Psyche Support 19/10 Sorrel hopes she's dreaming
Oct 23, 2022 17:33:31 GMT
Anthony, Velania Kalugina, and 2 more like this
Post by stephena on Oct 23, 2022 17:33:31 GMT
“Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
One thing was certain, that the grey squirrel had had nothing to do with it. It was the red squirrel’s fault entirely. While Sorrel was sitting curled up in a corner of a great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the squirrel had been having a grand game of postie, delivering her an invitation that whether she held it backwards, sideways, upside down or never wise it made just as much sense as if she read it plain and simple as day.
“Carnan needs help putting Eric’s mind back together and doesn’t trust Killian. Meet at Fort Ettin ten minutes before receiving this message.”
“Curious,” Sorrel said out loud, startling the squirrel which had been pretending it was the queen of all the lands and more besides. “Squirrel, if that’s really your name, I have been into three minds already. A fourth will surely be child’s play.”
“What is it like?” Fog, a blue skinned Firbolg, asked, ten minutes earlier.
“It’s unpleasantly like being drunk,” Sorrel began.
“There’s nothing unpleasant about being drunk,” Archie, her brother Kavel’s wizard friend, sounded dubious.
“You ask a glass of water,” Sorrel nodded wisely.
“The point being,” Carnan, the tall, blue Firbolg she’d met with Oziah, interrupted, “the horror of that moment, that young child Eric sent into the mirror which shattered his mind, I shall never, never forget. And now one piece has been left behind.”
“As long as I am in the party, all will return in one piece,” Tayz, her old Araacokra comrade in arms, said proudly.
'Shouldn't do that—shouldn't do that—' the Frog muttered. 'Wexes it, you know.' Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet.
As the door crashed to the floor Killian was standing by a writing desk, a thing entirely unlike a raven, and talking to himself as if clearly asking for adventurers.
“That was quick!” he cried when he saw them. “That's the effect of living backwards. It always makes one a little giddy at first.”
“You’re not living backwards, you old coot,” Carnan snarled. “We are here to save Eric.”
“Well, don’t cast any spells,” Killian warned. “That’s what turned you into a melon last time.”
Carnan sighed. “It was a lemon.”
“Aren’t they the same thing? They’re spelt the same. Names should mean what I want them to mean.”
“What exactly is going on here?” Sorrel felt a little out of her depth.
“The mirror was aimed at trapping me obviously,” Killian shook his head impatiently. “What do you create your magic mirrors for? Xantha – my neighbour – wanted to separate me into multiple, locked away, parts. Eric got sucked into the mirror by a trap originally intended for a more powerful magician. And there are spells protecting the mirror. But you need to go inside. Oh, and the place is drenched in wild magic so shit’s gonna get real in there.”
Sorrel looked over at Carnan. “Last time we were here, rats were dragons, right?”
“It’s a complicated place, the witching court,” Carnan said sheepishly.
“Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through,” Archie suggested. “Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through…” he was up in front of the mirror as he said this, though he hardly knew how he had got there. And certainly, the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Archie was through the glass and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.
Archie through the Looking Glass
They were in a black endless void feeling strange. Sorrel had been in a very large number of black endless voids, and all felt strange, but this felt stranger than usual. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she ruminated. “I am wise beyond my years, and understand that if you get what you want, it’s the enjoying of it that is the true achievement, and I wouldn’t have realised that before. I should write down my thoughts whilst my brain seems so alive.”
But as she pulled her pack off her back she tripped over it and fell flat on her face. “Wait a minute,” she said out loud. “I am less nimble, a lot stronger and filled with wisdom…” she surveyed the party carefully. “It’s as if I’ve become one of you…”
“Whatevs,” Archie shrugged, then looked startled. “Have I become Fog?”
Then they saw Eric.
Floating in the void was a beach, maybe 15ft wide with the ocean crashing against it. Eric sat there meditating in neat black robes.
