Dreamed I was a Baroness
Dec. 26th, 2012 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI dreamed I inherited a sort of castle from a distant and previously unknown cousin. It was very oddly built, and I realised it was more about keeping things in than keeping things out. The courtyard had been enclosed, doors filled in, roof put on it, but it wasn't a banquet hall like it said on the plans, it was just the old courtyard with no escapes. All the interior doors were very thick indeed, and many of them showed signs of damage, like someone had tried to knock them out of their frames. But only on one side. The results left a mark and the cause did not.
On the front of the building was one large statue of a lion holding a shield, oddly to the right of center. Except on the photos there were five statues, all different animals, all holding different shields. The night I first arrived there was only the lion, at least when I went in. I heard a lot of stumbling around, and a woman led her kids through to the back rooms apparently blithely unconcerned that I, owning the place, had no idea who she was. But by the time I got to the front door to let a friend in and then back to show her, the woman had gone. From a house with only one entrance. We were creeped out, but the friend was Rani from the Sarah Jane Adventures, so she had some ideas for investigating too.
The next night there was a sort of a dragon statue up top, in the space left of center. That night we started to figure it out. After dark, a monk climbed up from the basement. He was dressed in a dark brown robe, and he was physically disabled. He got all the way up with a pail of potatoes and stopped for a breather, then looked up and saw us... and did not look surprised. He called back down the stairs that 'it' had happened again and they wouldn't be getting back out that way. Someone down there called back. And we'd been pretty sure there were no people there before sunset, we'd searched. We had a lot of questions, but all the answer he had were that it happened sometimes, they'd go down for some supper and come up somewhere else. They just waited it out in the cellar. He had questions too though, like, did we have something to eat that wasn't potato? So I said we'd stock up and maybe trade tomorrow. He was all 'hah, trade!', and I was puzzled and said, swap maybe? But he just walked around the landing and looked over the balcony, then opened a gate in the railing and stepped off with a splash. When we got there to look there was just a big puddle, still moving, and some floating potatoes.
So that was a bit odd.
But it started to make sense of some of the notes the previous Baroness had left, before she was killed. I hadn't had full access to them, because I'd been a suspect in the murder for some months and the house had been left shut up. Rani, however, had studied, and thought she'd figured it out. So we prepared to receive more visitors. That meant getting more people in, to watch everywhere, so we hired servants. I ordered all the cupboards cleaned out and inventoried, only proper in date food to be kept, and only vegetarian. Some of the servants were not best pleased at being stuck with being vegan on the premises, but it was my money so I couldn't use it on meat or alcohol. (They were really not best pleased about the alcohol neither). But by night fall we had a veritable cornucopia of food, not just for eating but for trade goods, so I had whole spice racks and rather a nice selection of chocolates in.
And the the gold coins started to appear.
They were tossed in from balconies, from windows and from doors. All the interior between places, all the liminal spaces inside the big castle thick walls, were just raining these gold shiny things as big as my palm. I picked one up and it bent, thinner than chocolate coins, but it seemed substantially more valuable nonetheless. I went for a wander to see how far this spread and ended in the courtyard, but as soon as I got to the far wall people started shooting arrows at me off the big balcony. I got back under cover as sharpish as I could given my costume. I was wearing my Dark Angel best, all ruffles and lace, trying to look the part rather more than I had the night before. Pyjamas don't look especially noble on anyone. But ruffles aren't really what you want once the arrows are flying.
I got back in, and ordered the upstairs sealed off. The people on the balcony were not invited. I also made a note to hire a different sort of person in the morning, since apparently we needed to treat the place like a border fortress.
It must have been very securely locked up while I was being investigated. Or else a number of persons were in the habit of using the place while we were away.
The ones on the balcony were not in a good mood about us being back. But the ones throwing gold coins presumably thought better of us.
