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 Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:31 pm
The key turned in the lock and the tumblers clicked home with firm finality. There was no turning back now, if that point hadn't already been reached the moment the man inside decided to enter a flower shop and talk to the naive girl behind the counter. The world was opening up before Orah and she felt it in the smooth doorknob that twisted in her grip.
"Alois?"
Orah wasn't sure what would greet her inside this house. The young woman had never been here before, never been invited into the private world of the man she'd met less than a handful of times. The symptoms he'd described for her had been horrible... But the entryway of this decidedly masculine home was clear and the house, for the moment was quiet.
Calm before the storm was all the dark haired girl could think as she pushed the door shut behind her, heading in to find a kitchen where her burdens could be set down. One bag held school work and reading material, the other a still-warm container of comforting home-made soup. One was for her, the other him... Though there was no guarantee either would be enjoyed tonight.
Turning the corner, Orah was relieved to have found the kitchen she was looking for. "Alois..?" She called again as she set down her bags before wandering into the other areas of the home. Geez... She didn't even know which room was his and she was supposed to be taking care of him? Insecurity was rampant here, and she'd barely begun.
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Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2014 5:34 pm
The cold, hard surface pressed into his cheek without any jutting angles. It soothed his feverish skin, somewhat, and marginally assuaged the nausea which churned what little breakfast he had left into a sour bile, threatening to eke out of his mouth in thin strands. The sink faucet rushed briskly, echoing in the small bathroom, against the tile floors and whitewashed walls. The unforgiving fluorescent lighting pained him as it beat down on his eyelids. However, crouched against the porcelain, with his arms crossed at the far end of the lid where the hinges connected, his existence felt tolerable. His stomach was still plagued by nausea and his head pounded in time with his heart, but it felt tolerable. Doable.
But he understood it would change in the coming days.
A latch sounded in the distance, but it lacked the assuredness of Alex arriving home. No, these tumblers clicked humbly, almost tentatively, and the voice following confirmed his suspicions - Orah arrived. Initially he lacked the wherewithal to respond, to even eke out a grunt, but as she persisted he considered calling back just to shut her up for a while. Even a minute, a precious second where her grating wails might not cut into his fragile sense of equilibrium.
"In here," he finally responded, though his voice barely rattled out of his throat. With a frown, Alois sat up to issue a louder statement. After wiping away the strand of bile that connected him to the toilet lid, Alois returned with a more authoritative reply. "In ze bas'room, Orah." Afterward he coughed in an effort to clear his throat.
A glance at the clock confirmed late afternoon, so the teen likely left school at least an hour ago. How much time had he passed in here, then? Judging by the stiff muscles in his shoulders and almost paralyzing kink in his neck, he guessed a few hours. Dozed off hugging the toilet... Somehow that sounded almost benign. A bitter laugh issued from the misanthrope and he rested his forehead in the palm of his hand, steadying himself against the rim of the toilet while his shoulders shook with quiet mirth. A general of the Negaverse, once demoted and rank restored, now practically sprawled across the bathroom floor in the throes of withdrawal... Zinkenite knew of it, so surely Laurelite knew of it. Oh, how he hoped she cringed when she found out...
But for now there was Orah, who surrounded herself with the sweet, heady scent of flowers. Orah, who was about to walk into a bathroom filled with the unaired, putrid stench of bile and cold sweat and stale cigarette smoke. Welcome to my world, Orah, he thought bitterly. Enjoy your stay.
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Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 7:51 pm
The response, when it came, was weak. Tired. Maybe it was only in her head, but she imagined she could hear the pain in it too. It sent a ripple of concern through the young woman as she shuffled towards the call, turning the corner through a door way to be stopped for a moment by a wave of smell.
What was that...? It smelled like sickness... and something else. Smoke? She wouldn't be that surprised. He did morphine, smoking cigarettes was tame next to that. Smell aside, concern replaced surprised at the sight of the young man on the floor, hunched over the toilet. For a moment, Orah was sure he was throwing up with the way his shoulders were shaking, but it certainly didn't sound like it.
"Alois..." She said softly as she turned and moved to the sink, hunting down a wash cloth. A splash of water and a wring with slender brown hands gave her a cool compress and in a smooth step, she was crouched down beside him, the cool cloth pressed to the back of his neck.
