2014.11.6:Awakening The Goddess Within

Awakening The Goddess Within
Stephanie takes that first fateful step into a greater Reality
IC Date	November 5, 2014
IC Time	Night
Players	Stephanie, Maz, Kylara
Location	Canyon Park Crossroads Apartment 305 / The depths of Stephanie's psyche

Begin Log

It's Wednesday evening. In an effort to get her head on straight, Stephanie is burning through her vacation days so she can spend time at home. She had a long talk with Kylara on Saturday morning, and a long talk with Maz on Monday. Now here it is Wednesday evening. She's invited both of them to her place, and currently finds herself pacing the living room nervously as she waits for them both to arrive.

The sound of a key being inserted into the door's lock is the first indicator of an arrival. The door opens and Kylara steps through, smiling at Stephanie as she closes the door behind her. "Hey," she greets the other woman with a smile. "Your message just said to come over and not be late or else," she says as she takes off her jacket. "What's up, babe?" she asks, making her way over to the taller woman.

Maz walks in, wearing one of those weird V for Vendetta type masks. "Surprise!" she calls out, as she starts tossing Christmas crackers (the British party favour, not the food) at you both. She lifts up her mask and smirks. "I'll have you lovely bitches know its Guy Fawkes Day today, and I am missing out on some truly freaky Guy Fawkes Day sex with my man. Who truly appreciates that sort of thing. So deep is my abiding friendship, and yadda yadda oh my Goddess, I'm still kind of stoned. Can I raid your fridge, please?"

"Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot." Stephanie grins, "Well... I wanted to spend some time with both of you. Together. Plus Maz had an idea the other day and I wanted to discuss that with both of you too." Considerate hostess that she is, she's got a bowl of chips out on the coffee table already, but Maz's question gets her a, "Sure, my larder is your larder."

Kylara frowns, giving a questioning look to both Maz and Stephanie at the obscure references, then just shrugs and shakes her head. "Well, I don't know what any of that really is," she says as she decides to take a seat on the couch. "I mean, sure, I saw the movie, but the mask and the poem don't click," she explains. "You're getting convoluted again, babe," she says with a soft chuckle as she reaches for some chips.

Maz blinks for a moment, and then nods. "Ooooooh. Oh. Wow. Seriously, just wow. I think I know where this is going. Neeeeaaat. Hey Kylara..." She offhandedly waves and heads into the kitchen, and begins to poke around, occasionally calling out, "Oh my Goddess woman, I think I've died and entered the promise land. Which is in your freezer, yeh?" She then pokes her head out, and gives Kylara a look, "Oh my Goddess, seriously, Ky? Guy Fawkes Day? When the Catholic extremist tried to blow up the Parliament building with gunpowder in 17yaddayadda?" She shakes her head, "You Americans." At this she gives a snort and a giggle, goes back to the fridge, and says, "Alright. Cool, yeh. I'm glad you decided to at least consider my idea, Stephy."

Stephanie paces a little more, then settles down on the middle of the sofa, grabbing a handful of chips and cramming them rather unceremoniously into her face. Yeah, she's definitely on edge. In fact, there's... palpable tension in the room, impinging on the mystic senses of both other women present... though it's hazy and undefined and seems to permeate the home rather than centre on any one thing or person.

Kylara cranes her neck around to look in Maz's direction as the woman raids the fridge. "Yeah, well, history was never my strong point," she says in response. "Had a hard enough time trying to learn my own history, thanks." She turns back to face forward, grabbing a small handful of chips for herself, though she only has one at a time. "Okay, now I know I'm clearly completely out of the loop," she says, sighing. "But I imagine you two will let me in on it when you're both good and ready." She finishes off the small handful of chips and brushes her hands clean. "Steph. Babe," she says, reacting to the taller woman's obvious tenseness. "What's up?

Maz drifts out of the kitchen, lasciviously sucking on a yoghurt tube in a way that borders on obscene. "Omhigherdes," she mumbles, mouth half full. "Seriously, have you two tried this yoghurt? Its like being tonguefucked in the mouth by...like an awesome cloud." She approaches closer, looks at Steph. Around her. Even through her. Reaches into her pocket and pulls out a large 1910 gold eagle coin. Flips it, catches it in the air as it flies off with a *ping!zzzzzzzzzxxip*. Lets it dance throughf and over her fingers as she studies the patterns. Starts to sort of sway, moving slowly, as if doing some kind of Tai Chi kata, as she looks around the room, and then back to Stephanie."

Oh...oh babe. It is heavy and momentous in this room right, and your patterns are all looking extra....."

Thirty seconds later...

"...interesting. You are close, I think. Way close, We should probably do it tonight, Maybe even now. I can gently put you to sleep, if you wanted to."

Wow...she's jumping rather quick here...

Stephanie blinks at Maz and sighs a little, "Whoa... let's tap gently on the brake pedal and at least let Kylara catch up." She turns to Ky, "So I've been having these dreams lately right, the Goddess dreams? Were you here when we were talking about those? Anyway, they've been getting more and more intense, especially since Hallows' Eve." She wipes her hands on her jeans. "Um... Maz was suggesting she could slip into my dreams and observe them, maybe help me get a handle on what's going on with this 'waking up' thing she keeps going on about." She reaches out and grabs both of Ky's with her own, giving them a squeeze before looking over at Maz. "I've decided that's a great idea, but only if three conditions are met: One, you can bring Kylara along. Two, Kylara agrees to coming along. And three, I don't want to be lucid during it, I'm almost certain that'll skew the results. I'd love to be able to remember it when I wake up, but the dream itself should play out like it would if you two weren't there." She looks from one woman to the other, chewing ever so gently on her lower lip, sweat standing out on her brow and her palms in Kylara's hands clammy and moist.

