tampered | Log: COMPLETE [Nightmare and Dreamgirl]

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Log: COMPLETE [Nightmare and Dreamgirl]

When; This afternoon (Nov 5th)
Rating; Surely PG?
Characters; The Corinthian [

sugar_and]
Summary; Are you dreaming? Am I awake? Two dream experts decide to meet in the waking world and have a chat. Or, perhaps, are you merely dreaming they did?
Log;

Apres her short yet sweet conversation with her Tall, Bright, and Teethy, Paprika pushed herself from the bench upon which she had been sitting and stretched lavishly. She had been dreaming, she had said-- which in some ways was true, but Paprika never dreamed her own dreams. That's what Atsuko was for, and Atchan wasn't here, and so she fell on double duty. Dreaming, waking.. Now she truly knew the difference between the two.

Skipping through the park, she paused to lean over the fountain and check her reflection. There her dark eyes looked back at her quietly, and for a long moment Paprika merely stood, thinking. Here, it seemed, she had no control over herself. The environment--that was a given. One did not enter dreams expecting to change the view. But without all that made her her, the world--this waking world--proved to be more frightful than she had imagined. "Ah, Paprika~! You'll be late!" she said to her reflection, allowing only a moment of regret that the image did not change, react, or move any differently than herself, before she shot off quickly for the cafe. Arriving (what she hoped to be) on time, she burst through the door and looked around hopefully.

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"I was never alive," he remarked, at first interpreting her comment personally. "No you can't die, most of the time anyway. People have died and reawakened in a dead state, sort of like a vampire or ghoul. Others have died and no one's heard from them again."

Cori spoke her question to himself silently.

"... No, I have a few friends here," very few, and the ones who mattered most had gone away. "You?"

"Ohh, zombies.." She had always wanted to see zombies. She had seen plenty, for sure, but if they were real--or as real as this place seemed--then that would be a new experience all together.

"Ah, that's nice. At least a familiar face." Paprika tipped her head to the side, wondering. She was used to working alone, wasn't she. "Yep~ With At-chan not on the other side, I guess I'm all by myself~"

"Close enough, though I'm sure this City has seen its fair share of sentient ones," Cori grinned.

"Pretty familiar," the white blond nodded in agreement. He was familiar with Lucien, Rose Walker, the Endless, even the Morningstar, his concubine, and their godchild. That meant little to the Corinthian; most of all he missed the raven. "You haven't been here long, have you? A perky young woman like yourself is bound to make a shitload of friends."

"Just arrived, really~!" Confused, and rather unsettled, she had woken up, prepared to be in a dream just like every other time and then found herself.. where, exactly? "Friends? Oh I don't know~ Can you really be friends with your dreamgirl?"

Laughing softly, she disentangled herself to approach the cage of lemur-type animals with giant ears and even longer tails. She watched them for a moment, wondering where they came from. Friends had never been an option. And she wasn't even sure if she was interested. What a strange place she had come upon.

"I can tell," he offered a smirk with a pinch of his sunglasses. "Mm, I'm not sure. I've never been friends with my 'dreamboy' particularly," Cori shook his head.

He glanced aside to the lemurs a moment. They were awfully ugly in his opinion, hardly the cute fuzzy matriarchal creatures National Geographic made them out to be. They were like any other living thing, no better no less. What interested the Corinthian was the expression on Paprika's face. Either she didn't know Madagascar, or she too was a creation derived from an aspect of her originator. All knowing without knowing much. He knew how that felt.

Turning her attention back to Cori, she almost sighed--she so liked to be able to play a bit more creatively on dates like these, but such was the way of things.

She grinned slightly and skipped forward again, dividing her attention between the colorful animals, and the colorful character before her. "Dreamboy? Ah~ Do you have one? Do you meet outside of dreams, or should I expect this to be a rather serious affair?"

"I do, to an extent," he nodded, watching her skip forward towards a toucan enclosure. "I fucked up once and had to be dismantled for it," Cori openly admitted to Paprika, "do you operate under the same parameters?"

Most of the Dreaming already knew about that incident, as did a handful of people in the City. The Corinthian had little to fear in sharing this information with her, other than now Paprika knew even the nightmare could be stopped, but being under the mastery of an Endless sort of made that a given. The toucans weren't very happy to see him either, Cori never did have much of a way with animals.

"Dismantled?!" she exclaimed, starting off a series of indignant protests from the already disturbed toucans. Paprika turned to her companion, peering at him curiously. "Dismantled how? What do you mean by parameters?"

Clearly, they seemed to have ended up on different pages. But such a confusing sort of event sparked her interest, and she forgot the chattering toucans and gave him her full attention. "Who dismantled you?"

"Dismantled, unmade, uncreated, like that," he arched a brow at Paprika. He should have known better than to assume she'd understand what it meant on the first try. "I left my realm when the boss took an unannounced vacation," smirked the nightmare, "I walked around Earth for a good eighty or so years until he caught up with me. Turned me back into a pile of dream dust for being a bad bad boy."

