Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

1st Ashan 719

They were in the Veil again, and they walked in silence, passing door after door that led to the inner mindscapes of people she didn’t know nor cared to know. Information was her life; Zipper had played informant when she barely reached up to the average knee, engaged as a secondary reconnaissance operative in the Etzori army as a fledgling Attuner, and her entire career as a Black Guard climbing the ranks was built brick by brick upon a campaign of domestic espionage, informant management, specialized magically-enhanced interrogations, and a whole lot of bribery - on either end. She never thought information would ever be too much of a good thing - until Emea gave her the key to a library of sleeping minds and unspoken thoughts so vast she would never finish reading even a fraction of them in a thousand lifetimes.

Nor did she want to; most of the books in this great library were donkey balls.

Small, constrained minds with small, constrained means seemed to be the majority breed of novel in the library of Emea. The common-folk had their uses in the waking world. In fact, those who were mundane fixtures of society were often beneath notice and thus the best informants, but none of them were worth the effort of exploring, understanding, and plunging the depths of the sleeping mind to exploit its potential as an asset.

But she didn’t need potential or assets today; she just needed geographical circumstance.

“Mathias.” Zipper said. She was starved for help and he was the only one around. She had encountered other Dreamwalkers during her seasons within Emea, but they had all proven unreliable. The Huntress was an animal. A skilled animal but a beast nonetheless, and her sensitivities had broken their loose partnership after she had rejected Zipper’s basic counsel. Pepper, the young Dreamwalker from Rharne, was nowhere to be found. After a quick check on Finn, she had dismissed her. Chances were that a Nightmare had taken her.

Which left her with… dear Mathias, all empty green eyes and clear features. A man who worshipped a Crippled Immortal, thought nothing of eating people, and was clearly missing a few screws in the head. Screws called empathy and more damningly drive; ambition. Goals. He was a tool in the most objective sense of the word. He wanted to be used. He wanted someone to tell him what to do.

It should have been the greatest gift she would ever receive: A Dreamwalking partner, and a powerful Abrogator to boot, that only did exactly what she told him to do. Instead, it just nagged at her. Gnawed at her like a rat wanting out of her chest. She had grown up with criminals, worked with criminals, handled criminals all her life. A lot of them were unsentimental, awful people-

But they all wanted something. Short-sighted or long-term, they all sought.

He didn’t.

It shouldn’t have been a problem but it really, really, really was.

“Fiona,” he replied. They didn’t break stride as they locked eyes. Did he even feel it, she wondered, when his mother died?

“Did you even feel it, I’m wondering, when your mother died?”

He blinked twice. “My mother is alive and well, as far as I am aware.” Nothing. Not a hint of emotion anywhere in his voice, in his face, or in those frustratingly empty, empty eyes of his. “Did you kill her?” It sounded like he was asking her about the fucking weather.

It occurred to her at that moment that she wasn’t expecting -nor wanting- sorrow. She would have despised self-pity, rolled her eyes at self-deprecation, rejected any move for attention. No, no, no, what she was looking for was-

Anger. Anger at a life snatched away. Anger at a denial of a resource. Anger at an asset, a caretaker, a person who had raised him and continued to provide opportunities and employment stolen away.

Anger was her entire life and she wouldn’t have it any other way, so what the hell was his malfunction?

“We are being pedantic, I see.” Zipper smiled that thin smile of hers. “Was the old woman in the mansion not a mother to you? Was she not as close to kin as you would have?”

“Are ‘caretaker’ and ‘mother’ interchangeable in this language?” There was just enough rise in his voice to key into the fact he was asking a legitimate question. Then again, he rarely, if ever, made use of rhetoric. Another one of the many things about him that just rubbed her the wrong way: limited, rigid diction.

“Not always, but I would think somebody who entrusted her home, her care, and her spark to be worthy of sentiment, no?”

He didn’t respond right away, but neither did he give any indication that he was mulling over a word she’d said. Not until he spoke, anway. “If it is a matter of worthiness, I would not know the proper scales to measure it.” He blinked once. Twice. “But I assume the answer you would prefer to hear is ‘yes, she was worthy of sentiment’, correct?”

Not quite.

“Only in the sense that you offered value add beyond the stated contract.” He blankly stared at her in silence. She sighed. Further explanation then. “A man has a cat. The cat catches rats, the man offers water and a roof. The contract is settled. The man pets the cat. The cat reciprocates. That is outside the contract but it is not unwelcomed.” That small, familiar spark of what she knew he considered comprehension - but wasn’t - lit up his eyes for a tick. He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “I am not expecting a fuckin’ hug nor do am I asking for you to give me one, if those are your next chosen words, my dearest fucktard.”

His mouth shut. Fuckin’ knew it. When he opened it again, he at least had a grasp on the situation. “You are wondering if I will act as a proper companion rather than a simple tool in our own relationship?”

Missed the mark by a few but she’d take it.

“As a professional confidant. An advisor.” She resisted rolling her eyes.

He blinked. “You have never once taken nor appreciated my advice.”

“Nor have you given any worthy of appreciation but people grow.” But they did not change. A shit bud would become a shit tree. “People change. You barely knew how to enter a dream a few seasons back, now we seek passage to another land.”

His lips curved into that slight frown he wore to signal whatever was his equivalent of “confusion”. “Are you… being sentimental?” The frown faded. “Or are you genuinely requesting I state my own opinions more often?”

“Do I look sentimental to you?” Zipper barked incredulously.

“I honestly do not know how to identify most of your emotions, aside from anger,” he admitted. “Which you now appear to be more so than before.”

