken. "The two people, with the swords."

[wingwalker]

Xas creeps close enough to see her and then stares at her for a moment, uncomprehending: she's not an angel, she's not a soul. She looks human, and she has a gun. And he can't get his mind around it, but it feels like she's everywhere, and like she's important. The closest comparison Xas can make is to God.

"Barakel and Tagas," he answers rotely, then presses a hand to the back of his head and frowns. That can't be right. Tagas has been dead for a long time, and Barakel - the thought is cut off by groaning metal from somewhere in the building, and he turns his back and his wings on the woman to face toward it. He's not afraid of the rifle. He's terrified of whatever else is out there.

"What are you?" he asks her, without looking back, and then the less important but more polite question: "Are you all right?"

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Me?"

She sounds surprised by that question, the first one, although it could cover the second as well. It seems like the kind of question she should be asking, but instead, she answers it with; "I'm a dreamwalker." Which would make sense, but first one would have to decide that this place, rich in detail, in its scents, its density, is somehow unreal and created, and it could go either way. For Benji, this is home. However much she may feel like God, she's forgotten she isn't supposed to.

"And-- yes, I'm fine. Frightened." To be honest.

She doesn't say of what. Maybe she's talking about the thing that chases with prehistoric patience and weight, scraping metal through the stairs. Maybe she's talking about Xas. "Seven hundred pounds of steel and iron," she says, after a moment. "Those things. They climb well but they've very heavy."

Below, there's a clatter and crunch as the pursuing monster navigates the bridge that Xas had passed himself. Not seven hundred pounds worth of clatter, other pieces breaking away, but its noisy all he same.

"Are you? Alright?" She doesn't ask what he is. He's obviously an angel.

[wingwalker]

"Frightened," Xas echoes, still facing the stairwell, while his mind spins like a reel that's reached the end of its film, clamorous and arrested: fuck the machine and seven hundred pounds of steel and iron and dreamwalker.

(He only sleeps when he wants to, and only ever wants to sleep to dream - but it's never like this. It's always flight, endless lines and dives above the clouds, where the horizon curves and vapor crystallizes in his hair.)

Another clatter draws him out of himself and he turns back toward her, steps closer and lowers himself into a crouch. He doesn't know whether he's trying to protect her or asking to be protected. Maybe both. His wings slide uselessly against the ground to spread behind him, a poorly-formed shield - and that's wrong, too, somehow. This is all wrong. "I don't know where I am," he says. "This isn't Hell." His tone is decisive, but his expression is asking for confirmation, and preferably an explanation.

[cestrumnocturnum]

She reads his expression like maybe there's a joke to be had in there, the assertion that this isn't Hell. But. Angel. Being something of an atheist doesn't seem to actually interfere with the acceptance of this information, but that's what dreaming does.

"Not literally," Benji concedes, after a moment. "But it is New York City, which some people might consider synonymous, but they probably wouldn't if they knew about the real thing." She stops, there, swallowing against more nervous ramble, and looks him over before moving into a crouch as well, picking up the shotgun the way someone does when they know how to work the damn thing but would rather not have to do so.

Red light makes a play at all the grey and shadows. From where as had escaped the stairwell, two red lights suddenly hover in the darkness. They glow from silver sockets, a large feline skull forged from steel, with teeth and everything, although where a lower jaw once was is instead a needle charged with some unknown fluid, silvery tip protruding passed eye teeth. As it the creature flows into view, it is without a doubt mechanical - the insectile tick of movement, the metal legs and its ribcage like body with steam pluming out from between metal slats. It seems organic enough to growl, but machine-like enough for the gently whrrr of moving parts makes sense, even to those who come from a time far before 2029. Or later.

It is sharp and big and superheated, and the definition of fuck the machine may need to be altered. Benji's doesn't fire wildly at it, as if distrustful of her own immediate panic -- she just moves to disappear with a flap of coat around a concrete pillar. Around Xas, the shadows, the angles of the building's interior, provide hiding space and uncertainty, but they're also changeable, confusing, a feeling of vertigo suddenly cloying in the air.

