21 - In restless dreams I walked alone

[with_my_teacup]

Who: Riddick and YOU. Or as you. You choose.
What: Riddick's dreams.
When: Various nights and days through the dreamplot
Where: Various prisons and planets-- inside Riddick's brain
Warnings: Claustrophobia, cannibalism, general horror, eye scream depending on the dream


So-- dreams are interactive or spectator. Just let me know what you're up to in your text or header. Your character can dream through Riddick's eyes or be an AU exile/prisoner/survivor in his settings.

If you're behind his eyes, you have nice new acute senses and are seeing a mash of infra-red and visible light.

Comments

Slam City (Eyescream)

[with_my_teacup]

He still dreams in color, sometimes. But never much before prison. That stress consumes his brain as long as he's trapped aboard the barge.

He dreams of Slam City, the prison station. The brightly lit places where the doors still lock, where guards still patrol.

The darkness. The last darkness he'd ever see. Still black, though, the faint glimpses of light sometimes blocked by Shiners, the other people moving around down here. And they can see...

Somewhere there's a cutter down here. Someone who can shine his eyes.

[some_kinda_hero]

It was the first in a series of cross-dreaming, shared fantasies. Claire wasn't prepared, nor fully aware of what was happening, but she found herself in a room with a shady looking doctor. Least, she assumed he was some sort of doctor, given the scary tools displayed and winking in the light.

Like all dreams, she arrived in the middle. She was confused about the going on's, before, now, and after. She swallowed hard and waited, casting a glance at the door. The doctor announced he was on his way. But whoever this 'he' was, the blonde hadn't an inkling.

[with_my_teacup]

Riddick's vicious game of hide and seek with the shiners reaches its inevitable conclusion-- a beating in the dark, rolled for the cash on him.

He doesn't hear we got to him too late, or see the doctor and the young woman walking towards him, carrying lights. But this time two sets of hands grip and drag him, and that's not how it usually goes... Is it?

[some_kinda_hero]

Somehow she knew upon sight that he was Riddick and nothing is yet out of the ordinary as she gently guides him to the table. It was crazy, the things people wanted. Claire wasn't sure she could always fault, nor judge, and despite their reasoning for being here, this was her life now. And so, from time to time, she showed kindness on the lambs.

Claire gingerly touched the top of his head, looking up at the 'surgeon'. "What now?"

[with_my_teacup]

"Why did you bring me here?" Riddick's voice is gravelly with half-consciousness, or the dream equivalent. The cutter starts to talk about the shine- that's how this one goes- but his voice fades into the background, a drone with meaning but without words, as he focuses on the blonde.

"And who are you?"

[some_kinda_hero]

She took to the background in both voice and action, letting the cutter take over while she waited to assist. She was only pulled out from her thoughts when that lullaby tone drifted over over and Claire held his gaze, putting the old eyes to memory with all the others before. She felt like she should know that voice, but it was too brief a wonder and gone without another consideration.

"I'm the help," she answered. To prove her point, the young woman strapped him down, settled him in. "You know you won't be the same after this, right?"

M6-117 (creature feature)

[with_my_teacup]

Night's falling over the desert, but it falls with dream logic. Patches of light linger-- safe spots that diminish, slowly, shrinking and receding.

Dream logic.

He starts alone but there will be survivors-- memories twisting, people showing up after they should be dead. Carolyn-- here somewhere.

No telling what cataclysm broke this planet across the back. The great predators-- the bioraptors, the hammerheads, whatever you want to call the blind mammalio-insectoid carnivores that stalk the night-- they were never meant to have full reign. They've ripped the head off their own survival. One race of bioluminescent invertebrates won't offer enough carbon utilization to keep a predator population alive.

In ten generations, a hundred, the last creature will eat the second to last and when it starves to death in the days to follow the planet will be quiet.

Riddick knows it intellectually but it doesn't provide relief to his dream-- they call in his mind, their sonar cries almost playful, almost inquisitive.

AaaOOOP? WOOOoo....

It pings off the bones and rocks that stud this desert world.

Spectator cool for this?

[fuglyslut]

Regina knows, the way one sometimes knows in dreams, that she is both herself and this man at the same time, that the senses she's experiencing should be new to her. It's not exactly lucid, but she's aware, just for a moment, enough that she tries to move away from the sound.

Supercool! Let the Srs Narration commence.

[with_my_teacup]

The details of the dream start to flesh themselves out, either in sudden bursts of 'oh, I knew that' or distant sightings of a figure, a form.

There's safety to the east, a skiff off this planet. There's the other survivors he (she) abandoned off in the opposite direction. It's the usual choice in these dreams.

A terrified voice yells "Regina!" and there's the little girl, head shaved just like the dreamer, running back into the shelter of some rocks... but the sonar whoops are getting closer, and a lithe form, a creature with a four-pronged skull and vicious claws that glow body-heat bright in Regina's vision, slithers in after her.

The ship or the girl, Regina?

[fuglyslut]

Most definitely the ship.

After all, it's not like she can do anything against the creature...

...Can she?

[with_my_teacup]

A young scream from inside the crevice, a sickening lurch of empathy, that sense so atrophied that it hurts to use.