“Eric, we’ve come to take you home,” Sorrel spoke gently so as not to startle him.
Eric seemed calm. The beach dissolved and was replaced by a vast library with the party sitting in huge armchairs holding cigars and brandy.
“The problem is, one bit of mind is still here,” Eric explained. “But I’m worried that if I go in to the next room I might lose the rest of my mind again.” He waved his hands and large iron doors appeared covered in vines. “I don’t know what’s in there.”
“So you just think things and they happen…” Tayz waved his arms in a holy ritual and suddenly became a teenager. “I hate it here. You guys don’t understand me,” he huffed.
“This is very interesting,” Archie nodded. “If only my intelligence hadn’t sunk so low… no offence Fog.”
“Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
Through the door Sorrel found herself alone in another void. Infinitely high walls of glass formed a circle around her. Beyond the glass there were swirling colours and shapes which, when she looked in certain directions, started to come together in shapes and solid colours.
She looked down and her feet seemed a very long way off. “I seem to have grown much larger,” she said to herself. “It was much pleasanter at home when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller.”
She was suddenly aware of two presences – Fog and a unicorn. After some unsuccessful attempts at conversation and a couple of shameful charades, it became clear that Fog couldn’t speak.
Further, that Fog had three blank pieces of paper that they thought had a map, directions and numbers on respectively.
“What do you think unicorn?” Sorrel sighed rhetorically.
“Don’t get rhetorical on me, hoodie,” the unicorn grumbled. “I was having my tea when the goddam wild magic snatched me.”
“It's a great huge game of chess that's being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all.”
Sorrel turned her attention to the colours and shapes and gradually saw the light. Or rather, a window, light shining through, some toys and a Tayz.
“Tayz, eh?” Sorrel pondered.
“Is that Sorrel?” Tayz turned and turned.
It appeared that Tayz could hear her but not see her. Interesting. And the toys… they looked uncannily like the party, as if they were Hero Forge replicas.
And Sorrel could see plinths. One in a dolls house, one in the centre, one in a maze and one in the shadows. Perhaps one was for her.
Someday her plinth would come.
She moved around the glass finding a vision of Archie in the darkness with five glowing orbs constantly blowing himself up. She gazed at this for a while as watching wizards dodging fireballs was some of the best fun a girl could have, especially when he grew a beard of feathers, then moved further around until she glimpsed Carnan, much much much bluer than before.
“It’s like, how much more blue could he be?” Sorrel thought. “And the answer is none. None more blue.”
But he had a compass.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Whilst she had no lodestone, just her house breaking kit, she was able to mock up a compass for Fog to twist into the correct directions according to the blank paper.
Fog thus described directions to Sorrel and Sorrel to Carnan and eventually, like a chess piece moved by a Heath Robinson god, Carnan found a door with a cat in front of it.
Carnan and Killian’s cat now filling their glass booth, Sorrel turned to Tayz.
Fog waved a blank piece of paper at her.
She gave Fog a blank stare in return.
Suddenly Fog’s voice returned. “Thank fuck for that – the dolls are us!” Fog cried. “Get Tayz to put us on the plinths representing our positions.”
And so they turned to Archie with his five exploding orbs and a curious sequence of numbers.
1 3 7 2 5
4 6 9 10 8
The numbers glowed one at a time, and the pattern slowly revealed itself. Each ball grew in size until they engulfed Archie and they were all in the tower.
A door appeared revealing another black void.
"Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."
Eric lay on the floor. Carnan ran to pick him up, everything dissolved and there in the void was Eric.
And then (as Sorrel afterwards described it) all sorts of things happened in a moment. The Eric merged with Eric, the party were through the mirror, Killian was hastily explaining that still the magic in Eric remained trapped, Tayz returned to his adult form, “and very like a bird he looks,” Sorrel thought to herself, as well as she could in the dreadful confusion.
She walked over to Carnan, pulled out a hand crossbow and murmured – “we could just go next door and ice the bitch?”
