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Colin arrives at Sylvia's and rings the bell.

[Is this the same day that Colin wakes up?  Is it after Sylvia spends time with Logan?]

OOC: Next day I thought.  Lunch with Logan was the day Colin woke up, but earlier in the day.

Sylvia has one Vicodin left, and she's duct-taped it in a little plastic baggie to the inside of her emergency kit.  Thus, she looks a little stark when she answers the door--not junkie stark, only stark like someone who's coming back to cold, hard reality and finding it's even colder and harder than she remembers.  "Hi," she tells Colin and makes an effort to smile.  By Thursday the smile looks a little less like the rictus of a marionette.

"You look good. Which means that compared to your usual self, you don't look very well." Colin says, clearly concerned.

"In which world you'd like us to take our walk?"

"I'm just tired," she tells him.  "I'm fine."


"The other one.  It's noisy here."

She tries to be companionable.  "Are you all right?  No lingering side effects?"

Colin would object something, but keeps it in, for the moment.


He snickers.

"It looked much worse than what it was. It was just... five for fighting. Will you make the place or should I?"

"By all means," she says with almost no irony, "show me how it's done."

"Uhm." Colin says, considering.

"I start from my dreams. Dreams are closer to that side. And also, things in dreams are closer to their spirit, to their... essence. Over there, something like, say, a lake, isn't real, but it expresses a meaning we give to a lake. No, I'm complicating a simple thing. Start from a dream, or a recurrent daydream of yours. See it in your head. Start from sight and build up the other senses, hearing, touch, smell... by the time you get to taste, you've given it a meaning, and it should appear. Try it."

He sits next to her, gives her his hand, and closes his eyes in preparation.

Sylvia looks at him with the placid, scientific interest of someone who's viewing a two-headed mutant for the first time.  "You know that works for me here," she observes.

Poor Colin has such good intentions, and Sylvia resists him as if by instinct.

"But you said you like it there because it's quiet, didn't you? Remember when you went looking for me there? Same place. There you have no telepathy and no illusions either, I guess, since we're inside your mind. Well, that and somewhere else too, but that's where it gets complicated. I think that if you cross the border and try, it'll work. Actually, you should be much better at this than me. I can pretty much only do natural landscape. Older spirits. I don't think you have such limitations. Just get to the gray featureless landscape and try."

Sylvia assents with a mild half-smile, half-grimace.  In the next minute she slumps like a fresh corpse.

The landscape isn't gray and featureless.  Sylvia's gotten to be too good at visualizing, at imposing her will on reality, to spend much time dithering with visualization exercises.  The environment resolves out of formlessness within a matter of seconds and becomes Oak Park High School, the newsroom.  The computers have layouts and articles on their screens; someone has left a pile of news clippings on the file cabinet under a paperweight; even Gretchen is there, clicking and dragging articles into her place.  Sylvia manages to have a clear and detailed imagination without actually being very imaginative--at least today.

She looks around and seems more animated and emotive here.  Exhaustion, depression, apathy--they can't mask and muffle her spirit the way they do in the real world.  "Great," she says.  "My fantasy life is school."  She seems to make an effort to change the landscape around them.  The corners of the room ripple and distort, providing a glimpse of something warm, sunlit, and coruscant with color, but it's as if some kind of ineluctable force holds them together, makes them more solid than they ought to be.

"Uhm. Don't strain yourself, the school is good for a start, actually very good. I knew you would be better at this stuff than me."

The astral Colin looks around, moves a chair, and goes to look out of a window.

"I'm not too surprised we ended up here. This is your realm, after all." he says with a warm smile, but then a shadow passes over it, and his eyes dart at the door.

"What about we get out the old-fashioned way?"

Sylvia is about to nod when Gretchen looks their way.  "Whoa, where ya headed, chief?  You have to go do that interview."

Sylvia should have complete control over this world, but the look on her face seems to suggest the world has control over her.  "What interview?"

"How to patch a rip," Gretchen says.  "The home ec teacher wants to see you."  Sylvia's not even sure Oak Park has a home-ec course, but it seems muzzily plausible.  And as soon as the thought occurs to her, Gretchen says, "Your mother's teaching it."

Colin for a moment looks like he's watching through Gretchen, then he turns back towards Sylvia.

"Syl, are you doing this?"

He looks around again. His hand goes reflexively to the scar-tattoo on his neck, and he seems worried.