Kylara blinks and frowns as she looks down at Stephanie's hands in hers and then back up to the other woman's face. "I still don't even know what...this is," she says. She looks over at Maz. "I'm not agreeing to anything until I know exactly what the hell is going on." Winter in Antarctica is warmer than this woman's voice right now. "No convoluted allegories, no waxing poetic. I want straight answers."

Maz flops down next to you both and slowly suckles on her yogurt tube in thought. Licks her lips and says, "A'ight. Here's the score then, in simple talk, yeh? Stephy is on the cusp of going from doing the sort of low level static magic the two of you practice, to understanding the underlying true nature of Reality, in such a way that she will be able to warp it to her desires. With all the power and danger and responsibility that entails. We are taking serious red pill territory here." She pauses, "Oh wait. Was it blue? Cant remember, i was like twelve, you know? When that movie came out...anyhow, it sounds like her Avatar, the piece of the divine soul, for lack of a much better term, inside that makes it possible is about to emerge at last. Peeping her dreams would help us understand where she's at in the process. How close. And yeah, I can keep all those promises, Stephy. Easy peasy."

"It was the red pill... blue pill was 'go back to sleep'." She smiles wanly over at Ky, "I want to share this with you... I... well... Like I told Maz when she brought it up, dreams are way intensely private... Even at my most casual I never peeped on someone else's dreams." She squeezes Ky's hands again, then takes one hand and squeezes Maz's too. "I need to understand what's going on with me, but... if I'm going to let people into my dreams, it's both of you or neither."

Kylara listens intently as Maz answers the question, nodding once or twice, eyebrow raising on a point or two. When Maz is done, Kylara lets out a long slow, pensive breath. "Why didn't you and Stephanie just say that, then?" she asks, the frustration evident in her voice. She turns her attention back to Stephanie, giving a squeeze in return. "Okay, babe, now that I know what's going on, sure. I agree." She smiles, the smile fading a little as she notices Stephanie take Maz's hand, too. "Wait, you said what Steph and I do is...like rookie stuff?" she asks, eyes widening a bit. "You mean like real fantasy magic stuff? Gandalf and Merlin and all that crap?"

Maz sucks up the rest of the yoghurt, and then carelessly tosses away tne wrapper. "Merlin? Sure, yeh, for starters. I'm talking Jesus level water to wine and walking on water. I'm talking Hercules and Archimedes. Baba Yaga and Thor and Krishna..." She smirks, "Its all kinda cool, really." She claps her hands together. "Right then, Stephy, is you just want to lie down ans get comfy, we can get started." She then laughs, "Goddess, look at me, acting like this is a gyno exam. Really, I am totally jazzed right now to be doing this. Its exciting. This is a very exciting time!"

"I don't think it's rookie stuff, really... Maz was saying I can casually do stuff now that I'm going to struggle for maybe years to relearn doing it the other way. It's just, ya know, different." She gives Maz a 'Help me out here' look. "Anyway, um, bed. I'm going to get into bed the way I usually do, and you two are gonna join me... you can do the cities or whatever you call them lying down, right?" She flashes Maz a grin as she levers herself to her feet without letting go of either woman's hand.

Kylara purses her lips and whistles silently as the full implications of Maz's additional answer start to sink in. "Holy crap," she whispers. She remains silent, just nodding, the expression on her face one of a person half in a daze, whic is possibly understandable given that almost everything that Kylara has been told was immutable just...isn't. "Uh, yeah, sure, hon," she mumbles, finding herself getting to her feet and being led wherever.

"Siddis. Sid-ease. Yeh. I mean, I need to dash off to my car, get a few extra ritual bits and bobs, but we can be good soon. Might be best if you slept, and Ky and I sat. And...as for explanations...its...um...kind of like trading in one very nice spanner for an entire huge toolbox. It takes a while to learn how to use them all effectively, a while to find that one spanner again. You can summon yourself up a nice lunch, and leave it at that. I can't cook anything without first rewriting the laws of thermodynamics. Harder to more quickly explain it better than that...

And so a few minutes she's back again, setting up candles and incense cones in the bedroom. As if she was drawing a circle, with the bed in the middle...

By the time Maz returns, Stephanie has gotten herself undressed and either stripped Ky or cajoled her into doing it herself. Stephanie lies in the middle of the bed. She's changed the bedding just today, fresh silk sheets, these ones a rich, vibrant blue rather than the black they usually sport. "Silly," she tells Maz, "If I'd known that's what you wanted, I've got a whole trunkful of stuff like that in the closet for my own ritual-work."

Kylara sits cross-legged on the bed on one side of Stephanie, hands resting on her knees. She blushes bright red as she only belatedly realizes that this will be the first time Maz has even seen her nude. "Wow, these are...to be honest, babe, these are a lot better than those black ones." She shivers and shrugs. "Something about black just...doesn't sit right with me."

Maz glances over to the sheets and smiles, reaching out to touch them. "Mmmmmmm...niiiice." She spends a little more time petting the bedding before she remembers herself. "Yeh, but I need *MY* stuff, right? Not all candles and created equal." She smirks and then starts to strip down, "Hell, since we're going all starkers here. Good symbolism, for dreamwalking." She starts to light the candles as she places them, touching flame to incense cones to start them smouldering.