Carnan shook his head grimly. “This isn’t over,” he said. “And when the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”
One thing was certain, that the grey squirrel had had nothing to do with it. It was the red squirrel’s fault entirely. While Sorrel was sitting curled up in a corner of a great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the squirrel had been having a grand game of postie, delivering her an invitation that whether she held it backwards, sideways, upside down or never wise it made just as much sense as if she read it plain and simple as day.
“Carnan needs help putting Eric’s mind back together and doesn’t trust Killian. Meet at Fort Ettin ten minutes before receiving this message.”
“Curious,” Sorrel said out loud, startling the squirrel which had been pretending it was the queen of all the lands and more besides. “Squirrel, if that’s really your name, I have been into three minds already. A fourth will surely be child’s play.”
“What is it like?” Fog, a blue skinned Firbolg, asked, ten minutes earlier.
“It’s unpleasantly like being drunk,” Sorrel began.
“There’s nothing unpleasant about being drunk,” Archie, her brother Kavel’s wizard friend, sounded dubious.
“You ask a glass of water,” Sorrel nodded wisely.
“The point being,” Carnan, the tall, blue Firbolg she’d met with Oziah, interrupted, “the horror of that moment, that young child Eric sent into the mirror which shattered his mind, I shall never, never forget. And now one piece has been left behind.”
“As long as I am in the party, all will return in one piece,” Tayz, her old Araacokra comrade in arms, said proudly.
'Shouldn't do that—shouldn't do that—' the Frog muttered. 'Wexes it, you know.' Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet.
As the door crashed to the floor Killian was standing by a writing desk, a thing entirely unlike a raven, and talking to himself as if clearly asking for adventurers.
“That was quick!” he cried when he saw them. “That's the effect of living backwards. It always makes one a little giddy at first.”
“You’re not living backwards, you old coot,” Carnan snarled. “We are here to save Eric.”
“Well, don’t cast any spells,” Killian warned. “That’s what turned you into a melon last time.”
Carnan sighed. “It was a lemon.”
“Aren’t they the same thing? They’re spelt the same. Names should mean what I want them to mean.”
“What exactly is going on here?” Sorrel felt a little out of her depth.
“The mirror was aimed at trapping me obviously,” Killian shook his head impatiently. “What do you create your magic mirrors for? Xantha – my neighbour – wanted to separate me into multiple, locked away, parts. Eric got sucked into the mirror by a trap originally intended for a more powerful magician. And there are spells protecting the mirror. But you need to go inside. Oh, and the place is drenched in wild magic so shit’s gonna get real in there.”
Sorrel looked over at Carnan. “Last time we were here, rats were dragons, right?”
“It’s a complicated place, the witching court,” Carnan said sheepishly.
“Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through,” Archie suggested. “Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through…” he was up in front of the mirror as he said this, though he hardly knew how he had got there. And certainly, the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Archie was through the glass and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.
Archie through the Looking Glass
They were in a black endless void feeling strange. Sorrel had been in a very large number of black endless voids, and all felt strange, but this felt stranger than usual. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she ruminated. “I am wise beyond my years, and understand that if you get what you want, it’s the enjoying of it that is the true achievement, and I wouldn’t have realised that before. I should write down my thoughts whilst my brain seems so alive.”
But as she pulled her pack off her back she tripped over it and fell flat on her face. “Wait a minute,” she said out loud. “I am less nimble, a lot stronger and filled with wisdom…” she surveyed the party carefully. “It’s as if I’ve become one of you…”
“Whatevs,” Archie shrugged, then looked startled. “Have I become Fog?”
Then they saw Eric.
Floating in the void was a beach, maybe 15ft wide with the ocean crashing against it. Eric sat there meditating in neat black robes.
“Eric, we’ve come to take you home,” Sorrel spoke gently so as not to startle him.