He ignored the birds as well, continuing to walk towards another rainforest sort of exhibit.

"My master, my 'Atchan' so to speak."

"Ohh~ I see.." Paprika tapped her chin, looking up at the post-dismantled dream-dust boy, or whatever he was. Now she wasn't so sure. "And then you grew out of dream dust? Or were you.. re-mantled?" While she herself was able to control dreams, it seemed that Cori was some how.. outside of that. Improbable!

"But Atchan isn't my master. She's me."

"Re-mantled," Cori confirmed for her even if that wasn't the word he would use. Resurrected was more like it, or given a lobotomy and allowed to resurface after post surgery. He could think of several euphemisms and epithets for what he'd been through.

"And I'm a nightmare, an aspect of my master, modeled and sculpted to handle the affairs of my Lord, always under his dominion but solely responsible for any fuck ups," the Corinthian shrugged once. "You should look into that, if Atchan really is you or if you're just am aspect of her finally released on your own," he smirked.

There was something mildly thrilling in encouraging a fellow dream to break free of their confines. He'd yet to determine what this Atsuko could do to Paprika in the event Atchan wasn't pleased with her behavior.

"Oh so.. does that mean your master is.. in control of dreams? Or. In charge of, because I doubt anyone can really control dreams past manipulation and inspiration.." Paprika puzzled over this for a while, now seeing that Cori was quite different from herself. Nightmare or not, he was the backstage crew to her supportive role.

But at his words on Atsuko, she burst out laughing. "Finally released? Well I suppose that's one way of putting it. That's what I said to her, when she was trying to control me--maybe she's the creation. But.. there is no me without her."

"Now you're catching on," said the Corinthian, remembering when he had challenged Morpheus at the Cereal Convention and literally met his maker.

"In a sense, yes. Dreams can be controlled, but they aren't truly dreams if we insist on collaring them. So when they've grown too far out of control they're either imprisoned or killed." Cori shrugged again, "but 'out of control' is rather flexible."

"Dreams being killed?" Taking a moment to physically scratch her head, Paprika thought this over and, after a moment, decided she had no idea how to take it. "So. That means, if someone were to have a nightmare, you would be running around in their head? And if I were to go around in that nightmare.. I would be running around.. In you?"

Casting him a lavishly flirtatious glance, Paprika crossed her arms with a knowing nod. "Are you sure this isn't just an attempt to get a second date?"

"By the Dreamlord himself in any case, though with the right magic anyone could do it," Cori remarked, "everything has a limit." He didn't find it necessary to mention that even Morpheus, third of the Endless, had been captured once, made to sit in a glass cage for 80 years. Instead he considered Paprika's hypothesis, running his thoughts over every clause. The Corinthian tapped his chin again.

"I think you're right," he grinned, then tilted his head, "I'm pretty confident that if you want a second 'date' you'll just ask for it."

"Well," she said, raising her arms in a shrug. "Your guess is as good as mine as to what is this all about. Limits, masters, Atsuko, dreamlords. Can't hardly wrap my head around it."

Giving up on the more serious things in life, she returned the smile, her hands on her hips. "Wonderful~! Then might I suggest a place in the near future to meet up once more?"

"It's a lot more fun when you just hang around cafés and take walks through the garden," he smiled in agreement then glanced to the butterfly exhibit gateway. "I'm usually at the Coliseum or down in the Casino," Cori nodded, having no real attachment to the letter C, it was plain coincidence.

"And you," he asked of the woman.

Paprika paused at the butterfly doorway, her face stilling for a moment. Butterflies. Osanai had liked butterflies, hadn't he..

"Me?" Turning around to smile again, she shrugged. "I'd like to see the whole city. But I'd rather meet in your dreams~"

"I'm sorry to disappoint; I don't dream," said the Corinthian as he plucked a cigarette from his pack and stuck it between his lips. It was a white Mild Seven. "But you're welcome to watch me work, just knock first."

"Ah, I see~" It made sense. If he was a dream maker, then there was little cause for him to dream, right? Although the idea of someone making the dream, and not just the mind creating it, was quite out of her area of expertise.

"Well then, I'll just have to visit this work of yours? My dreams are Atsuko, so we can't meet there~ But this being Awake nonsense is dreadfully boring."

"You will if you dream," he smirked while puffing the smoke through all three of his mouths. "I can't say when though, that's up to you."

"Oohhh~" she murmured, watching the smoke rise. Some people had all the fun, and here she was with no chance to show off. "When? When indeed! When I find I've missed you~" Laughing, she turned toward the exit-- she was getting tired, and figured it might be a good time to take a little rest...

"I'll drop by sometime soon, though. I'll make sure you recognize me." Paprika blew a kiss before hurrying off down the road, waving a hand over her head. "'Till next time~!"

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Log: COMPLETE [Nightmare and Dreamgirl]

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