“I need a second opinion to prove how right I am and yours is the only one available. Simple as that.”

For a moment, he continue to stare at her, their footsteps a single sound as they continued on their way past door after door, both seeming to ignore the fantastic and expansive landscape as if they were strolling through their own backyard. “I will make an effort to provide that for you from this point forward.”

“Deeply appreciated.” Zipper said in a tone that was anything but. “As a new opinion-spewing man, which hole do you think we should go into?”

There was not even a single trill of consideration or hesitation as he immediately pointed at the closest door to them. “That one.”

She spun around and walked into the furthest one in the portal cluster.

Carrots were a vegetable, an edible root that grew out of the earth. He knew this because he’d read about them once in one of Graciana’s many books. There had even been an illustration along with a detailed description of their physical characteristics: typically a variant of orange in color with green or pale yellow stems and foliage. They could be chopped up and put into soups or shredded over salads or even tossed into a pot with other tuberous edibles and mashed up into a sort of paste that, reportedly, paired well with both beef and pork.

Yet, what the thousands of carrots had been doing for the past half break as he and Fiona had tread through the absurdly verdant hills and cerulean skies of their unknown host’s dreamscape was nowhere near what had been detailed in the book. Everywhere they looked, the little orange vegetables were vigorously - even violently - attempting to shove a part of themselves into one of their peers. Their actions were made all the more disturbing due to the fact that each of the carrots possessed an uncomfortably shrill voice, which most of them utilized for moaning.

The sort of moaning one would have heard on any given night during late evening stroll through Lair.

Others were a bit more creative, breaking up the general sensual drone with such things as, “Ah, fuck just take it!”, “I’m almost there, I’m almost there!”, and “Such a good boy for daddy...” There was slapping and riding and spanking and shafting. Had Mathias had any interest in the act of copulation, he might have been impressed. He did not, however, and instead the scene was merely overwhelmingly loud.

Needless to say, Fiona had been exceptionally quiet since they’d passed through her chosen door. He knew she could wipe them all away if she so pleased, but it became increasingly clear that she was much more focused on ignoring them out of existence.

“Let’s find the dreamer.” she finally said.

It was an unnecessary command. They’d been walking through the slick and sticky fields for some time to no avail, and there hadn’t been a dreamscape yet they’d entered where they hadn’t, to some degree, been in search of the realm’s maintainer. He didn’t make any comment of it. One needless sentence didn’t warrant another.

Instead, he simply nodded, eyes still set and scanning their surroundings for anything that wasn’t a brightly colored, concupiscent carrot. Thus far, the only thing he’d noticed were the little vegetables weren’t so little anymore. That, and many of them were now sporting some concerningly warped variants of human-like genitalia.

It seemed that such alterations in the dreamscape meant they were getting closer to its creator.

It also seemed that the dreamer, wherever and whoever they were, had taken notice of them.

All at once, the thousands of carrots stopped what they were doing, allowing a deep and heavy silence to fill the sickly sweet smelling air. Had the dreamscape itself not been so saturated with color and light, it might have even been considered eerie. As things stood, however, the quiet was more comfortable than anything else, even with the sounds of shouting and moaning still ringing in both of their ears.

“Not a word,” Zipper said. She clearly meant that in more than one way. “Not a fuckin’ word.”

“Croode vulgarities will not be tolerated in this agricooltural commune.” A voice said, ringing out across fields of prior-fornicating carrots. “There will be respect in this sacred place. The king demands it!”

If nothing else, the king stood out from his subjects. A great, lumbering mass of blue parted the orange sea, and it didn’t need to come much closer before he saw it for what it was: a giant blue pumpkin wheeled by hundreds of tiny carrot people, straining against his great weight with sounds uncomfortably similar to what their coitus-crazed compatriots were making.

Another thing that was uncomfortable was the incredibly long time it took to wheel him over. Fiona went from staring intently, to tapping her fingers together, to looking up at the sky with a face that begged for death. Every once in awhile, there was a little twitch in her arm, as if she wanted to conjure up a door and leave but was too proud not to at least see her chosen door through.

Mathias, however, merely stood still and stared.

When, at last, the massive periwinkle pumpkin came to rest at what was, more or less, a comfortable speaking distance from the two of them, Mathias offered a polite bow of his head. It was a king, after all. The other carrots did much the same, save for the quivering, clearly straining members of his subjects that continued to hold him aloft, their high-pitched breathing exceptionally loud and tormented in the otherwise silent atmosphere.

“The king demands yoor names!”

Mathias towards Fiona, his grey-green eyes just barely lit with the spark of a question. A king the strange blue gourd might have been, but Fiona held the only authority that mattered, as far as he was concerned.

“I’m Zucchini Oli’via.” she said, staring up at the great king. “And my friend is…”

“...Squash.”

“These are nooble names, my subjects!” The king bellowed, the weight of his shout crushing a few of the smaller sexual carrots. “These are dignitaries from a fooreign land! Their croode words were simply fooreign missteps and are readily foorgiven! Let us welcome them as friends too the kingdom!”

As one, the carrots moaned. Fiona held her hand up to her mouth and Mathias swore he heard a gagging sound.

“What… do we do now?” Mathias murmured, his voice easily drowned out by the carrots’ moaning so as not to reach the pumpkin king’s… whatever he had that functioned as his ears. A few of the carrots might have heard him as well, but they were too busy moaning their welcome to act upon it, if they cared in the first place.

“The day is still young.” she said through gritted teeth.