Sylvia looks as if the dream has lulled her into complicity, as if she's bought into it.  "Yeah.  It was my idea.  There are all of these big holes that need patching.  You can't just ignore them."

"Colin," Gretchen says, "you should go and take pictures.  There's something you need to see."

Colin hesitates just a moment, then nods. He grabs one of the newspaper's cameras, and opens the door for Sylvia.

"Women first." he says, gallantly as usual.

"No way," Gretchen says.  "That guy scares the crap out of me.  But go have fun.  When you're done, you can patch me up."  She stands and holds out the fabric of her tee-shirt to show off its large, ragged tears.

Sylvia is wearing a ripped-up dress, too, and she frets with the fraying edges of the fabric.  "I don't know how I'm going to hold this together," she says.  "No matter what you do, things fall apart."

Sylvia heads out the door, but Gretchen stays, turning resolutely back to her computer.  The headline of the issue she's laying out reads, 'AP Class Canceled.'  The text of the article is gibberish.

Colin looks down at himself, but his clothes are fine. Even in this world of Sylvia's making, it's his self image that is projected here. He notices though that he has no bandages for the burns.

Weird. When I come here, I guess my conscious self is in control. Sylvia looks like she's playing out a dream or something. They say you can't read in a dream. I'm not sure it's true. Well, there's only one way to find out the meaning of this.

He looks around constantly, as if to check every corner, every shadow, for something that could be hidden there.

"Well, it's quite fortunate someone is going to teach us. We'll be able to fix things after we learn." he tells Sylvia, playing along.

There are pictures on the layout desk, crystal clear snapshots suffused with bright color.  The top layer contains pictures of Donnie, Logan, Colin, Rob, the other Suspects, and they're mostly pictures of people smiling, laughing, throwing Cheetos at each other, and goofing off like children.  Sylvia's family is here, too.  Carolyn's fixing a motorcycle and playing lacrosse.  Mitzi's rolling out sugar cookies and working at a pottery wheel.  Ginny's wearing a blonde wig and a white dress and standing next to a fan that makes her skirt blow up.  And Smith is here, although Colin might know him only as the man from the asylum or the man from the witches' dream spell.

Under those pictures are black-and-whites depicting many of the same faces with different expressions.  Donnie looks angry.  Colin looks smug.  Logan looks cold.  Sammy, jealous.  Sylvia's parents, frightened and worried.

And under that layer lie pictures so thick with chiaroscuro that they're almost obscured.  Torrance, face twisted with malice and conscienceless pride.  The witches, in a scene Colin is sure never happened in real life--sowing slaughter and mayhem in a maenadic frenzy through the streets of Oak Park.  And another picture, this one fading in like a half-developed Polaroid:  a man in a classroom, nothing more than a silhouette in front of a whiteboard.


"I hope so," Sylvia says wistfully.  "I hate the way things fall apart.  I just need something to hold onto."

They find themselves in the school basement, in the kind of seamless transition dreams provide.  The door at the end of the brick corridor, thick with pipes and steam, has a weathered look and a frosted glass window on which the words "HOME EC" have been painted in black.  A vague silhouette shows through the glass, too thick and stolid to be Mitzi.  "We're here," Sylvia says, balking.  "I don't like the smell."

Colin pockets this one while Sylvia is not looking.


Colin has the camera ready. And the tattoos ready as well, just in case. He takes a tentative sniff, wondering which smell she's talking about.

It's a thick, oily, ashy smell--rich, with a disturbingly savory weight to it, like a gasoline fire at a dump, or barbecue gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Something red flickers on Colin's arms for a moment. The smell reminded him strangely of Leland Palmer. And this bodes extremely ill.

Whatever this is, he's not going to let it haunt Sylvia's dreams. He's going to see this through. He opens the door, and unlike his usual manners, he gets in first.

Mr. Hamilton is there, looking calm and dour as he stands behind his desk.  "Today, class, we're going to learn about buttons."  The classroom is empty, merely rows of seats arranged behind the long steel tables sometimes seen in chemistry labs, but Hamilton turns toward Colin as if he were interrupting a lecture to a full classroom.  "Good evening, Mr. Crow.  Good evening, Sylvia.  I'm glad you could join us.  Please, take your seats."

