Go Find Your Own Nightmare

[Synful_Blood]

Dream Battle. Closed. Expanded limitations (Syn can manip 6 oz blood, from the rivers as well as her body, and Chris's presence will cause fire to rain from the sky, meaning he won't need to summon it) agreed upon by both participants.
It had been two days since the survivor of the two men who had tried to steal her razor escaped her. Syn hadn't seen him since. It irritated her as much as anything did, she'd intended to gut him and then strangle him with his own entrails. No one tried to separate her and her Mellon en Amin and survived the ordeal. No one.

The scrawny elf sighed, brushing black and white hair back under her hood with a corpse-gray hand. All too soon she would have to leave this world of darkness-enshrouded blasphemy and hunt once more in the light, looking for a particular man that deserved death.

She'd taken to hunting the streets of Scara Brae for him in the day time, as much as it irked her to move from the shade of the tree, and at night she'd taken to watching the fire from the off-shore temple. She idly wondered what the priests thought they were doing, lighting fires and chanting at night. Her eyelids started growing heavy, probably from the lack of food, lack of sleep, excess blood, and the rhythmic but distant sounds of the priests' chants.

Her night-time world went softly dark.


~~~

The next thing she knew, Syn was much closer to the fire. It burned bright red just beyond a wide crimson river. She stood on the banks of the river, rotting bones and bone powder cracking beneath her feet. The metallic tang filling the air came from the river, and the mix-blood Elf didn't even have to look to know that it was blood. Her blood. Blood that her hatred, and the hatred of the rest of the world, had made her shed.

The fire beyond the river burned up the bones of the people she'd killed out of that hate, and the black smoke the conflagration sent up blotted out any hint of a sky. All above was dark and angry, and the smoke that didn't rise into the low sky spread a deathly smog through the landscape, adding to the miasma of blood and rotting corpses.

There was something eerily soothing about this place. It was as if she had finally come home, wherever home was.

Turning, she started walking away from the river banks. She couldn't really walk away from the river -- it was her. It branched out into hundreds of little rivulets that made blood run across the fields. As soon as she left the banks of the river, though, there was a series of crrks and crunches beneath her boots. She looked down idly, to see what had caused it, and saw shards of broken glass lying amidst singed paper flowers. Kicking these aside, she saw that more rotting bones and piles of flesh were hidden beneath them.

At the center of the field was a tree. From where she stood, she could see that its bark and branches were that of a normal tree, but in the dim light from the fire behind her, the leaves gleamed like razor blades. Resuming her slow walk towards it, Syn let a tight, stiff grin cross her face.

Vanima...

Beautiful.

[Christoph]

What a night…

But then again, how was it any different from just about every other night since Chris had left his home in Salvar to go on this forsaken “business trip”? First, he decided to pay a visit to a local pub in Underwood that hot, humid night -- a bartender walked into a bar. Being as such, he should have known better; the whole concept sounded like the opening of a bad joke. He was more than well aware that tempers rose with the temperatures. Actually, either extreme prepared for particularly poorly mannered patrons. It was merely that the colder side of the spectrum often left everyone too numb for violence. And thus, proving his unheeded prediction, a wave of violence overtook the humble pub. The traveling chef was too weary to even pay attention to how it started, which corner of the tavern it spawned from, or who threw the final insult or the first punch.

It was frustrating beyond the means of articulating it. Most nights, he would have been perfectly content to jump right into a brawl. For once in a long time, however, he just wanted to sit quietly and be left alone to drink and relax. But, of course, that wasn't about to happen. Bar stools went flying, tables were turned up, and beer mugs smashed in the faces of drunks and sober men alike. Even the lute-playing bard fled the scene. Chris was forced to fight his way to the staircase that led to his room on the second floor of the pub. But, again, he should have known better.

The weary and homesick chef sighed, rubbing the side of his head that had fallen victim to a flying bottle. The business trip had started out so well, too. He'd left Salvar two months ago, arriving at Scara Brae to meet with a few warehouse owners there. A few profitable contracts were made, involving the supplying of grain and other items to his mother's tavern. He'd even met a few interesting people while there. It wasn't until he'd arrived in Corone, to work out deals with some ship owners, that things began to spiral out of control. Fighting with thieves, followed by zombies in Concordia, until he ended up being arrested and forced to fight in the Citadel against his will. When he'd finally escaped captivity, it looked, for a day or two, like things were destined to start going smoothly again.

