[open] a friend in need's a friend indeed

[nedofpies]

Who: Ned and OPEN
What: Random encounters & fallout from dream-walking tomfoolery
Where: House 20, the garden, anywhere around town
When: Day 89

It's been a long week. A long, mostly-sleepless, weird week during which Ned has seen far more of his friends' and neighbors' subconsciouses than he would have liked to. Plus, a creepy city made of crystals that everyone seems to have seen, but no one will claim as their own. Shady stuff. Today, he is determined to wear himself out. Perhaps if he's tired enough, whatever mojo the men behind the curtain have put on him won't be strong enough to stir him out of a deep and dreamless sleep.

It's probably a futile tactic, but he can't just do nothing.

So he is a bustle of activity - cleaning the house, walking around town, checking on the crops to see if they are holding up well (carefully, with an eye for any enterprising tigers roaming too close to the edge of the forest), keeping an eye out for new faces and an ear out for rumors of missing ones.

Comments

[nedofpies]

Ned nods, even more puzzled than he was before. If anyone's world would match his own, he'd thought it would be Wallie's. It had all sounded so colorful in his description: swordsmen and gods and journeys. Then again, his own world isn't that exciting, per se, so perhaps the only correlation is linguistic.

"The people who showed up in my dreams seemed to find it very startling. When I saw their dreams and memories, it all looked the same way it does here." There's a furrow forming between his eyebrows. "So there was no difference at all, even between where you grew up, and the place you ended up after all the-" he gestures vaguely, a wave of his hand meant to indicate death and resurrection in another man's body.

[reluctantsword]

"Not in colour. I mean, there were differences -- a lot of differences -- but not in colour."

Wallie struggles for a moment, trying to think how to phrase it.

"Look, obviously they weren't going to speak English in the World, and I wouldn't have been much good if I couldn't communicate, so things were a little... mucked around in my head. I always thought in English, everything sounded English to me, but it wasn't all the same. It was like having an automatic translator, but I was limited by Shonsu's vocabulary. If I wanted a word, and Shonsu didn't know it, I couldn't say it. Sometimes I would say something, and realise as I said it that there were shades of meaning that didn't exist in what I was trying to phrase in English. That said..."

He looks over at Ned, his knife and whittling project, for the moment, held still. "The horses were a good example. If I looked at them, I knew the word for them, and it was horse. But it... wasn't a horse. It was a beast of burden, a herbivore, make a saddle and ride it around, for all intents and purposes culturally a horse, but it was also a hideous camel-faced monstrosity that is definitely not the same species as the horses I knew. There were... fish in the river. The word I had for them was 'piranha,' because they were vicious things that ate anything that blundered into the river in their path, but they weren't really piranha as you might know them."

He frowns. "I'm pretty sure actual Earth piranha aren't that dangerous."

[nedofpies]

That gives Ned pause. He'd never considered the fact that they all speak the same language, in the Cape. Just how likely is that? They are from all different versions of reality and points in time and places in the universe. He could aliens like the Doctor or Shiala speak English, or people from the far-off future like River or Daneel? Even if it were some derivative of English, the language would likely have evolved past recognition by that point.

"Do you think they've mucked around in our heads, here? To make it so we can understand one another, I mean." It isn't out of the realm of possibility. If they can interfere with peoples' dreams, a little instant translation wouldn't be too hard.

The way Wallie describes the process of translation he went through in the World is fascinating, and makes his head hurt a little to imagine. He's never known more than a word or two in another language, and the idea of knowing a word but not being able to speak it out loud is so peculiar and strangely frightening. "What sorts of words didn't he know? Can you say them now?"

[reluctantsword]

"It's... possible. I can't rule it out." Wallie shrugs. He's still pretty sure he's speaking English now, but if he isn't, he can't tell. "But I can definitely say the words I want now. Let me see."

He takes a moment to think. "Spelling. Reading. Writing. The sorcerers had words for those but Shonsu didn't. Computers, electricity, television, geochemistry, the Edmonton Oilers and the National Hockey League. I think I'm doing all right." He grins. "If I'm not speaking English, whatever system is going on here is subtle enough that I can't tell. I presume the Goddess didn't exactly want me going on about things that have no place in the World."

[nedofpies]

"At least we have electricity here," Ned comments, gratefully. As an afterthought, he adds, "And no super-piranha, or, not that I'm aware of. Though I suppose the wolves and tigers and robot bears in the woods are just as bad. At least fish stay in the water. Usually."

He can understand the reasoning that Wallie lays out for why certain words would have been impossible for him to say, but all the same can't quite understand his laid-back attitude towards having his head messed with. Ned'd experienced that just once, and it had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

"That's almost more frightening though, isn't it? That they might have reached around in our heads and moved things around so we could understand one another, but they did it so sneakily that we can't even tell." He chews on the inside of his bottom lip, gaze dropping as the puzzlement on his face changes to concern.

"Don't you ever think... Occam's razor? I mean, what are the chances that we're actually being experimented on by people we've never seen, but who somehow have the ability to get their test subjects from different times and planets and versions of reality? That somehow, magically, they can turn us into monsters and make it so we walk around in each other's heads? Isn't the far simpler solution that instead of all this crazy stuff happening to us we're just... crazy?"

[reluctantsword]

"It's possible." Wallie's expression sobers, and he frowns, not a pleasant expression on a face that was used to cruelty long before it was his. "I was pretty sick, you know. It took me some time to convince myself that everything that happened in the World was just a very juvenile hallucination while I was dying in a hospital."

He waves an arm in a grand gesture. "I mean, look at me. The nerdy engineer, given the best suit of Conan the Barbarian muscles, attended by a sexy slave girl--I was pretty disgusted with myself when I thought it was just some sad fantasy. I... don't think it is that. I think it's real. There are things I can't remember properly now, but... I can relearn things."

He smiles, rather sadly. "I've had time to get used to it, Ned."

[nedofpies]

Wallie has a point, though. If this were a delusion, it's a strange, and strangely detailed one. If all this were the product of his imagination, Ned can't imagine that it would be such a strange mix of wonderful and horrific. Usually these things only came mixed together in waking life. His dreams, as he's been reminded these last few days, are emotionally focused: everything wonderful, or everything horrible, with little in between. Why would he have delusions about being held prisoner but meeting such wonderful people, becoming friends with them, finding a way to survive together? Why not just the delusion of friendship, or just the delusion of imprisonment.

"You are a bit Conan the Barbarian," Ned agrees, with a little smile. He can say that, now that Wallie's mentioned it himself. "I was pretty terrified to talk to you at first, actually." Might not be the nicest thing to admit, but he knows he probably wasn't all that subtle about it. Besides, Wallie clearly knows that he looks intimidating.

Something else that he said catches Ned's attention, and he asks, "They have slaves, there?" That's... not good.