They entered from the back of the classroom, but Sylvia, following the topology of the dreamscape, is suddenly near the front of the classroom, where Hamilton is, staring fixedly at him.

"Now, then," Hamilton says, "if you will all take your buttons and get ready to press them. . . . "

Colin is there, and he puts a hand on her shoulder.

"No." he says. "Don't. You don't have to do it."

Sylvia gives him a confused look.  "Aren't we supposed to fix things?"

Hamilton's impassive face shows a shred of anger, a fragment of rage.  It's as if his face distorts and becomes mask like, and his voice, too, darkens and sounds, for a moment, like two voices twisted into one.  "Your buttons, please."

"Of course we are. Just not this way."

He takes a step forward, to get between her and the Hamilton-thing. His eyes start to shine a bit.


Colin waves a hand over his shirt. His clothes change to a black tracksuit she's seen on him before. This way, all his buttons are gone.

"Sorry, we won't press them. Now what?"

Hamilton directs his complete attention to Colin, face oddly more animated--expression cold and yet shifting--as he speaks in the same lugubrious tones the man used in life.  "You think it's that easy, don't you?  You always think it's that easy.  That's the downfall of every idealist.  Eventually they come up against something that defies their cut-and-dried morality, their fairy-tale ideology, and they fail.  And when they fail, the people they claimed to protect pay the price.  You think you're some kind of champion.  That's what they tell you to make you do what they want.  You think you're on the side of right.  You're not.  You're only a self-deluded voodoo sorceror who thinks that, just because some disembodied voice tells you what to do, you can do no wrong.

"What have you really done, Mr. Crow?  You've talked your friends into endangering themselves on the advice of entities who have no stake in their survival.  You've pleaded for power and used it to disturb the dead.  You're a charlatan and a ghoul, and most of all--most of all, Mr. Crow--you are a killer.  Your achievements are delusions.  You leave nothing but casualties in your wake--piles of ash when you try to save souls--and that's when you succeed."

Hamilton sounds as if he could go on for eternity.

Colin sighs.

"Ok. I'll explain to you. Just once."

He talks, and while he talks he takes slow steps that each time get him closer to the Hamilton-thing.

"The universe is complicated. It defies simple explanations. Not even scientists know every answer about it. But while you might be right about some idealists, you're wrong about me. The earth isn't flat, but, by approximation, the ground on which you build a home is. That's what my ideals are. Approximations. Rules of thumb. Guidelines. I make the choices.

A step forward.

"No one ever told me I'm a champion. Instead, they told me I couldn't be one. They told me I couldn't be a messiah. I can't save everyone. Nobody can. No one ever told me I'm on the side of right. That's why I question myself so often, and try to stay on the straight and narrow. Because I'm free. I could be anyone I want to be. And this is who I choose to be. I can do wrong. I can do a lot of wrong. I know there is darkness inside of me, I tasted it, and I carry the scars of the darkness outside me. But I don't delude myself. I make the choices."

Another step forward.

"You poor thing, you don't know my friends. You don't know how brave and generous  and fun and beautiful they are. Sure, they have their flaws and their limits, like every other human. But have you seen them when something important is at stake, have you seen them when it counts? You think I have endangered them? No. They would be heroes without me. They would have put themselves in danger anyway, because that's what they choose to be. They're free. And it's the choices they make that define them. These 'entities', as you call them, they gave me a way to get there in time if a car is trying to run them down, or if a fool is about to blow himself up. And you know why? Because I asked them too. You see, I make the choices."

Another step forward. Now Colin is quite close to the thing.

"That means I can make mistakes. Awful mistakes. I can be predictable, like Vandross and the witches found out, and too naive. I did kill the blackened husk of a boy who was once Leland Palmer. And I often wonder if I could have prevented it. I might want to see more good in the world than what it's actually there. I might prefer to see part of what I've managed to do as a success, something to be celebrated. Your mileage might vary. In the end, though, it doesn't matter. I make the choices."

Colin is now just one step away. His voice changes a bit.

"So does every other human. So does my friend Sylvia. And sometimes, maybe often, we come to regret these choices. Fortunately, we're much more than a single, or even a thousand wrong choices. We always have the future. We always have the next choice. We can try to make up for our past. We can try to fix things. Sometimes, it can't be done. But trying matters anyway. It's a choice. But you, poor thing, you have no future. You have no choice. So leave, please. You're just the ashes of a failure. And you don't belong here."