"How bad is it?" She had been about to ask if he felt okay, but it was pretty obvious he didn't... but she did need to know if he felt well enough to move. The young woman's mind buzzed with thoughts of how to ease the situation... how to get him into bed, what to do if he felt nauseous again, where they might keep cleaning supplies so she could clean up the bathroom. Getting rid of the smell might go a ways towards making him feel better, or so she hoped.
Honestly, Orah was torn between wanting to mother him and being unsure how far he would appreciate her going. She'd dealt with sickness before, of course... she had always been the one to play mother when her younger brother had gotten sick. That, and she knew what it was like to be sick and not have someone there to take care of you. Neither of the men in her life had quite the nurturing nature that she did.
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Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 5:51 pm
Alois' tirade of bitter mirth faded into a dull snicker when Orah braved the scene. Surprisingly, she never fainted nor blanched due to the smell, and even pressed on knowing its source. "Oh Orah..." He greeted, still smiling. "What circumstances we find ourselfs in." He sighed softly; the cold compress soothed slightly, but he shivered beneath the sensation. His shoulders ached terribly, so he dropped his forehead to the lid once more and gripped the strained muscles gently - a paltry consolation for what he now endured. "i woke up restless, which I had expected. My legs felt... strange, as if a cluster of bees erected zeir hif'e wis'in ze sinew. Nossing assuaged zat feeling outside of actif' movement, but even zen I would suffer ze occasional muscle cramp.
"My day progressed decently enough until I ate - initially I did not suffer for zat decision, but nausea crept in some hours afterward and I'f been quite taken wis' ze bas'room ever since." Weakly he gestured toward a german copy of Crime and Punishment, titled Schuld und Sühne, propped open on the floor with its spine pointed toward the ceiling. The pages looked worn, its paperback cover abused and folded one too many times, and a water spot warped the paper irrevocably. Shifting, he fully sat against the cool tile with his knees vaguely framing the toilet, his side curved toward Orah as one leg echoed half a cross-legged seating, and the other bent toward the cabinets.
"I am so tired..." He mumbled softly, sunken gold eyes closing to watch the light play across their lids. When he shifted, a thick segment of hair finally brushed over the lid of the toilet and into the pool of water and bile below. Alois found it too far beyond his emotional reserves to give a damn. "I'f read about it in passing - detox, zat is - but reading offers such a maladroit approximation for what one will soon experience." 'Flu on steroids' hardly covered the gambit of physical and emotional abuse stemming from the process.
"And how was school, Orah? Was it better zan zis? I'd wager so - it's a little more benign from what I remember of Gymnasium myself." Alois drew a breath, but it aggravated his nausea. After discarding a wad of bitter spit into the toilet, he continued on a separate vein. "I told Alexandre of your coming; I suspect he tidied up ze place to offer a warmer welcome to you. He is... Sentimental like zat. But I am just rambling now - it hurts my sroat, but I find it marginally more tolerable zan tasting ze precursor to vomit." Alois offered a tired, but genuine, smile.
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Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 7:35 pm
Orah pressed her lips together when she saw how bad he was. The day he spoke of sounded uncomfortable, to say the least, and the nausea sounded very much like what she would expect from flu. Shifting, she smoothed the damp rag over his neck before lifting it away. The rag wasn't hot, so there wasn't the fever she was used to, but hopefully it had felt refreshing anyway. It was hard to see him like this, or really to see anyone this way. It tugged at her sympathies.
"School was fine. Normal. I had a test in calculus that I might have managed to pass and I have a paper to write for economics. Boring stuff, really. I skipped choir practice and went home after school to make you some soup, but if you're not feeling up to it, it might be better to just have some of the broth. I also brought some sparkling water... I've heard that carbonation helps with nausea. Do you think you're okay for me to get you back into bed? I'll get you a... bowl or a bucket or something so you don't need to slouch over the toilet like this." Feeling bold in the face of his poor state, she lifted his face in her slender hands and ran her wet cloth over it, both cleaning him up and hopefully soothing him.
Brown eyes studied the face she cradled in her hands, just holding him for a moment longer before she released him and rose, brushing her skirt down her thighs before she dropped the rag in the sink and rinsed it out.
"You have to keep some liquids in you some how so you don't dehydrate." Orah said softly.