Well, on that note, getting stuck in a bar fight was much tamer than almost being eaten by zombies. He chuckled to himself as he entered his prepared room. Of course, "prepared" is meant to mean that the sheets on the bed mostly clean and that there was a fresh candle. Still, it was better than sleeping on the ground or in a jail cell. Chris smiled as he plopped himself down upon the lumpy bed. It wasn't often that he was actually able to be optimistic. He was probably just much too tired to mope.

On that note, sleep sounded absolutely wonderful...

***

Light spun rapidly and faded into blackness as reality slowly slipped away. The dim room in the inn vanished and Chris found himself standing behind a dusty wooden counter, just like the one in his home’s pub. His hair was clean and his face shaved and he was wearing his white chef coat and poofy hat again. He was polishing a glass – the same glass, over and over again. His hand moved a rag across the glass in circular motions along the outside and then scooped and swabbed the inside, before starting all over again. He relished in the lovely simplicity of it.

The air in the bar seemed hazy, as though smoke from the kitchen had drifted into the hall. It was much thicker, though. The corners were obscured and even the closer walls were blurry. Patrons talked and laughed at every table. The sound was distorted and unbalanced: Chris could hear a conversation on the other side of the room as though they were yelling from a few feet away, while the voices of those on the stools in front of the counter were reduced to mere whispers.

Then, every single customer stood silently and abruptly and left for no logical reason. They filed out in a zombie-like trance, leaving Chris standing alone behind the counter. It wasn’t long before he felt the strange urge to leave as well. After a brief hesitation, he gave in to it and walked to the door. It opened before him with a groaning creak. He peered outside, and was shocked to find a land completely foreign to his Salvic home. It was dark, darker than any night should be. The air was befouled with the stench of death. Every instinct told him to back up into the tavern, and get the hell away from the door. Yet, his feet carried him one more fateful step forward, taking him through the doorway.

The moment he left the building, a series of rotten cracks filled the silent vacuum. The entire structure collapsed behind him, as though the very support beams were decaying as he stood there. Less than a moment later, a vengeful flame of bright red appeared and hungrily consumed its remains, before that, too, faded. Chris was left alone, surrounded by a black veil of hopelessness and despair. And hate. Yes, he could feel the hatred, burning like fresh, wind-swept ash embers against his skin. A roaring inferno off in the distance emanated the only visible light in the hellish landscape. It was bright red, similar to the blaze that had devoured the tavern, but it burned with a demonic hunger that was even more insatiable.

No sooner had dread begun to overtake the confused chef, who was thoroughly convinced that he'd stepped into hell itself, than did the skies begin raining fire. It wasn't the "fire and brimstone" rain that he'd read about in his ancient texts, though. It was something not of hell. Brilliant blue streaks filled the sky like great beacons of hope, showering down upon the desolate landscape. None were falling close to him, yet. Instead, they descended with bold swooping sounds, landing several hundred yards before him, exploding triumphantly. Their glorious light reflected off the tortured Earth as though it were covered in glass, and illuminated a distant tree that reached for the ominous sky like a lonely, clawed hand.

Perhaps there was something to light his way, after all.

With that single, slightly comforting thought, Christopher started forward, forcing himself to ignore the grinding and crunching beneath his feet.

[Synful_Blood]

Syn had gleefully clambered up her razor-leafed tree, where she had immediately taken hold of the most beautiful of the arrowhead-shaped leaves she could find and twirled it between her fingers, admiring the shape and general perfection of it and of the tree from which it was born. She didn't let it caress her flesh. No matter how great the temptation, only her beloved razor, Mellon en Amin, was allowed to release the Taint of Alerar from her body.

Still, she finally found herself in an environment that seemed to just...fit, somehow, and she felt an odd sense of contentment tingling through her veins. She hardly knew how to describe it...and she knew that the Elves in whose presence she'd grown up would be repulsed by her heavenly bit of Hell. That made it all the more satisfying.


