Well that was exhausting bonus sleep
Apr. 26th, 2025 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI fell asleep with the light on and my watch telling me to stand every hour. I took off the watch eventually but that was a lot of interrupted sleep I wasn't expecting.
My most recent dream before waking:
I was with Captain Picard and Riker, Picard series editions, and we were trapped in the Abyss, trying to find portals out.
Portals looked like flatscreen TVs at sizes up to and including Battle Cruiser
and the only way you'd know a portal from a picture
was to touch it and see if you went through.
If you did that standing still and bare handed though you'd end up floating in a weird inbetween space on the other side, which is fine for demons who can fly and teleport, but usually fatal for mortals.
I guess Picard et al can teleport? Maybe get teleported out when they say what the problem is?
Wait the teleport would have to be on the same side of the portal or it is effectively infinitely far away.
Well the solution was always to take ships through. Some enclosed vessel, preferably one they can pilot. So if they lost someone who could yell for help then they could take a shuttle through and catch up with them, while trying not to just fly into them.
They had figured all that out before I caught up with them. I was trying to get to know them. And figure out if they were actually lost mortals or yet another trap.
Then Picard met someone he thought he recognised, someone who was willing to show him a route the demons didn't use. Picard by now was flying a tiny two passenger thing with open sides, but he could take it through to scout, so Riker and I hung on in the back and we went through.
To Cardiff, in the 1990s, I reckoned from the cars.
I felt a lot better immediately, the Abyss being a place I in no way click with. Picard and Riker weren't so sure. For a moment I almost thought we were home, but then I realised, no, not all the way out. Cardiff has an overlap like the Worldwound does, or on good days like the Scar. Cardiff overlaps with Abaddon.
(Pathfinder cosmology and one line in a Torchwood episode get together to make Problems for Characters.)
Abaddon is the place plain evil goes, evil without law or chaos. Alignment wise I had one match, not evil, but Picard and Riker were still a step more Lawful. Still, beats the Abyss.
Abaddon is also the home of undeath, and soul eaters, and things that steal their prey before the Judgement. Everyone Judged there starts out as the Hunted, but sooner or later the survivors become the Hunters. It's a place where you either die forever or become like them.
And in this overlap Cardiff, I could see silver men.
Cybermen incoming.
We were away from the vehicle now, which had parked right next to the portal, inside the building, and was going to be difficult to get moving enough to go back through it. So we needed a different way to run.
We ended up running for the elevators, and the other two got there first, and got whisked away down.
Down was a weird direction to be available given the view out the ground floor windows, but, I took the next lift and followed them.
Only to find down didn't seem to end around here.
The first time the lift stopped, Sam (SG1) and Susan (DW) jumped in, hitting buttons to make the doors close faster. I don't know what was Hunting them on that level, but they wanted the first route out.
But after that the lift kept going and going and going, and Sam concluded it was broken. So first she took the cover off the controls, which only told is they seemed too simple to be remote controlled, or possibly too simple to work. Then she decided to take a floor panel up
and accidentally incovered infinity.
Inbetween space. Everything outside was Inbetween.
Sam out the panel back down fast, but it seemed far too flimsy to be the only thing between us and all that.
I could feel the lift was getting far away from Cardiff, the same way I could feel it when I was close, because I had magic and the knowing of portals and things. Well, enough of the knowing to get lost, apparently, but.
I could also feel I was catching up with Picard and Riker, because I'd put tracking spells on them roughly like toddler harnesses. Which they couldn't see or feel, but, I could follow.
The next time the doors opened though it was to a very different set of people, a lot of wild west looking people being ushered along by horseback riders. It seemed like the lift going down was also going back, in time or equivalent extra planar levels. The crowd rushed in to a lift that was somehow big enough for all of them, which didn't seem weird to Susan but did to the rest of us. And then the last one in slapped the button by the door and we kept going.
But the very next stop was Picard and Riker again, and now I'd caught up I could explain to them and everyone I knew how to get us out.
Problem: I'd have to get to a specific overlap in time and space, in the Plas with the fountain.
That meant getting up time again to when it was actually built, and the 90s at least had Cybermen. There was no knowing where they'd expanded to, hunting for new converts. And they would keep going and going forever, that's all they were, so that was all they could do. We couldn't leave them any clues or afford to lose even one person who had heard me say what I knew.
Problem the second: in every crowd of Hunted, you had to watch out for the Hunters.
But that I couldn't say out loud.
I just had to wonder which of them it could be (any), who could fall first.
So, I woke up knowing if I could get up the lift far enough I could follow Jack Harkness home to Cardiff,
but also that I'd somehow have to warn him to keep the refugees contained and keep an eye on them,
which seems rude now I'm awake but also one of the big conundrums.
I'd also have to close the door I made before Cybermen could get to it, and that would mean staying on the Abaddon side.
And then of course Captains Riker and Picard would need to go back to the abyss to pick up the rest of their friends, and this route out wasn't quite a way home for them, unless we could get all the way back before Susan got a message to her Grandfather. Then there's a lift home waiting.
Tidy.
The exact sort of mega crossover that happens in dreams and goes meaninglessly messy when you try and write it, but, for the characters, tidy.
