Welcome to Gaia! ::

She had not been capable of any kind of coherent communication at first, so it was just as well to let herself inwardly collect her scattered and tumultuous thoughts through the processes of divesting herself of her bag, handing Mel the little treats she'd picked up for both her and Lulu at the farmer's market, requesting a glass of water, and then sitting on Mel's sofa with a numb sense of narrowly-avoided catastrophe, such as we might feel after just managing to swerve and miss a deer on a dark road.

But there had been a catastrophe, hadn't there? Even if it had all turned out all right in the end, she had done something so painfully and stupidly reckless that she was having trouble assigning the action to herself. She really, really needed to get some actual sleep tonight. Real sleep.

"I am so ******** relieved," she said impulsively, at last, "that you are you. I thought I'd really ******** up, for a second."

"I have got to stop skipping sleep," she said grimly, extracting herself from Mel's friendly gesture, but only because she was helping herself to a cookie with one hand and with the other absently bending down to pet Lulu's ears. "I feel like I'm only firing on about two braincells lately and I don't like it. Don't apologize," she added mechanically. "You didn't do anything to apologize for and it's a bad habit to apologize when you haven't done anything to apologize for."

She probably did not need to say that this was exactly the kind of habit that got you persistent exes who did not believe you when you gave a too-gentle "no." But she was thinking it, and she connected it very suddenly to Ekstrom's defense of the Code and its lying, and a sort of internal "ah" flickered to tired life.

"I guess at least I don't have to worry about you being able to defend yourself if it comes down to it," she said, with a dark little laugh.

"Oh god," she said, in a sort of despairing tone. "It's a long ******** story. I found this - thing - these things - on the Garde. I don't know if I can even coherently explain. I've been trying to figure them out - they let you sort of - sort of lucid dream? But I've been working with them because I can't get them fine tuned and Nail is ******** useless as far as they go, so I can't even get any pointers from him. But anyway, I don't think the sleep you get when you're wearing them actually counts."

She gave her a tired, dreary look. "I think I'm pretty close to sorting them out. But it's like having a puzzle you know you're really close to cracking and not being able to put it the ******** down. You know?"

Maybe she didn't know. Elaine had a certain manic stubbornness when it came to that kind of thing that was only occasionally shared by those around her.

"They don't do everything I thought they'd do," she added at last, sounding a little subdued, as if she had in some way been disappointed by what she'd learned. "But they do enough. I need to skip them tonight. I need to skip them the next few nights."

She absently patted Lulu's forehead. "It feels so ******** weird talking about things like this," she said. "Keep having this awful feeling like I've forgotten to unload a gun or something."

"It's fine - it's not the stuff itself, it's the -" she made a vague gesture to herself - her civilian clothes, her civilian hair; doubtless not a familiar way to be dressed when breaching topics of the magical realm.

She paused. "They don't do any of that. That's why I was so confused for so long. I thought for sure they had to like - show you something important. But they don't. I don't think they show you anything you don't already know. The only time they didn't it was something I think I did know and just didn't realize - like, lurking in my subconscious, like s**t does. But I've tested it - like, ******** exhaustively. Like, if I look at a bit of mural in the Garde in the dream that I can't remember, my brain fills it in, but it doesn't fill it in with what's really there when I wake up. It's all sort of - constructed out of your head.

"But," she added, and here she sounded exhausted again, "they do have a purpose. I tried them out with - with a friend I owed a favor to." This was a bit uncomfortable. Had she known Ekstrom to be Mel, she might have asked her, instead. But among other things - expertise, a shared love of old things - she had selected Nis because she had not known whether the experiment might in some way compromise their identities, and at the time, no one else had known her as Elaine. "Anyway, I'd sorta figured it out by then - they let you meet up together and walk around in the dream. But I thought maybe - if you did that - things would be real. I thought for sure you'd get some kinda insight into - reality, or the past, or the future, like you say. But you don't. You're just there. And then I thought -"

She hesitated. There were things that she was still not sharing even with herself, let alone with someone else.

"Well. I thought they might be useful other ways. Anyway, my theory is that - well, the Garde was a peacekeeping institution, you know? And you can't get hurt in the dreams. I tried," she added, with a touch of grimness. "And I've kept trying. You really, really can't. So maybe they were a negotiation tool, to meet people safely on neutral ground. Maybe it was for espionage - sharing information over long distances safely, in a way where you can't be eavesdropped on."

She had said as much to Nis, at least on the first theory. But she paused, now, and added with some reluctance: "I think they were a - a social tool, too. You've been there. You know how there's - romance painted everywhere." She wrinkled her nose. "And back then maybe if you weren't convenient to cosmic or Mauvian tech or whatever maybe it was pretty hard to be apart from someone you loved for a long time. I don't know."

She swallowed, reaching for her water as a convenient excuse to stop talking before she said something she'd regret, about her own expectations and her original theories and how she'd felt when they hadn't panned out.

"You could borrow them," she added. "If you wanted. They're safe, as far as I know. Just don't stop sleeping. Actually - maybe you can help me test something right now. Since we're here. No sleep required."