Unsuitable

Date: 2/17/2019

This is a backlogged dream from November 23, 2018. There was a futuristic, floating city. People moved through it using portals. The portals were dark, purple vortexes. They looked like whirlpools in the ocean. They looked like miasma in video games. Nobody questioned this. They used them normally. The main character... shifted? It was kind of unclear. For most of it, I think the main character was someone who looked like a teenage girl and was using that fact to their advantage to go undercover. Their goal was to uncover why the magic of the world was “damaged” and why the government was hiding that damage from the general populace. There might have been some other goals, too? Like... solving some missing kid cases? Or murders? Regardless, they started working with a powerful magic user who had been cursed. A mage in the form of a fluffy, little pug mix. A small dog. He’d more or less exiled himself — or been exiled by the government to hide the existence of curses — and only had a few other magical, talking animals as company for many years. He hated most of them. The detective asked for his help, and was refused at first. But things happened, and the mage started to realize that the detective could potentially help cure their curse and help them to teach true, advanced magic to people once again. So, he and one of his talking animal neighbors (a cat? Skunk? Pine marten? Fox? It was fluffy and dark-furred and drove him up the wall, that’s all I know) ended up deciding to help the detective with their case/quest. There was one point when the group went to a weird, magic bog where curses ran rampant. A witch there offered them a raised cabin just above the water and moss of the bog itself, but the catch was that they needed to have someone there to guard the cabin from curses at all times. The neighbor suggested using a spirit, since they had acquired several spirit summoning items. The items were basically half-rolled-up rugs with incense in the rolled-up part. There were 3-5 of them. The detective had to decide which to leave at the cabin and which to take with them. They were trying to decide based on the personalities of the spirits. They left the most annoying one at the cabin along with one other and took the rest with them. The whole ordeal was a lot like arranging things in your pockets in Animal Crossing. It felt weird. At some point, there was a school festival and the detective got too into it cause they were pretending to be a high school girl. Every class was displaying magic creations, but because magic was broken they could only do minor things — not that any of them knew. They just thought that magic was magic, and had regular limits. There was some cool stuff in the show, I wish I remembered it more clearly. The detective was pretty excited to see what their friends made. The pug mix kept getting annoyed. He said they needed to refocus on the case. The detective brushed him off as best they could. By the end of the show, the group had somehow recruited a seemingly random adult man. He looked like a character from a post-apocalyptic setting. He had long hair on his head and lots of facial hair and dark skin and a build like he’d been fighting and practicing martial arts for years. He apparently had some kind of either genuinely or mistakenly criminal past. He didn’t get along super well with anyone in the group. He was awkward with the detective. He was even more annoyed with the neighbor than the mage. The mage tried to, in his own harsh and grumpy way, make the criminal his apprentice. The criminal also had some weird magic curse of some kind, himself. He had abilities, but he didn’t fully understand how to use them and was often interrupted by strange curse consequences that happened out of nowhere. He needed to do something or make some kind of decision and needed to get perspective on it. He went alone, to the tofu farm where he’d been a temporary slave as part of his community service or something. He went to go visit the old couple who’d owned him and had him work on their farm. He went in to their little cottage on the farm and walked in to talk to them. Rather than listening to his problems, however, the old couple kept trying to nag him about their own things. They kept trying to tell him to eat healthier, and to come back to the tofu farm and take over since they were getting old. The wife made food for him, but it was all salad. The old man kept talking over him. The criminal was getting really annoyed, but it also felt like there was some kind of hint about his powers hidden in all this. The old man kept saying that the criminal wasn’t suited to certain things, and that he was really just a lump of muscle and that was his only use. It was... demoralizing. But when he stopped and listened, he thought he might have been starting to understand. The words flashed in his head, repeating themselves. “Not suited” was the key. He was supposed to figure something out with his shapeshifting — which he apparently had. He could become suited to a given task by shifting. He also saw an image of children escaping from somewhere with iron bars, and him being responsible for their escape through his powers. But just as he was about figure it all out, he got a telepathic message from the mage. “You’re using my head as a mic? Asshole!” he complained, holding a hand to his temple to make the connection clearer. The mage seemed unperturbed by the insult, cause this was just... how the criminal acted. But the old lady was less forgiving. “We don’t use that kind of language in this house!” she scolded him, and was promptly ignored. “What do you want?” the criminal growled, looking out the window. He saw the mage and the neighbor (clearly against the mage’s wishes) in a small, radio-controlled car. They were driving up to the little house, with some kind of cargo. They were coming to pick him up and get him back on the case. The conversation continued, but it wasn’t clear or easy to remember as they got closer and closer to the house. That’s when I woke up.