Amin, i'vanima Ambar
Entë en Gurtha ar'Nyérë.
Ron ya vana ta utua Umbar,
Nan'amin caela Fárë.
Sinome naa Hópamin.

Unfortunately, however, her contentment was to be short-lived. The sky lit up in brilliant patches before hundreds of fist-sized balls of fire started raining down upon her tortured landscape. The flames weren't born of the raging red conflagration across the river. These blazed blue and fell like purifying agents on a broken landscape that wanted only further corruption. The sense of these was almost...celebratory, like fireworks.

Syn's mouth twisted downwards in a disgusted snarl as she jumped down from her tree. Her duster caught briefly on some of the leaves, pulling them down and letting them clatter metallically against the glass shards at the tree's base.

THIS was not part of her perfect landscape, of that she was sure. She was going to find the culprit...and she was going to choke him.

Looking around as the flames crashed to the ground, Syn spotted another figure, coming from a direction she hadn't explored yet. It was a human, dressed in a dirty white apron and hat. He was fairly tall, but she'd seen taller.

Ho. Ro uuma cale ai'yamen' sinome. Sinome naa AMIN.

Drawing her dagger, Syn started forward to meet the man. If he was dead, then the blue fire ravaging her landscape would certainly disappear. She didn't for one moment consider that it could get WORSE. She just knew that neither it nor he belonged.

Suddenly, a fireball dropped just in front of her, close enough that the heat singed a few stray strands of hair that were blowing about in the chaotic crosswinds the storm produced. Almost at her very feet, some paper flowers were turned to ash, and glass melted, splashing up to form tainted, writhing, dirty statues that still glowed from the heat.

It was still her landscape.

She continued to approach the man, and though the flames fell around her, none came quite so close to hitting her. Remarkably, the tree also remained untouched.

When she was within hearing distance of the human, she glared at him with blood-red eyes, all that showed of her face from under her cowl.

"Ya naa lle, edan? Mankoi caela lle tule?" she demanded of him, her hostility causing ripples in the many trickles of blood that irrigated the landscape. Many of the little rivers were less than an inch in width. ...But she had noticed them responding to her surging rage. Maybe, in this landscape that seemed a glorious reflection of her tainted soul, she would be able to exercise more control over her craft.

Glowering at the human, Syn held her dagger in her hand. He would answer her question or die, and that was all there was to it.

>>>Mine, the beautiful World
Center of Death and Sorrow.
They who walk it find Doom
But I have all that I Want.
Here is my Haven.<<<

>>> Him. He does not have a place here. Here is MINE.<<<

"Who are you, human? Why have you come?"

[Christoph]

Chris had pushed forward with an air of very much forced determination. The chef found that the less he actually paid attention to the inexplicably disturbing environment, the easier it was to carry on. In fact, he only paused once as an odd tingling feeling ran up his spine, almost as though every bard, minstrel, and poet in all of Althanas had simultaneously given up their wills to live.


~Crunch.

Crinch.

Splich.~

I don’t want to know what I’m walking on. I don’t want to know what I’m walking on…

Denial was his sanity’s only real defense mechanism, erected around his traumatized psyche like a wall of stone. The grass was not made of glass; that was just his imagination. There most certainly was not a river of blood flowing to his left, spilling some of it’s contents onto the ground, under his feet; that was just his paranoia acting up. And finally, the base of the distant, massive bonfire was clearly not build from human bones; that was simply his eyes playing tricks on him. Of course, the ominous black sky of despair and the ill-omened, choking odor of rot and decay were harder to maintain a willful ignorance against. That was not to mention the gaunt figure a mere one hundred paces in front of him.

Gaunt was indeed the best way to describe this strange individual. It was a woman, as far as Chris could make out. She was slender to the point of being emaciated. Her face was sunken and bony. If her stride had been a shuffle instead, the chef would have been utterly convinced that she was another one of the zombies from Concordia.

As he grew closer to her, he realized that she didn’t possess the emotional void of the undead, either. This didn’t make her seem any more pleasant or comforting, though. The void was filled with bitter annoyance and wrathful hatred. She was like a tiger protecting her cubs, only instead of seeing the chef’s intrusion as mere threat; it was as though she also saw it as the vilest of insults. And she was mad.