After the gold coins came women in an odd assortment of clothes, some in skirts and some in big trousers and some in shorts, printed t-shirts and ruffles all in evidence. It was like they'd made sure one of them would match whatever we turned up in. An older lady in a very dignified sort of pink dress was wandering around peering at everyone. I found a convenient doorway to lean in and watched. She saw a young woman in a dress actually probably better than my own, one of the servants but dressed like shiny LARP nobility, and she pulled herself up and went to greet her. But when she got closer her eyes narrowed and she looked her over swiftly, taking in not just the shape of her face but the way she was somewhere on the border between tense and terrified, and she just mentally dismissed her and altered her walk so somehow it looked like she'd never meant to greet her anyway. Then she saw me and started the same routine, looking me over. I stayed leant back against the door frame, skirts a bit worse for wear, top not laced as tight as it had been before running from archers turned out to be on the itinerary, so it showed some purple t-shirt with a tacky print on it. But I nodded as regally as I could muster, as if her attention was of course my due, and she glided over to greet me as the new mistress of the house. Correctly identified, more greetings followed, including a woman in grey with a very tall stack of books. I of course stood up straight for that one, and went and cleared a table off for them. Stuff to study!
Inside there were maps, but very odd projections. They were all on triangles and the edges didn't seem to match. I got a piece of paper out and started trying to redraw them in a more familiar way, using some of my old worldbuilding books for suggestions.
A man walked up behind me and leaned over my shoulder, then offered some helpful hints. What I was doing would reveal the geography, yes, but the crossing places were only clear in their projection. Our castle was the one right in the center on these maps.
The man was tall, elegantly dressed in suit trousers and waistcoat but no jacket, very well tailored, and he carried himself in an upright and controlled manner that contrasted with rather a lot of the others wandering through. He looked a little like Tony Stark, and a lot like Crais as played by Lani Tupu, but mostly like himself. There was a much younger version who looked a lot like him only with a broader face, and that one wore shorts with his waistcoat and suit shirt. Also he was smirking a lot. I checked around a bit and most of the new people were white women but they seemed to be deferring to men who looked more like New Zealand.
So there were five statues on the building, and I'd seen four different styles of visitors: The busy woman with her family, the monks, the archers, and now these guys. We figured out they were four different realms that sometimes crossed over with our own, but only in this building, the borders of which had been set to contain these intrusions. The different realms weren't really well defined in the notes ancestors left, but by modern physics theory I wondered if they were alternate universes with set divergence points. Like, in our universe the British went out and conquered practically everywhere until we got kicked out with varying degrees of emphatic, and now we're just Monarch of most of the Commonwealth. But here these guys seem to have gone the other way around, so our nobility was now from the farthest away Commonwealth places. That was just interesting. And maybe the monk dudes were from somewhere that didn't put disabled people in hospitals but sent them to be monks, which with the celibacy and all would have knock on effects that were actually quite creepy. Also just having a lot of monks around would suggest some major changes in the religious history of England. And then there were the archery dudes. England stopped expecting people to actually go do archery of a Sunday, but maybe that world kept up with it. Busy lady gave the fewest clues. She looked like Peri from Doctor Who, as she is now, but that's not much to build an alternate universe on. We'd have to get to know here better.
Mister tall dark and handsome seemed to want to get to know me better. That was interesting. But it involved an elder lady with perfect and complicated tall hair asking me discreet questions about my sexual history, which wasn't really how I'd ever planned first contact to go. Easy to answer though: title is Baroness, but also Reverend. Whole story in one word. She seemed somewhat blinky shocked about that. Didn't really know what to do with it. I was annoyed at even being asked, because the other guy was strolling around being smirked at by a probable son in his 20s, but nobody was answering the equivalent questions for his team. Annoyance.
Later though the monks found my title a bit encouraging. Something in common. And they were especially interested in comparative theology and the differences in the social arrangements of the churches.
The castle was set up to just keep all these strangers out, close doors on them, have me live in the smallest possible apartments near the front door and leave the house to be a prison the rest of the time. But I wanted to know how that photo with all five statues happened, and if it was possible to meet without the aggression, and just get along.
So that's a fun set up. Five alternate worlds intersecting in one building, limited resources, very limited knowledge, and a kind of clean slate for deciding how to deal with them all. There's a lot of story in that one.
In other news, I am asleep a lot due to ill, and only got up cause mum phoned me because I hadn't phoned her today. This is because when I phoned her yesterday I mentioned I was going straight back to bed and we agreed I would phone her when I was awake. Which I was not. But mum is having a merry christmas, so that's nice. My brothers are both still there and there will be big eatings that mum does not have to cook. That's like the big win of all christmas ever. But I don't mind missing it because it is carnivore christmas.
