Event || Once Upon A Dream

[eternitymods]

Who: All characters who signed-up!
When: May 31st - June 04th
Where: The Dream Width (+ Curti Center & Airships)
What: Event log for the Once Upon A Dream Event! Should your character have their own memory, start your own top-level with said memory. If not, then tag around in other characters's memories! Furthermore, feel free to use the Mingle threads at the Curti Center and in the Airships for non-memory related CR. Please refer to the OOC Post for details and plotting. Plot Memories and the second Airship Mingle will be unlocked on May 25th.
Warnings/Notes: Memories with specific warnings will be marked as such by their players.

Please use the following form for your memory's title line:
CHARACTER'S NAME | MEMORY TITLE | WARNINGS (IF ANY)
We will add links to your memories here as the event progresses!

Mingle: Curti Center | Airships #1 | Airships #2
Plot Memories: The Dream | The Nightmare | The Premonition
Holographic Messages

Adrien Agreste | Then and Now
Aqua | Thorny Pathway | cw: spoiler for kh 0.2
Castor | Lord of the Inferno | cw: fire, mind control
Ena | Zera Hamlet, Reprise | cw: mutilated corpses
Futaba Sakura | Early Days | cw: references to verbal abuse/neglect and auditory hallucinations
Ignis Scientia | For The Life of the Chosen | cw: spoilers, violence, death
Irhya Pendhula | The Parting Glass | cw: violence, amputation
Johnny D'Amico | United Earth Prisoner
Kanji Tatsumi | You're a BOY, you know! | cw: bullying, mild homophobia
Lelouch vi Britannia | Julius Kingsley
Monika | Just Monika | cw: spoilers, possible horror, possible deletion
Nanamo Ul Namo | A Good Memory
Noctis Lucis Caelum | Light of the Crystal | cw: chapter 13 spoilers
Okuyasu Nijimura | Lending a Hand | cw: blood/injuries
Prompto Argentum | I'm not one of your experiments! | cw: episode prompto spoilers
Selphie | The Answer | cw: gore/death
Takashi 'Shiro' Shirogane | The end of the beginning | cw: end of season 2 spoilers
Tidus | A Broken Dream | cw: death, bullying

Comments

[spaceforged]

He follows. There’s not much else he can do. “Noctis wake up. We are in the Dream Width. This happened once-“ Shiro reaches for him and his breath catches in his throat so hard it almost hurts. His hand falls back to his side and he stares with wide eyes at the crystal ahead of them. It isn’t a comforting light like the soft blue glow of the crystals of the Castle of Lions. This is a light that is contained and bound.

He stares down at his still active arm and shuts it down only for someone to speak behind him. He whips around so fast he almost falls. His heart is hammering like a gunshot and he can’t shake the fear that rips through his calm for a brief second. He doesn’t see dark purple robes or glowing yellow eyes.

But the laughter incites rage. His sword almost begins to howl with the power pulled in as his focus narrows down like a target. Until Noctis cries out. His anger forgotten he charges down the walk way. “Noctis! Noctis, you need to wake up! This happened!” He reaches the crystal with a skid to keep himself from touching it and whips his blade as it morphs into a massive cannon, the whine of it charging filling the air with a sound akin to a roar. “You went through this.” The light is pure blue as it curls and rolls into the barrel. It becomes a blinding blaze.

He knows he can’t take down key parts of the memory. But this man had responded to him and even if it is a memory he is compelled to defend a friend. “I know it feels real. You might not even remember me right now. But think about it. Really think about it. This man led you here. Put your people in danger. Caught you here and now. Why? You remember that don’t you? You remember what comes next! Noctis!”

[warpstriking]

The memory continues, almost as though Noctis doesn't hear the other. Though it could also be because the memory is telling him exactly what happens, and considering his feet are no longer on the ground? The struggling continues. Even as he sometimes glimpses in the direction of the voice he hears like one would a static-emitting television set.

That's what it seems to be in his eyes, too. A brief flickering of something that looks like it tries to break through, and yet fades back to what his memories tell him should be there. So instead he focuses on the one other being in the room as he continues to fight something more than just the light pulling him up further and further off the ground.

"In an age long past, an incurable scourge ravaged mankind. A tiny menace that twisted men into monsters, the likes of which you've seen."

The older man's voice is calm, practiced despite the scene before him. Almost as though he is only educating the young royal instead of giving a lecture as he struggles and writhes as, inch by inch, the Crystal isn't just pulling him up, but inside.

And, for an instant, the scene flashes to the storage hangar, focusing on the different types of daemons they'd just fought before it returns to the Crystal's chamber. Just in time for the cannon's blast goes off, knocking Ardyn to the ground. Yet nothing truly seems to happen, except his face begins to show black ooze falling from his eyes and the corners of his lips. His own pale face turning ash-white as blackened cracks form where the veins in his neck should be and the whites of his eyes turn black.