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Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 8:45 pm
Alois huffed in mild irritation when she ran the rough wash cloth briskly over his face, but he voiced no outward protest. Speaking in the midst of her actions would only warp his words when she brushed the cloth too near his lips, and his pronunciation issues needed no further aggravation. When she finished her businesslike scrubbing, she hadn't yet released her grasp - and in that brief moment he watched her with a certain sharpness to his gaze, one worn and tattered by exhaustion. What he saw equated to concern, or so he thought - but he knew so little of it lately that he didn't trust his judgements. What difference was there between concern and pity?
"Eating sounds like an exercise in futility - same wis' drinking anysing. If I don't piss it out in fif'e minutes, I'll sweat it out in half ze time." With a sigh, Alois deflated against the toilet once more. His face felt cleaner than before, at least. "Wis' my luck, I'll puke it up before I finish eating it."
Alois groaned softly as he forced himself to his feet, using the lid of the toilet as a sturdy support in the slow ascent. As he rose, his vision shrank phenomenally fast, almost wholly occupied by starburst patterns and fragmented flecks of light dancing across his peripherals. His hearing shrank to distant white noise, and the Saarlander clutched the counter momentarily. Alois rationalized between dehydration and low blood pressure as he waited for his vision to return to a tolerable level; Alois was loathe to guide Orah toward his room if any step might have him prostrated across the floor.
When his pallor faded to his typical color and Alois found some measure of confidence in moving again, he beckoned for Orah to follow him. "Zere are some sings we need to accomplish before I lose my resolf'e in zis... ********." Alois departed from the bathroom at a slow gait, a hand trailing against the textured wall as he progressed down the hallway. Aside from the occasional wall sconce to light their way in Alexandre's typical ornate flair, the walls only sported varying paintings of the more memorable haunts of Europe - some Alois remembered viewing personally.
Turning the corner, Alois' trailing hand found a distressed black handle and froze atop its unforgiving surface. As he rested his forehead against the frame, Alois closed his eyes and spoke of their coming task. "We will need to gut my room of any remaining morphine, as I am sure you remember. I will gif' you some locations at first, and zat should help you develop a taste of where to look. However, I want to keep one small vial of morphine during zis process - maybe you find it asinine to do so, but..." Alois drew a slow breath and opened his eyes, settling that same tired gaze on Orah's healthy features. She looked as though she exuded some measure of radiance from the sun. "It's a reminder, of sorts. A reminder zat somesing crawled beneas' my skin so deeply once before zat I was stricken by it, and almost died from it. I overdosed in ze bas'room once, and nodded off beneas' ze surface of ze water. I didn't drown because I stopped breaz'ing."
Alois' grip tightened on the knob before he finally pushed the door open. As he stepped inside, practiced fingers found the light switch just inside the door and illuminated a naked bulb hanging from a fixture in the center of the ceiling. The walls peered back at them in drab white, positively littered with strange pictures pinned with clothespins, pushpins and any other manner of tape and nails. However, no single image in the room corresponded to a human visage except for one - a photo of a girl from the crown of her shoulders to just beneath the tip of her nose, exposing bruising around her neck and blood from her nose and mouth. Her expression remained indifferent - or so it seemed without her eyes present in the photo. Other images included deconstructed buildings and other echoes of disasters, from weeds growing through a discarded wheel well to a building half-destroyed from an old explosion. A rather large photo facing the door directly depicted a simple white tee shirt so tangled and dirtied in razor wire that its form was no longer recognizable.
The room itself maintained few furnishings aside from a standalone keyboard, a bed set on a low frame, a single nightstand and a desk in the far corner by the window. Alois' bed sported little in the way of excessive comforts - aside from two pillows and a simple black comforter, the bed lacked excess trimmings to assuage its owner in desperate times like these. The nightstand appeared fashioned from distressed wood and wrought iron, more of an echo from the starker past of Europe than its beauteous locations displayed outside. Atop the banded and bolted wood were a pair of simple cylindrical drinking glasses, one mostly full of water and the other with a swig of beer covering an inch of its bottom. On the floor laid a long-sleeved black shirt and a pair of black cotton lounge pants, likely discarded in the middle of the night due to overheating. A book half-covered by the sleeve of his shirt read Die Verwandlung, and featured enough dog ears to look like an art project.
