[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

[enchangement]

River smiles. She learned a few things but she isn't sure what good knowing them is. How much of it is her, and how much of it is the world. The problem with sharing dreams is that sometimes it manages to chip away at her sense of reality.

Still. "You weren't always tall, and dogs can get everything wet in less than a tenth of a second."

[nedofpies]

Ned laughs again at that, but it is a stabler, fonder laugh, this time. "They're very good at that, yes. And no, I wasn't. I was the smallest kid my age for quite a few years." He doesn't ask if River turned up in anyone else's dreams. She hadn't volunteered the information, so he figures it isn't his place to pester, particularly when there's nothing to be gained from it.

He thinks back over the dream now, again, as he has been on and off since it happens. "I think the strangest thing was being younger than you. Or... thinking I was younger than you, for a while." Of course, there had also been the way River interacted with the people in the white coats, at the very beginning, how she had held his hand and dragged him out of the familiar nightmare. "Strange how... real it feels. Like all of it actually happened, even though I know it really didn't."