THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]

Through a silvered lining in a cloud - well, a fog, really, creeping across the golden roads, snaking into the gaps in between the glass bricks and the black grass, a grey haze twinkling with sparkling argentine shards, half-remembered shades of dream - Aaron brushed the shades of rainbow grey away. It felt like a hug. Aaron wasn’t sure why, but at the moment he hated hugs: useless, intangible shit that would be of no use to all but the most emotional of people, and those could always, always be bribed another way. He saw Tschic shiver as they brushed through the empty husk of that dream, sticky strands of sap clinging to that half-reconstituted body - the unsettledness of which Aaron could not place, other than the fact that it didn’t leak paint-covered footsteps behind them.

YOU GAVE ME YOUR WORD.

The sappy half-dream dispersed as they followed the golden path. “Not good. He must have consumed most of that one. The better the remains, the worse the stuff he must have eaten.”

“He?”

The silver tongue tripped over itself. “Wh-whatever your nightmare is. Doing this.” He shook his head. “We need to find out more about the Cistern.”

Shapiro thought for a moment: “The Great Library, perhaps? It holds all of Port Ceridwen’s historical texts in its archives, though I don’t believe they’ve been touched for a long time.”

“Sounds boooooooring.” For emphasis, Tschic lit up a cigarette and fell, facedown, onto the multicolored grass. Then he threw up.

“The Great Library is one of Port Ceridwen’s most unique landmarks!” Shapiro protested.

“Look,” Tschic rolled over, thankfully away from the puddle of puke, “how can a place be the most unique? Every landmark is unique by definition, that’s why they’re landmarks.” The cigarette leapt into his mouth, igniting the grass on the way. “Mmmm.”

“The Library sounds good. We can plan a strategy there.” Aaron looked down at the smoking Tschic, and Aaron wasn’t in a particularly dealing with Tschic mood, to be completely fucking honest, and Aaron was getting to the end of a particularly short mental tether, and Tschic wasn’t helping. “You coming or what?”

“This is fine,” came the reply from the burning circle of grass.

Sigh. “Shapiro, grab a leg.”

The classical elements: fire, water, earth and air. Intuition rules in the dream world, and logic rules in the waking one. Hence, the interplay in between the elements of the periodic table, and the elements of primal force, makes Ceridwen a fascinating place for the the study of magical sciences. The issue is in writing things down and remembering them, we’ve found, as dreamworks are inherently unstable in the waking world, and vice versa. Elementally speaking, dreamstuff is made mostly of air and fire, ephemeral things, not easily captured or understood. Reality is mostly silicon, oxygen, hydrogen: essentially, earth. Conjunctivin, or “sleep sand”, is one example of a compound made from both dreamstuff and reality. It is more common than you think: the beaches of this onieric moment are covered in it.

Interestingly enough, the only element that seems antithetical to this project is iron. The water of the sleeping ocean is similarly reticient to experimentation, but iron refuses to cooperate in any way. It refuses to acknowledge anything comprised of dreamstuff; it expurgates the results of any experiment we try to perform on it here in Ceridwen. Definitively a matter requiring more investigation.

--On the Nature of Elements, Eugene Braud (Head Onierologist, Ceridwen Project Director)