"Oh my Goddess, right Ky? We should plan a nice night to break them in, the three of us....ah...I mean...if you're alright with that. Getting ahead of myself here..."

Stephanie reaches up and tugs on Ky's shoulder a little, "Lie down, silly. If you two are gonna be inside my head, I want you in my arms too, all nice and snugglied up." She smiles over to Maz, "Yeah, point... I couldn't just grab someone else's athame and start working with it either."

Kylara goes even redder at Maz's comment. She laughs softly, a bit nervously even, and shrugs. "Never know what might happen, right?" she says to Maz, then turns to Stephanie, chuckling and nodding. She slips under the covers to lay down next to the younger woman, cuddling up right against Stephanie's nude form.

Maz smiles down at you both. "Okay. So...just to give you an idea...Stephanie, I'm going to put you to sleep, gently. At the same time, I'm going to draw the siddis around us, and form kind of a...gestalt conciousness. I'll be the guide, Kylara will come along for the ride. We'll interact passively with your dreams, just asking a few queries and peaking around. No...summoning up ephemera, or changing the ongoing dynamics of your dreamspace. I'm...not entirely certain what to expect, so Ky, when we're in there, you stay close, yeh? No matter what, that's really important, although I should be able to cut and run us both out if something...gets sticky in there. But really, I'm not too worried."

She takes a draw off her hash oil pen, holding it in and breathing the vapor out, "Pleasant dreams, babe?" she murmurs to Stephanie, before kissing her lips. She offers it to Ky, who can take a hit, or just leave it. Either way, Maz would crawl into bed, and begin to slowly, softly chant in Sanskrit, varying the tone and the lilt in her voice, as if she were singing a lullabye.

Kylara nods as Maz ticks off the list of dos and don'ts, her demeanour very much that of a soldier about to undertake a mission or, more appropriately, a cop about to execute a raid. She shakes her head in a silent, but polite, rejection of the pen.

Stephanie accepts the kiss happily. She snuggles in between the two smaller women, gathering each in so that her modest breasts become their pillows, her hands resting lightly on the smalls of their backs. The magic and the drug combine to calm and sooth her jangling nerves and, just like that it seems, she's not only asleep but sliding rapidly toward REM.

The words swirl around them, droning and droning on. There is an odd feeling of the very air in the room twisting and warping. The weft and wave of reality itself being gently, slowly pulled back, and then reweaving into a new pattern, a small pocket of reality far more amenable to what is required.

---

Kylara hears words, burbling out of the darkness as she regains awareness within the dreamspace.

"The nice thing about working in dreams and in the mind is that we're largely immune to the weight of the Consensus. In dreams, so much can be accepted, and written...because it's all a dream, yeh?"

She stands in front of Kylara, but looks far...different. The six arms she now sports are the big kicker. The slight blue tint to her skin. She is draped in silks and gems, and gold chains, although her breasts are largely bared. She's standing in front of a white door, hanging there in the perfect blackness.

"So then, Alice? Ready to step through the Looking Glass, then?"

The door uh...just suddenly became a big mirror. Last minute change in symbolic paradigm and representation, apparently.

As the mirror forms so does a room. It could be the bedroom of any white suburban teen-aged girl in the US or UK - posters on the walls, a laptop on the desk, a girl asleep in the pink frilly bed. Of course, because this is weird dream logic, the room is only in the mirror, a reflection of something that isn't truly there apparently. Do the dream travelers dare the portal?

The Kylara standing in the dreamspace also looks quite different. Her hair, eyes, body, all of that is the same. What's different though, are her her clothes. She is dressed head to toe in maille, the links gleaming with a pure, white light. As one's eyes grow accustomed to the brightness, it becomes possible to see rents in the armour here and there; a sleeve that looks as if it's being held on by only a few beat-up links, a slash in the armour across the lower chest, several others on her thighs and calves. But, battered and bruised - yes, even a bruise or two and one angry red scar on her cheek - as she is, she still radiates the aura of a warrior determined to struggle to the end, ready to uphold her ideals even if, especially if, it means her doom.

She looks at the room in the mirror, then at Maz, and, stepping close to the Goddess-Maz, as Kylara thinks of her, nods. "Ready."

On the proper side of the mirror, it reflects the room the pair find themselves in. It does not, however, reflect the duo themselves, apparently they're slightly out of sync with the dreamscape. The girl in the bed sits up as the alarm starts going off, then peels herself out of the bed. Both women have, by now, seen the yearbook photo that forms the core of her self-image, so her appearance isn't as shocking as it otherwise might be. 13. Spots. Frizzy hair. Braces. Headgear (which she removes as she's getting up).

The pair are able to observe her for the moment, getting up and presumably getting ready for school. She pauses as she looks in the mirror and says something to herself about today being 'the day'. She digs a sheaf of printed papers out of her dresser drawer and goes over them, taking some little containers out as well. She leaves them on the vanity while she goes to shower. The two can see the containers have some sort of cosmetics in them, something hand-made from the look of things, and the papers are apparently scans from an old text, the header being 'A Spelle To Wyn The Maydins Hart.' Ah, the good old days, when so few people were literate that spelling was a hobby rather than a rule.

Kylara lets out a short breath along with a shake of the head. "So that's how she started, I guess," she murmurs, more to herself than anyone else. She takes care to stay close to Goddess-Maz as both she and the other woman watch Stephanie.

The ongoing "defensive effect" kicks in, shifting Maz and Kylara back into more 'fitting' forms within the local paradigm. Decked out in casual clothes fitting to the time period. "Oh Goddess. I'm starting to remember how much I hated secondary school, all of the sudden."