"Did your parents never tell you it is rude to interrupt your elders when they speak?" The man asks, voice far more corrupted and less human. He moves quick to his feet as well, before tossing the fedora aside and, in the blink of an eye, the same weapons that spun around Noctis not long ago appear around he man. Red replacing blue, a hand making a simple gesture of dismissal as all twelve of them shoot forth from their positions to strike at Shiro—

"No, you can't—!"

—and the scene switches to a train. The same man, frozen solid and turned to ice as a silverite trident stabs through the man to the core. Noct's hand guiding it before it disappears in pale blue light and he falls to the floor.

It's a scream of rage that snaps it back to the actual memory. Everything becoming more greyscale aside from the light and the three present. Ardyn, unharmed, standing only a few short paces from the two of them. Only this time the man of no consequence looks completely through Shiro as Noctis' right leg ends up stuck inside the Crystal as well.

"In Lucis lived a savior that could cure the afflicted. His body would come to host a myriad daemons, that countless lives be spared. Yet, a jealous king, one not yet chosen by the Crystal, ostracized and demonized this healer of the people. Making a true monster of him."

In yet another blink, it switches to another scene in the same train, the man once again completely whole and unharmed. A brief glimpse of the man kneeling before a woman in all white before it cuts out with his voice once again, before anything could be seen of what happens.

Noctis is stuck in the Crystal up to his hips, now. free hand almost as if trying to grasp at his own neck-

"Noct, killing you as a mortal will bring me scant satisfaction. Claim the Crystal's power. Arise as its champion."

A vision of the Draconian, the King so small he fits neatly at the center of His large clawed hand as the same blue eyes gaze down upon the Chosen. "Only once the Crystal and King are no more..." A static-filled scene in grey and blue, as ghostly figures appear around a throne, where an older and more ragged man sits. "can I know redemption."

The Chamber disappears as a bloodcurdling scream leaves Noctis' throat, revealing what the true memory is: the young king floating in the very void that the memory began in, brilliant blues and violets swirling around them as the younger man curls into himself, arms hugging his knees close to him as the only support in zero-G. The Ring on his finger glowing with a brilliant light as his shoulders shake soundlessly.

[spaceforged]

He was going to die. The weapons streak forward so fast that even as he throws himself the side he realizes that he just opened himself up to a lot more pain. His mind still screaming with the shock when everything goes strange like his memories sometimes do. But it isn't his memory.

He'd had time to register that once again since creepy wizard is going to lay him out when he's standing again, bayard deactivated. He blinks and the memory moves forward.

His gaze follows the man's and everything inside him freezes. "What-" His feet move as the bayard disappears with a crystalline shimmer he doesn't bother to think about. "Noctis, hold on!" Just a little further. He reaches the crystal with a harsh exhale and thrusts his hands forward to grab onto Noctis to pull-

The vision hits him like an open handed blow. Feeling small and insignificant in the hand of something vast. Reminds him of a star filled expanse where the robotic lion he pilots rose high over head and stood as its former paladin and its present one battled. The ghostly figures. A throne.

Noctis own words echo in his head like a funeral march. One way or another, they who wield the light of the Lucii have to face the fact that they will burn. One way or another. Even me.

Noctis life is going to be far shorter than he had ever guessed. The realization is like slamming the controls forward. He pulls at Noctis desperately, calling to him and trying to brace his feet. It's as futile as fighting against his own destiny to fade.

Noctis screams and he snarls as the world disappears. They're floating in the void and he can't call that better than an ancient man speaking of a destiny he literally forced upon his friend. He blows out air. "That is a strong grudge." It reminds him of Zarkon. Once a good man but now something that must be stopped.

He turns in the void and tests his armor's jet pack. Nothing. He ignores the faint worry that they're helpless here and speaks up. "Noctis...can you hear me? If you can. Give me some sort of sign. Anything at all."

[warpstriking]

The fact the memory changed as the attack was about to land should have told Shiro that some part of him heard him. Yet as they float there weightlessly, their voices don't so much resound audibly as they are heard in each other's heads. Both a blessing and a curse, as he briefly seems to stop shaking nearly as much. Just as their vision is overtaken by a scene they both knew: the two of them, staring up at a deactivated Black Lion.

It's only a flash, but it is there.

[spaceforged]

It brings a smile to his face. "So you can hear me." Good. Now that he thinks back Noctis had saved him when the memory shifted. It had been him right? "Thank you for saving me." He adds, just to cover his bases.

He tries to send an image back. The Black Lion floating in space before a ruined red planet and the view of within the cockpit clearing to reveal the sleek white and blue lines of a Lion Hangar.

"This space we're in isn't real." He follows and feeling weightless, he tries to turn and reach out to Noctis. "Memory."

