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]

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.