His desk, composed of wood in an espresso stain and glass atop its surface, featured minimal additions as well - his black laptop sat in the very center as the feature use of the desk, with a steno pad to its left and a nearby ringed cup filled with various pencils and pens. A hardly-used black mousepad sat to the right of the computer, and beyond it stood a stereo hand-wired to speakers hung in each corner of the room. Plugged into the stereo's headphone jack was his mp3 player, set atop the lid of his laptop some time ago. Currently the device played a contemporary quartet piece on Summer Overture at a mild volume.
One of his studded and buckled jackets lay across his keyboard, as if laid out for use at a later date. The keyboard itself looked hardly touched lately. As his gaze brushed over it, Alois inwardly reprimanded himself for slacking in his practice. "Check ze battery compartment for zat keyboard. Check beneas' my nightstand, on ze underside of its surface. Additionally, check ze inside of..." Alois trailed off with a groan before pointing toward the far corner of the room. "Zat speaker." Standing aside, he left the door ajar for Orah's entrance.
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Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:15 pm
At least he hadn't blown up at her for the instinctive task. That was something.
"You're going to be losing liquid whether or not you drink something and if you don't get something in to replace it, things will just get worse." Orah said briskly as she folded the cloth and dropped it, turning just in time to see Alois waver as he stood. Her hands rose instinctively to steady him, but he recovered quickly enough, turning to lead her from the bathroom. Well. At least he was well enough to walk.
Her fate seemed to be one filled with surprises, though, and irony. The room he led her to surprised her and Orah had to stop a moment to take in all of the images he had on his walls. They were so... bleak. Heartbreaking. They said more about his character than he might have intended, but then again, maybe not. It was like by opening the door, he had opened himself to her and she found herself wondering all over again what she was doing here. He was so far removed from everyone and everything she had ever known, any experience she had ever had. But... when she had a moment to process it, she realized that she really had no right to judge him. He was who he was, and right now? She was here to help him.
Brushing off the oddness of the surroundings, Orah focused in as he directed her to a few hiding places. First thing was first though.
"Go and sit down before you fall over." The brunette said as she turned back to the hallway, sweeping out of the room and back to the kitchen. Soon the sound of banging cupboards could be heard. Maybe luck was on her side now, as the young woman found what she was looking for and returned to the bedroom in short order. The bucket she had found went by the bed before she was finally ready to begin the hunt.
It wasn't easy to put herself in his frame of mind, something necessary if she was going to find where he had hid the drugs they were trying to rid him of. The first hiding places were easy with his direction and once she got started, a thorough search was soon on. What she turned up as she sifted through his belongings she dropped into the large front pockets of her button up sweater, the bottles clicking together. The sharps she found, however, got set on the desk next to his lap top, at least until she was ready to deal with them. Not that she knew how to dispose of them... that was going to be a real challenge.
As the young woman moved about, she kept a discreet eye on her charge, making sure he had settled himself and wasn't trying to hide anything from her.
"Did you, um... take any of these photos?" Orah asked as she moved about, trying to draw him into conversation and just maybe distract him from his distress.
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Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:55 pm
Alois looked askance at the petite brunette when she uttered an order so brusquely. Cocking an eyebrow, he responded in kind. "I asked you here so you could catch me." However, she departed before she heeded his retort. Idly he wondered if his words even reached her, but it was of no consequence. After drawing the naked shutter blinds closed, Alois paced toward his bed and fell onto its disheveled surface. He never bothered to hoist his legs atop the mattress.
While Orah set to work, soon after she placed an unimpressive bucket near his bed, Alois fought for consciousness as he settled into the comforter. Finally he slipped a hand down the v-neck of his loose shirt and procured a single vial tied around his neck on a length of treated black cord. Alois found it exceptionally small, only housing a few CCs of morphine within, but the german traced his fingernail atop the stopper while he watched the liquid pivot within its vial. With every clack of the bottles within Orah's sweater, he flinched slightly - each collision of glass echoed a fresh reminder of the heaven he found in a sharp and a flat, as he called them.
Together, they made him natural.