[warpstriking]

Noctis looks to Shiro briefly, nodding solemnly before his gaze falls to the Ring. He wishes that it was anything but this place that he saw. His prison for the next who knows how long.

Deep down, he just wishes it was over already.

"Heard you from the start." He says, voice raspy even in this place. Who knew how long he was here in reality? Days? Weeks? Months? ...Years? "Lot less clear than in here."

There's not really much to stare at other than his own hands or Shiro, so he closes his eyes instead. "...That man. He's my uncle," he begins to explain, before suddenly the recollections start again. This time, though, there is an image of the Citadel's entrance. The four from earlier, younger by likely months—far less scarred physically and emotionally. Noctis stands with an elderly gentleman on the stairs leading to the entrance, his father, as the former king places a hand on Noct's shoulder—the very same Ring he now bore glimmering in the light of a midday sun on the hand that holds his walking cane.

It switches then to a meeting room of sorts,an even younger Noctis—somewhere in his teens—approaching a rapidly-aging Regis, his Shield standing guard beside him. Clarus shares a rare smile as Noctis' voice rings out, "Gladio, your dad... I'm grateful to him."

And lastly, it switches to a scene of Tenebrae set ablaze as the Empire attacks. An even younger Noctis—eight at the time—being carried by a much younger looking Regis past a screaming Ravus, yet the young prince only had eyes for the blond girl his dad was trying to lead away by the hand. A few years older, far more accepting of her fate as she lets go. 'Luna!'

Ignis, wishing him luck before they split up in a crowd, then turning to face him in a hotel room of sorts. Scarred. Blind.

"I've seen enough lives torn apart or stolen because of him. And just because it's a memory—"

—doesn't mean it's not real, is what he tries to say as he reaches out, too. When the memory resets and Noctis snaps a little as that very hand holds his father's sword again. No. Not again. He can't see this play out again from his own perspective—!

He's so upset that instead of simply fighting, he seems to almost glow with a white light as all of his ancestral weapons float about him. Using each one against a different daemon one-by-one. It's probably pretty terrifying, seeing what he's like in battle when unleashed. Yet he doesn't care to stop.

[spaceforged]

He had been about to answer when the memory shifts. It fills in pieces and gives him more reasons to feel that stab of determination to tear Noctis free of this world crafted from memory. If it were him having all these memories cobbled together and looping would drive him nuts. Then everything resets but this time he draws the bayard sword from the start.

He whips the sword and sends power screaming out just before all hell breaks loose. He stares in shock as the weapons tear into daemons and flow through the room with the precision of a swordsman's hand. Were he the sort to swear this would be the moment he'd breathe out a few words.

The level of responsibility for such power...power passed down from father to his first born on and on down a line that feels...ancient. The Uncle...betrayed and fallen. Shiro shakes his head and surges forward. He calls out. "Noctis! When I first came here your uncle interacted with me! He talked directly to me! We need to talk to him. See if he's the key to getting you out."

[warpstriking]

The weapons do not fade as he seems to short-range teleport every few steps, turn around, and slam a blade into the next. Over and over again as the others tell him to go it alone. Something inside him screams as the attacks grow ever stronger, eyes glowing just that little more.

That is, until he stops entirely. The thirteen weapons he'd collected brightly shining behind him in a white light before they shoot forth into the metal giant; or, more accurately, through them. He follows one into it, and then he disappears. Warping between weapon after weapon over and over again as each one strikes home. Until, at last, he hovers in midair with the Ultima Blade in his hand, gesturing for all the glaives to strike at once. Light forms in cracks on the ground where they strike beneath them, sings around his blade like fire, until he drops down and slams the blade through the daemon and into the ground.

The light erupts from the fissures, and quickly fades away as he dismisses the blade in his hands, shouting up at the ceiling as the giant and the daemons in close proximity fade in dark wisps of smoke. "Ardyn! I know you can see this!"

"Oh? So the boy believes himself a man simply because he's regained his borrowed toys?"

"That's not the point and you know it." Noctis seethes, but stands up straight despite phasing through attacks meant for him. He'll have to warp at some point to regain some energy, but the way he's phasing and blocking with his arsenal help somewhat. "You spoke with him. Speak to me."

Suddenly the storage hangar and his armiger fade from view, the Crystal glowing behind them. On the other end of the catwalk stands Ardyn, smiling that same, smug look in his eyes. "Did you enjoy seeing your dear friends the way you remember them?"

Noctis grits his teeth. Every fiber of his being is screaming to strike the bastard down where he stands, but he restrains himself.

Save the fact his eyes are about as crimson as Ardyn's hair.

[spaceforged]

The level of power coming from Noctis isn't the most worrying part of the whole situation. Noctis looks to be getting closer and closer to an enraged state. The moment he reaches it he'll be blinded by it. He doesn't know him well enough to snap him out of it.