She pokes curiously, here and there, looking at some of the spells and papers, but otherwise staying completely out of Dream-Stephanie's way.

"Amazing what you can accomplish with static magic, all the same." She murmurs quietly, and then sniffs curiously at the handmade beauty supplies.

They smell mostly of paraffin and roses, one of the pots containing what is clearly meant to be used to stain the lips red. In amongst the containers is also a scrap of paper with a girl's signature on it... in the otherness of the dreamstate that is clear though it wouldn't be in reality, as it could just as easily have been written by Stephanie herself. But here, it glows faintly to the two travellers, a faint silver band expanding out from it to tether it back to the person who wrote it. Now that they know what to look for, they also find a small snippet of honey blonde hair in a small plastic box in amongst the things, also tethered by a silver thread back out into the world. The name is Heather Marshall. It's about now that the two hear the shower shut off.

Kylara takes note of the bits and bobs, nodding. "Makes sense. A love spell. At thirteen." She sighs, a sound of sorrow and heartache. She restrains herself from wanting to reach out and hug Dream-Steph. She knows enough to know that she's way in over her head.

Maz pulls out a notebook from nowhere in particular and starts to take notes. She purses her lips, twitching them in thought. "Huh. Yeh...yeh. Oh. That's clever. First time I've ever had, to study static magic with the aid of a dreamtime context. I'm actually learning a thing or two here at the moment." She scribes down a few more thins, following the silver threads. "Huh...some akashic resonance here...sort of a sideways...correspondence point but wait...not really. Oh boy, this stuff must drive the Ironminds absolutely raving mad. Or...they just deal with it as the cost of keeping the dynamic stuff down, yeh?"

When Dream-Stephy steps out, Maz just makes sure to act casual, to not get in her way, and just observe. She gives a knowing glance to Kylara.

The spell itself was more or less unreadable to the dream-observers, like text in a video game that wasn't meant to be read it was just squiggles on the page. Young Steph seems to have no problems with it though. As she gets herself ready to go, she uses the hand-made cosmetics in lieu of anything store bought, chanting a little rhyme in 'dog latin' as she applies the items. A foundation layer conceals all but the worst of her blemishes just mundanely, and the lip stain is applied as well as Kohl for eyes. She even tames down her flyaway hair and greases it with a sort of pomade. At the end she lights a candle and takes the piece of paper with the girl's name on it, wraps it around the hair, and thrusts both into the candle flame. "She thrice named mine shall be," she says softly, "Heather Marshall. Heather Marshall. Heather Marshall." There's a flare of light as the hair and paper burn in a way that hair and paper ordinarily do not, and the two observers are able to see a kind of double-image of the girl. Someone okay looking who has made an effort to look better is the base level, but overlaid on that is presumably what her victim will see, with rosy cheeks and warm kissable lips and unblemished skin and vibrant eyes, her imperfections swept under the rug as it were. The last piece of the puzzle is those thin silver threads that once connected the signature and hair to their distant maker now are pink and tethered to Teen-Steph's chest, right about where her heart would be.

Kylara swallows, nostrils flaring a little, her breathing getting a little quicker. "This must be what she did to me," she thinks. Or does she say it? Or both? She frowns in thought at the change in colour of the strands. "What does that mean, Maz?"

Maz mmmmms. "No...this is the early stuff. The toy magic. This is how it starts, yeh? She needed more and more of the trappings, the foci, needed to play more and more by the game rules, in order to pull off what she could. Time goes on, her mind becomes more...saturated with it, understands more. Is able to do more, bound by fewer fetters. Blimey...in a way, she's been struggling to Awaken since she was thirteen...I think.

She turns to face Kylara. "If I had to take a guess, I'm going to say that we're about to take a trip down the one, long Fate-strand that's leading up to...the End. The Beginning. This must be what I was sensing a little while back. Coin flipping, I was...ah..reading the local Fate, as it were. Lets follow her. Lets follow the thread. Something tells me that when we get to the end of it....something massive is going to happen.

She smiles at it though, "Something wonderful. We just need to see how far it unspools on its own. Might be she needs a little push, after all."

In that way that dreams do, the scene shifts and time passes as soon as she steps out the door to the bedroom. Now she's an older teen, braces gone, hair still messy but in that careful way she likes it to be, still not sporting the purple contacts yet. Her complexion has cleared up and her body has filled out, all that wonderful stuff. She's again in front of a mirror, they're apparently a motif now, and the mirror still reflects that spotty 13 year old as she touches up her make-up. She reaches for her special make-up, then stops, using the store-bought stuff instead, smiling brightly, almost skipping when she heads out.

Again there's a scene-flip/time-skip and she's on a date, at a drive-in movie with an older woman with black hair and a faint Eastern European accent. They're not watching the movie, of course, they're too busy with one another. Another brief scene-flip to them making love in a nice apartment that dream-knowledge tells the pair belongs to the woman. And then a final skip.

The two are in Steph's room in her parents' house again, once more standing in front of the vanity mirror. Stephanie swipes several containers of her special make-up out of Ilya's hand, holding them like they're burning her. Their voices are distorted, loud and angry but incomprehensible, but it's clear they're having a row about them.

Kylara watches intently, struggling a bit to keep up with the rapid shifts in time and space. She holds back another sigh, her lips in a thin line as recognition starts to dawn on her who this older woman might be. Once the scene shifts to Steph's room again, Kylara is certain. As she watches the events unfold, as her certainty grows, her image wars with the defensive measures Maz put up earlier, the warrior trying to break free. When Steph swipes the cosmetics out of Ilya's hand, Kylara starts to take a step forward, her manner and stance that of someone ready to commit focussed, directed violence.