Listen, lady, I’m not exactly happy that I’m here, either, he though as the corpse-like female’s vengeful glare fell upon him. It wasn’t until they were a mere twenty paces apart that the woman, en elf of some kind, finally addressed him. It was in Elvish, a language in which he was familiar, but not fluent. He could, however, make out the gist of what she was saying. Of course, her tone alone got the message of “get the hell out, heathen scum” across quite clearly. He sighed and shrugged helplessly before her.

“I don’t know why I’m here, nor how I came to be here,” he replied slowly in Tradespeak. He prayed to whatever gods would listen that she would understand him. “I just want to get out of this infernal place.”

[Synful_Blood]

From the moment the human opened his mouth and started spewing his gibberish, Syn knew he didn't belong in her landscape. She could see the disgust in the turn of his lips, and the confusion and fear in his eyes. He was foreign. She didn't want something foreign in her haven.

"Wany, edan," she hissed. "Mani um lle sint hiraetha? Nwalyaa? Wany don'udun arvandoramina. Lle uum elan'sinome." As she made her declaration over her territory, the winds whipped more furiously than ever in the midst of the falling fireballs, making her duster lash out violently in every direction.

As she spoke, the little rivers of blood rippled in response to her rage, and she started stepping forward. The sky darkened further and red lightning crackled down from the sky, sometimes intersecting and dissipating the fireballs. Glass and paper crackled beneath her boots, and she gripped her dagger tighter. She was going to get rid of this human one way or another.

He started backing up, raising his hands to try to placate her and assure her he didn't mean her any harm. "Take it easy! I want to leave as badly as you want me gone! Let's just...try to figure out a way for me to get out of here without either of us dying." He was looking around, trying to look for the best avenue of escape.

Something about his tone made Syn pause. Maybe the soothing undertones reached through to the portion of her mind that had retained its sanity. The dagger started to lower, just slightly, although the blood-red eyes did not stop glaring fiercely at the out-of-place human.

The truce, if that's what it was, was to be short-lived. No sooner had Syn's dagger lowered a few inches than several of those roaring fireballs impacted her tree one after the other, and utterly decimated it. She whirled around, and felt her blood boil at the fact that the most beautiful and perfect piece of her landscape had been destroyed.

Turning back around, she let her dagger linger at her side as she glared. She wanted him DEAD. She wanted to watch the light leave his eyes. As if in response to her wish, six thin tendrils of blood sprang up from the little rivers in the ground, three on each side of the human whose fire was a blight upon her land and whose mere presence was a blasphemy. They whirled around to about the height of his knee for a few moments...then lashed out, trying to grab him and hold him still so that their mistress could add another corpse to her field.

"Leave, human. What do you know of sorrow? Of suffering? Leave this hellish heaven of mine. You do not belong here."

Bunny approved, please confirm.

[Christoph]

Awww! Such a cute bunny. So fuzzy. I approve of it.


Ah hell... literally.

Chris had been so close; his formidable powers of persuasive reasoning had almost succeeded in calming the enraged living-zombie woman. There was the faintest glimmer of hope, like the flicker of light from a shooting star, that the entire crisis could be resolved in a way that allowed his primary arteries to remain intact. Unfortunately, just like a shooting star, its encouraging light vanished just rapidly.

Fate, it seemed, was similar to a giant, malodorous fish, in that it had an uncanny tendency of delivering unexpected, humiliating, and mostly undeserved smacks to the back of the poor chef’s head. As such, just as a faint glimmer of sanity sparked in her eyes, the bright flare of raining balls of fire surged down, pelting the strange tree into a smoldering stump. He uttered a drawn-out obscenity as the pointy-eared demon turned her murderous red orbs toward him once again.

At that very instant, six crimson tendrils sprung from the ground, jolting for his shins and ankles in the blink of an eye. Not having expected this sort of attack, whatever if even was, Chris was hard-pressed to react swiftly enough. Summoning a pulsing sphere of orange fire into his right palm, he backpedaled and flicked it at one of the incoming crimson tendrils as gambler might deal a card across a table. His target sizzled noisily, falling back to the polluted ground.

The rest, however, immediately wrapped themselves around the lower sections of his legs before he could dance away. His entire lower body jerked awkwardly out from under him before he could fully register what had happened. Despite his iron resolve, the chef couldn’t prevent himself from crying out as he hit the ground. The impact brought an intense sharp, burning pain to his back, as though the ground itself were covered with shards of glass.

