S M Gilded Nightmares are Nightmares Still (NPC)

[King Ghidorah]

Jewels has night-terrors almost every time she goes to sleep. Some of them, however, are more significant than others. For posterity, those will be recorded here.

The apartment wasn’t much. There was a stove, and a sink. There was a table, with three chairs. There was a pile of pillows and blankets in the middle of the room that they used for sleep and for complicated sex. There was a cabinet, for clothes and food, and a bathroom in one corner – tiny, but with all the things you hoped a bathroom would, at minimum, have. There was a work-bench, covered in tools, electronics, and guns in various states of disassembly and repair. The walls were bare concrete, covered by heavily-annotated charts of geological strata and posters of lakefront scenes held in place with little blue dots of putty.

It was cramped - But it was theirs. Secure and warm within their pile of furnishings, Jewels nestled closer against Krade’s brawny chest, making a contented little purr as she traced the arc of his collarbone with one hand. The surveyor felt Flipper stir in his sleep, the most petite of their trio reactively molding himself against the arc of her back, wrapping an arm around to clutch possessively at her breast as he nestled his face against the nape of her neck. He made a soft little sound, a long, drawn-out squeak, like a quietly deflating balloon.

She giggled fondly. Even in his sleep, Flipper was a dork.

Sandwiched between them, Jewels felt safe and warm; She was needed, and she was loved. As a permanent resident of Inverxe, she lived in hell, but not a day went by when she didn’t have at least a moment where she was grateful. As long as she could come back to this little room, to watch terrible holo-novelas with Flipper, and help Krade learn to box, to play cards, and make plans, to sing, and eat, argue and complain, to fall asleep in a knot of tangled limbs after fucking her boys ‘til her eyes rolled back in her head and she forgot how to spell her name, Jewels could endure anything this horrible little moon had to offer.

The building shook, a minor tremor. It wasn’t unusual, and FP 428A was built to withstand them. But then it shook again. And again.

Some of Flippers tools slipped off the work-bench and clattered to the floor. Krade’s favorite mug leapt off the table and shattered to pieces.

It didn’t feel like a quake. It was too rhythmic – too regular.

The tremor came again, and cracks raced through the walls. Abruptly, Jewels was alone in her nest, the absence of her lovers a deafening vacuum, far colder than any mere lack of warmth. Another tremor, and the blankets were gone, another, the pillows – the work-bench, the stove, the posters and charts.

Jewels didn’t understand what was happening – where were Flipper and Krade?

The ceiling began to cave in – stalactites and slabs of stone shattering all around her as she sprinted, barefoot and weeping, for the door –

And emerged onto the streets of Markov. It was night – the backalleys and markets lit by neon. She was no longer nude, but clad in her old surveyor’s outfit – thermal envirosuit, utility belt and mask, boots and goggles.

The street shook, and the lights flickered – the neon taking on a distinctly golden hue. The crowds milled around her, unheeding, going blithely about the business of the night.

Jewels grabbed the nearest person by the shoulder – and was surprised to find it was someone she knew – the woman who’d lived down the hall in her building on Inverxe. Her midsection yawned wide, from pelvis to sternum a jagged gaping hole, but neither she nor Jewels seemed to think this was unusual.

Jewels asked her neighbor where the boys had gone, and why the ground kept shaking – but the woman just shook her head.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, “how the living only ever ask the obvious questions?”

The dead woman wandered away, trailing snow and bits of ash. Unpurturbed, Jewels moved on.

The streets shook again. And again. In the distance, something hit the ground with an apocalyptic crash, shattering glass and broken concrete, and plumes of smoke began to drift across the sky. Strangled and mournful, a siren began to blare.

Jewels continued her search. Faces moved around her, half-remembered, mortally injured, people she had known, on Inverxe and on Cevanti: her parents, their skin and eyes yellowed with jaundice, eight years gone to alcohol and despair. Her boss, Ted, with his head turned ‘round backwards and his chest clawed open. Her childhood friend Dala, dead of an Akata bite at age nineteen.

None of them could tell her where the men she loved had gone.

She was growing desperate. A deep conviction, a gnawing certainty that something awful, unspeakable, had happened, was growing in her mind, and she couldn’t handle it.

If she could just find them, then she knew they would be safe.

A mist had begun to roll the streets, refracting the soft golden light of the increasingly monochrome, and increasingly unreliable, neon lighting. It cast alien shadows upon the walls, rendered the tenements and skyscrapers of Markov strangely liquid to the eye.

The crowds began to thin. Now it seemed that every person who caught her eye was either Flipper or Krade – until they turned around, offering only the face of an oddly familiar stranger, but never the same one twice.

The ground shook. A bolt of golden lightning as wide as a city street split the sky in a continuous arc, carving a swath through the neighborhood. Everything it touched that was not instantly incinerated detonated violently in its wake – and now, as far as Jewels could see, the entire city was on fire.

Still, Jewels searched. On and on, until there was no-one left to ask, nowhere left to look. The city burned to its foundations around her, and she strode an endless plain of burnt and twisted corpses, their carbonized flesh melted together, ravaged faces twisted into unrecognizable caricature.

It was all the same two faces – the same two bodies, copy-pasted across the planet entire. They didn’t look like anyone she knew, yet they filled her with such a tremendous emptiness, a grief and rage that jammed her psyche, assaulted all sense and order – and they were inescapable: They were everywhere she looked, the very ground upon which she stood.