Just watching. Just nodding. Understanding and processing. "S'what she meant when she said she still only saw herself from the beginning. Poor girl. Never realized she was already becoming the woman she wanted to be." Maz then pauses. "Or...was that magic use changing her. Changing herself?" She taps her lips in thought, and starts mumbling to herself, treating all of this like some sort of safari. "Is it possible that she had used the magic so often, her own nascent Avatar was changing her, slowly but surely. Huh."

She holds out an arm in Kylara's way. "Don't. These are all the sins and secrets that are her past. There's nothing to change, and she doesn't want us trying. Disrupting anything out of what her subconscious is currently expecting could cause her to wake up. And then we're back to square one, yeh?"

Words are shouted and gestures made, but these are focusing power rather than simply continuing the row. Shadows loom up around Stephanie, seeming to reach for Ilya, who looks concerned at first, then distressed, and then the shadows touch her and distress turns to panic as she flees the room. The shadows flee at the same time, apparently taking Stephanie's own shadow with them.

More jumps take place, the girl now a young woman. Another confrontation with Ilya, less unbalanced this time, a more even fight, as the other woman conjures flames to counter Stephanie's darkness. They fight to more or less a standstill until mundane authorities show up to investigate and they both flee. The next skip finds Stephanie on the road, driving that dilapidated Oldsmobile of hers through Los Angeles' rush hour before breaking free and continuing (in much less time than it really takes) to Prospect. Stephanie's apartment forms around the three, as she stands in front of the big mirror that hangs on the back of her bedroom door, again seeing her 13 year old self reflected in it, the faintest hints of the other women just barely visible in the glass as she says, softly, "No. That's not me. Not anymore." Her hands gesture and darkness ripples out from them, coating the mirror in shiny blackness as she steps forward into the unknown.

Kylara is stopped my Maz's arm, but seemingly more from the surprise of Maz reaching out rather than any true impediment. "It's not right!" she hisses softly to the woman holding her back. The warrior image almost does break through, but the smaller woman appears to accede to an argument raging inside her own head. The image of the warrior recedes, but does not fade. It's almost as if the warrior agrees to remain hidden. For now.

Kylara's attention returns once more to the scene playing out, feet planted solidly shoulder width apart when the shadows flow out from Dream-Stephanie, like she's bracing herself for an assault but willing to stand her ground. The defensive stance wavers, then she relaxes completely at Dream-Stephanie's declaration.

Maz murmurs, "It wasn't right. We aren't in Time, we're in Memory. Although...Memory is realy just he mark Time leaves on us. But...okay, no time for deep philosophy right now. Wow. I mean, she told me some of this stuff, probably told you more. Fascinating. Seeing all she's been through. Everything that's leading up to the end point. Like her whole life was preparing her for something.

She starts to lead Kylara towards the blackened mirror. "Welp, c'mon babe. This is where things probably start to get....interesting."

Blackness engulfs the travellers for a brief moment as they step through the glass 'doorway' to find themselves on a brightly lit field. Sun shines down from above, the sky's a perfect azure, the grass perfectly emerald. Stephanie is ahead now, looking as she did in the real world when she went to sleep, long blonde hair loose around her head and naked. At the top of a nearby hill is a temple, Greek architecture, but it's in ruins. No... not ruins, unfinished. Still being built. Craftswomen swarm over it moving marble bits here and there, as naked as Stephanie herself is. Stephanie is striding purposefully toward it at first, covering ground faster than her observers can. But then suddenly she stops. A slow-moving stream crosses her path, and she pauses beside it, kneeling to look down into its mirror-like surface, allowing the others to catch up, to once more see the young girl in the reflection.

Maz looks up at the temple and smiles to herself. "Well...I'll be gobsmacked. I'm a better teacher than I thought." She then heads over to Stephanie, glancing at her curiously, this way and that, Ponders her next time, and mmmms. Focuses, until suddenly, she looks like Maz, only at age fifteen. School uniform and the like from some crappy secondary school in South London. She just comes up to the woman and says, in a more pronounced version of her Estuary Accent. "Hey Stephy. So was' all 'is den?" As she waves over towards the reflection. Hoping that Stephanie's sleeping mind will accept her as a part of the dream itself, a piece of Stephanie's subconscious made manifest

Even asleep, Stephanie brightens at the sight of Maz, smiling, shaken from her reverie by her greeting. "Oh, hey Mazing." She steps up and steals a quick kiss on the cheek, then looks up at the temple again. Her lips tip down into a frown and she just kind of stands there, looking from Maz to the temple and back again, at least she's not looking at her 'reflection' anymore.

Kylara stays where she is, observing, frowning, not sure what to do, and so she decides to keep on keeping on, for the moment. She moves closer to the other two to peer down at the water, then back up at the temple and finally back at Stephanie. Head cocked to one side, she starts to smile, a hopefuly little expression, soft and tender.

Maz crosses her arms and smiles, giving a gentle kiss in return. She cants her head towards the temple. "So they're building tha' for yeh. You've been building it a while now. So ah...so wha's holdin' ya back from going there, sweetness?" She cant help but glance back at the stream, reflexively

Stephanie's eyes are drawn by Maz's glance down to the stream again, and the observers experience another of those weird dual-representation moments. They still see the stream as they have since arriving, shallow, narrow, placid But they can also see it presumably as Stephanie herself does, as a vast river, at least a hundred feet across. Very deep, turbulent near the middle but placid enough at the banks to be able to see her 'reflection' in it. She speaks to Maz without looking at her. "It's too far," is all she says.