“And that’s not even a metaphor!” he howled, for reasons not even fully known to him at the time. His thick chef coat was the only barrier that stood between his fragile flesh and the merciless teeth of the jagged ground. The limited protection it provided prevented his back from being turned completely into grated cheese. Still, blood began oozing from dozens of small cuts, adding itself to the bog of gore and glass that he’d found himself in.

Christopher struggled with bitter defiance against the magical bindings. The more he fought, however, the tighter they bound legs together. His squirming merely served to open more painful wounds. The burning blue flames flared in response to his pain. It was suffice to say that he was in trouble.

[Synful_Blood]

A feral grin spread across Syn's face as the chef went down, and while gripping her dagger in her right hand, she bent down and picked up a large shard of glass. Although she hadn't quite expected it, the ground was extremely hot. Maybe she just hadn't thought about it. Paper didn't burn on its own.

As he cried out, presumably in pain or surprise, the Elven hybrid broke into a run, gripping her dagger and her sharp, makeshift weapon. Her cowl fell back as she ran, letting her black and white hair fly freely in the raging winds that blasted her fields. She had him cornered. The more her prey struggled, the more he was caught. Her eyes shone with excitement as she started closing in for the kill.

Atsae e'ungweamin.

She raced forward, the ground beneath her feet crunching and tinkling at every footfall. Ten quick strides had brought her to the human's side, and she whirled to give herself momentum as she started bringing her hands down in a deadly arc.

As the blades began their descent, there was a sudden flash of light in response to Syn's anticipation of an impending kill, and suddenly little black specks fell from the sky in a flurry. It was snowing ash -- a vile corruption of a child's innocent joy.

Caught in my spider web.

[Christoph]

Chris growled defiantly as he struggled in vain against his bindings. His foe was closing in rapidly, leaving the chef with little doubt in his mind that she was about to make his current injuries seem an trivial as the bites of small insects. Time seemed to slow down, as it always did during times of danger. Thousands of gruesome possibilities of what the she-demon could do to him flickered through his mind; she could skin him alive if she wanted, perhaps she could slit his belly and strangle him with his own intestines, or maybe she could do something even worse. She could do whatever she wanted -- that is, assuming Chris didn’t stop her.

He sat up in an instant, opening up several more painful slices in the process. Flakes of ash had begun to flutter down from the sky, joining the falling balls of flame that had begun to land a little too close for comfort. The hopeful blue glow of the raining fire was the only thing that the panicking chef could understand in that place. It was clean, determined, and powerful, very much the same as Chris saw his inner self. It was for this reason that he wasn’t surprised that, when he exerted his will to create more fire in his palm, the nearby pockets of sapphire flame came to his hands in a swirling inferno. It was his fire, after all.

In the final second of the enraged woman’s charge, Christopher’s entire outlook on the situation shifted. His foe was no longer a vicious predator, come to finish her prey. Now, she was nothing more than a moving target. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the surplus of time needed to devise any sort of clever timing with his attack. It was, simply put, a “throw now, or die” situation. So he did. Glaring at her, he hurled both handfuls of burning defiance simultaneously. It was no mere flick this time; the fireballs surged at their target with a blinding flash, propelled by both his physical strength and the force of his will.

[Synful_Blood]

As Syn whirled, she saw two blue balls of fire coming at her. One of them caught her on her arm, and she sliced through the other with her knife. Her momentum carried her through her attack, but since the vile intruder had sat up, her weapons plunged harmlessly into the grisly ground.

The fires burned along Syn's arms, not having extinguished themselves after they'd hit. They burned through her, quickly engulfing her entire frame. It hurt more than anything ever had. It burned through her and around her, and she screamed. It was invading her, violating her. And the pain wasn't physical. The flames were made of emotions foreign to her battered mindscape -- joy and hope and curiosity. It was more than she could stand.

She screamed as the flames consumed her, and her perfect landscape shattered into thousands of pieces as the ashes drifted softly down.


