Night gaunts between tick and tock
Mar. 6th, 2018 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo that dream was interesting. Well, terror with a side of nausea, but now I'm awake and thinking, interesting.
There was complex that was mostly for mixed use, but had a set of exit doors led to some facilities for those of us who are magic. Half the people I knew used that door just to prove they can. Not the ones with signs, the ones who had to deal with having horns in the modern world, they mostly got called on to prove they were people, their magic wasn't in doubt. But the human looking ones, they'd stroll out the hard way to prove something, and my continued avoidance of that door had them looking down on me.
But it wasn't to prove anything I finally went in. I was just following someone, cause I'd noticed something, something they really needed to know.
It wasn't so bad at the first door, I could keep moving through the pull. But the second seemed to spin, spin, spin, until I had to psych myself up and jump in like it was a too fast revolving door, one of the big ones that closes the whole door off to airlock you through. Everyone else just walked, didn't notice a thing, and of course got further ahead. So I jumped through, twice, and ended up somewhere funhouse crazy. Everything twisted and distorted. But not, apparently, the everything everyone else had a view of. So I was down to crawling, feeling like the world's worst carnival ride was trying to puke me up, and everyone else just walked past laughing. Look at the mundane getting above herself. Poor thing shouldn't have tried.
But my problem was rather the opposite. They were walking through the result of the magic. I could still feel it, every twist in the spell grid.
So you know gravity can do weird things? Like a donut. You could have a donut planet, and walk around on it, it's perfectly within the rules. Once you've got a donut the forces balance, though who even knows how you could get it there. Only somewhere in the middle you'd be falling, like an orbit, but the other side could catch you. Or everywhere could, at once, and you'd finally find a still point in a turning universe.
They'd done that. But they'd done it to time.
So maybe it's more of an hour glass wrapped in a force donut, somehow, twisted until right in the middle of the pinch there's stasis, for the ordinary lives. And it was attached in the corner of a multi use complex, but most of the pinch, that was in a hospital.
So you could see the use of it. One great big suspended animation spell, at least for mundanes. Magical nurses and doctors could do their thing, but muggles were unaware. Why? Spell was balanced for them, the fall halting, but magic made us heavier, somehow, or bigger. Heavy enough most people kept falling at the usual rate, strolled through. But for the most magic, we were big enough to feel every twist in the grid, every spin put on it to maintain that one little bubble.
Nobody who worked there could sense the spell. I could feel it like a spiderweb thrumming in huge waves. Made me seasick.
So that's the setting. But for most people that's not the problem. And that wasn't why I'd chased someone in.
There's a lot of beings that are not human but who shared a world with them. Horns aren't the half of it. Folklore gives them reputations, and some of them are ugly. But the ones that scared me the most were the night gaunts.
They were living shadows, as far as we could see, but we couldn't see our own. They're forever in our blind spot. We have to hope someone else spots them, a shadow where no shadow should be, almost human shaped but perhaps cloaked, or wrapped in something.
I'd chased a man in who had one on him.
But I had a hell of a time persuading any authority.
They thought I was a bit useless at magic. Couldn't even hold my formal wear, kept sitting there in a cardigan waiting for the restaurant staff to acknowledge me, but they never did, because it ain't polite to watch someone get changed.
But I was terrible at Illusions. I disbelieved. Even when it was me trying to cast it, I disbelieved. My basic problem was I saw and sensed what others didnt, because I saw what was there.
So I told them how sickening their spell was, and how I'd seen a night gaunt, and all they could see was me, staggering and crawling and at one point plain getting sick.
Who wants to believe that?
But I tried to show them what I was seeing, the lines of force that stretched right through their office, and when someone pulled up a spell diagram I was right. But most of them called it coincidence and sent me further in, because I was clearly ill, and there was hospital.
Once through the worst of the clashing forces round the edges, all the way into the donut hole, it stopped being so bad, became more like leaning on a cage. Or a cage wrapped all around me. But I tried thinking of corsets and found a way to balance to move freely.
What I saw though... what I saw...
I saw a lot of humans, all oblivious.
