IC Contact/Voicemail

[ardent]

[VOICE/TEXT/VIDEO; OPEN TO ALL]

"You've reached Kiyotaka Ishimaru; I seem to have missed you! My sincerest apologies for that - but if you leave your name and state your business, firmly and concisely, I'll return your contact as soon as I can!

Until then, I look forward to speaking to you; do what you can to make your day pleasant and productive, and be sure to keep your head up!"

[Please state in the subject line if OOC planning is preferred and we can handwave like the wind, but otherwise IC will be assumed!]

Comments

[nostabbing]

Not yet. But I think he's been up here; there's purple fur.

[ardent]

Well, that's good, at least.

How did he get out of your

[...you know what, just. tell him when we get there, that would probably make more sense.]

Never mind, we can talk in person in a moment.

[nostabbing]

OK.

[And as promised, here she comes, popping off the grate and swinging herself down out of the shaft with absurdly graceful ease.]

[ardent]

["Aneki, why" is probably going to be a running theme tonight, isn't it.]

Ah...there you are, aneki!

[...okay he has to admit that was kind of cool

the entire thing is still claustrophobic as hell of course

but kind of cool regardless]

How did your cat get out of your room in the first place?

[nostabbing]

[Considering it involved at least a few seconds of hanging upside-down by the fingers of one hand, "kind of cool" is a fairly accurate assessment there. But she, of course, thinks nothing of it.]

He jumped and turned the knob. He does that sometimes — runs away, I mean. One time he ran halfway across the city and got some guy at an outdoor cafe to feed him before I caught up.

[She bounces on the balls of her feet, fidgeting anxiously.]

Sometimes he takes Stiletto and Taser with him but today he just got out.

[ardent]

W-Well, I'm sure he's all right; the animals around here are very resilient as it is, and they're smarter than most I've seen. So I'm sure nothing's happened to him.

[nostabbing]

And there's no cars.

[It seems unusually important that she have that reaffirmed, somehow.]

[ardent]

...Right. There are no cars, either!

What made you think that he was hit by a car in the first place?

[nostabbing]

I had a nightmare. A really —

[...]

A really, really vivid nightmare, like. Like, when you don't know if you're awake or not because it seems like you're awake but you're not and then you wake up and it all still feels real but you were sleeping and then it's like deja vu like you never stopped being asleep, maybe, or maybe you were and you don't know and...

Like that.

[ardent]

I have those a lot.

[There's nothing pointed about it; it's just how things are. The sky is blue, the grass is green, he has those sorts of nightmares a lot.]

It wasn't so bad tonight, but I wasn't having good dreams, either; it's why I'm awake right now.

[nostabbing]

I never have them about Archie. Cat-Archie.

[ardent]

...It'll be okay. We'll find him; he's got to be around somewhere.

[nostabbing]

I think he's probably in the vent where it's too small for me to go. I send him in there sometimes to hide stuff for me. Maybe that's what he's doing.

[ardent]

I'm sure he'll come out eventually, then!

[He pauses, though.]

Are you going to be okay?

[nostabbing]

...

[...]

It's just a dream, right? Dreams don't matter. Not that much.

[ardent]

Maybe not, but they can still be upsetting.

[nostabbing]

Yeah. But I'm awake now. And stuff's usually worse when you're awake than the stuff you come up with when you're asleep.

[ardent]

[He tenses a little at that, but to his credit he doesn't seem to be getting properly upset.]

I guess so. Most of my dreams tend to be about things that have already happened.

[nostabbing]

[...Oh.]

You mean like school, right?

[But still, something about that rings sideways for her, and it takes her a minute, but then she figures out why.]

That's why it was a weird dream. It didn't work the way dreams do.

[ardent]

[Well, that's got his attention, actually; let's...focus on that latter part.]

In what way?

[nostabbing]

Well, okay, when you have a dream — wait. Okay. There's this one con, it's pretty famous, but that's because it exists and nobody's ever pulled it off. It's called the White Rabbit, and you're supposed to...you get in the mark's head, and you make them change what they're doing with dreams. It's like a cross between a grift and a hack, except you're grifting their subconscious and hacking...their mind, I guess.

[Which sounds pretty creepy when you voice it aloud, so she'll just move on...]

But no one's ever done a successful White Rabbit because hacking someone's dreams is hard. Dreams come from memories that get jumbled up and played back out, from your mind...putting existing stuff together in new ways. That's why you dream about things that stand out, or why things show up in dreams that you just saw recently before you had it. Because those are the pieces getting thrown together.

But this one didn't feel like that. Some of the pieces aren't right.

[ardent]

Well, there's that and the part where human minds are designed to forget things, but yes - I know what you're saying.

What was different about this one, though?

[nostabbing]

Archie got hit by a car.

[ardent]

...I don't understand.

[nostabbing]

My cat, Archie. He got hit by a car. I mean, run over by a...you know.

[She frowns a little.]

I named Archie after my dad.