The dreamer's head floods with cold, bloody information. How the creatures can be killed. How likely the dreamer is to die, under what circumstances.

And the bone deep drive to protect the child.

[fuglyslut]

Shit.

This dream is the worst.

She wavers for a moment in place, and in her mind, the landscape seems to waver with her: the ship now closer, now farther; the child infinitely far, now too close to be ignored.

"Fine." And she takes off for the rocks. At least there's power, here. She feels it in her new body, her new senses. Knowledge and power.

That feels kind of good.

M6-117 (creature feature)

[nolongerhollow]

A pair of silver eyes flash from a crevice in the rocks. Dracula, dead, scentless and very dangerous in his own right, had survived thus far, easily. But he can't shake the horror of this.

He knows now that this is just such a disaster as the Devil wanted to visit on the Earth using his people. But with vampires instead of these...things. And it steels his resolve to forswear his own allegiances.

He slips along the wall slowly, eyes to the dark. Soon enough one of the circling creatures will go for him or his strange sort-of-companion. Either way he is ready.

M6-117 (creature feature)

[with_my_teacup]

Riddick looks up to the sky, where a pair of straggling beasts has taken to fighting, murdering one another.

"Fuck this. We get these power cells to the skiff--" and there are power cells, as he locks into one time, one memory, and the whole dream stabilizes. "--we're off this rock. Leave the others."

M6-117 (creature feature)

[nolongerhollow]

"I will help you get to the safety of the ship, but then I'm going back for them. I would never wish anyone a death in this place." His voice was firm.

He crossed to the power cells and shouldered into the makeshift harness for half of them, testing its strength with a few tugs.

M6-117 (creature feature)

[with_my_teacup]

"They're dead weight," Riddick snaps, the strain clear in his voice. "Leave'm. Trying to save them will only get you killed. Let Fry play hero, she's the one with the big heart."

Fry. She stirs something in him, this feeling of camaraderie, of -- having someone to work along side of instead of against. Jack, her hope and her perfect trust and the strange protective instinct that disturbs him, that leaves him vulnerable.

M6-117 (creature feature)

[nolongerhollow]

"Dead weight." Fry wasn't going to be able to do a damn thing without their help. And there was a child among them.

"Bullshit," he stated flatly. "Fry won't make it on her own. Besides, why concern yourself if I risk my neck? All I'm asking you to do is keep the engine warm until we get back."

Ursa Luna (Cannibalism)

[with_my_teacup]

Human blood.

Coppery. Clotted. The only source of moisture there is on this fucker of a moon. The prison administration controls access to it-- keeps prisoners from running. But Riddick always runs.

The other prisoner is already dead, got the wrong end of a life-or-death fight. It's been days since he's eaten, his stolen water bottle empty. The alcohol he stole will dehydrate more than it hydrates, but it will cut the taste of metal. He stoops by the body and slits a vein.

The terrible algebra of survival.

(interactive dream)

[timesbureaucrat]

"What are you doing?" Narvin squeaks. He can, of course, see what Riddick is doing and the question is more an expression of horror than a query. The smell of wet blood was thick in the air, cutting through the smell of unwashed humans and sterile, over-recycled air.

(interactive dream)

[with_my_teacup]

A warden. But not in a uniform. Why does he know this is a warden? But he trusts his instincts implicitly.

"Do you enjoy starvation?" he asks pleasantly. "Dehydration? Really fire your thrusters?" Blood spills into a battered tin cup, and the last of someone's carefully hoarded schnapps follows. Riddick swirls the mixture, sniffs it, and then drinks deep. It's not pleasant, but it's water, water, water...

Half the cup is gone when he stops, and he licks red streaks from his lips. "...peppermint cuts the taste. Want some?" He proffers the gory drink.

[timesbureaucrat]

"Fire my--?" He cringes in disgust as Riddick drinks the filthy mixture. The smell alone nearly sends Narvin gagging.

"No, thank you. I prefer my mixed drinks to be light on the bodily fluids."

He takes a step back, reacting in instinctive wariness to the predator-like smear of blood on Riddick's lips.

[with_my_teacup]

"See, I haven't had water in more than twenty-four hours." His eyes fix on Narvin, and a deceptively slow, graceful gesture flips the shiv in his hand, blade now perpendicular to his wrist and aimed at the other man.

"Then again. Prison guards don't have to worry about that, do they? You guys, you live pretty high on the horse."

[timesbureaucrat]

Narvin takes another two steps back.

"I could get you water. Real water." Narvin has no idea how he'd follow through on this promise, but he'll deal with that later. Right now he's just hoping that Riddick doesn't kill him here and now.

UV-6 (the non-nightmare one)

[with_my_teacup]

Dreams in dreams in dreams-- limbs stiff with the cold, half-hibernating between meals. A planet full of one or two big herbivores, lichonovores-- and then the scavengers.

That's him, too. He wanders in the snow, looking for the movement of longtooth cats or urzo to lead him to a mammothfall; he curls in on himself in a cave, decked in fur, and lets his metabolism shut down.

A peaceful dream, where moving is like pushing through molasses, but there's no fear. There's a calm on the knife-edge of survival.

OTHER

[with_my_teacup]

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