Slug shares his thoughts on Dreaming (LOG)

[nick_garou]

 The cabin door is once again wide open to the outdoors, despite the pre-dawn temperatures being below freezing. The interior of the cabin is lit by the flickering orange and yellow flames cast from the large fireplace central to the cabin's greatroom. Nick, visible in the kitchen within, is just now taking a large pot of coffee out of the coffee maker, two cups in hand.

 

A large black wolf comes trotting along, heading in a little faster than the day before. The black fur is a bit ominous ( especially with all the Spirals in the area ), but the heavy scarring on one side of the wolf's face ( and it's mis-matched eyes ) leave little doubt as to who it is. Slug springs up into Homid as soon as he's inside, and slumps back against the door, shutting it with his back and shoulders. "It ain't the coldest I've ever felt, but it isn't warm out there."

 

Oddly enough--or perhaps not consider who resides there--the open door doesn't seem to be letting the heat out nor the cold in. "It is a bit nippy," Nick says as he sets up coffee, mugs, individual caramel-flavored creamers, and sugar packets on the coffee table in front of the futon couch. "I was rather hoping for some snow, but I suspect we're just in for more cold and wet today." He settles onto the far end of the couch, not bothering with closing the door. "So you stumbled across some information or news? Hopefully good instead of bad? We could use some of the former and less of the latter."

 

"Yes, actually," Slug says. He glances back at the door to make sure it's shut, and then he walks across the room to take his coffee, and a seat at the counter. "Thanks," he says. He takes a sip, and then he looks at Nic. "You know, I kind of wonder if my new 'filter' Gift also filters nicotine and caffiene. Haven't thought about that, but they both seem to keep working... Could be like a placebo though." Slug shrugs, takes another sip, and wraps both his hands around the coffee cup. "Me, Val, and another Gnawer went into the Dreaming."

 

Nicodemus prepares himself a cup of coffee. Two creamers, one sugar. Not the usual black he tends to go with. "Could be a gift that works selectively, filtering unwanted but keeping wanted? That's useful if that's the case." He yawns. "Especially in the morning. So tell me about this Dreaming thing. I'm not entirely familiar with the concept--or I am and just use different terms for it."

 

Slug holds up his hand and says, as if offering a disclaimer, "I am not a Theurge." Then he clears his throat. "The Dream is... A Realm, in the Umbra. I think it's a place made of the dreams of all things, men, spirits, Mages, Shifters, whatever dreams. It's a neat place, but as a side note to you- It's also very real. You can die there. The line between a dream and a nightmare is thin. I cracked a few ribs on the trip, but hey, that kind of thing ain't nothing for a Garou."

 

Nicodemus winces momentarily, sympathetically. "Still hurts initially though, I imagine." He then adds, "I'm familiar with the concept of the Dreaming," he replies. "So you, Val, and a Mystery Gnawer went out there for a visit?"

 

Slug smiles across the brim of his cup. "Pain is a good thing, it reminds you you're alive." He swallows more coffee, and nods. "Yes. When we got there, we went looking for Magpie. I got Her attention by turning into a giant shiny coin. She... Showed us a vision of two serpents, one of earth and water, and one of darkness, that fought and struggled, wrapping around one another as they did. After the battle, they fell, sleeping, and changed into the world we know." Slug looks down at the counter. "Ying and yang, ebb, and flow. The darkness isn't evil. It's just 'Nothing'. It is what it is... But it isn't meant to be doing what it's doing right now, you know. Eating nuclear reactors." Slug tilts his head to the side. "I think it's just drawn to the radiation because it's drawn to things that change. It seeks to 'fight' it. 'Consume' it, because that's what it's compelled to do."

 

Nicodemus listens attentively. "Interesting. So it sounds as if something might have woken up the Nothing. And now maybe, to counter it, someone needs to wake up the Something?

 

"No," Slug says, perhaps a bit more quickly and forcefully than he intended. He closes his eyes, and takes a breath. "And yes. Something did wake the 'Not'. Maybe that Mage. Magpie said someone 'betrayed' us, but that they didn't wake it out of hate. They seem unaware of what they did. She also said that neither serpent is our friend, and I'm... Inclined to believe Her. It's been *hard* for us to contain or fight the first serpent. If we wake up another, their struggle could destroy the world." He looks down into his coffee cup, then drains what remains in it. "It would be better to put it to sleep."

 

"That was my second suggestion, as I suspected the Something would, by in large, find us all to be rather inconsequential." Nick sips thoughtfully at his coffee, thinking a moment. "But no one knows how--or even if--The Nothing can be put back to sleep."

 

"Magpie showed us a memory of it being put to sleep once. Why can't it be done again?" He smiles, and chuckles, shaking his head. "This isn't something we can fight with destruction. It isn't something to be destroyed. I said that to Magpie, and She agreed. I put an idea on the table, and said we should fight it with creation. Change... But I also don't want to go anywhere near that Caern. If we could summon up some magma from the earth and have it pour down the mountain, and into the lost Caern, we could change it. Create something new. Seal the wound. Magpie said this was 'close' to a solution, but I think we're missing something."