~~~

Syn awoke with a jolt, breath coming heavy. She could still feel the fires ravaging her mind, and she didn't like it. But as she looked around, she saw the darkness of the Scara Braen night, and across the water, the priests heretical fires were dying down.

Da kaimel?

Sighing, she shivered. It had been a beautiful dream, until the intruder had come. And then it had been awful. And although everything was all right in the real world, she still felt terrified, confused. With trembling hands, she drew her razor from her pocket.

"Mellon..."

Opening the blade, she let it gleam softly in the moonlight before letting the blade gently caress her scarred skin. As the warm blood seeped out into the cold night, the Elven hybrid let out a relieved sigh.

Ere'kaimel ta nae.

>>>A dream?<<<

>>>It was only a dream.<<<

[Christoph]

The dreaming chef looked on in stunned disbelieve as the magical fire devoured his attacker. It didn’t make any sense; his fire was not supposed to be that powerful. Yet, there it was, eating the scrawny girl alive as she gave an agonizing inhuman scream. The flames immolated her entire body before his eyes.

Then, the answer hit him. He had already come to the slow realization that this was a dream, which was very odd since he’d never been aware of his dreams until he awoke. The damage being dealt to his foe wasn’t severe in a material sense. In fact, the bloodstained, corpse-strewn, glass-glittered hellhole in which he’d found himself wasn’t even a material landscape. It was a mental and, more importantly, an emotional realm. He’d already witnessed the havoc wrought by the raining fire that had followed him here. The only force that held the hellish land together was its master’s hatred.

When he wielded the blue flames, infused with his own hopes, curiosities, and ambitions, they had reacted against the vengeful hopelessness of the macabre-like girl. It was remarkably similar to the reactions of colliding the positive and negative energies that he’d secretly read about in his arcane texts back home in Salvar. His assailant must have been so unbalanced that it allowed his fire to completely consume her, or at least the subconscious projection of whoever she was.

Christopher couldn’t help but laugh out loud in triumph. It wasn’t in triumph over his victory, but rather, over his discovery. When he awoke, he would certainly need to make note of this amazing finding right away! This was the second time that he’d found himself invading another’s dreams, albeit unintentionally. Perhaps this new information would aid his research and allow him to uncover these strange occurrences. He felt overjoyed, as though he’d just stumbled upon a great chest filled with the wealth of entire nations. And, perhaps, he had found just that... or at least a start.

Then, the amplified sounds of shattering glass and splintering wood filled the imaginary scene, reminding him that all of his marvelous plans hinged on him actually waking up. He’d never been caught in a dissolving dream before. As he struggled to his feet, the outer stretches of the visible world were literally crumbling into nothing. The rivers of blood boiled, the glass shards melted, and the sky itself dissolved into an even emptier blackness like a cube of sugar in water.

He choked down his panic; the gods only knew what would happen to him if he couldn’t escape. Then, barely an instant after the edges of the dreamscape began to crumble, the ground her stood on literally shattered with an ear-splitting crack that sounded more like an explosion. As he climbed back to his feet, the magical bindings around his legs gone, the shards of ground continued to splinter before being absorbed into the hungry void. Only the piece that he stood on remained partially intact, probably held together by his own stubborn will even as the whole of the dreamscape wanted to expel him like a virus.

At that point, he noticed that the raining fire that he’d brought with him had swirled into one massive burning pillar. The raging twister of flame touched down on his platform, barely a foot in front of him. He could feel the singing heat against his face. It wasn’t painful, though. Of course it doesn’t hurt, he realized. It came from his own mind. As he stood there, almost losing himself in thought once again, his footing began to break apart. Perhaps that raging pillar of optimistic fire was his only escape from the disintegrating hell that he was in. Without giving it a second thought, he dove into the blinding blue light.

* * *

Chris awoke with an exhilarated gasp, bolting upright in his lumpy bed. He glanced around, finding himself back in his room in the Inn. Outside, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and all that other happy nonsense was going on. He shuddered slightly at first as the images of that scene hellish insanity invaded his thoughts. At first, he tried to push them out, but he stopped. He would need to remember every detail.

Wasting no time, he found his journal, opened up a blank page, and proceeded to fill the entire page with the account of the dream. Indeed, it was certainly not his own. He scrawled on the page with his quill with an almost unhealthy amount of enthusiasm. He still didn’t know how or why he was invading the dreams of others, let alone why these others always seemed to be so damned strange, but he was beginning to learn some valuable insights regarding the nature of these imaginary realms.