When Orah asked of the photos, the open-ended question roused him from the dreary half-sleep that threatened to claim him. Slowly he sat up, rubbing one eye as he scanned around the room quickly. Finally he gestured toward one of the photos near the bed, depicting a long stretch of train tracks passing into a tunnel. Initially the tracks looked unusual - as if the rubble beneath the trusses were different, somehow. Upon closer inspection, what looked like detritus was actually a host of broken porcelain doll heads and all their constituent parts.
Alois gestured to a second photo not far from it, curiously of himself at the younger age of seventeen. He stood in front of a brick wall, looking listless, and spray painted behind him was a pair of bird's wings bloomed in flight. In the left side of the picture, a street post stood offering street names in german. Far out of focus, one barely discerned trees in the midst of summer. Despite his expression, the Alois in the photo looked more natural than he did now - more at ease with himself on black jeans and a black shirt depicting a skull in its center and one fishnet arm. He lacked some of the piercings in his ear that he sported in current times.
"I was in Dresden for zat one. Found zose wings painted on ze wall, so I used ze disposable camera I had for ze trip. I don't know why I kept it. I never liked Dresden, no matter how many times I visited." Alois searched his pockets and produced a battered pack of cigarettes and an equally neglected book of matches. After taking from both, he purched the cigarette between his lips and took the nearly empty glass of beer with him toward the window. After elevating the blinds and cracking open the pane, Alois sat on the sill and struck the match across the screen. Lighting up, he took a long drag before he dropped the match into the glass.
"Do you know anysing about Dresden, Orah? It was a beautiful city in its time - or so I understood from pictures. During ze second world war, ze British and Americans bombed ze city bad enough to destroy its center - its heritage. Zey rebuilt parts of it since, but I liked it better in its aftermas'. It felt more... real. Zere's a picture around here somewhere of Dresden in 1945, but I can't..." Alois shook his head. A tremor cropped up in his smoking hand, and he tried to steady it with a firm grip on his wrist. Nothing helped; even with smoking, the nausea grew worse.
"I apologize, Orah; I am exhausted."
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Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2014 7:49 pm
Honestly, Orah didn't much like letting him keep that one bottle he had around his neck. It seemed like it would work against what they were trying to accomplish, but at this point she was still unsure about how much she could push him, how much authority he would let her have. Hopefully it wouldn't do too much damage to have that one, small vial.
The young woman turned her head to check on Alois as she heard him stir, stilling the bottles rattling in her pockets as he described the photos. They were places she had never been, some she had never even heard of, but they were part of him. Things from his past, the building blocks of him.
"I don't know anything about Dresden, I'm afraid. If you say it was beautiful, I believe you and I will have to find some pictures." It was... well, it was unsurprising, at this point, that he would prefer a war-torn version of the city. It fit what she was starting to see. In a part of her mind, she could appreciate that beauty too... sometimes darkness, pain, despair had its own sort of emotional connection. It wasn't what she would normally surround herself with, but this was his world. She was just visiting.
Suddenly, concern flooded her as his hand shook and he confessed to exhaustion. Orah moved quickly to his side to put her hand on his wrist and still the shaking, her other hand cupping his elbow.
"If you're tired, then you should sleep. The more you sleep, the more of the withdrawl you'll sleep through, you know? I'll keep searching and see if I can warm up something for you to drink when you wake up." She said softly.
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Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2014 6:54 pm
Alois slipped his arm from her grasp in an instinctive jerk. Though he did not cringe, his distaste for such intrusive gestures flourished in his gaze, which still settled far beyond the house. A picturesque world existed just beyond the glass panes, safely sealed away for the misanthropic spectator. But Orah leaked in - she bled through the cracks and conjoined on the other side, establishing herself in this strange room he called his own, regardless of his urge to swap residences repeatedly.
When you sleep, you will die.
The thought precipitated without prompt, and Alois froze in sudden recognition of it. The shock wore plainly on his face and he blinked it away almost immediately; Orah needn't know of his prior struggles, no matter their context. "Dresden... Never quite felt real. Perhaps zat had more to do wis' my reasons for visiting. Es ist egal; it has no bearing on us now." The Saarlander drew from his cigarette once more, exhaling in thick plumes of smoke. The nicotine settled his stomach somewhat, bu his nerves remained undeniably frayed. This exhaustion, this curse of lethargy plaguing him so greatly - no amount of sleep hoped to sate it.
He was weary for morphine, not soup or sleep or caring words.