 

"I suspect the magma idea won't work," Nick claims after a moment's thought on the matter. "I've got a bit of the black ooze stashed away for experimenting on. Give me a bit and I'll go heat and liquify some rock, but I'm pretty certain it will just eat it--like it does everything else. Glass, it seems, takes a little longer to go through. But it still goes through it."

 

"It isn't the physical force of the magma that I'm driving at," Slug says. "It's what it does. It brings life. It brings change. It is the birth of something new, raw, and hot, and pure. It's like fighting a hole by filling it with dirt." Slug shrugs his shoulders. "If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but make sure when you do your test that you're hitting it with that kind of force. In Magpie's vision, it creation, the Ying to the nothing's Yang, that fought it to a standstill." Slug pauses for a second. "Oh, and she said the magpies might not be 'Magpies'. Maybe some kind of illusion?"

 

"Well, maybe," Nick says after dwelling further on the concept. He still doesn't sound entirely convinced. "But it also eats Life energies, too." He divulges, "I have the fairly rare ability of sensing every aspect of reality. I more often than not don't know what all that input necessarily means, but The Nothing is unusual in that it registers as... just kind of a hole in the fabric of reality itself. It's difficult to even focus on it, as I have to focus more on the perimeter of where it ceases to exist rather than directly at it." He then hypothesizes, "I wonder if the Magpie Collective is actually the other mage I'd converesed with earlier? If so, we might effectively be dealing with a demi-god."

 

"Maybe it isn't just a physical creation, then. Maybe it needs to be the *spiritual* equal of a volcano, like a little Big Bang." Slug drums his fingers on the counter, then he laughs. "Maybe you could 'sense' two people as they make a kid or something, and find something with the same spiritual pattern as a new life being made, and see what happens when you throw *that* at the Not." To the later bit, he simply shrugs again. "Maybe it's what happens when he sleeps. Maybe he doesn't know he's doing it. Maybe it could be something else. If he's sleeping, though... We could always try to find his dream. But that sounds like it would suck. You want to break into the dream of a sleeping God?"

 

Nicodemus chuckles slightly as the garou defaults to spiritual solutions. "When I mentioned being able to sense all aspects of reality, that included the spiritual aspect of things. Although there's /potentially/ something I'm missing at the microcosm or macrocosm level." He clearly seems to be speculating haphazardly at this point. "And I showed the black ooze to a warper with far more knowlege of spirits and life than I possess, and he likewise had no answers as to what it was nor how to purge it from existence. It is, simply put, a mystery. It sounds as if even this masquerading magpie entity is vexxed by it. Maybe," he says, thinking a little more, "I could again attempt to contact this sleeping god. I'm not sure how wise that is nor how to do it, as he--or she or it--intercepted me earlier when I attempted to scry backwards into time to examine the thoughts of whoever had penned those earlier, rambling documents." He counter-offers, "Maybe we need to go investigate that site north of Hanford? Along the banks of the river. The place where the magpie spirit thing said to 'Find Me.'"

 

Slug hikes one brow and smirks, shrugging. "Well, I'm open to better ideas. The idea of fighting it with creation and sealing the hole shut seems to be a better one than we've got so far. Maybe there's something hard to define about the act of change, or birth, or creation, that fights it, cancels it out. You could always try putting it into a jar that constantly changes shape and size and see if that does anything." He laughs. "Maybe, but I wouldn't go there without some serious artillery, and a plan to get the hell out. Maybe I can steal one of those jetpacks from a muesuem, you know. Dedicate it. Then if the ooze shows up, I can use my Gift to blast the hell out of there. As for the God... Maybe go to sleep with images of him in your head. Ideas. See if *he* comes to you. Might be less offensive to his ego than you just YOLO'ing out there, looking for him. I dunno."

 

After a call ahead to announce her intentions to visit, Memory makes herself known by landing on the window sill and tap-tap-tapping away at the glass with her beak. Once she is let inside, she settles on a perch, makes herself comfortable and yawns rather expansively. "Hey."

 

Nicodemus surrenders his end of the futon to Val after letting her in, and goes to grab a chair from the kitchen rather than crowd that particular piece of furniture. "Maybe. That's certainly more subtle and less likely to get me turned into a steaming pile of goop," he says to Slug.

 

"I do like you in your non-goopy state," Memory tells the Mage, as she lets her head sink into her shoulders and her eyes close. "Kinda tired. You'll have to excuse me if I just sit here and listen, without adding much to the convo. Ourobors. That's what I took away from what we saw in the Dream, Slug, if that helps you any."

 

"You learn a lot about placating egos when you deal with Garou and spirits all day long," Slug says. He wriggles his fingers at the bird, and then smiles and turns to look at Nic. "Assumin' we do close the leak, though, we still got the problem'a the nuke plant."

 

Nicodemus looks to the dozing Corax, then back to Slug. "It's interesting that she mentioned an ouroborus. I had a... well, a vision a couple days ago. Bleak and grey and wet dripping at night countered by an energetic and vibrant daytime counterpoint. It made me thing of polar opposites, the yin and the yang, and the ouroborus." He taps a finger on his knee as he things. "You know, there used to be a pack here that were named Oroborous a decade and change ago. Andrea, a Child of Gaia theurge, was in it. She later ended up being sept Alpha, if I recall correctly, before she departed on some sort of quest." The mage has clearly kept tabs on certain aspects of the local garou for some time. He debates a little internally before replying, "Probably unrelated. Probably."