Everyone said thanks for their presents. Except for daft brother, who said 'any more?', but we think he means he liked them.
On the front of the building was one large statue of a lion holding a shield, oddly to the right of center. Except on the photos there were five statues, all different animals, all holding different shields. The night I first arrived there was only the lion, at least when I went in. I heard a lot of stumbling around, and a woman led her kids through to the back rooms apparently blithely unconcerned that I, owning the place, had no idea who she was. But by the time I got to the front door to let a friend in and then back to show her, the woman had gone. From a house with only one entrance. We were creeped out, but the friend was Rani from the Sarah Jane Adventures, so she had some ideas for investigating too.
The next night there was a sort of a dragon statue up top, in the space left of center. That night we started to figure it out. After dark, a monk climbed up from the basement. He was dressed in a dark brown robe, and he was physically disabled. He got all the way up with a pail of potatoes and stopped for a breather, then looked up and saw us... and did not look surprised. He called back down the stairs that 'it' had happened again and they wouldn't be getting back out that way. Someone down there called back. And we'd been pretty sure there were no people there before sunset, we'd searched. We had a lot of questions, but all the answer he had were that it happened sometimes, they'd go down for some supper and come up somewhere else. They just waited it out in the cellar. He had questions too though, like, did we have something to eat that wasn't potato? So I said we'd stock up and maybe trade tomorrow. He was all 'hah, trade!', and I was puzzled and said, swap maybe? But he just walked around the landing and looked over the balcony, then opened a gate in the railing and stepped off with a splash. When we got there to look there was just a big puddle, still moving, and some floating potatoes.
So that was a bit odd.
But it started to make sense of some of the notes the previous Baroness had left, before she was killed. I hadn't had full access to them, because I'd been a suspect in the murder for some months and the house had been left shut up. Rani, however, had studied, and thought she'd figured it out. So we prepared to receive more visitors. That meant getting more people in, to watch everywhere, so we hired servants. I ordered all the cupboards cleaned out and inventoried, only proper in date food to be kept, and only vegetarian. Some of the servants were not best pleased at being stuck with being vegan on the premises, but it was my money so I couldn't use it on meat or alcohol. (They were really not best pleased about the alcohol neither). But by night fall we had a veritable cornucopia of food, not just for eating but for trade goods, so I had whole spice racks and rather a nice selection of chocolates in.
And the the gold coins started to appear.
They were tossed in from balconies, from windows and from doors. All the interior between places, all the liminal spaces inside the big castle thick walls, were just raining these gold shiny things as big as my palm. I picked one up and it bent, thinner than chocolate coins, but it seemed substantially more valuable nonetheless. I went for a wander to see how far this spread and ended in the courtyard, but as soon as I got to the far wall people started shooting arrows at me off the big balcony. I got back under cover as sharpish as I could given my costume. I was wearing my Dark Angel best, all ruffles and lace, trying to look the part rather more than I had the night before. Pyjamas don't look especially noble on anyone. But ruffles aren't really what you want once the arrows are flying.
I got back in, and ordered the upstairs sealed off. The people on the balcony were not invited. I also made a note to hire a different sort of person in the morning, since apparently we needed to treat the place like a border fortress.
It must have been very securely locked up while I was being investigated. Or else a number of persons were in the habit of using the place while we were away.
The ones on the balcony were not in a good mood about us being back. But the ones throwing gold coins presumably thought better of us.
After the gold coins came women in an odd assortment of clothes, some in skirts and some in big trousers and some in shorts, printed t-shirts and ruffles all in evidence. It was like they'd made sure one of them would match whatever we turned up in. An older lady in a very dignified sort of pink dress was wandering around peering at everyone. I found a convenient doorway to lean in and watched. She saw a young woman in a dress actually probably better than my own, one of the servants but dressed like shiny LARP nobility, and she pulled herself up and went to greet her. But when she got closer her eyes narrowed and she looked her over swiftly, taking in not just the shape of her face but the way she was somewhere on the border between tense and terrified, and she just mentally dismissed her and altered her walk so somehow it looked like she'd never meant to greet her anyway. Then she saw me and started the same routine, looking me over. I stayed leant back against the door frame, skirts a bit worse for wear, top not laced as tight as it had been before running from archers turned out to be on the itinerary, so it showed some purple t-shirt with a tacky print on it. But I nodded as regally as I could muster, as if her attention was of course my due, and she glided over to greet me as the new mistress of the house. Correctly identified, more greetings followed, including a woman in grey with a very tall stack of books. I of course stood up straight for that one, and went and cleared a table off for them. Stuff to study!