Kylara remains silent nearby, listening, watching, not wanting to do anything to disturb the two. She'd tried to alter herself like Maz had, but all she felt was the veil start to lift. She dropped that idea straight away, not wiling to risk an adult her suddenly appearing in Steph's dream. Though she remains obscured to Stephanie and the other dream constructs, with the exception of Maz of course, her warrior self is back in full. She just can't hide who she is. She sighs, wishing she had Maz's talents right about now. She looks around, trying to see if Steph's dream-mind might have hidden something Steph could use to cross the river.

Maz makes a kind of tching noise, glancing over to Ky, before glancing back. "All a matter of perspective, isn' i' babe? Its just a little hop, skip and jump for me." And so she does hop, skip, and jump straight over the little stream. She waves and smiles. "C'mon Stephy. There's cute girls at the temple, yeh? Does it still look too far? Tell me, can the world really have two skies? Or does it have every sky imaginable, and you only see the one you want?

As if the punctuate the point, the sky rolls through so many possibilities. Red, purple, polkadot. Starry. White and stark. Black and featureless. It eventually settles back, and Maz says, "My sky is..I think...just a tinier bit more pink than yours..."

She almost misses Maz's 'miraculous' leap across the tiny little stream, but the changing sky draws her attention far more fully than that. She gasps, blinking a little at all the swirling colour and brightness changes, and before she can really stop herself she's wading across the shallow water, barely getting as deep as her knees before she steps out on the other bank. She stops again and looks back at the water, "It... doesn't look so far from this side."

Kylara lets out a sigh of relief as she watches both Maz and Stephanie cross unharmed. She follows, but almost as soon as she steps away from the bank, she finds the current tugging powerfully at her legs. Still, it's shallow, so she plows on only to find she's up to her waist, struggling to stay on both both feet. Committed, she pushes forward against the swiftly flowing current, her maille weighing her down. She's not about to discard it, though; to d so would be to discard an arm or a lung. The water level rises, higher and higher, until only her chin is above water. Resolutely, she forces herself forward, step by step, determined to be there to witness this for Stephanie. Suddenly, she stumbles, the current having subsided and the level of the water having dropped to her knees. Dripping wet, she staggers up the other side of the embankment. Another sigh of relief, this time at making it across the river.

She doesn't notice that the rents in her armour have been repaired, nor that the bruises are gone and the scars, though still present, show signs of long-term healing.

Maz glances over toward Kylara and smiles, "Well well...look at you. Bru' force of will. Tis a thing to behold, yeh?" She nudges Stephanie, and points to Kylara, "You see that? She did that. For you. So, you think you're ready to try for the temple again? Or...."

She leaves so much hanging and unsaid from that point.

Stephanie's eyes are drawn to Ky, noticing her for the first time. Her smile for the older woman is just as bright as the one Maz got earlier. "Hey, Ky... wow... nice maille... who's your tailor?" Her mind seems to take the woman's appearance in stride, just adding her along for the ride. She looks back to Maz, then up at the temple. "I... think I just might be..." she says, still a little hesitant though as she starts up the path.

Kylara laughs softly and shrugs, managing to hide her surprise that Stephanie addressed her directly. "Oh, this is just something In picked up a while ago," she says, still dripping water. "You know," she says softly, "I've never seen a temple being built." She walks over to stand next to Stephanie. "Can I see? Will you show me?"

Maz smiles softly at this. Without anyone noticing when it happened, she's back to being just plain old Maz. At least for the moment. Crossing the river is one thing. Actually making it to the temple is another. She waits for Stephanie to take the lead and start guiding them both towards the temple again, curious to see what happens next.

Stephanie just nods, turning back toward the hill. There's another of those split perspectives, as for a moment the hill becomes a mountain, high and foreboding with the temple perched precariously atop it. This only lasts a heartbeat though as the young 'witch' looks at her friends, then back at the hill. It's still a split perspective, but the hill only looks a little steeper and taller to Stephanie than it does to the others. It's still grassy and sunny and welcoming as she sets her feet upon the path to the summit.

Maz drifts around a little bit, almost as in little circles. "Yeh. Yeh that's better, but you're still...fighting it, still trying to find ways to hold yourself back. Still feeling...unworthy? What's up with that, Stephy? Where's your head at, mmmm? G'own, tell Auntie Maz."

Steph keeps walking up the path now, resolute. Determined. She shakes her head to Maz's question, "Too much talking... this needs doing." She wends her way up the hill to the temple, the two 'versions' of it consolidating into a whole that's a little less inviting than the way it started, a little more inviting than the way Stephanie was seeing it before.

As she crests the hill, the work-people seem to have disappeared... must be their lunch break. But there's a lone figure standing guard in front of the doors into the temple, bronze and inscribed with bas reliefs. It's 13 year old Stephanie again, headgear and all, just as naked as the 'real' Stephanie but far less appealing to look at - almost-flat chest, skinny to the point of scrawniness... and her spots don't end at her face. She smirks at her adult self and quotes Gandalf, "You shall not pass," then follows it up with, "Loser."

Stephy the Younger shakes her head. "You don't want to go in there. Trust me. You'll lose everything that we've spent our whole lives building. All that power? All that magic?" She glances over to Maz and frowns, then points a finger at her. "She's lying to you, you know?! She's jealous. She sees everything we can do, and she wants to take it away from you. From us."