He turns to Sylvia.

"Let it go."

And this time Hamilton's voice is black and insidious and oh-so-smug.  "You do think it's that easy."  Hamilton's face doesn't look quite like his own anymore.  It looks like the pasty, stretched skin of a corpse, pinned to a skull too big for it--a skull with inhuman jaws, teeth meant for tearing and gnawing, and a gullet meant to swallow whole what it can't consume in shreds.

"Sylvia," it says, timbre swelling to fill its bulging throat, "remember what I said.  It's only a matter of time."

Sylvia stares at the thing-that-was-Hamilton, mouth open, but mute, with tears sliding down her cheeks.

Colin has to restrain himself from going giant and wrenching this thing's neck. He has to understand, before.

"A matter of time before what?"

Hamilton's lips peel back over his jagged, blackened teeth in a hideous smile.  "You won't be able to help her.  You can't save everyone," it mocks.

Hamilton suddenly has a device in the tetanus grip of his marionette hand, perhaps the same detonation device he used in the last moments of his life--or at least what Sylvia remembers of it.  He depresses a switch, and Sylvia looks at Colin in anguish.  "John!"  She reaches for him.  But Colin isn't John, and he can't save her.

The explosion isn't what they expect, though.  Instead of a rush of fire and shrapnel, the sound that follows is the jovial fwee of a party horn, followed by a muffled champagne-popper explosion.  A bloom of jagged, peeled-back papery edges explodes through Hamilton as if he were nothing more than a movie-screen projection, and shreds of confetti and coils of streamers begin to shoot out of the gap.  Nothing but blackness and oblivion lie beyond it, a darkness so engulfing that it seems to have appetite.

Sylvia, nevertheless, faints, and it's as if all reality begins to crumple down like a wadded magazine page around Colin.  As the dream's anchors tear free, only the cool light Colin may have expected from astral reality remains.  Sylvia is gone.

Blackbird? I might need help here.

"Sylvia!" He shouts out, the astral sea rippling around him.

If he's still holding her hand in the physical world. He pulls on that connection, trying to follow her wherever she might have gone.

Sylvia is nowhere in the astral zone.  Like any dreamer who doesn't wake directly from the horror of a nightmare, she's enjoying the deep and blissful mercies NREM, in her flesh, where she belongs.

Colin gets back into the real world. He stands up, and he silently walks around the sofa where Sylvia collapsed, absorbed in his thoughts.

Some nightmares are dangerous. Some nightmares open the door to something worst. He learned as much in Alicia's head, and he's got the claw mark as a reminder. There is no way he's letting anything like that within Sylvia. And if it isn't a dream-demon, if it's just her psyche acting up, and punishing herself, well, he's not going to let her suffer this way either, not if he can heal it.

His eyes start shining with the ghost light, and two tattoos on his left arm with a soft green glow. He gently takes Sylvia's head in his hands, and jumps in.

He returns to the school basement, and summons the Hamilton-creature again.

"I'm not done with you."

OOC: This is Sylvia's BBQ so I'll let her GM it.

[Aw, crap.  I'm retired!]


But Colin's control over this world is tenuous at best.  Whatever he saw, whether it was a construct of Sylvia's unconscious mind or something else, taunts him by refusing to appear.  The most he can summon--or retain, as it were--is the Polaroid in his pocket:  a blurry, dark gleam of teeth and the inky impression of a heavy, bloated, well-fed body.

OOC: Bwak.....bwak....bwak...Chicken!

[Would you like a leg, a thigh, or a breast?]

"All right." he says to the photo. "You won't come. I should have expected as much. You might think that by refusing to face me, you can win. You're wrong. I'm here to help you, because she's my friend, but she doesn't need my help. She's stronger than you think. And you'll find out. Oh, you'll find out."

He pockets the photo and summons a shovel. It glistens, as if it was silver or something. With all his force he sticks it into the pavement, and starts digging into the concrete, and then the ground below that. Hours seems to pass here, as he keeps digging, deeper and deeper. He sweats profusely, breaks his nails, and gets blisters on his hands, that start to bleed, but he keeps digging. Until finally, at the bottom, a trickle of water appears. It's muddy, at first, but surprisingly fresh. it feels good, even just at the touch. Like it was healing water.

Colin smiles, lets go of what remains of the shovel, and collapses out of exhaustion.