I saw whole wards of still, still, sleeping people. So many kinds of ill in there. And I could't resist snapping off a quick healing spell, even though I expected that to mean I'd have no more for the day. But it came back right away, and I could see it had worked. So I set about methodically going through the spaces, casting healing like it's cantrips and orisons, round after round.
... but not minute after minute. Minutes weren't passing in the usual way. And to start with I was quite angry no one else was doing this, thought it might be because the sleepers are all mundanes, but then I realised, caught in the spell like this I was spun up, time speeding past me while I was in the still centre, but my power was big enough to pull something from the speed. Like I could sit on an island and my hands reach down to use the water for these people, but everyone else would have had to climb a cliff. Not how I'm used to thinking of me. Small? Not that way.
But after the healing I knew how to do, there were still some areas. Curtained off wards, with warnings on them. I sidled past and looked, just through the gap, out the corner of my eye. And I saw a ward of paired up people, ones with night mares, pale riders, and night gaunts.
I strolled on faster, sweating, and headed for the stairs.
You couldn't see if they had seen you, was the thing. You knew you'd seen them, but which side of the shadow could even look at you? How would you know if they'd looked back?
So down the stairs I went at a brisk stroll, as if heading out of enemy territory.
And I saw more of them.
Handfuls.
Dozens.
I didn't see a hundred, not all at once, but what line of sight in a hospital give you a hundred people? No, not a hundred, surely, but...
Every single staff member was walking around doubled.
Shadowing ain't meant to be quite like that.
I got down to the ground door and headed for the exit, quite unconcerned with the nausea and world twists compared to everything I see in here. And I don't just mean the shadows. There's people here in uniforms it isn't healthy to notice. One of them is cleaning a bathroom, with the sign out all right and proper. A man who looks military, with a mop in his hand. Smears of something dark are still on the walls.
I hurry.
And I see ... well, Rupert Giles, as he would be by now, silver haired and confident. He appears to be sparkling in his own spotlight. He also appears quite benevolent, but he's surrounded by all this and none of it is bothering him. Clip board and scrubs and pristine whites he may have, but an abundance of compassion is not demonstrated by this much unconcern. Maybe no one else can see the night gaunts, but they can sure as hell see the mop.
So I head for the exit faster, however interesting here might be.
And at reception I find two young men, dressed quite differently, one in a pricey but ill fitting suit, the other in t shirt and hoodie. The only thing suggesting they're together is they're the same, for want of a better word, species. Bright red skin, little black horns. Your classic devil, such as you mostly don't see these days.
The one in the suit is explaining they've brought donations of bottled water - supply being a manually assisted pain due to the special conditions.
The other one seems bored, pulls out a mobile phone. An old flip phone. And as soon as he presses a button, all is alarms.
Right, he says, this is a hostage situation, you answer to us or there's bombs.
The one with him is as horrified as the receptionist. He was here on a goodwill mission.
The guy in the hood reckons there's no good will left, not after what they've done to us.
Nobody leaves.
And that's when I woke up, all adrenalin with just a memory of nausea.
But I think I can figure this.
The problem is closed ecosystems.
Well, one side of the problem.
There's these bottled places in the corners of big complexes, places for offices and hospital beds, but where everyone still awake is either not human looking or not what they seem. Seems a logical place to take someone for tests. Which, with the uniforms there, is likely sinister. But it doesn't have to be. Magicals needed their own space once to avoid the burning. There used to be enough people of the type red and horned that they got observed by everybody, or at least the book writing classes. Now there ain't. And they're trying to do PR and build up good will. And they're pretty epic pissed. So. Mundanes have not been the ones getting the mucky end of that stick. And yet, they'd all still need medical care.
This place where only people like us can move could be perfect.
But it ain't.
The only 'demons' in here are paired, the human they're attached to held somewhere deeper than unconscious, not available for any purpose. Maybe it's meant to starve them out?
But what do night gaunts even feed upon?
Night mares are easy, they stir up fear, you get a glimpse of them in sleep paralysis, you know what they are.
But a night gaunt, you wouldn't even know it's there. Fear can't be the main reason.
... maybe paranoia. Paranoia I'd buy.