Writing it down sounds tidy and plotty but dreaming it was all just
Run.
I do have my dreams trained well though, if they know they can always Run to Jack.
My most recent dream before waking:
I was with Captain Picard and Riker, Picard series editions, and we were trapped in the Abyss, trying to find portals out.
Portals looked like flatscreen TVs at sizes up to and including Battle Cruiser
and the only way you'd know a portal from a picture
was to touch it and see if you went through.
If you did that standing still and bare handed though you'd end up floating in a weird inbetween space on the other side, which is fine for demons who can fly and teleport, but usually fatal for mortals.
I guess Picard et al can teleport? Maybe get teleported out when they say what the problem is?
Wait the teleport would have to be on the same side of the portal or it is effectively infinitely far away.
Well the solution was always to take ships through. Some enclosed vessel, preferably one they can pilot. So if they lost someone who could yell for help then they could take a shuttle through and catch up with them, while trying not to just fly into them.
They had figured all that out before I caught up with them. I was trying to get to know them. And figure out if they were actually lost mortals or yet another trap.
Then Picard met someone he thought he recognised, someone who was willing to show him a route the demons didn't use. Picard by now was flying a tiny two passenger thing with open sides, but he could take it through to scout, so Riker and I hung on in the back and we went through.
To Cardiff, in the 1990s, I reckoned from the cars.
I felt a lot better immediately, the Abyss being a place I in no way click with. Picard and Riker weren't so sure. For a moment I almost thought we were home, but then I realised, no, not all the way out. Cardiff has an overlap like the Worldwound does, or on good days like the Scar. Cardiff overlaps with Abaddon.
(Pathfinder cosmology and one line in a Torchwood episode get together to make Problems for Characters.)
Abaddon is the place plain evil goes, evil without law or chaos. Alignment wise I had one match, not evil, but Picard and Riker were still a step more Lawful. Still, beats the Abyss.
Abaddon is also the home of undeath, and soul eaters, and things that steal their prey before the Judgement. Everyone Judged there starts out as the Hunted, but sooner or later the survivors become the Hunters. It's a place where you either die forever or become like them.
And in this overlap Cardiff, I could see silver men.
Cybermen incoming.
We were away from the vehicle now, which had parked right next to the portal, inside the building, and was going to be difficult to get moving enough to go back through it. So we needed a different way to run.
We ended up running for the elevators, and the other two got there first, and got whisked away down.
Down was a weird direction to be available given the view out the ground floor windows, but, I took the next lift and followed them.
Only to find down didn't seem to end around here.
The first time the lift stopped, Sam (SG1) and Susan (DW) jumped in, hitting buttons to make the doors close faster. I don't know what was Hunting them on that level, but they wanted the first route out.
But after that the lift kept going and going and going, and Sam concluded it was broken. So first she took the cover off the controls, which only told is they seemed too simple to be remote controlled, or possibly too simple to work. Then she decided to take a floor panel up
and accidentally incovered infinity.
Inbetween space. Everything outside was Inbetween.
Sam out the panel back down fast, but it seemed far too flimsy to be the only thing between us and all that.
I could feel the lift was getting far away from Cardiff, the same way I could feel it when I was close, because I had magic and the knowing of portals and things. Well, enough of the knowing to get lost, apparently, but.
I could also feel I was catching up with Picard and Riker, because I'd put tracking spells on them roughly like toddler harnesses. Which they couldn't see or feel, but, I could follow.
The next time the doors opened though it was to a very different set of people, a lot of wild west looking people being ushered along by horseback riders. It seemed like the lift going down was also going back, in time or equivalent extra planar levels. The crowd rushed in to a lift that was somehow big enough for all of them, which didn't seem weird to Susan but did to the rest of us. And then the last one in slapped the button by the door and we kept going.
But the very next stop was Picard and Riker again, and now I'd caught up I could explain to them and everyone I knew how to get us out.
Problem: I'd have to get to a specific overlap in time and space, in the Plas with the fountain.
That meant getting up time again to when it was actually built, and the 90s at least had Cybermen. There was no knowing where they'd expanded to, hunting for new converts. And they would keep going and going forever, that's all they were, so that was all they could do. We couldn't leave them any clues or afford to lose even one person who had heard me say what I knew.
Problem the second: in every crowd of Hunted, you had to watch out for the Hunters.
But that I couldn't say out loud.
I just had to wonder which of them it could be (any), who could fall first.
So, I woke up knowing if I could get up the lift far enough I could follow Jack Harkness home to Cardiff,
but also that I'd somehow have to warn him to keep the refugees contained and keep an eye on them,
which seems rude now I'm awake but also one of the big conundrums.
I'd also have to close the door I made before Cybermen could get to it, and that would mean staying on the Abaddon side.
And then of course Captains Riker and Picard would need to go back to the abyss to pick up the rest of their friends, and this route out wasn't quite a way home for them, unless we could get all the way back before Susan got a message to her Grandfather. Then there's a lift home waiting.
Tidy.
The exact sort of mega crossover that happens in dreams and goes meaninglessly messy when you try and write it, but, for the characters, tidy.
Writing it down sounds tidy and plotty but dreaming it was all just
Run.
I do have my dreams trained well though, if they know they can always Run to Jack.