Double Feature - 2/2

Date: 6/17/2017

I had two dreams last night. This post includes a summary of both and the full story of the first. The first involved interdimensional travel (of course, as all my dreams seem to feature that lately), lost love, communication issues, memory loss, cats, kittens, and a terrifying invasion of ants. The second involved a board game, its real life counterpart, demons, contracts, secrets, time travel, and death. The second dream is only slightly clearer in my mind than the first, but again I'll do my best to fill in the gaps where it's needed. This dream began with a group of friends playing a board game that I don't think actually exists in the real world. The game itself was all about racing the clock by working effectively with one's teammates. The Game Master would play the role of several characters as needed -- Targets and Bystanders, who would speak to the main players in order to move the story of the game forward. The players would be representing a group of grim reapers, who had gained their position by making deals with certain demons just before they themselves were supposed to die. The Reapers themselves, in the lore of the game and later on in the dream, had been renamed with numbers (1-5) upon making their deals, according their role in the new squad to which their demon(s) would ultimately assign them. They were then branded with these numbers, white-hot claws digging into their foreheads to permanently scar the numbers into their skin. Each was also given a unique pattern somewhere else on their body by those same claws, to differentiate Ones from other Ones and Threes from other Threes and so on. The newly assigned Reapers gained a few powers. The ability to view human souls as color-coded pillars of fire, the ability to view human intent in whatever ways made sense to them, the ability to manipulate time (to a degree), and most importantly: the ability to summon their demons, in order to harvest the souls which some unknown force had marked for death. The goal of the board game, using this lore as its base, was to use your wits and your powers (as outlined on each player's character cards) to accomplish two distinct tasks. Identify the Target among the Game Master's characters, and summon the appropriate demon(s) to harvest the Target's soul before time ran out. If you accidentally said one of the secret Key Words the Game Master knew for that particular story, or performed one of the other Penalty Actions kept secret by the Game Master, you would be forced to draw a card. A few cards in the deck say either "secret revealed" or "time up." Secret revealed cards refer to humans seeing the Reaper marks or being over-exposed to Reaper powers in such a way that they are able to feel the energy of death that clings to the Reapers at all times. The humans are spooked, the demons have had their contracts violated, and the same thing happens as when a "time up" card is drawn or an incorrect Target is chosen; the demons turn on their Reapers. The players have a chance to fend off the demons until they're able to draw a "reset" card that lets them go back several actions in order to try again. If they fail, their characters are torn apart limb from limb and gruesomely murdered by their demons, who then perform a memory-wipe spell on the remaining Bystanders and depart. I'd really like to find a way to make this into a real board game, because I'm starting to get ideas about how to make this model work with just a few alterations and additions to give it more structure. In the dream itself, the board game portion ended when the Game Master won and the team of Reapers failed to fend off their demons. They were given graphic descriptions of their deaths from a smug GM, and threw their cards angrily on the table. The scene then changed to focus on the characters they had been playing -- the actual, non-game Reapers. Their squad was small. It included a young, thin man with black hair named One; a slightly older, more full-figured man with brown hair named Five; and a girl who looked like she walked straight out of Hot Topic with a thin body and blonde pigtails and a schoolgirl-style pleated skirt and exercise-style short shorts underneath and a Harley Quinn shirt who was always chewing bubblegum named Three. Two and Four were nowhere to be found -- perhaps their demons had eaten them for some transgression or other. The small team had jobs in several places throughout the course of the dream, including a gym and a bar and a hospital, but regularly came back to the same diner again and again for both soul harvesting and squad bonding. In this diner, they repeatedly had extremely close calls -- having to scramble to keep their Reaper status a secret when humans were on the verge of finding them out. They even had to fight off their demons a few times, and Three kept having the same arm forcibly removed from her body each time and refused to let her teammates forget about it. They always managed to reset to the right spot, and fix their mistakes, but they lived in near-constant fear of their demons. One day, Five used his resetting power and sent the squad back too far -- several decades too far. He tried to justify this action by quickly coming up with some kind of convoluted plan to make this time travel work in their favor. He even managed to convince his teammates that the squad could gain something by moving back and forth between those time period and their own. They could learn secrets that would help them with their job. They were successful for awhile, and started to settle into a routine. The only problem was... well, they couldn't quite tell. Something was nagging at the back of their minds, making them jumpy whenever they weren't able to answer a question from a waiter fast enough or said something about an event that hadn't happened yet or felt evening creeping over them from time to time. Something was wrong, and yet they couldn't bring themselves to stop what they were doing. It had helped them too many times, and even saved them from their demons and given them the opportunity to regroup once or twice. It wasn't something they could give up easily. Until the day another Reaper sat down in their booth. He was heavy-set, and always a little smug even when he wasn't saying or doing anything at all. I don't remember his name/number, but whoever he was he had a higher position within the system of Reapers than the main squad did. He worked the details of their misuse of power out of them, and basically threatened to "report" their actions to their demons if they didn't return to their own time. After an encounter with their demons in the past, the squad relented and agreed to stop traveling so far back in time. They would stick to their own time, and all would be well. Except they still used the secrets they had learned in the past. They still relied on that time even after they had left it... and they never took jobs anywhere but at that diner. The regular patrons began to grow suspicious of and uncomfortable around the squad. Their close calls and resets grew closer and closer together, wearing them down until they too became paranoid and jumpy. Their judgment was severely impaired, and it showed. Finally, there came a day when they utterly failed to hide the marks that designated them as Reapers and failed to reset before their demons descended upon them with a swift and deadly force. They were torn apart, a real-life rendition of the gorey description the GM had provided before, and their blood stained deep into the flooring of the diner. The mark of it remained, like an old wine stain, even after the patrons' memories had been wiped and nobody but a ripped apart and battered One was left sitting mournfully in his booth, alone, when I woke up.