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Colin catches Sylvia away fro the table to chat with her.

The first moment she's not with Donnie, or someone else, Colin tries to grab a hold of his friend.
"Syl, have you got a moment?"


"Before, at the table, something seemed to bother you. Was it something I said? I mean, it looks like there's something gnawing at you, and I'd like to help, but I'm too dumb to figure out what it is. Still, if you want to talk about it, I'm here for you." he looks at her with concern.

Sylvia gives him another hollow-eyed look, the kind of look you give someone when you're thinking something's best left unsaid.  "I'm okay," she says without conviction.  "It's just . . . "  Her gaze shifts to something else, anything else.  " . . . thinking about complicated things."

Colin tries to make her look into his eyes.
"Hey." he says "It's fine if you don't want to talk about it, or you aren't ready to talk about it. I just wanted to tell you that sometimes you can think clearer if you have someone to bounce your thoughts on. What did I say that made you feel so wrong?"

Sylvia gives him another ghoulish smile when he says "someone to bounce your thoughts on."  She says, "Nothing.  Just wondering what it's like to know what's what.  You're lucky that way.  You always seem to know what's really going on."

Colin looks at her strangely as he bites his lower lip. His shoulders begin to shake, and fianlly he can't take it anymore and bursts out in a hearty laugh.

"Sorry. I'm totally sorry, I'm not laughing at you, it's just... So, you think I always know what's going on? Wow. Maybe we should trade place sometimes. Really I'm often as far away from knowing what's going on as one could be. I'm just learning to go with the flow, that's all. I've changed, in ways I'm not sure I'll ever understand fully, I've been given some gifts I really don't know how should really be used, and, well, one begins to think of what his life will be... and now? What has happened to my life? Where is it going? Have you ever seen those movies where a boat is caught in rapids? That's how my life feels most of the time. And you think I always know what going on? Wow, I must be really cool." he laughs again.

"Syl, you're not thinking straight. You are the one who always knows what to do. What happened to you? What is it that you don't know? You are so smart."

She grimaces.  Her mouth opens.  She stops.  She tries again.  "How . . . how do I know what's real?"

Colin becomes quite serious. He keeps looking at her, obviously thinking about something.

Then he kneels to take something out of his backpack. it require quite a bit of fumbling, but finally he has something hidden in his hand.

"I may ask you to do a little experiment. But first I have to ask you: when you make up something, like a disguise, or something that just isn't there, what do you feel exactly?"

"That depends," she says cagily.  "Sometimes nothing.  Sometimes exactly what I didn't expect."

Colin fumbles a bit with his pocket too, then he finally show her what he's got in his hand. It's a quite large, quite beautiful, yellow and green glass marble.

"Look at it very closely. Take it if you want. I'd like you to make another, identical but fake marble. Do you have to keep watching it, for it to... exist? Because otherwise I also want to give them both to me and close your eyes for a moment. Do you think you can do it?"

Sylvia nods gravely and conjures up another marble, identical in its glassy weight and swirled color.  She hands it to Colin and closes her eyes.

Colin now has the real marble in right hand, the fake one in his left hand, and a smile on his face. He doesn't even try to watch them for any difference, or tries to disbelieve the fake one. He doesn't need it.

Sylvia hears the marbles clash.

"Ok. Now, before you open your eyes, I want you to use your instincts, or to concentrate, or just try to think where your marble may be. I have one in my right hand, and one in my left hand. It's not difficult. When you think you got it, you cna open your eyes. Or if seeing my hands closed could help you, you can open your eyes right now."

Colin's two hands, closed into a fist, are right in front of her.

She doesn't open her eyes yet.  "I could make one disappear," she says.  "That would be the one I made."

Colin smiles.
"Yes, you could. Then one of my hands would be empty. It's a first answer to your question. Real is what you can't make disappear. Is it satisfying enough for you? Because if it isn't, I have more."

Real is what she can't make disappear?  It sounds easy, but a thought, slippery and insidious, nibbles at the back of her brain.  "Doesn't that mean just that it's real enough to fool me?  Is that enough?  Does that make something really real?"  She's been thinking too hard about this, spinning her gears until their teeth have worn away to slipping nubs.

"Well, there's no 'enough'. It is or it is not enough for you. Maybe you're right, that doesn't make 'real' real enough. Open your eyes and choose. You'll find out something else."

She opens her eyes and, without looking, reaches out with her right hand to touch his left fist.

Colin is smiling brightly now.

"Good. Whatever method you used, it was successful. You found it."

He opens his left hand, where a green and yellow marble shines. It looks perfectly real.

"Now you may ask how I knew it. Well, it's quite simple really."

He opens his right fist, where a more beautiful, bright black with swirls of red marble appears.

"Real is not under your control. It's not set. It's unpredictable. I'm an oracle, right? Well, even I can only tell what could happen, not what will happen. Something coming out of your imagination cannot really surprise you.

Is it better now? I have something else too, if you want."

It's a good trick, and Sylvia wants very badly to believe.  But she wonders if she can accept his glib theorem without scrutiny.  Can nothing out of her imagination surprise her?  "Dreams," she says.  "Dreams surprise me.  Where do they come from?"


"What is it?"  She hopes that he will show her something to restore her faith in the universe again.

Colin seems fascinated with the question.
"You aren't making it easy for me, are you? Dreams... are special. I don't think they come out of our imagination. Sometimes they use our imagination as a language, but I think they come from somewhere else. From deeper within. I...  I think dreams are very real. So they don't count."


Colin puts the red and black marble back in his pocket, and gets out the yellow and green one. He gives her the real and the fake one.

"Now you shuffle them, until I can't tell anymore, and then give them back to me."

"But. . . ."  But how can she argue that?  If dreams are somehow more real than illusions, and if psychosis is like a waking dream, then it's the psychosis that's the illusion.  It's not real.  Unless she can't make it go away.

Confused by her own analysis, she keeps quiet.


She plays the game as best she can, feeling the weight and temperature of each marble, their evident substance.  She gives him two marbles and waits.

Colin takes the two marbles and and clenches his fists around them, until he can feel the blood pump in his fingers around them. He opens his hands again to look at them, at their reflexes, at their shadow. He squats, and makes them roll or bounce a bit on the ground, observing them, listening to the sound they make. Finally he brings them up to his face and sniffs them.

OOC: Will save (1d20+4=21) (http://invisiblecastle.com/find.py?id=778167)

"Real is what survives the experience. And also what you can truly bring yourself to believe in.
Sometimes real is what a good friend tells you it is."

He puts one of the marbles back in his pocket, and hands the other back to her.

"This is yours. Now you can make it disappear."

The marble disappears, and Sylvia stares at the spot where it was.  It appears.  It disappears.  It appears.  It disappears.  "Not real," she says.  Then, in that same quiet voice she asks, "And what if the marble didn't go away?  That would mean it was real?  What if I knew it wasn't real?  I mean, what if it appeared one day and then didn't go away?"

"Then I guess it would mean you believed in it so much, you wanted it so much, you made it become real. Like Pinocchio. Would it be bad for you?"

He takes her hand and gives her the two real marbles.

"Take them. I want you to have them."

She takes the marbles and holds one tight in each fist.  "Could you cure me?" she asks, dead serious.  "If there were something wrong with me, could you cure me?"

Colin can't help but think of Seth and be saddened.

The words bobby taught him, rolling out of his mouth, have all the flavor of a solemn oath.
"I would do everything in my power to cure you."