She walks over, taking a few awkward steps at first, that become more confident as she approaches Stephy Regular. Taking those hands in hers. "Look at what we did. Look at what we made. I mean...REALLY made. We were just barely into puberty, and we were casting MAGIC. REAL magic! Love spells. And then shadowcasting. And controlling mana. We really are BETTER than...than her!" She cants her head towards Maz again.

She blinks, and then very softly says, "Go back. Go back Stephanie. Please. It's better this way. You know what you have. You know what you can lose. That temple behind me? It's a trap. You walk into it, and I promise you...I PROMISE you, you'll regret it. You'll never be the same again. You'll be...you'll be different. Weaker. Don't give it up, don't give up what WE have.

Suddenly her voice rises up, angrily. "I spent my life on it! You can't take it away! It's mine!" she yells at Maz.

Stephanie of the present looks from her younger self to the women behind her, then back to the short-stack with the bad hair and skin and teeth. She frowns. She shakes her head. "No. You're wrong. I'm not you, not anymore. I haven't been you in years but I've been too scared to admit it. I'm still scared, the idea of falling in love again is terrifying... but I can't keep letting my past rule my present and future."

She takes a step forward and makes the gestures she usually uses to call forth the shadows, instead bringing forth a pure white light, nearly blinding. It splits into two as her hands move apart, and its light brightens the courtyard of the temple, making most things look more solid, more real.... but washing out little-Steph, making her a pale and shadow-like. Soon all she is is a shadow, and as Stephanie defiantly walks past, the shadow slips soundlessly to the ground and becomes her true and proper shadow, cast by her body in the glow of her hands. The glow fades and she steps forward again, hands on the handles of the doors that lead into the temple, and here she hesitates again.

Maz reaches out, gently gripping Stephanie's wrist. "Little bittle was right though. I mean, you step through that door, your life will never be the same. You walk inside that temple you've built, and you'll Wake Up. Literally. You will see how much of a Lie everything around you actually is. You will See and you will never be able to Unsee ever again. Some folks can't handle it, they go insane. I don't think you will but...but you need to know. You have that one rare opportunity to know EXACTLY what you are getting into. This is your last test, Stephanie: Something amazing is waiting for you, but...but you are literally on the precipice between Life and Death. Your old self is going to be gone for good. You'll rise up from the ashes, reborn. The Wheel will turn." She leans in and whispers "It's okay, if you want to step back from this. Some people do, you know? They go as far as this, and then step back."

She lets go of the wrist, and starts to hum, singing gently:

You've been told, many times before
Messiah's pointed to the door
No one had the guts to leave the temple.

Stephanie smiles at Maz, then over to Kylara. Her hair bundles itself back up into the braid she was wearing on Hallows' Eve, as she starts to sing as well:

It's time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I'm freeeeeeeeeee!"

On the last triumphant note she throws open the doors to the temple! A glittering golden throne sits atop a dais within, censers burning along the sides filling the room with sweet smoke. A marble statue sits on the throne, but as Stephanie walks toward it, She begins to move, turning looking down to see who's approaching. The statue smiles, becoming flesh even as she stands up and walks toward Stephanie. As they approach one another, they begin to resemble each other more and more closely until finally they join hands in the middle of the temple, and the two become one!

---

Aaaaand that's when Maz and Kylara wake up, still curled up alongside Stephanie, and yet... this isn't, exactly, the girl they fell asleep beside/half on top of. For one thing, those 'dirty pillows' have gotten a bit bigger, at least a full cup size if not two. Thankfully she was never huge to begin with so now she's merely 'big'. Her overall figure is more curvy as well, a good deal fleshier than she was at the start of all this. She herself continues to slumber - perhaps this last part is too intimate to be observed by outsiders.

Kylara sits up, blinking, giving her head a bit of a shake as she comes back to herself. "That was...that was... different," she says softly. "I'm not sure of a lot of what I saw in there," she adds, then looks down at the slumbering Stephanie. Her eyes go wide and she scotts back away from the transformed woman, hopping out of bed to stand there nude, a foot or two away. "What...what the hell?"

Maz yawns and wakes up, rubbing her bleary eyes and starts to explain. Then looks down at Stephy and murmurs. "That's....different. Um....oh. Wow. I've...heard of this, yeh? A particularly strong Avatar, like...screamingly mad, Awakens, and it makes changes to the mortal vessel. Leaves a sort of...primal mark." She shakes her head. "Wow...she looks good though, yeh?"

She rises up, and leans over, giving Ky a reassuring kiss on the forehead. "I think...if I interpret the dream logic properly...that Stephanie was coming to terms with how she'd lived her life to this point. The way she'd used her power. And the fear that losing those abilities caused. We helped. You and I. Over the past few weeks. Helping to open her eyes. So...yeah. Go you." She grins and attempts to fistbump the other woman.

Kylara is breathing a bit heavier, staring down at the very physically altered Stephanie, then back up at Maz. "I don't know if I can..." She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "What the hell is going on?" she asks plaintively. "Why was I dressed like that? Why did you look like that? What the hell is happening to Steph? Is she possessed or something?" She sits down on the floor suddenly, head in her hands. "I must be going crazy."

Maz reaches out, patting Ky on the shoulder, and breathes out. "No, love. Everyone's crazy. You're just starting to go a little Sane." She rises up, and walks around, to hold Kylara reassuringly, embrace her. "I'm sorry. This is weird, and frightening and....and we should have prepared you better for this. Should have tried. For that, I'm sorry, yeh?" She kisses her on the cheek and continues, "I wouldn't call it possession. But a transformation. Yes. In her own way, she is becoming divine."