The tremors came again, a thunderous tread, a titan’s footsteps. Everything now was cloaked in mist, lit in shades of limpid gold.

“How… curious.” Hissed a voice, bypassing her ears to echo in the bereft and ravaged chambers of her heart and mind.

“What, I wonder, is something so tiny and broken as you doing inside our dream?”

 

[King Ghidorah]

For the first time in several days, Jewels has found herself able to sleep. Catch-up can be a bitch.

The water was warm, and the breeze was cool. Jewels didn’t actually remember how she’d gotten here, but she didn’t care. The important thing was that this balmy oasis in the middle of the woods, surrounded by steep embankments and fallen slabs of stone, fed by a picturesque waterfall, had been a goal of hers for a while. Don’t go out there, they had said, whoever *they* might be. You’ll get eaten. Or smooshed. Or infected by Akata and turned into a void-zombie.

Well, she sure showed them.

Plus, there was that cool door at the bottom of the lagoon.

Jewels took a deep breath, savoring the smells of clear water, growing things and wet stone, and she dove.

Beneath the surface, the water was darker than she had expected for such a sunny day. In fact, the quality of the illumination was increasingly strange the deeper she went - the white light of the sun giving way to twilight shades of red and gold.

Abruptly, Jewels realized that she didn’t know which way was up anymore. There was just water all around - water, and the door.

And she was running out of air.

The placid joy of mere moments before entirely forgotten, she paddled frantically, desperately, the door, a thing of scorched wood and rusted iron, growing no nearer.

Jewels could hold her breath no longer - she screamed, the contents of her lungs bursting forth in a rush of bubbles - and her fingers brushed the handle.

The door swung open. There was no rush of water, no change in the dynamics of force and gravity - but she was standing at the bottom of the dry lagoon-bed. Only now she could see that what she had taken for stone was in fact slabs of shattered concrete, that this was in fact the basement of a ruined building, with fires still ablaze and the bones of its inhabitants crunching beneath her sandaled feet.

Two red eyes peered at her out of the darkness behind the door, pupil-less rubies, gleaming malice.

"Hello, " they said.

"I see you have returned. Curious. You should not be here, little thing. "

A warning-siren sounded somewhere nearby, a lilting wail, a portent of disaster.

“I’m just,” said Jewels, tripping over her words ”... swimming? I think?”

The eyes stared, unblinking.

"Hmm. I see. You are sleeping. You are sleeping, and something within you is drawn to this place.

How fortunate, for you, that it is I and not my brothers upon whose dream of death you have drifted. They are less accommodating than I. Less… appreciative, of the wonders of the individual. Control would see in you a tool: the Wrath, a victim. Make no mistake, both of these things I see as well, and I am most sorely tempted to treat you as such - but my rarest pleasures are more subtle, and I perceive things which they cannot. Flee, should you meet them, else though something with your shape may arise come the morning to destroy all that you hold dear, you will never wake again. "

Jewels stared. She now understood, in the nebulous manner some dreamers do, that she was dreaming - but also that this was more than a dream.

“Okay… okay…what are you, exactly?” she asked, backing away but getting nowhere. Part of her knew the answer. She couldn’t frame it, couldn’t grasp it, but part of her knew, and that knowledge was rising to the surface on a wave of terrible fear.

"I am the wicked laughter: the curious child, the Joy which Burns. Most often, I am called the Whimsy. "

There was a long pause.

"You may call me Kevin if you wish. "

For just a moment, the fear abated beneath a muted confusion.

“Kevin? Really Kevin?”

"It is a name I have chosen, not one which was chosen for me. My brothers and I, we chose each other’s names - and there have been so many others, echoing across the stars, cast upon the minds of the dying… but yes. Kevin. It is mine because I say so, and the others would not understand. But I would like if it were used, even by a thing so small and doomed as you."

The siren sounded again, and the ground shook. The crackle of flames rose higher as the shadow of something massive passed overhead, pursued by the screaming roar of supersonic fighter-craft.

“Okay… Kevin. Um… how do I wake up? I’m beginning to think I’d really like to wake up. I don’t feel safe, here.”

The eyes twinkled , growing larger and farther apart - getting closer.

"Were you not listening, little thing? You do not feel safe here because here there is no safety. In fact… for you, I suspect there is no safety anywhere. You are drawn to this place, when you sleep - beyond the realms of nod and unto the depths of dreaming death. Twice now I have found you before me, in a place only our living echoes should be capable of visiting."

There was a shape in the dark now, behind the eyes. Almost familiar - like a serpent or an eel.

"Somehow, you have partaken of our power. I can taste its mark upon your soul. We are connec-

“NO!”

The vehemence of her denial, the force of it, the wild gesturing that accompanied it, surprised her. She didn’t even know what she was denying - the enormity of it continued to rise, to overwhelm, all-consuming, but the truth refused to take on a coherent shape.

“No! Absolutely not! No!"

Jewels was panicking, thrashing, falling to her knees amidst the bones of unknown thousands.

NO!

The eyes narrowed.

"Hm. How unfortunate. I can see you are not quite ready. Another time then."

The siren rose to a deafening pitch - and the leading edge of an argent blast of cosmic fury touched the surface of Jewels’ skin, began to burn it from her bones.