But whatever it is, there's a superabundance here. I've never seen so many or so visible. And there's only one still staying with the sleeping mundanes, the others are following staff around quite happily.
Have you ever tried to keep an ecosystem balanced?
Probably not on planet scale. (Beings of that type probably don't need any hospital we could build.)
But say a fish tank. They're always wandering off somewhere. Salt, pH, ammonia, all sorts. And whatever starts to drift starts taking the living along with. Algae, especially, but any closed system is a fight for everything in it trying to make things their version of best.
This hospital ward might not be closed, strictly, but bottled off as it is there's unique eating for some things. It can't just be me getting my recharges in. And it can't just be mundanes who can't get out.
If us magical heavies can keep on flowing, what happens to whatever is too light? Maybe it don't fall in in the first place, but if it's something we each give off...?
Night gaunts. Whatever they feed on, it is pooling here. And maybe in their point of view that makes them invited, or they're being quite polite.
Hospitals always have an emotional residue, a psychic backdrop. Imagine if none of that could ever get out.
So, night gaunts, terrifying, but at worst hungry at a banquet.
A banquet the hostage situation would keep in place and quite possibly feed up.
But whatever made the reds so desperate they even thought of hostages?
... might involve mops.
... now that I'm still cared of, even after I understand.
So.
There's me, there's two fears I don't want to face, and seeing the way one gets fed makes the other part of that ecosystem. And I can recognise in my own fear how others might respond with violence. But that's not the way.
Got to rewrite the diplomatic situation in the face of entrenched bureaucracy and powers greater than I am. And probably contrary to whatever sparkly Giles was. Since he's the most distinctive thing trapped in here.
Probably the big problem will be the tendency to keep the vast majority of people ignorant and sleeping while the ones with the power decide for them.
Pretty sure that's a story.
And if it's a story where I can sling unlimited magic around, well...
... I would probably try that in the middle and then realise that exactly what gave me that power is dampening democracy and upholding systematic oppression, come to think, on account of it being that time twisting spell that holds everything inside it still. Got to set it up to move on. Means tearing that apart even if it leaves me ordinary.
Which is less fun, but more progress.
Definitely a story.
There was complex that was mostly for mixed use, but had a set of exit doors led to some facilities for those of us who are magic. Half the people I knew used that door just to prove they can. Not the ones with signs, the ones who had to deal with having horns in the modern world, they mostly got called on to prove they were people, their magic wasn't in doubt. But the human looking ones, they'd stroll out the hard way to prove something, and my continued avoidance of that door had them looking down on me.
But it wasn't to prove anything I finally went in. I was just following someone, cause I'd noticed something, something they really needed to know.
It wasn't so bad at the first door, I could keep moving through the pull. But the second seemed to spin, spin, spin, until I had to psych myself up and jump in like it was a too fast revolving door, one of the big ones that closes the whole door off to airlock you through. Everyone else just walked, didn't notice a thing, and of course got further ahead. So I jumped through, twice, and ended up somewhere funhouse crazy. Everything twisted and distorted. But not, apparently, the everything everyone else had a view of. So I was down to crawling, feeling like the world's worst carnival ride was trying to puke me up, and everyone else just walked past laughing. Look at the mundane getting above herself. Poor thing shouldn't have tried.
But my problem was rather the opposite. They were walking through the result of the magic. I could still feel it, every twist in the spell grid.
So you know gravity can do weird things? Like a donut. You could have a donut planet, and walk around on it, it's perfectly within the rules. Once you've got a donut the forces balance, though who even knows how you could get it there. Only somewhere in the middle you'd be falling, like an orbit, but the other side could catch you. Or everywhere could, at once, and you'd finally find a still point in a turning universe.
They'd done that. But they'd done it to time.
So maybe it's more of an hour glass wrapped in a force donut, somehow, twisted until right in the middle of the pinch there's stasis, for the ordinary lives. And it was attached in the corner of a multi use complex, but most of the pinch, that was in a hospital.