[wingwalker]

The sensation freezes him for a moment. In hundreds of falls and dark places, he's never felt this. Spatial disorientation isn't in his make-up. The only time he's felt anything similar is when he first woke up with half of his body missing: his wings were gone, are gone, he remembers that now. This isn't me, he thinks; she'd said dreamwalker. For a moment he feels on the verge of understanding.

But when he backs away from the creature, not near enough to revelation not to be pushed into instinctive retreat, it's his bare, feather-coated back that touches the wall behind him. The familiar feeling of not being himself, the one that means he is himself after all, floods back in, like it was always there and the wings never were.

In the meantime the metal beast has come closer, and Xas tries to believe it can't hurt him. Nothing can, except his siblings. He can stare this down. He can.

It moves forward again, leaking steam and unnerving noise, and he changes his mind and runs. He's less clumsy now, stronger than his weight warrants, unencumbered. When he steps blindly into one of the gaping holes in the floor, he takes the fall with a practiced roll and keeps running; when a new trio of bodies appears ahead, swords glinting, he launches himself back up through the next hole, catches the splintered floor and pulls himself up.

He can hear the beast somewhere behind him in the dark, still. He doesn't look back, focused ahead. If the woman knows where they are, maybe she knows where to hide or how to escape.

[cestrumnocturnum]

There are celestial beings in this building, even though giant metal cats with needles for fangs are prowling it too. This particular mind, sidling its reality against hers, it's different enough that consciousness and lucidity will have no choice but to surface, already a dark shape beneath, coming nearer. Right now, there's so much going on that gaining back control is temporarily just outside of her grasp, and the attempt to do is what confuses Xas's sense of geography and space.

The room bends, and the robot is right there, and for a second, he can feel the heat radiating from its body, a trick of sensation attributing warmth to the glow of red eyes on his face, and there is no specific part of his body that actually is pierced with the raking of the needle, but for a split second, he viscerally knows what that's like too--

The loudness of the discharging firearm to his right-- maybe-- seems to vibrate through reality, more felt than heard; the actual noise is almost muffled even as buckshot takes out the glow of red eyes. Glass sprays and sprinkles.

The floor breaks beneath him.

They need to be somewhere safe, and there is a split second of vertigo that Xas experiences, the robot coming down with him, the clash of swords and battle ringing in his ears. But then, he is falling to land somewhere else, and Benji, invisibly and intangibly, latches onto this. Xas will go somewhere only he knows, somewhere that is familiar. It does not have to be pretty, or appropriate, but a lack of robots and sword-having beings would be a start; he is used, for their own benefit, as a vehicle.

[wingwalker]

Xas lands on his back in forgiving dirt, with his hand pressed to his scarred side - not because he was pierced there, it takes him a moment to realize. He wasn't. The sensation wasn't localized at all. The beast is gone. And he's home. He sits up to make sure, and to check for swords or for metal monsters; he exhales his last lungful of ashy air, and inhales humidity and perfume and decaying plant matter.

No amount of effort could make the garden grow like one on Earth. The blues bleach to white, the reds turn nearly black, and where stems should be pale green they're darker than pine nettles. But the black glass dome arching overhead keeps out the oppressive light and arid heat, lets things survive, obscures the jagged landscape and the citadel in the distance. Xas managed.

This is Hell. Before was a nightmare. And this is - not a good dream, given that he's grounded and wingless. But it's still a better one, even though Xas still feels watched and accompanied, like he always did before he learned to ignore God. "Go away," he says, sullen but lethargic. A bee lands on his knee, and he lies back down.

[cestrumnocturnum]

She never resolves back into a shape. There is something frightening about this place, and not only because of how it looks and feels and smells, but the acceptance and understanding attached to Xas that she feels and knows as intently as the ground beneath his back and the domed sky he stares straight up at. She clings like a shadow for a good few moments, before he makes his request.

As sheepish as an omniscient entity can be, she grants his wish, dissolving out from the dreamscape and leaving him be in his own head, to carry out his sleep as he may.