caveofsapphires | Today is the first day of the rest of your lives [ opening post ]

Today is the first day of the rest of your lives [ opening post ]

WHO: EVERYONE. NPCs will be around to actively engage if you so desire.
WHAT: Sleepers wake and begin to figure out just what, exactly, they are supposed to do with themselves. tl;dr: REACTION POST for new characters to get out and mingle.
WHERE: Everywhere. Mostly the living quarters, but really: anywhere you want.
WHEN: The first week, April 1st through April 7th.
WARNINGS: Travis Touchdown (Ryan LeCourt) has quite a mouth on him.
NOTES: This is a serious game, guys. WE’RE SUPER SRS HERE. ~~This may be a lie.~~

Shimmering blue blanketed the underground city as the light reflected off the sapphires in the ceiling. It cast its eerie glow, almost mimicking the effect of light on water without the sort of freeing peace one might feel with the soft ocean waves. Figuring out how deep down the city was located was near impossible when the air was obviously heated to something approaching comfortable, and nothing seemed to echo too far past the quiet hum of the city.

Workers made their way down the street, every one with a Sleeper in tow. Something that would have been unheard of only a few days ago, now more likely than one would think. They intended to start slow, but considering how many others were still in cryo, this was a laidback pace.

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Snow, meanwhile, had spent half of the morning pacing his condo (distractedly enough that he still couldn't even tell you what color the walls were) and the other half on the couch with his forehead in his palms in a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to clear his head.

When he'd headed out into the halls, he'd had no set destination in mind. Just get out of that condo. Honestly, it a half bad place to live--it was better than what he'd had back home, that was for sure--but he couldn't shake that 'prison cell' vibe. You can put a dress on a monkey but it's still going to be a monkey, no matter what you try to call it. And this had 'prisoner' written all over it.

In theory, the more ground he covered, the less confined he'd feel. Not that it would help clear his head too much. In fact, he was lost enough in thought that he wasn't exactly watching where he was going, and narrowly dodged bumping straight into Elena.

"Hey, sorry about that." He flashed a sheepish grin, despite that grinning was kind of one of the last things he was in the mood for at that point. It wasn't not her fault he was stuck there (he was pretty sure, anyway), so she wasn't going to have to deal with his less-than-spectacular mood.

At one time, it would've been near impossible for anyone to nearly bump into Elena like that. She would've made sure of it. But this... it only made her realize again how tiny she felt. She'd been capable of throwing someone halfway across the room, and now, back to being a normal, defenseless sixteen year old girl.

A year ago she would've been delighted at the fact, but now all she could muster up was some strain at being in this kind of weird situation without the ability to at least protect herself. Though admittedly, she sure wasn't missing the blood lust.

"It's fine," Elena said, pulling up a smile. As far as she was concerned, she couldn't trust anyone she met here. Not yet. "No harm done, right?"

She looked him over with careful scrutiny. At first glance, he seemed like your every day sort of guy, but experience showed that appearances could be deceiving. For all she knew, he could be a serial killer. Or... dreamed that he was one, if she was going to go by what they were all told.

"Hey- you wouldn't happened to have just woken up too, would you?" she asked, putting just the slightest bit of emphasis on 'woken up' to show her doubts about the whole thing. After that announcement, Elena wasn't about to test what the guard force would do to people who insisted on their dreams. Better safe than sorry.

That was quite possibly one of Snow's biggest flaws: Just because you could more-or-less take him at face value meant that he tended to assume the same of other people. And for him, this seemed pretty black and white. There were the people like him, the 'sleepers', and then there were the people trying to tell them their lives were just a dream. Two opposing sides, and if she was confused like him, that put them on the same side, right?

'No harm done, right?' He nodded, grin shifting from sheepish to something more confident. "Right."

And then came the loaded question.

It was a pretty simple question, actually, but what kind of answer he gave theoretically depended on a lot of things that he didn't quite know. How did she feel about this whole mess? Did she believe in what she knew, or what she was hearing now? By her tone, he could figure that one out easily enough.

Now the question became, were the guards listening in?

At that point Snow realized he'd been silent a little too long, and he shook his head a little, pulling himself out of his thoughts. "Uh, yeah," came his answer, and he reached up with one hand to scratch at the back of his neck. "My name's Sn-..." Whoops, watch yourself Snow. "Well, I mean, I think you're supposed to call me Shiloh." While her doubt was expressed in a subtle shifting of tones, his was slightly less subtle. But to be fair, it was less trying to break the rules and more just trying to adjust.