So you could see the use of it. One great big suspended animation spell, at least for mundanes. Magical nurses and doctors could do their thing, but muggles were unaware. Why? Spell was balanced for them, the fall halting, but magic made us heavier, somehow, or bigger. Heavy enough most people kept falling at the usual rate, strolled through. But for the most magic, we were big enough to feel every twist in the grid, every spin put on it to maintain that one little bubble.
Nobody who worked there could sense the spell. I could feel it like a spiderweb thrumming in huge waves. Made me seasick.
So that's the setting. But for most people that's not the problem. And that wasn't why I'd chased someone in.
There's a lot of beings that are not human but who shared a world with them. Horns aren't the half of it. Folklore gives them reputations, and some of them are ugly. But the ones that scared me the most were the night gaunts.
They were living shadows, as far as we could see, but we couldn't see our own. They're forever in our blind spot. We have to hope someone else spots them, a shadow where no shadow should be, almost human shaped but perhaps cloaked, or wrapped in something.
I'd chased a man in who had one on him.
But I had a hell of a time persuading any authority.
They thought I was a bit useless at magic. Couldn't even hold my formal wear, kept sitting there in a cardigan waiting for the restaurant staff to acknowledge me, but they never did, because it ain't polite to watch someone get changed.
But I was terrible at Illusions. I disbelieved. Even when it was me trying to cast it, I disbelieved. My basic problem was I saw and sensed what others didnt, because I saw what was there.
So I told them how sickening their spell was, and how I'd seen a night gaunt, and all they could see was me, staggering and crawling and at one point plain getting sick.
Who wants to believe that?
But I tried to show them what I was seeing, the lines of force that stretched right through their office, and when someone pulled up a spell diagram I was right. But most of them called it coincidence and sent me further in, because I was clearly ill, and there was hospital.
Once through the worst of the clashing forces round the edges, all the way into the donut hole, it stopped being so bad, became more like leaning on a cage. Or a cage wrapped all around me. But I tried thinking of corsets and found a way to balance to move freely.
What I saw though... what I saw...
I saw a lot of humans, all oblivious.
I saw whole wards of still, still, sleeping people. So many kinds of ill in there. And I could't resist snapping off a quick healing spell, even though I expected that to mean I'd have no more for the day. But it came back right away, and I could see it had worked. So I set about methodically going through the spaces, casting healing like it's cantrips and orisons, round after round.
... but not minute after minute. Minutes weren't passing in the usual way. And to start with I was quite angry no one else was doing this, thought it might be because the sleepers are all mundanes, but then I realised, caught in the spell like this I was spun up, time speeding past me while I was in the still centre, but my power was big enough to pull something from the speed. Like I could sit on an island and my hands reach down to use the water for these people, but everyone else would have had to climb a cliff. Not how I'm used to thinking of me. Small? Not that way.
But after the healing I knew how to do, there were still some areas. Curtained off wards, with warnings on them. I sidled past and looked, just through the gap, out the corner of my eye. And I saw a ward of paired up people, ones with night mares, pale riders, and night gaunts.
I strolled on faster, sweating, and headed for the stairs.
You couldn't see if they had seen you, was the thing. You knew you'd seen them, but which side of the shadow could even look at you? How would you know if they'd looked back?
So down the stairs I went at a brisk stroll, as if heading out of enemy territory.
And I saw more of them.
Handfuls.
Dozens.
I didn't see a hundred, not all at once, but what line of sight in a hospital give you a hundred people? No, not a hundred, surely, but...
Every single staff member was walking around doubled.
Shadowing ain't meant to be quite like that.
I got down to the ground door and headed for the exit, quite unconcerned with the nausea and world twists compared to everything I see in here. And I don't just mean the shadows. There's people here in uniforms it isn't healthy to notice. One of them is cleaning a bathroom, with the sign out all right and proper. A man who looks military, with a mop in his hand. Smears of something dark are still on the walls.
I hurry.
And I see ... well, Rupert Giles, as he would be by now, silver haired and confident. He appears to be sparkling in his own spotlight. He also appears quite benevolent, but he's surrounded by all this and none of it is bothering him. Clip board and scrubs and pristine whites he may have, but an abundance of compassion is not demonstrated by this much unconcern. Maybe no one else can see the night gaunts, but they can sure as hell see the mop.
