Dreamscape Quest
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You are currently reading a thread in /qst/ - Quests
You are currently reading a thread in /qst/ - Quests
The rug is a trap.
You knew it when you entered the room. You knew it when you took your seat. The color of a bruise: gray and black and blue. Adorned with swirling nebula patterns that drew the eye down and in. You could feel it through the soles of your shoes, radiating a secular coldness as if it were not a rug at all, but a door yawning, letting the night in. You resisted the urge to reach down and touch it. It would not be soft, you knew. It would not feel like something you could put into words.
You feel yourself as the Fox now. Nothing but pure animal simplicity. Dangerously close to the rusted vice, half buried and long forgotten, meant for something much larger than you. Your paw dances around it. Daring the ancient spring to serve it's only purpose. No warnings, just a soft click and a flurry of movement, dead leaves thrown in the air. Slow, but you're slower. The only question now: will it take the paw clean or will you chew it off?
With a concentrated effort you manage to pull your eyes from the carpeting, and you wonder if the displeasure you feel is your own or the rug's.
There are other chairs in the room, rows of them, but only you. The walls and ceiling are featureless white planes, meant to bore the eyes, turn them back down toward the floor and the rug and the trap.
There is an opening in the wall opposite from where you entered. Not a door, but a window. And not a window to the world, just a view into another white room. Smaller than your's and with only one chair. This one occupied by a young woman, her hair pulled up into a tight black bun that rested atop her head. She faced you but was not looking at you, her head lulled ever so slightly foward, her eyes on the floor. You wondered what secrets the rug whispered to her.
You hear a door close.
You turn around, back the way you came. And you realize this is a mistake even as you make it, but it's too late. This is the trap sprung. This is the trap springing. It's slow, but you're slower. The wall is white and empty. Inviting you to look down.
"Mr. Reed?"
The woman. You turn again and for a second the world is a blur of purple and white motion. She's standing in the same room as you now. She beckons to you.
"They're ready for you, Mr. Reed, this way."
She motions to a door behind her, next to the window you had seen her through. A door that had not been there before.
--Do you:
1. Follow her
2. Question her
3. Look at the rug
4. Other
>>31808
Follow
>>31808
>3. Look at the rug
Her hand hovered at a perfect meridian where the purple of the rug met the white of the wall behind her. This transfixed you like a cheap magicians slight of hand may captivate a child. The gradation of the white wall into the peach of her hand into the dark, spiraling blue-violet abyss left you spellbound. You feel yourself teetering on an edge. Her hand drops and your eyes follow, clinging to it like a sailor to a buoy amidst choppy seas. Knowing your only hope is to focus on her hand, that without her it would just be the rolling lavander waves washing over you. Crushing you.
The hand! Just watch the hand!
You can feel this is important somehow but your eyes are slipping, being pulled below her fingertips and down her thigh, past her knee. Tracing the line of her shin to her feet. Her toes a beach, the tide coming in. Gravity. Pulling you over space and time. Stretching you to nothing. Leaving you where no light reaches.
The Hand!
Her toes are barely in your peripheral vision now. Your chin is nearly against your chest. You're looking down at the floor. Down where you shouldn't be. You're looking at the rug. It opens like a mouth. And through lips the color of dusk you see stars live and die. See them rage and burn, see them grow and swallow their entire systems before shrinking back to coldly simmering husks of their former selves.
You see all this in glimpses as the mouth moves. It's trying to say something to you but you can't make out the words. You know if you could just get a little closer...
--Do you:
1. Get closer
2. Look up
3. Other
>>34454
>2. Look up
((Putting on a trip to avoid confusion should I happen to post at work instead of at home again))
You know if you could just get a little closer you could make out the rug's words. Secrets racing to your ears like light from distant suns. Turning your skin a waxy green with forbidden knowledge. Your legs fusing together, hardening to wood. Somewhere a woman is laughing, a joke at your expense. Your arms split and divide, grow leaves, reach hungrily for the suns shining through the mouth. You start to take root.
The mouth is only saying one thing. One word, over and over. The lips forming the same shape again and again, but you still can't hear it. Your branches reach the mouth itself, the leaves that brush the lips come away black and smoldering as if dipped in fire, but there's still no sound. Your roots should have found soil by now. You look down, expecting the reassuring blanket of earth but instead are met by nothing but a vast, bruised sea, your roots drowning in it.
The rug!
The mouth springs like a lion from tall grass. Barreling down upon you. No longer speaking, it hangs open in a snarl or scream. The only sound the deafening roar of air as the mouth swallows everything, not even light escaping.
Your legs are bloated with dark water. You can't move. Not that it would matter anyway. The last thing you see before looking up are all the stars blinking out of existence inside the mouth. Like thousands of tiny candle flames being snuffed out at once. Leaving nothing but a dark hole into empty space. It howls, defeated, as white walls come crashing down around you like a cage. Pushing the mouth down. Turning it back into a rug.
A sensation of vertigo grips you, turns your knees to puddy. You crumple back down into your chair, fighting off a dizziness that threatens your consciousness.
The woman still stands before you, her hand again hovering to accentuate the door behind her. Only now, from the angle you perceive from a sitting position, her hand no longer matches up perfectly with where the wall and floor meet. Instead, it was surrounded entirely by the white of the wall, as if floating lost in a fogbank.
This time, when she drops her hand, you do not follow it. She smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes.
"This way, then." She says, turning. She doesn't wait for you.
--Do you:
1. Follow her
2. Wait, then explore on your own
