They've been talking about this for a while, and now Teagan has made space for it to happen. They've rented a cabin out in the woods by Fort Brunsett, despite the warnings to stay out of Fort Brunsett. They're waiting, in their sleep pants and a loose tank top, sitting on the bed. They've built up a fire in the fireplace, and the room is comfortably warm. (It is more evenly comfortably warm than it would be just with a fire, because Summer tricks are Summer tricks... )
Glitch is there already, having met and made the journey out with Teagan. Roaming around is fine, but he's trying not to be foolish and range out in such places all by himself. Not anymore, not with the current stakes. He's in comparable sleeping clothes, dark cotton shorts and a loose black tanktop of his own. Wandering over to the bed, there's a glance around at the warm fire and Teagan in its flickering light and makes a slightly embarassed face, eyes darting to the side. "We are here for the dream stuff...right?"
"... yes." Teagan raises one of their eyebrows at him, and adds, "Unless you've changed your mind." There's no judgment there, perhaps he has changed his mind, after all. "I appreciate, a lot, that you're choosing to show me this, but, like. We don't have to." There's something inestimably, and almost carefully, gentle in what they say, there, even as they're reaching one hand up to pet Glitch's cheek. "It's only a day pledge, anyway. If you want me working with you more, I can, but."
Glitch slips onto the bed. He's just a little flustered by the cozy atmosphere in here, it seems, but his eyes settle back on Teagan's and mean business. A firm little nod from his rasterized chin follows. "I haven't changed my mind. If you're going to help me with this, you need to understand. This is the easiest way." He pauses. "We should have a longer pledge, too. But for now, just tonight, for this."
-> >> Teagan to Here << <-============================================
- Rolled 5 Successes for an exceptional success.
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Composure + Subterfuge.Blank_as_an_Empty_Mirror + 1 9-Again << <-====
The Mirrorskin's face remains as pleasantly blank as a mirror, reflecting back to Glitch his expression in its entirety. No more, no less. "Good. I'll help you. And yes, we should. If we're sharing these things, I'll want my secrecy protected before I can share too much with you. And I imagine you'll want me sworn to keep this to myself. For now, you'll just have to trust me." Teagan clears their throat. "Tonight, let me dream with you. Give me the skills I need to do this better. No penalties, no long-term promises. That's all we need." One hand's extended to him, their scarred palm turned up, for him to take. The promise hangs, waiting, in the air.
Glitch watches and listens. "I trust you. And I don't care who knows this." "But you don't know it, and you should. You will." He reaches out to slide his hand into Teagan's, squeezing firmly. "...do you have a way to make me sleep faster...?" he asks a bit more quietly, sounding like he just now realized this potential wrinkle.
Before they answer, Glitch remembers to complete the pledge, a little distracted by circumstance. "Tonight, we'll dream together, and share our vision. No penalties, no long-term promises." He pauses and thinks for a bit, squeezing the hand. His mouth moves slightly, as he continues trying to match the pledge language, but he continues in a somewhat different tone. "Give me buffs to attack and evasion. We'll dream until sunrise, and if anyone interrupts us, I'll be ready for them the second I wake up."
The pledge snaps into place, binding them one to the other for the night. There's something briefly broken and vulnerable that flickers across Teagan's face, so quick, and then gone.
Their hand folds in his, warm, but rough-palmed. "I care who knows it. And I won't want you telling people what you might see from my side, if we dream together more. You have to be at least a level six friend or lover to access my tragic backstory, and I'd rather keep it that way." They know how to speak his language, and employ that to the best of their abilities. "Thank you."
They lean over to kiss him, quick and at the corner of his mouth, a soothing gesture, and then crawl in under the blankets. "Well, I mean, there's how I usually knock your ass out, darling, but it isn't fast. Just... C'mere. We'll be close. It's warm. That'll put you out."
Glitch is a fussy one, and he wrinkles his nose slightly at the bit about level six friends. He doesn't say anything, but he looks somewhat like a kid hearing their parent trying to sound cool. His idiom is rather specific, though, and he understands what's being said. "Was just saying, I'm not ashamed of any of this. What happened There, anyway. I think." He frowns, perhaps just now realizing he was being too caavlier. "I don't know what'll actually come up in the dreams, so..." But by then, Teagan's crawling under the blankets, and he follows. His arms slide around them, noses brushing, and he tries to close his eyes and relax against the pillow. He's more tired than he lets himself realize, and he relaxes quickly...
They give him sort of a sidelong look. "I'm trying," Glitch gets offered back when he wrinkles his nose at their attempts to relate things in his language. They sigh, and curl up close to him. They're warm as warm can be, rather oddly soft for all that they're made of lean muscle, and they pull his head in to their shoulder. Their eyes close, and perhaps it's the closeness, or perhaps it's that they know there's something interesting on the other side of sleep, but they sigh out softly and murmur, "Goodnight, Player One." And then? They're asleep.