That hesitation in Shiloh's introduction gave away a lot more than he probably anticipated. It was clear that he was still hung up on the dream life he had, and that he wasn't very good at pretending not to be. And he seemed to have similar doubts about this entire place, though she wasn't sure if he believed the story about this being their real lives or not. At least he seemed to realize that the doctors seemed serious about not mentioning their dream lives.

"Well, Shiloh, I'm Chloe," Elena said matter-of-factly, taking care not to sound too hesitant to make up for his, leaning against the wall with her shoulder slightly. She would have to check the diary in her hands later for someone by that name.

"Can I..."

Her question faded off slightly as Elena was struck with the possibility that this was all a dream conjured up through witch magic. Maybe Sheila wanted to test her humanity somehow, by changing her back into a human, before making her a day walking ring. Her brow furrowed at the thought, not dismissing it out of hand, but putting it to the side for now. She gave Shiloh the most apologetic look she could muster up. "Sorry, I totally zoned out. Um- can I ask what you dreamed about?"

If it turned out that he also dreamed about Earth, then there was no way it could be a coincidence, right?

"Hey, no problem," he offered to her apology, especially considering he was doing a fair amount of zoning out, himself.

As for her question, his brow knit, and his hand dropped from the back of his neck. "So we can still-...?" Talk about it? "I mean-..." But then it occurs to him that to be quite honest he's never quite given a damn about the authorities anyway--'No Obligations, Rules, or Authority' was his militia gang's motto back home, and while he may have learned a whole lot about the world as a whole since then, he still had the inescapable tendency to dismiss rules he didn't quite mesh with.

"I hate to sound cliche, but I dreamed about an adventure. All over Cocoon--that's home, Cocoon is--and all over Gran Pulse, too. We fought all kinds of monsters and the fal'Cie, all of us did. Me, Lightning, Hope, Fang and Vanille, Sazh..."

He lifted his hand up near his chin to eye the outside of his forearm now, and for a second he looked a little bit troubled, despite that there was nothing there. 'Nothing there' was kind of the point. He rubbed it casually with the palm of his other hand. "Had a l'Cie brand right here. A 'tattoo' I guess, but that's not even half of it."

And the absence of his brand sobered him up a little. Enough that it actually occurred to him that he was looking significantly more pensive than he usually allowed. So Snow wipes the thoughtfulness off of his face, replacing it with something like determination. "I was looking for Serah. We all were." And as an afterthought, he clarified, "Serah's my fiance, and Light's sister." Smoothing his bandanna in place with one hand, Snow tacked on, "Or 'was', anyway."

"I don't see why not," Elena said, giving him a shrug and said in a tone that was far too casual to be genuinely oblivious. However, she does flash him a wry smile. "I'm just curious what everyone else dreamed about."

She listened to his recollection of his adventure with a mixture of interest, and disappointment. It definitely was nothing like Earth. At all. In fact, it almost sounded like something straight out of some kind of video game, or movie. Or... a dream.

There was a brief moment of silence as Elena digested everything he said, and compared it to her own life. A strong wave of sympathy crested over; the strength of it surprised her, but it was to be expected, now she was human again.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "It must be hard to be told that all of that was just a dream."

'It probably would be, if I believed it,' that's what he wanted to say, but he'd pushed it plenty for one day already. Snow wanted to be a little more sure of his environment before he had to elude the authorities in it.

So the reply that ended up coming out was, "Yeah, it's... definitely pretty frustrating." Snow's never been great with expressing negative emotions, and this wasn't an exception.

"But hey, what about you? What'd you dream about?"

"Me?"

She took a moment to consider how much she trusted him. The answer was, not very, considering they'd only just met for the first time. He had given her his own life story... or what he'd lived through anyways. On the other hand, he also admitted that he fought all kinds of monsters. Elena was too disillusioned to be oblivious to the fact that morality or not, vampires were considered 'monsters'.

And from the way he talked, she got the feeling he firmly believed that this was all a lie, and everyone's 'dreams' were what was real. Or at very least, he believed his was real.

With a slight smile, Elena simply said, "It's pretty bizarre now that I think about it. Way different from yours."

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Today is the first day of the rest of your lives [ opening post ]

is this okay? (besides the poor quality--good lord it's late)

it's fine! c:

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oh my gosh i'm so sorry for late

it's okay, shit hit the fan at my other game so I'm a little slow too, whoops

mutual slowness then hahah