 

"Or maybe not," Slug says. "Theurges screw everything up with their weirdness and the weird things that they do. Couldn't hurt to do a little digging into that, but... It ain't really my field. I don't like prying into other people's secrets." Slug makes a distasteful face. "Also, about the nuke plant, I thought about shutting it down... But I'm worried if we do that, the thing's just going to go somewhere else. It needs to be a better solution, even if we shut the door on the goo cave."

 

Nicodemus raises his mug of coffee up to his face, takes a sip, and then raises it higher. "Weird stuff, I get." He pours the liquid out of the mug and it congeals into a ball, as if suspended in zero gravity. The mug gets returned to his lap while the dark-hued liquid just sort of hangs out in air, oscillating into what will eventually become a perfect sphere. "Spiritual weirdness, a bit less so. I /might/ be able to do something with the radiation at the nuclear plant. It's energy, after all. I just have never mucked around with radiation before, and I suspect it might be complicated. That and difficult to explain away to the public should it just up and disappear."

 

Slug regards the sphere of coffee with something akin to amusement and wonder. "I can do that," he says, a second later. "But with garbage. I used it on Val, once, while she was flying around. It's weird seeing a bird flying through the air with a bunch of garbage leaping up to attach itself all over it's body." He shrugs his shoulders. "It's less about the radiation, and how we contain the stuff. We can worry about cleaning up Hartford after we put Doom back int the jar."

 

Nicodemus raises his eyebrows sligtly at the floating garbage comment, but then he pauses as an idea comes to him. "Huh. Well... interesting thought," he shares, elaborating upon the expression that likely crossed his face seconds earleir. "This stuff loves radiation, right? I mean, I've fed it some spent radioactive waste and it went apeshit over it. Like a fat kid after a Snicker's bar." Nick raises his mug and recollects the liquid ball he'd left hovering in the air above him--perhaps so he doesn't later spill it on himself. "Is there an anti-radiation? Like how you can cancel out one sound by countering it with another sound and the wavelengths negate one another instead of amplifying one another?" Where is he going with this? "Maybe we can feed it the equivalent of some bad sushi."

 

"I'm not sure if it's radiation, or just... The thing that radiation represents. But maybe." Slug wets his lips, and then scratches the stubble on his jawline. "Or... Maybe we can trick it. Bring it back to the Caern it came out of with a phony gush of something that 'feels' like radiation, but isn't. Then when it comes back to the Caern to eat the energy, we slap the lid back on the jar, and bury it."

 

Nicodemus laughs outright at that proposed solution. "You know, one time I came across this really nasty piece of work. Turns out it was some truly ugly bane that some garou had bound up into a dreamcatcher ages ago, but the dreamcatcher was decaying and the spirit inside was starting to be able to influence things around it. I'd proposed disposing of it by dropping it in a 55 gallon drum, filling it with cement, taking it for a boat ride out to sea, and then dropping it off the continental shelf. I got told that that was not a good solution." He shrugs. "Seemed good enough at the time for what little talent I had back then." He leans back in his chair and takes a sip of the no-longer-floating liquid in his mug. "But I think maybe your idea might have some merit. We've certainly got new things to think about. And with this Pseudo-Magpie thing, which may or may not be a demi-God warper? Suddenly we're not out here all by ourselves anymore." He nods his head twice, affirmatively. "That's one hell of a plus we didn't know about before."

 

"Contain what can't be destroyed. Always a good idea. We just have to make sure we put it to sleep, don't wake the other serpent, don't attract further attention to the area so something else wakes it up, and not get killed by the ooze or the Spirals while we're doing it." Slug gives Nick a pair of thumbs-up. "And then when we're done with that, we can stop Fomori from another dimension from waking a God of Destruction and bringing him into the material world. If this was a TV show, we'd have to do both things at once, and someone would die during the season finale."

 

"Not it!" Nick says rapid-fire in response to your last statement. He then half-smirks, fully realizing people people might indeed die--or the world collapse. "Yeah, there is still an epic shitload of stuff on our collective plates. And it is still overwhelming."

 

"Can't be me. I haven't had enough screen time to be it. Gonna be someone a lot nobler than I am," he says. He reaches into his jacket, takes out his pack of cigarettes, and pulls one out with his lips. "That's the problem with havin' power. You either have to use it to help save the world, or get a conscious that lets you ignore it." Slug stands up, and turns for the door. "I'm going to go walk, smoke, and think."

 

"Quasi-Magpie is going to die, then," Nick theorizes, only partially not serious. "What a loss that will be. See you later, Slug. And thanks for the good news. I needed some in a bad way."

 

"Don't we all?" Slug strikes up a fire with his lighter, takes a single puff, and steps out the door. "Try to resist the urge to change Val into a cougar while she's sleeping." And with that, he tugs the door shut, and steps out into the woods.