From utter darkness, all-encompassing and soothing, something emerges. The flickering light of a screen. An old tube TV, all curved glass and bleeding phosphor dots, framed in wood and festooned with big chunky dials. Blues, greens, and earthy oranges scroll across its surface, faintly illuminating the small cozy attic room and the small boy sitting on the carpet, staring at the screen. For a while, this is all, a series of melodic and pure tones coming from the simple game on the screen.
The boy turns, his face hard to see in the dim light, and there's another child there. Older, taller, with a nasty smirk spreading across his face. "We saw what you and David were doing," he says. There's a sudden shove, and the child playing the game is suddenly slamming back against a hard metal locker, the bang of the impact ringing through the cement halls, the bully's fists still clenching oh his shirt. They lean in with a rictus grin, stare him right in the eyes, and hiss: "Fag."
Teagan appears as they always appear, only far more androgynous: all clues one way or the other as to any sort of binary gender are erased, and their body is wound round with shadows, clinging to them and forming their clothes. The machete hangs from their hip as they walk around the scene, silent. Observing. There's a flicker of understanding in their fractured-mirror eyes, but they don't interfere.
The boy, less young than he seemed in front of the old television, taller but still on the cusp of adolescence, stares down at the hands gripping them by his sweatshirt, hood dangling over his face. He lifts his head back up to look the bully in the eyes, and then moves his head forward and down again very fast, and very hard. His forehead slams directly into the other kid's face with a loud hard noise, and things start to blur slightly. Before the bully's hands are even up all the way towards his face, his former victim's hand is balled up and punched right into his stomach, and then another. Things start to move slower, and slower, until it seems like watching the nasty kid double over takes an eternity, and everything is getting fuzzier around the edges, dithering into little squares.
The boy reaches out. Glitch reaches out, trying to grip the bully, to continue the assault, to keep hurting him. What's dream and what's past is impossible to say, but the school hallway recedes into the darkness until it's gone.
It's actively hard to restrain themselves from reaching out and helping. Teagan specifically hunts bullies like that, after all. They hold their breath, following after Glitch as he reaches out. One hand comes out to touch his shoulder, and Teagan whispers, just so: "I'm here." A reassurance.
Glitch looks back over at Teagan, expression neutral, flat. His long black coat flaps to the side, fluttering in a wind that isn't there. The coat is pixellated just the same as Glitch's own skin, composed of tiny squares in the same resolution and grid alignment as his face...and so is the large rust-red metal girder they both stand on, the black rivets in it, and the murky green sea they're suspended above. "I know," he says, voice low-fidelity but a little less distorted. The scene before them is a sort of nightmarish industrial pier, long platforms of pixellated rusty metal, shipping containers, and vague bits of industrial machinery all hang above a hypnotically patterned sea, suspended by a few slender pylons that seem incapable of supporting any of it. It's not clear exactly how lucid Glitch is right now, but he looks Teagan in the eyes as he holds a sword out to them handle first, a generic cross-hilted longsword with a flat double-sided blade that tapers right at the tip. It feels surprisingly light.
They take the sword: this was always in the cards, somehow they knew it. Who else could they be in this situation but Player Two? Their face turns out toward the industrial pier, the urban decay of it all, and there's a brief flicker of something in those fractured-mirror eyes. They take a deep breath in, and look out. "What's the objective of this level?" they ask, rubbing their other hand over their hair. (He may notice they take the sword in their left hand. He may not.)
Glitch almost looks like he's staring a bit past Teagan, or seeing something else in their place. But he hears the question, and tilts his head. His face is utterly clear, not a blemish on it, and not a single sign of scrambled pixels or digitized scars, and while his stare is a bit far off it's not quite as dull and haunted as Teagan later knows him. "Same as usual," he mutters dismissively, and turns towards the looming obstacle course. The longer it's stared at, the more insidious elements present themselves, hidden among the different platforms at varying levels. Large triangular spikes, half the size of a person, sitting in rows just past a short drop. A swirling circular saw, lazily moving up and down a spider-thin line in thin air. Hunched mechanical shapes moving around further down. "Get to the end alive, and kill the boss. That's all." Uttering that with an air of finality, he unsheathes a long, thin, straight sword from his back. On the horizon, there's what appears to be a shoreline, or at least the facade of a city, rendered in the same pixels as everything else. Above that is the sky stained a deep sunset orange. It fades darker and darker as the eye travels up, and above it, there is nothing, an absolute and all-encompassing darkness, a dead channel that knows not a single point of light or color.
Something electric is felt in the air, like television static, a hissing tingle felt in inexplicable ways. From nowhere and everywhere, an ominous baritone voice booms: "LEVEL START". Glitch takes off at a dead sprint immediately, hauling at top speed down the platform.
Their eyes widen, their head turns to one side, and then the other, watching for the hidden traps in the level. Player Two tips their head slightly, shivering when the electric feel in the air charges it, and then they follow after Glitch once that voice booms. Teagan's as fast as Glitch is, but they don't know this level. They're just... witnessing. Following. Mimicking. Mirroring. There's a gut-level fear, the sort of thing that comes instinctively, when faced with danger, and something else, too, which they can't help in themselves. They suppress it, quickly, remembering that this isn't real danger but a playing-out of old traumas.