Shiro transforms the bayard into a shield. It holds up to demonic assault a s the world fades out and fades back in. He lowers his weapon. Silver blue light washes over it shaping it into a sword over his right arm. He comes up to Noctis right side and touches his arm. "Easy. This is a memory and we need to talk to him to discern why you can't wake up."

He stares at the man unable to shake how he'd looked when blackness had oozed down his face. Shiro breathes in. "This world shaped from memory...What do you really represent in it? You're not in the next part. Yet you're conscious."

[warpstriking]

"Why, what awaits, of course." Ardyn's smug grin does not budge as he speaks, waving the arm with the black wing-like shield as though it were a dismissal. "After all, we are so very alike..."

Both were chosen, but one rejected and the other ordained. Noct's hands clench into fists. "I am nothing like you," he mutters darkly. "Unlike you, I still love our people. Knows what it's like... You are blinded by your own spite, a slave to the dark."

"And yet, it is you who are trapped." Ardyn points out, eyes glowing with malice despite his bored expression. "A prisoner of fate destined to die for the sake of thousands upon thousands... I wonder how many will be left by the time you are ready and- ah, but that would mean being capable of leaving, would it not? And you are so very trapped by more than the Draconian's game."

"Shut up!" Shiro may want to let go of his arm, so he doesn't get shocked. "Quit screwing with my head!"

...What was that little chirping noise that accompanied the groan from outside?

[spaceforged]

He narrows his eyes and takes a step forward. Shiro releases Noctis's arm as his voice cuts through the air with the ring of authority. "Alright, so you're just going to repeat something similar to last time. Good to know." His temper is set lower than his friend's but it's still there in his darkened eyes.

It would be a mistake to get close to someone that could stab him with their blades from a distance. Even with the bayard's protection.

He pauses, raising an eyebrow. "Did you hear that chirp?"

[warpstriking]

"That is up to Noct," he replies with a shrug. "After all, it is his-"

Noctis blinks, pulling out a phone from his pocket. Blinking at the screen a few times.

"What are you doing?" Ardyn inquires, but a tiny little growl and yip answer in response. A small fox...thing? appearing in front of the two of them, ruby lights forming around him as it yips again. "-'buncle?" Noctis' mouth opens slightly, but he looks at the phone screen again. Two more messages popping up on the screen.

I've got you, buddy!
Don't worry, Noct. You aren't alone.
You have friends here who will help where I can't.

"Carbuncle!" he cries out as the little devil charges and lunges at Ardyn's face, buying time for the Big Guy. It brings Noctis to his knees as he clutches his head with one hand, eyes glowing the same red-violet they always do when-

Little blue lights form in the air around them, separate from the light of the Crystal. Thunder resounds from outside, and with the speed of a lightning strike, a large staff with the head of a strange unicorn slams through the catwalk between Shiro and Ardyn. The resulting lightning storm seems to do nothing to either of them, but with a final chirp, the memories fade into space.

Let's play together again soon!

[spaceforged]

Things happen so fast Shiro barely has time to stuff his bayard back on his hip before it all goes to hell. He turns on the catwalk as something small appears. He puts it out of his head when Noctis sinks to his knees. He drops to his own, reaching out to brace him when...

there's really no way to describe it. One moment lights are rising around them like sparks. The next a staff so vast it could pin the Black Lion to the ground slams into the catwalk and cuts it half.

He breathes as they return to space, and is inwardly grateful for his armor. It will make what he has to do that much easier. He grabs for Noctis shoulders and shoves him back towards the ship in one fast motion.

He can feel the nebula forming already. He's worried what he'll see. What memory will rise up? But he still smiles. "Don't worry. Space pilot, remember?"

[warpstriking]

The moment they find themselves free of the nebula, he realizes the hand that held the phone now holds another, smaller item. Tiny and pale blue, red little crystal on its forehead.

"Carbuncle," he mutters quietly, but before he could bring it to his chest, he feels a pair of hands pushing him away. In an instant, he recalls what brought him into his memories in the first place.

Relief flashes in his eyes as Ignis opens his, smiling faintly. But, he knows it wouldn't work. That they could both die if they're exposed to the Dream Width too long without the protection of memories—

He'd pushed him to the safety of an airship, too. Told him he'd see him again soon... Panic sparks to life in his eyes as he sees the nebula reforming around his new friend, as he flails against the momentum to reach him. No... No!

"Damn, sonova-" He doesn't finish that thought, reaching out with his free hand as if to grab him from the nebula before it fully forms, but his fingers touch nothing but empty matter. Not again. Not again—! He can't see this again even if it's with someone he barely knows in comparison...!

His back soon hits the floor of the airlock on the airship. Noctis hisses, grimacing as he takes hold of the side as it automatically closes and begins to pressurize. "Shiro- Shiro!"