So I head for the exit faster, however interesting here might be.
And at reception I find two young men, dressed quite differently, one in a pricey but ill fitting suit, the other in t shirt and hoodie. The only thing suggesting they're together is they're the same, for want of a better word, species. Bright red skin, little black horns. Your classic devil, such as you mostly don't see these days.
The one in the suit is explaining they've brought donations of bottled water - supply being a manually assisted pain due to the special conditions.
The other one seems bored, pulls out a mobile phone. An old flip phone. And as soon as he presses a button, all is alarms.
Right, he says, this is a hostage situation, you answer to us or there's bombs.
The one with him is as horrified as the receptionist. He was here on a goodwill mission.
The guy in the hood reckons there's no good will left, not after what they've done to us.
Nobody leaves.
And that's when I woke up, all adrenalin with just a memory of nausea.
But I think I can figure this.
The problem is closed ecosystems.
Well, one side of the problem.
There's these bottled places in the corners of big complexes, places for offices and hospital beds, but where everyone still awake is either not human looking or not what they seem. Seems a logical place to take someone for tests. Which, with the uniforms there, is likely sinister. But it doesn't have to be. Magicals needed their own space once to avoid the burning. There used to be enough people of the type red and horned that they got observed by everybody, or at least the book writing classes. Now there ain't. And they're trying to do PR and build up good will. And they're pretty epic pissed. So. Mundanes have not been the ones getting the mucky end of that stick. And yet, they'd all still need medical care.
This place where only people like us can move could be perfect.
But it ain't.
The only 'demons' in here are paired, the human they're attached to held somewhere deeper than unconscious, not available for any purpose. Maybe it's meant to starve them out?
But what do night gaunts even feed upon?
Night mares are easy, they stir up fear, you get a glimpse of them in sleep paralysis, you know what they are.
But a night gaunt, you wouldn't even know it's there. Fear can't be the main reason.
... maybe paranoia. Paranoia I'd buy.
But whatever it is, there's a superabundance here. I've never seen so many or so visible. And there's only one still staying with the sleeping mundanes, the others are following staff around quite happily.
Have you ever tried to keep an ecosystem balanced?
Probably not on planet scale. (Beings of that type probably don't need any hospital we could build.)
But say a fish tank. They're always wandering off somewhere. Salt, pH, ammonia, all sorts. And whatever starts to drift starts taking the living along with. Algae, especially, but any closed system is a fight for everything in it trying to make things their version of best.
This hospital ward might not be closed, strictly, but bottled off as it is there's unique eating for some things. It can't just be me getting my recharges in. And it can't just be mundanes who can't get out.
If us magical heavies can keep on flowing, what happens to whatever is too light? Maybe it don't fall in in the first place, but if it's something we each give off...?
Night gaunts. Whatever they feed on, it is pooling here. And maybe in their point of view that makes them invited, or they're being quite polite.
Hospitals always have an emotional residue, a psychic backdrop. Imagine if none of that could ever get out.
So, night gaunts, terrifying, but at worst hungry at a banquet.
A banquet the hostage situation would keep in place and quite possibly feed up.
But whatever made the reds so desperate they even thought of hostages?
... might involve mops.
... now that I'm still cared of, even after I understand.
So.
There's me, there's two fears I don't want to face, and seeing the way one gets fed makes the other part of that ecosystem. And I can recognise in my own fear how others might respond with violence. But that's not the way.
Got to rewrite the diplomatic situation in the face of entrenched bureaucracy and powers greater than I am. And probably contrary to whatever sparkly Giles was. Since he's the most distinctive thing trapped in here.
Probably the big problem will be the tendency to keep the vast majority of people ignorant and sleeping while the ones with the power decide for them.
Pretty sure that's a story.
And if it's a story where I can sling unlimited magic around, well...
... I would probably try that in the middle and then realise that exactly what gave me that power is dampening democracy and upholding systematic oppression, come to think, on account of it being that time twisting spell that holds everything inside it still. Got to set it up to move on. Means tearing that apart even if it leaves me ordinary.
Which is less fun, but more progress.
Definitely a story.