Glitch barrels down the causeway with eager intent, and flies into nearly choreographed motion. Leaping from platform to platform, he kicks into a slide under a low gate to bypass an assortment of more whirring saws. On the other side, he slices straight through some sort of robot, a two-armed torso of conglomerated scrap that flies aparts into bits and pieces as he keeps running straight through without slowing, then leaps into the air across platforms, sweeping his sword into a hovering spherical thing, little more than a ball with a propeller and a large gun. Teagan is tagged by several whirring blades and flying creatures during this cascade of acrobatics and running, but all pass through them harmlessly, the dream under control. Still, the landscape is the kind of fever dream convolution that goes beyond just dream logic, a true glimpse back at the sickness of Arcadia, and its horrors are hard to fully dismiss as they fly haphazardly towards the two players.
In time, the pair make it to a large, flat, open platform, wide and spacious. There's a horrific screeching noise from above, and a shape descends in front of the two, a massive lumpen structure or vehicle suspended by large round ports spewing searing jets of flame straight down. It is stark white, with two huge looming round black windows and a row of gleaming teeth. The massive skull leers down at the two as dark red orbs of light begin to swell into existence all over its exterior, flickering wildly as they grow in size. Glitch holds his sword at the ready.
After the first few swings pass through the flying blades as harmlessly as the flying blades pass through them, Teagan just... holds their sword and runs after Glitch. What's important here isn't the fight. What's important is keeping up with Glitch. What's important is witnessing. What's important is I need to see this. And so they focus on that more than anything else.
When they get to the open platform, one of Teagan's hands comes out to touch Glitch's shoulder. A brief reminder: I'm here. This is a dream. You can stop any time you need to. These things pass unspoken in the single touch. And then?
Their sword, too, comes to the ready. Waiting.
That unblemished digitized face turns to Teagan, mouth open slightly, a look of dull, sleepy recognition on his face. A slow nod. But he doesn't seem too worried, despite the gargantuan foe before them. He looks over towards the thing, which would be cartoonish if not for its sheer mass, the size of a small house as it bears down on them. Moments later, those glowing red orbs of light stop flickering, hinting at a change for just a moment before they all simultaneously fly directly at Glitch. He darts straight forward and keeps running as they slam into the ground just behind him. Tucking into a roll, he makes it under the looming craft and between the jets of flame keeping it aloft, taking a swipe at one of them as he goes, striking the nozzle with his sword while in motion. Another salvo of red orbs swells up on the surface of the skull, and fly out in a far different pattern, in staggered groups. Glitch dodges to the side to avoid one, reverses course to avoid the second, leaps over a third...and at the apex of his jump, takes the fourth dead on, unable to dodge in the brief moment he hangs in midair. The red lights fly straight through him unhindered, blowing his entire body from the waist up into pieces with a loud bursting noise, blobs and plumes of bright red pixels trailing everywhere.
That undigitized face is what takes their attention: they give that more attention than the fight that follows. Teagan lifts themselves from the platform with their shadows (far more useful in dreams than in real life), rising slowly like they've input a cheat code, to float gently and watch the fight. They zoom this way and that, considering the entire scene from one angle, and then another, watching it in slow motion and at regular speed. Their eyes, fractured-mirrors that they are, reflect back bits and pieces of what they watch. And then they light next to him, landing again, quietly. "Is there more?" Teagan asks, not reaching to touch Glitch's arm again. Just waiting. "Or just more of the same?" In dreams, their voice is inestimably gentle, and they don't broil him with their Mantle.
There is more. Glitch, or what was left of him, fades, and he returns whole at the end of the platform that he began on, fading back into existence in short order before immediately running back into the fray. He dances around, dodges over and over again, and then dies, horrifically. Sometimes sooner in the sequence than before, sometimes heartbreakingly further in. Another Glitch stands next to you, watching himself, not quite swooping around to see it from so many angles but drawing up a bit more lucidity than before. "More of the same," he beeps, watching passively. "Death wasn't any escape. I bet you knew that. Still hurts." He gazes down as he watches himself stumble into a jet flame while dodging a group of red orbs, disintegrated neatly across just the left half of his body. "This isn't when I left. I wasn't ready. I was still learning."
The sword in their hand is surrendered back to the ether of the dream, and Teagan steps in closer to the Glitch that watches. "This is a little what I thought it was like," they admit, leaning in; one arm wraps around his waist, their chin on his shoulder. "No. Death is never any escape in these situations." There's a sort of weary bitterness when they say that, as if -- of course -- they must at some level know. "It always hurt."
"What else do you need me to see, Player One?" He shows, and they anchor: they give him the words he gave them, they give him solidity and a reminder that outside this dream, reality waits. Grounding. (How does Teagan end up grounding people like this?)
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