[[Note: There's a lot of backstory to my char...>.>;; Please forgive the weirdness. Btw, you -did- say nightmare...but I had to curb my R/NC-rated tendancies, so it's not as bad as it could have been. ]]
NC-chan yawned, rather tired from making sure that she hadn’t forgotten to get something (even if only a little something!) for everyone on her mental list. She opened the door to the house she shared with her ‘children’, bracing herself for an impact that never came. Gingerly slipping inside, as it was nippy-cold out, she shrugged out of her coat and threw it onto the nearest chair, already piled with a variety of winter-style clothing and/or gear. The blue-haired girl quickly worked her shoes off, hissing as some feeling returned to her toes, and shuffled into the living room. She smiled, warmed by the cute scene she saw. Byakuya, her Hoof-it, was sitting with the couch as support, asleep on some throw pillows. Lucky, her black-furred Neko, was sleeping on Byakuya’s front legs, spread-eagled as if to try and take up the most room. Dusty, her white-blue mini Efui, was sleeping on Byakuya’s middle, nearly a small ball with his tail hanging down. Agamemnon, her stone dragon, was sprawled near the pile; she finally spotted Graylin, her Lunar Kyn, nearly under the coffee table as well as nearly out of sight. "All sleeping…" she whispered, glad that they weren’t up and fussing at her for being out late.
Rubbing at her eyes, NC shuffled as quietly as she could toward her room, wondering when she’d lost her ability to stay up to all hours of the day. ‘Probably once I decided to stay here and started getting regular sleep.’ For NC was a planeswalker, and an experienced one at that. She’d found Gaia to be a world -full- of nexies, portals to other worlds…and with so many different people mingling, nobody seemed to mind anybody else. Still…old habits died hard; once she closed the door to her room, she let her body shift back to it’s natural shape. Lith, lightly muscled frame, grey-silver fur, complete with ears and tail, her bizarre mutation of one blue eye, one green eye, and what most would consider fantasy demon/dragon wings. Since she usually only wore clothes that would look okay when she shifted back and forth, she didn’t see the need to strip now, noting that it wasn’t all that warm in here compared to the living room. Just as she was going to flop down, she sighed as she noticed who was occupying the bed. With some wrangling, she pulled one of the fleece blankets out from under Loz, her Fox Sushi, and Aquapolis, her Nacryn, a sort of cat with a tail light, and then crawled in between them, one wing covering each as she lay on her stomach, the blanket covering her lower half haphazardly while she buried herself in the pillows. Once she was comfortable, she dropped off to sleep.
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She was on a wide plain, long grasses blowing in the breeze. ‘This is odd.’ To her, it looked like the color had been sucked from the landscape, turning everything into a black and white movie. She shivered as a gust of cold brushed her back. “Guys, what’s going on?” Her words were muffled, not even echoing like they usually did whenever she met her other personalities in the realm of dreams. Something was wrong, and it made her nervous. The few times it had been quiet like this, a few of the darker personas had gotten together and tried ambushing her, as she was the strongest, thus the one usually in charge of the body. It had only happened once since she’d been staying on Gaia; Byakuya had been thoroughly frightened to find her in bed covered in her own blood, looking worse for wear. NC let her tail swish back and forth, showing her agitation, and made as if to start walking into the grass from the small clearing she was in.
An unspoken command to stop caused her to pause and mentally try and trace where that had come from. Before she could go far along that route, the landscape shivered and then collapsed, as if each and every piece had been long since burned and turned to ash, and only now was it dissolving from their earlier forms. Something was really wrong; and the fact that she couldn’t quite put her finger on it was starting to scare her. She stared at the empty and barren land, finally noticing the encroaching darkness coming from behind her that seeped into the grayness and dissolved even -that- into true nothingness. Utter fear froze her in place, back still to the darkness. “No,” she whimpered, her mind skipping back to another place and time, another brutal battle where she had nearly lost friends, as well as her sense of self. Her powers had changed, mutated, into a more powerful form, and it had warped her mind nearly beyond her control, shedding morals and intimate connections without abandon. She had won that battle, at that time, though her friends had been saved due to the efforts of another, and she had left that place, traveling for who knows how long, until she’d woken up one day to find herself in a place she didn’t know and with no knowledge on how to get back, fully in control of her senses. Of course, she’d known what she was missing, but knew there was no real way to get them back, time having passed.