Finally the misanthrope slipped from the sill and crushed the remains of his cigarette into the nearby ashtray. Electing to empty it later, he forsook the ash-laden glass and slunk toward the bed, where he sat atop the edge with a quiet sigh. Hunched over, with elbows balanced precariously on bony knees, he watched Orah as she stood in his room - the sole fleck of color amongst curious depictions of a world he knew for many years. Strangely, the harsh light of the naked bulb hadn't sharpened her features to a painful point - even in her shadows, she maintained a softer edge. A strange girl, certainly. Had she ever considered biting words before in her life?
"You'd best leaf' first," Alois finally conceded. However, the misanthrope was loathe to change into more comfortable evening clothes around the girl; what revulsion might warp her features when those honey brown eyes settled on his jutting, calloused scars? And if she managed to swallow their grizzly sight, what of the disgusting pallor ailing his skin, or the utter lankiness of his ligaments, or the plethora of minute deformities he scrutinized all over his body? Jaw set finely in his stubbornness over his suggestion, Alois waited for Orah to depart. As he did so, a shudder coursed through his body and a bitter taste assailed his senses.
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Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2014 7:15 pm
The instinctive jerk was probably more hurtful than he suspected and the young woman all but wilted as she dropped her hands, tucking them behind her in embarrassment. She had honestly been expecting him to do that this whole time, but he'd been allowing her to touch him and it had maybe made her careless with it. The pull from her just reminded her all over again that she barely knew him, and though she was here to help him through a difficult time in his life, she really wasn't welcome in it.
Well. She would just have to try to remember it better. So, rather than help him further at the moment, Orah stood back to watch as he finished his cigarette and move to the bed, her brows drawing together when he slumped on the edge rather than stretch out on it. He said he was tired...
"Oh..." The brunette murmured, almost disappointed when he told her to leave, until she realized... He was still fully dressed. "OH. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'll just... go." Hands fluttering like restless butterflies, the young woman nervously smoothed down her sweater and moved for the door, swinging gracefully through it and pulling it shut behind her.
Just before she disappeared completely, she paused with the door in hand and looked back over her shoulder. "I, uh... hope you sleep well and feel better when you wake up." She said before she quietly closed the door and leaned on the wall beside it, feeling like an idiot. Just another example of how she always messed things up. Oh well.
Gathering herself, Orah made her quiet way to the living room to settle on the couch with a book. She could afford to stay for a while, just in case he needed something tonight, as unlikely as it was. Maybe tomorrow would be better. Or worse. Who knew?
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Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2014 7:36 pm
Her response came stammered, disjointed, and utterly honest. Alois initially quirked an eyebrow before a small smirk cracked his stoicism and a thin laugh expressed his mirth. Was Orah really so out of place that she couldn't fully process his responses? Alois himself suffered that very displacement when she invited him into the warm confines of their apartment. And what had he discovered there, but a lack of secrets kept and a simplicity his own life could never manifest? A fruitful experience, perhaps, but utterly isolated from the typical course of his life.
INstead of reciprocating her well wishes, Alois watched in silence until the door latched behind her. Finally he rose to his feet and padded over to his dresser, where he rifled through the drawers to produce a simple black and grey striped shirt and a pair of black lounge pants. Changing felt difficult, as each stretch exacerbated the festering soreness in his neck and shoulders. With each pained tug, his thoughts broke to the small vial threaded about his neck and the contents therein. With just a single hit...
Sighing, the misanthrope slid into his bed absent nearly all energy. With the covers thrown over his frail form and cocooned up to his neck he sprawled out with his stomach pressed into the sheets and closed his eyes. A heavy ache beat against his eyelids, echoed in his skull, but beyond that the incessant tiredness threatened to overtake even his will. Somehow it hurt to close his eyes, to listen to the ambient settling of the house, to the small feet pattering about downstairs. Was she looking for more vials, or seeking his own secrets?
Would she touch the piano standing as the focal piece in the living room?
A flurry of questions flooded his mind in his last waking moments, from Orah to the Negaverse to his poisonous addiction, but his mind could not sustain such activity for long. Soon sleep overtook any lingering inquiries, and the exhausted misanthrope passed out against the flat pillows, with an eldritch set of nightmares looming just beyond his dreamscapes.
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