Eric seemed calm. The beach dissolved and was replaced by a vast library with the party sitting in huge armchairs holding cigars and brandy.
“The problem is, one bit of mind is still here,” Eric explained. “But I’m worried that if I go in to the next room I might lose the rest of my mind again.” He waved his hands and large iron doors appeared covered in vines. “I don’t know what’s in there.”
“So you just think things and they happen…” Tayz waved his arms in a holy ritual and suddenly became a teenager. “I hate it here. You guys don’t understand me,” he huffed.
“This is very interesting,” Archie nodded. “If only my intelligence hadn’t sunk so low… no offence Fog.”
“Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
Through the door Sorrel found herself alone in another void. Infinitely high walls of glass formed a circle around her. Beyond the glass there were swirling colours and shapes which, when she looked in certain directions, started to come together in shapes and solid colours.
She looked down and her feet seemed a very long way off. “I seem to have grown much larger,” she said to herself. “It was much pleasanter at home when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller.”
She was suddenly aware of two presences – Fog and a unicorn. After some unsuccessful attempts at conversation and a couple of shameful charades, it became clear that Fog couldn’t speak.
Further, that Fog had three blank pieces of paper that they thought had a map, directions and numbers on respectively.
“What do you think unicorn?” Sorrel sighed rhetorically.
“Don’t get rhetorical on me, hoodie,” the unicorn grumbled. “I was having my tea when the goddam wild magic snatched me.”
“It's a great huge game of chess that's being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all.”
Sorrel turned her attention to the colours and shapes and gradually saw the light. Or rather, a window, light shining through, some toys and a Tayz.
“Tayz, eh?” Sorrel pondered.
“Is that Sorrel?” Tayz turned and turned.
It appeared that Tayz could hear her but not see her. Interesting. And the toys… they looked uncannily like the party, as if they were Hero Forge replicas.
And Sorrel could see plinths. One in a dolls house, one in the centre, one in a maze and one in the shadows. Perhaps one was for her.
Someday her plinth would come.
She moved around the glass finding a vision of Archie in the darkness with five glowing orbs constantly blowing himself up. She gazed at this for a while as watching wizards dodging fireballs was some of the best fun a girl could have, especially when he grew a beard of feathers, then moved further around until she glimpsed Carnan, much much much bluer than before.
“It’s like, how much more blue could he be?” Sorrel thought. “And the answer is none. None more blue.”
But he had a compass.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Whilst she had no lodestone, just her house breaking kit, she was able to mock up a compass for Fog to twist into the correct directions according to the blank paper.
Fog thus described directions to Sorrel and Sorrel to Carnan and eventually, like a chess piece moved by a Heath Robinson god, Carnan found a door with a cat in front of it.
Carnan and Killian’s cat now filling their glass booth, Sorrel turned to Tayz.
Fog waved a blank piece of paper at her.
She gave Fog a blank stare in return.
Suddenly Fog’s voice returned. “Thank fuck for that – the dolls are us!” Fog cried. “Get Tayz to put us on the plinths representing our positions.”
And so they turned to Archie with his five exploding orbs and a curious sequence of numbers.
1 3 7 2 5
4 6 9 10 8
The numbers glowed one at a time, and the pattern slowly revealed itself. Each ball grew in size until they engulfed Archie and they were all in the tower.
A door appeared revealing another black void.
"Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."
Eric lay on the floor. Carnan ran to pick him up, everything dissolved and there in the void was Eric.
And then (as Sorrel afterwards described it) all sorts of things happened in a moment. The Eric merged with Eric, the party were through the mirror, Killian was hastily explaining that still the magic in Eric remained trapped, Tayz returned to his adult form, “and very like a bird he looks,” Sorrel thought to herself, as well as she could in the dreadful confusion.
She walked over to Carnan, pulled out a hand crossbow and murmured – “we could just go next door and ice the bitch?”
Carnan shook his head grimly. “This isn’t over,” he said. “And when the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate.”