With all this in mind, she couldn’t help but finally turn around, mind running in circles like a frightened rabbit, screaming at her that she wasn’t prepared for this, that she hadn’t been paranoid enough. What she saw…was a cloud, a presence, of nothing but seething, living shadows, with the suggestion of blades and other sharp objects moving about in it. The shear -aura- it was throwing off reminded her of only one thing, something she had handled sparingly on other worlds, though never on Gaia; Void. Nothing else could be so cold, so deathly quiet because it ate sound, light, heat, and most likely thought. This wasn’t something she could fight on her own; her soul couldn’t tap into what would be needed to even slow this down, much less contain it. The back of her mind whispered that it was only a dream, but she’d never encountered something like this here, and it scared her. Her form rippled, becoming more of a cross between a dragon and her fur form, deep blue armor forming over the backs of her wings and then across the rest of her, ending with a face bracer that kept her grey-white hair back from her face. If this was here, where had it come from? And had it followed her from somewhere else?
As if seeing her become a bit distracted, a shadowy tentacle lashed out, wrapping itself around a leg and ankle. The cold instantly sank in, right through the armor, causing her to scream in pain as the muscles in that leg locked up, the cold making all the bones in that leg conduct the extreme temperature upward. The sound of herself screaming echoing loudly snapped her awake, and left her briefly wondering what was going on.
The cold wasn’t as biting, but was still very real, wrapped around leg and ankle -under- the blanket. Flopping over and mentally apologizing to Loz and Aqua in case she hit them, she stared at what was sitting at the foot of her bed, taking up space and pinning Loz and Aqua to the bed with shadowy tentacles, it’s seeming attention currently on Will, the little shadow that had hatched from an egg she’d bought herself back at Halloween time, having the shadow demon mini pinned to the wall with a bigger piece of shadow than either of her other two ‘children’, as well as the one it was using to keep the door to her room shut. Pounding and shouting was shortly heard from the other side, the door wavering from the mini war being waged by everyone else outside the room verses the tentacle of the shadow monster.
Fear turned to anger as she woke up fully, rage rising as something was threatening her ‘family’ and thought it could get away with it. With a heave, she slapped her right hand onto the sword she kept next to the bed (pays to be paranoid!), grasped it, and slammed the edge onto and through the shadow tentacle wrapped around her ankle. To her surprise, she did meet resistance, cutting through shadowy flesh with a wet plop and sinking the blade into the mattress and blankets beneath it. The eyeless ‘head’ turned toward her and a gaping maw appeared, consisting of nothing but broken and rusty blades. It silently screamed, mentally blasting it’s pain outward; NC dropped her grip on the blade as she fell back, trying to curl up against the pain despite the futility and screaming in return. Will, however, seemed to be unaffected, and slipped loose from the confining shadow tentacle, helping the others get the door open.
Light flashed on; the nightmarish being coalesced and flinched, no longer having any place to hide. Dusty, having scrambled to NC’s side, to keep an eye on the thing and protect her (despite his size), suddenly shouted, “Displacer beast!” pointing with one paw at the nightmare. It could almost be mistaken for one, as the main body was rather cat-like, shadowy tentacles coming from it’s shoulders; however, it had blades for claws, no discernable eyes or eye sockets, and it’s back sported a row of spine-blades, shadowy tentacles running down either side of the blades as well as coming out of it’s sides and ‘neck’.
Once they were sure NC was okay, everyone else herded the beast into one of the other rooms, one that usually was used as a nursery due to having plenty of unbreakable lights. Just so that their effort wouldn’t be put to waste, NC-chan managed to wobble over (with lots of help) and ‘seal’ that room. “I think…we’re going to need some help dealing with that thing…” Running a hand through her hair, she sighed and leaned on Lucky. Looking at Will, who was floating around and trying to silently be helpful, she gave a wry smile. “And I think I know who to go ask…but first, I need sleep.” She made a face as Byakuya picked her up and deposited her on the couch, the smaller members of her ‘family’ all clambering up on her or next to her to be nearby, in reassurance that it was okay to sleep. With all the warm, fuzzy bodies nearby, their heartbeats in her ears, NC drifted into a deep sleep, one that would hold until morning.
[[ sweatdrop Dusty's been reading too much D&D...and yes, NC's paranoid enough to have swords next to the bed. <.<; Being ambushed by your nemesis in bed several times on different worlds will do that to you. Oh, and 3 pages typed. XD ]]