She pauses for a short while, and whispers against your ear, "As to why you looked the way you did, within the dream? Weren't my doing. We all carry a piece of divine potential in us. Almost none of us gets to see it, however. What you got there, sweetie...was a glimpse of your potential. The Essence of what you could truly become."

Stephanie's eyes open, her eyes as brilliant a blue as her stage contacts, though she wasn't wearing any such things when they laid down. She blinks a couple of times and yawns, sitting up, as memories of the dream come flooding back into her mind. She looks up at her two lovers, standing together. "Is... everything okay?" she asks, her voice one of the few things completely unchanged, still her sultry contralto. "That was... a hell of a thing, huh?"

<OOC> Maz says, "Are you at App 6 now, or do you need to buy up to that still? :)"

Stephanie's BASE APPEARANCE is at least 6

<---======##============[ Proving note for Stephanie ]============##======--->

<---======##=---------[ LEGENDARY_ATTRIBUTE (PRIVATE) ]----------=##======--->

Status: APPROVED by WhoopingCrane on Thu Nov 06 21:08:09 2014

Legendary Appearance (Beauty)

Stephanie's Avatar presents itself Aphrodite, and tells her that she is become Her physical embodiment... Her avatar, if you will. And she of course needs to look the part, so now she does. In addition to the stupidly high Appearance score, anyone viewing her FOR THE FIRST TIME must make a Willpower test against a difficulty of 7 (1+Her current Appearance) or become affected by her as if she were using Awe (Presence 1) on them. PCs may spend a willpower in lieu of rolling.

<-------------=============++++++++++++++++++++++++=============------------->

<---======##====================[ Dice Roll ]=====================##======--->

Maz rolls Willpower vs 7 for 0 successes.

1 2 3 3 3 3 4 10

<-------------=============++++++++++++++++++++++++=============------------->

<OOC> Stephanie says, "You guys can handwave the effect happening or not happening as you see fit, if it doesn't work you can justify it as having been brain-fucked by her enough times before to see through it. :D Or that could happen."

<---======##====================[ Dice Roll ]=====================##======--->

Kylara rolls Willpower vs 7 for 3 successes.

2 3 +8 +9 +9

<-------------=============++++++++++++++++++++++++=============------------->

<OOC> Kylara says, "Seen one Goddess-like supermodel, seen 'em all ;)"

Kylara stands up, leaning against Maz for support as she does so. "But she's still...Stephanie, right?" she asks of the other woman. She doesn't seem very much like the strong warrior from the dream right now. She hears or senses Stephanie begin to stir and stands upright, putting on a good show of shaking off the overwhelming changes she's been forced to contemplate.

"I...yeah, everything is...okay," she responds with a smile. "I guess...I wasn't as ready to see what I saw as I thought I was."

Maz doesn't immediately look at Stephanie, when she wakes up. She says to Kylara. "She is. She isn't. Any more than a waking person is still themselves, or stops being who they are, when they arise from the dream."

And then she gets a look. And oh...my...Goddess.

Literally.

She's only seen beauty like that once before. And yet, there was something different now. Lane is truly an exquisite beauty, but there was something...off...about it. Something still so terribly, awfully mundane. But Stephanie now...oh oh oh."

Maz doesn't even realize she's on her knees, looking up at Stephanie will a dumb goofy grin on her face. She reaches up, taking a hand, and nuzzling her face insistently against it. She kneels still, enthralled.

"Stephy," she whispers. "Seriously babe...are you...is your glamour turned on...because wow. I'm feeling it again. Vegas and everything."

(Must be an inside joke...)

Stephanie blinks at Maz's behaviour, turning on the bed now and scooting over to the edge as best she can only using one hand. "I... no. Not... I don't think so." She closes her eyes and bites her lower lip, "No... no it isn't... I'm not doing anything... why?" She starts to withdraw her hand but instead squeezes Maz's hand and reaches for Ky, wanting hers as well.

Kylara looks very oddly at Maz as she moves to the side of the bed. "Are you okay, Maz?" she asks. "Or maybe I'm the one who's not okay 'cause I'm not kneeling?" She looks at Stephanie as the other woman speaks and she blinks, both eyebrows raised. "Um...Steph...like...wow," she comments, nodding down at her lover's hips. She takes Stephanie's outstretched hand, moving to sit next to the other woman on the bed.

Maz closes her eyes tight and mutters something, for about a minute or so. But afterwards, she seems much more back to herself. Squeezing the hand, but letting it drop. Glancing over Stephanie, and I mean ALL of Stephanie.

"Wow....wow. You are...you must have a really...REALLY strong Avatar, love. Because it is shining through your mortal coil like nobody's business." She leans in and hugs her tightly, giving her a gentle, almost chaste kiss, as she whispers. "Welcome. Welcome to this world. You are a Goddess at last, Stephanie Williams." Another kiss, and then another kiss for Kylara.

She rises up and starts to head out. "I...I'll be giving you two a little privacy, yeh? There'll be time over the days to come...for all the answers. Hell, *I* want to ask you a million questions myself but..." She shrugs and just sort of drifts out...

Stephanie happily returns the kisses and smiles, nodding to Maz as she goes to leave. "Yeah... I'm sure I've got some myself." Once she's gone, she flushes slightly and looks over to Ky, sliding an arm around her and hugging her gently. "Are... do you want to spend the night. Not that I could sleep right now anyway but... um... yeah." She apparently hasn't noticed the changes to her own body yet.

<Exeunt MAZ. Curtain.>

---

End Log