Of course, he still wasn’t sure of exactly how these were linked to the real world, and what effect, if any, they had on those involved beyond a little emotional trauma. This thought triggered a spark of curiosity in the chef’s mind. He held his hand out palm up and focused his will to summon up a small lick of flame. Sure enough, it was as pure a blue as the raining fires in the dream.

What an interesting development, he thought to himself as he stretched his back with a yawn. I will have to investigate this further. At that moment, Chris’s stomach gave a growled, trumping whatever other plans he may have had.

Later... Food first, research later. With that, the hungry chef strode out of his room and down into the Tavern. There was no sense trying to solve the mysteries of life on an empty stomach.

[Skie and Avery]

Whoakay. I know you guys requested the commentary to be short and sweet, so if I'm long winded, please forgive. Christoph should read Syn's commentary, because some of what I said to her applies to you as well, and I don't like to repeat myself. Anyway, welcome to your Althanas judging, and I'll be your host, Manda.

Synful_Blood

Story

Continuity: 5 - I'm actually giving you guys a little leeway on this considering it's a dream and that allows for crazy things and meetings that have nothing to do with anything. What was annoying with you, Syn, was that there were continual references to the razor, but I have no idea why it's so important to your character beyond that she's a cutter. Is it special? I mean, it had been stolen before, so I assume there's something there that makes it alluring.

Setting: 6 - I like how she looked to this thoroughly dangerous environment for her weapon, and how you noticed the heat of the glass when you reached down to touch it. But why did these shards not cut anyone's feet? Why didn't the rivulets coming off the blood river not soak the powdered bone fragments into a mush? I know it's a dream-scape, but these were details that kept coming up in my mind.

Pacing: 4 - It started off slowly, with a lot of attention being put into your introductions. The thread got set up with just enough movement to hold my attention, and then I'm suddenly reading the endings as it gets to a good part. As soon as the fight got started, yes, the pacing should have picked up but not from the lack of reading material.

Character

Dialogue: 8 - This was really where you shone, both for the fact that you used elvish, and that the dialogue went well for the character. Especially the teenage angst emo poem.

Action: 4 - This was really disappointing. In a battle where the very physics of life are null and void, this was an attack, a counter attack, and a death.

Persona: 6 - In your writing, Syn does come through well, but work on the style. I think you could capture her even more clearly with a little work.

Writing Style

Mechanics: 6 - There were a few sentences that seemed to be almost alien in the way they were put together, almost as if you doubled back your thoughts in the middle of sentences. Try reading your posts out loud before you post.

Technique: 4 - One thing that really disappointed me was the brevity here. As the thread progressed, the posts got much shorter and simpler, and a problem that you seem to have had in this thread was inappropriate attention to details. In some things, you went on and on and repeated yourself, but then ignored chances at important detail. For example, you never really described her hair. You just said it was black and white. How do you mean? A dull darkness like on black and white television? Is it more black or white? Is the color in smaller multitude streaks or just highlights? Do you see my point?

Clarity: 8 - Both of you did well with this; I never needed to go back and reread sentences to try and understand what just happened.

Wild Card: 3

Total: 53


Christoph

Story

Continuity: 6 - I thought you made better use of this than Synful, linking actual memory with the dreams, as well as letting me know that this appears to be a common appearance.

Setting: 5

Pacing: 5

Character

Dialogue: 5 - I was very disappointed here. I really didn't get any of your character's personality through the dialogue. There was a spark of hope with the internal dialogue, but it fell short.

Action: 3 - I felt like you were really just reacting to Synful instead of offering much of anything. Just like your dialogue, I took into account of your actions and I still don't really know who Christoph is. For all I care from reading this, you could have been an NPC.

Persona: 4

Writing Style

Mechanics: 6

Technique: 6 - I like your style, I'd just like to see more personality in there. I want to read a paragraph and go, "Oh yeah, that's Christoph."

Clarity: 8

Wild Card: 6

Total: 54

The winner is Christoph

Synful_Blood receives 225 EXP and 80 GP
Christoph receives 750 EXP and 81 GP

[Letho]

EXP/GP added!