Inside there were maps, but very odd projections. They were all on triangles and the edges didn't seem to match. I got a piece of paper out and started trying to redraw them in a more familiar way, using some of my old worldbuilding books for suggestions.
A man walked up behind me and leaned over my shoulder, then offered some helpful hints. What I was doing would reveal the geography, yes, but the crossing places were only clear in their projection. Our castle was the one right in the center on these maps.
The man was tall, elegantly dressed in suit trousers and waistcoat but no jacket, very well tailored, and he carried himself in an upright and controlled manner that contrasted with rather a lot of the others wandering through. He looked a little like Tony Stark, and a lot like Crais as played by Lani Tupu, but mostly like himself. There was a much younger version who looked a lot like him only with a broader face, and that one wore shorts with his waistcoat and suit shirt. Also he was smirking a lot. I checked around a bit and most of the new people were white women but they seemed to be deferring to men who looked more like New Zealand.
So there were five statues on the building, and I'd seen four different styles of visitors: The busy woman with her family, the monks, the archers, and now these guys. We figured out they were four different realms that sometimes crossed over with our own, but only in this building, the borders of which had been set to contain these intrusions. The different realms weren't really well defined in the notes ancestors left, but by modern physics theory I wondered if they were alternate universes with set divergence points. Like, in our universe the British went out and conquered practically everywhere until we got kicked out with varying degrees of emphatic, and now we're just Monarch of most of the Commonwealth. But here these guys seem to have gone the other way around, so our nobility was now from the farthest away Commonwealth places. That was just interesting. And maybe the monk dudes were from somewhere that didn't put disabled people in hospitals but sent them to be monks, which with the celibacy and all would have knock on effects that were actually quite creepy. Also just having a lot of monks around would suggest some major changes in the religious history of England. And then there were the archery dudes. England stopped expecting people to actually go do archery of a Sunday, but maybe that world kept up with it. Busy lady gave the fewest clues. She looked like Peri from Doctor Who, as she is now, but that's not much to build an alternate universe on. We'd have to get to know here better.
Mister tall dark and handsome seemed to want to get to know me better. That was interesting. But it involved an elder lady with perfect and complicated tall hair asking me discreet questions about my sexual history, which wasn't really how I'd ever planned first contact to go. Easy to answer though: title is Baroness, but also Reverend. Whole story in one word. She seemed somewhat blinky shocked about that. Didn't really know what to do with it. I was annoyed at even being asked, because the other guy was strolling around being smirked at by a probable son in his 20s, but nobody was answering the equivalent questions for his team. Annoyance.
Later though the monks found my title a bit encouraging. Something in common. And they were especially interested in comparative theology and the differences in the social arrangements of the churches.
The castle was set up to just keep all these strangers out, close doors on them, have me live in the smallest possible apartments near the front door and leave the house to be a prison the rest of the time. But I wanted to know how that photo with all five statues happened, and if it was possible to meet without the aggression, and just get along.
So that's a fun set up. Five alternate worlds intersecting in one building, limited resources, very limited knowledge, and a kind of clean slate for deciding how to deal with them all. There's a lot of story in that one.
In other news, I am asleep a lot due to ill, and only got up cause mum phoned me because I hadn't phoned her today. This is because when I phoned her yesterday I mentioned I was going straight back to bed and we agreed I would phone her when I was awake. Which I was not. But mum is having a merry christmas, so that's nice. My brothers are both still there and there will be big eatings that mum does not have to cook. That's like the big win of all christmas ever. But I don't mind missing it because it is carnivore christmas.
Everyone said thanks for their presents. Except for daft brother, who said 'any more?', but we think he means he liked them.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-27 01:57 am (UTC)Reverend?