RE: The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)
01-30-2013, 02:28 AM
Name: He’s long since forgotten, then grown a dozen more to forget. He is the dreamer.
Race: As human as he thinks he is at any given time. More mind than man now, but a mind without meaning or matter.
Gender: Male, right up until he isn’t.
Color: The scent of summer rain and the taste of her lips
Biography: What is the past, to a creature of dreams? History is only a series of stories, causality but a crutch for those burdened with wakefulness. Memory is mutable, and if what was is no more than what one thinks it was, then it too changes when seen or forgotten. The story changes with each telling and changes the teller with it; there is no truth, only the one who would seek it.
But there is a dream that happens more than the others.
There is a man. A man of a mind so powerful that it bends other minds before it and reshapes the world when it pleases. He is not the only such man. His is not the only such mind. He thinks little special of himself, little notable, little meaningful. He winds his way through the stars in great ships of steel and humble bubbles of thought; the race of men is a race of exploration, of discovery, and their journeys bring them ever closer to the ever retreating goal of complete understanding. Men and the man meet a thousand million other races, uncountable minds so foreign they seem impossible and yet so driven by man’s same goals they seem brothers. But for every leap outward he makes, he takes a step inward. When the universe ran out of wonders, there would always be more to discover inside his own mind; when the worlds he visited lost coherency and meaning, there would always be a dream to retreat to.
But well before men reach the end of their infinity, the man discovers the boundaries of his. He finds the veil that separates within from without. Though behind him the dreamscape constantly changes and rewinds and never was, promises an eternity of novelty and wonder, he cannot be content knowing that there is an edge, even if it is forever distant. He is restless, the journey outward and the journey inward both losing meaningfulness as he finds limit for the first time. He cannot let this be the end. He finds the veil and he pushes.
Perhaps he expects resistance, but there is none; perhaps he had heard tales from other men and minds of their own veils and their immutability, but they were only fooled by their own fear. The veil parts. It was never there, only imagined. Within and without were never distinct, only a story he told himself. Past and future, dream and reality, self and other: all were just context, not truth. There is only one eternal crystallized now and only one mind to experience it. He is not a man; there is no such thing. He is everything, and everything is what he believes it is.
And then the dream changes again, and everything is rewritten.
Weapons and Abilities: Reality changes itself in the presence of the dreamer as he enforces his will on the world around him; many have made the mistake of believing it is only their perception of reality that changes only to find themselves paralyzed and hacked to death by their perception or erased entirely from the universe as they are forgotten. The dreamer believes that reality is only what he imagines it to be, and reality is happy enough to oblige, at least locally.
He was once a psion and retains those abilities even in his solipsistic haze and inconstant identity; presumably his psionic gifts are the source of the world warping around him, but they now mostly operate on an entirely subconscious level. It is only rarely he believes himself to be a person with such abilities, and thus only rarely they manifest at his behest. Most of the time, he doesn’t truly believe himself to be a person at all. While he is still capable of feats like telepathy, the concept of otherness has become so foreign to him that the idea of reading someone’s mind is borderline nonsensical. Mostly, he simply drifts, acting out the stories he tells himself and inflicting them on anyone near enough.
The thoughts and dreams of other people tend to start manifesting as well if they stay near him long enough, particularly if those other people are strong-willed or have mental powers of their own, but if it’s even possible to distinguish external influence he hasn’t noticed it. All dreams are one, and if someone from your past or beliefs appears, it’s only because he imagined you imagining it. You don’t really exist at all.
Description: He frequently changes, both physically and mentally and often with no warning or constancy at all. The logic of a dream is fickle, and if one moment he is an ethnically-ambiguous man in the robes of an Academy psion sporting a dazed expression, the next he may be a tantalizingly-familiar woman smiling sadly or a ravening beast of tentacles and madness. It will all make sense to him, and it probably will to you, too. It’s only a matter of time before you stop believing in the veil yourself.
Race: As human as he thinks he is at any given time. More mind than man now, but a mind without meaning or matter.
Gender: Male, right up until he isn’t.
Color: The scent of summer rain and the taste of her lips
Biography: What is the past, to a creature of dreams? History is only a series of stories, causality but a crutch for those burdened with wakefulness. Memory is mutable, and if what was is no more than what one thinks it was, then it too changes when seen or forgotten. The story changes with each telling and changes the teller with it; there is no truth, only the one who would seek it.
But there is a dream that happens more than the others.
There is a man. A man of a mind so powerful that it bends other minds before it and reshapes the world when it pleases. He is not the only such man. His is not the only such mind. He thinks little special of himself, little notable, little meaningful. He winds his way through the stars in great ships of steel and humble bubbles of thought; the race of men is a race of exploration, of discovery, and their journeys bring them ever closer to the ever retreating goal of complete understanding. Men and the man meet a thousand million other races, uncountable minds so foreign they seem impossible and yet so driven by man’s same goals they seem brothers. But for every leap outward he makes, he takes a step inward. When the universe ran out of wonders, there would always be more to discover inside his own mind; when the worlds he visited lost coherency and meaning, there would always be a dream to retreat to.
But well before men reach the end of their infinity, the man discovers the boundaries of his. He finds the veil that separates within from without. Though behind him the dreamscape constantly changes and rewinds and never was, promises an eternity of novelty and wonder, he cannot be content knowing that there is an edge, even if it is forever distant. He is restless, the journey outward and the journey inward both losing meaningfulness as he finds limit for the first time. He cannot let this be the end. He finds the veil and he pushes.
Perhaps he expects resistance, but there is none; perhaps he had heard tales from other men and minds of their own veils and their immutability, but they were only fooled by their own fear. The veil parts. It was never there, only imagined. Within and without were never distinct, only a story he told himself. Past and future, dream and reality, self and other: all were just context, not truth. There is only one eternal crystallized now and only one mind to experience it. He is not a man; there is no such thing. He is everything, and everything is what he believes it is.
And then the dream changes again, and everything is rewritten.
Weapons and Abilities: Reality changes itself in the presence of the dreamer as he enforces his will on the world around him; many have made the mistake of believing it is only their perception of reality that changes only to find themselves paralyzed and hacked to death by their perception or erased entirely from the universe as they are forgotten. The dreamer believes that reality is only what he imagines it to be, and reality is happy enough to oblige, at least locally.
He was once a psion and retains those abilities even in his solipsistic haze and inconstant identity; presumably his psionic gifts are the source of the world warping around him, but they now mostly operate on an entirely subconscious level. It is only rarely he believes himself to be a person with such abilities, and thus only rarely they manifest at his behest. Most of the time, he doesn’t truly believe himself to be a person at all. While he is still capable of feats like telepathy, the concept of otherness has become so foreign to him that the idea of reading someone’s mind is borderline nonsensical. Mostly, he simply drifts, acting out the stories he tells himself and inflicting them on anyone near enough.
The thoughts and dreams of other people tend to start manifesting as well if they stay near him long enough, particularly if those other people are strong-willed or have mental powers of their own, but if it’s even possible to distinguish external influence he hasn’t noticed it. All dreams are one, and if someone from your past or beliefs appears, it’s only because he imagined you imagining it. You don’t really exist at all.
Description: He frequently changes, both physically and mentally and often with no warning or constancy at all. The logic of a dream is fickle, and if one moment he is an ethnically-ambiguous man in the robes of an Academy psion sporting a dazed expression, the next he may be a tantalizingly-familiar woman smiling sadly or a ravening beast of tentacles and madness. It will all make sense to him, and it probably will to you, too. It’s only a matter of time before you stop believing in the veil yourself.