dreamscape ideas

[death_begins]

Dreamscapes.

Yuca

Yuca has two different dreamscapes. The first is his 'Forget me not' one, mainly for mindfucking people, and his second is his 'love-lies-bleeding' one, mainly used for developing CR and understanding him further- though both could be used for CR, of course. For the second one, I'd like to ask that only a few characters pop in there.

His dreamscapes are both built around the concept of eternity, symbolized by the mortality of flowers. The first is about the memories and confusion and uncertainty it gives him, the second is about him as a person, how this eternity has molded him and shaped him.

Forget-me-not

The forget-me-not dreamscape is what it sounds like: Yuca's dreams, his memories, everything that his soul won't let him forget.

You're falling. You don't know how, or why, or for how long- but it's dark and black and it's overwhelming. There's no wind whipping around you, no sudden drop of your stomach- you're just not standing on solid ground, and something is pulling you down, weightless. You don't know what's going on. You're falling, and suddenly, you hit the ground. You blink, and suddenly, you're in a memory, watching a young girl string together the wild forget-me-nots.

The world spirals out from there. Yuca isn't in this dream, but after a long while, your character may realize that they're seeing the world through his eyes. Names flit across their memories of people who are long dead, the scenes change swiftly and abruptly, leaving you little time to adjust to one before you're swept off into another, like somebody changing the channel with a frightening regularity. Throughout each scene, flowers will be incorporated in some fashion- they won't be blindingly obvious, but they'll be there, somehow, symbolizing the emotion Yuca attached to the memory.

Just before you think you're going to go insane from the utter confusion of it all, you're dropped again, and you fall to the floor. It's a cold floor. Dark black tile, smooth, glossy. You look up, and you're in a room with no windows, no doors. There is a single light, hanging from the ceiling. You get up and look around, but there is nothing there. A room with nothing in it. But the scene doesn't change like it has before. This room isn't a memory, it's a symbol.

Yuca himself will be there- a projection of him, anyway. He might talk to you, he might ignore you. But he won't be like Yuca. Depending on his relationship with you, the emotion you get will be different (for his projections will simply be that- different emotions he's composed of, or memories trapped in time, whichever.)

Flowers begin raining from nowhere- each and every flower from each and every scene- with one startling difference.

All of them are dead.

And they don't stop raining down- you can't walk for crushing them, and then it seems like the very floor itself is pushing them up toward you. Hundreds of them, thousands of different kinds, different memories, all rushing to bury you under their death. The taste of dead flowers in your mouth, scratchy dead leaves brushing up against your skin. You stay there until you suffocate, at which point, you exit Yuca's forget-me-not dreamscape.



Love-lies-bleeding

The love-lies-bleeding dreamscape isn't as chaotic, but is subtly deeper than forget-me-not. In this dreamscape, your character gets the opportunity to meet Yuca himself, as various different symbolic representations of himself. The entire dream takes you backwards through Yuca's eternity. There are four layers within this dream, and a projection of Yuca himself named after each layer- Memory (a library), Manipulation (a dungeon), Melancholy (a prison), Eternity (a garden), and Mortality (further into the garden). This is a long one, and will probably require a bit of threading out if you wanted to see it to its completion.


Also, I think I'm going to put in a guide, just so that the journey is more... interact-able? I haven't decided yet if the guide is going to be Rain, or another personification of Yuca- I think it's going to differ from character to character. Kurotsuchi will probably get Yuca, Alphonse will probably get Rain- that sort of thing. The guide will be kind, gentle, but ultimately without bias- nudging the character forward through the levels without being cruel about it.

It starts out in a hallway- a long and narrow hallway, at the end of which, there is only one door. When it shuts behind you, the lock clicks. There is no going back. On the other side of the door is a large room- the largest library you can even imagine. It seems to stretch out for eternity, but there are no books on the shelves. You look down and realize that you're stepping on books- hundreds of thousands of millions of books, strewn about the floor, flopped over on the shelf, random pages torn out and tacked up on the wall, rosemary flowers blossoming up through the pages here and there. It's a maze of chaos, but it's utterly still. If you look through the books, you'll find narratives. Scenes of memories, much like the forget-me-not dreamscape, but they won't pull you in. They're idle, quiet, just pages and stories.

After a few minutes, you hear a scuffling. Memory rounds the corner, a book in his hand, busy busy busy. He's the spitting image of Yuca, except younger, much younger- he hums to himself as he painstakingly and carefully files the single book away on the shelf. The instant his back is turned, the book flings itself off of the shelf and back onto the floor. Putting it back only makes it fly off again. You can talk to Memory, but he's immersed in his work, and will often lose himself in mid-conversation.

(a sidenote: Lief, if you still wanted Rhode to help, her organizing some of the books would be a big plus. She could- idk somehow use her powers to keep them strapped down to the shelves)

If you wander deeper, then you may notice something strange. The further you go into the library, the less it looks like a library. At some point, the boy has disappeared, but it's hard to tell exactly how or when. The shelves become more and more scarce, the lights getting dimmer and dimmer. You find that you can't turn back, you have to keep going. The walls start to narrow, the floor starts a slow decline, the smell of rotten, overripe fruit begins to become apparent.

You have entered the dungeon. The walls turn to stone with lavender growing out of the cracks. Manipulation is waiting here for you, smiling his liar's smile. In here, he is heartless. He's cold, calculating, and cruel. He may try to manipulate you, or he may simply tear you apart with the truth you don't want to hear.

In actuality, Manipulation is- in a way- protecting Melancholy from your prying eyes, the next floor down. Melancholy is a prison, a terrible one where there are no bars, only shadows. The walls seem to be made of rock, but you can see the vaguest sense of what might be human bodies, packed into it, like part of the architecture itself. Marigold flower chains hang from the ceiling, the only bright thing in the room. It's here where you meet the personification of grief- Melancholy. You can't make him feel better. Wasting time trying to talk to him is only going to drag you down into his despair.

A breath of fresh air breathes against you, and if you follow it, you find yourself stepping out of a door in the wall into a lush and beautiful garden- except there's something blocking the path. A giant oak tree sits, roots entangled up in the ground. The thing is gnarled, massive, as old as time itself. This is the tree of Eternity.

If you look closely at the tree, you'll start to notice something. An withered hand, as old and wilted as the tree itself. If you follow it up, past the lines of wrinkles and age spots, and places where the skin simply hangs loosely on the bone, you'll find a man inside the tree. You know what happens when a tree wants to grow somewhere, but there's something- a bike, a fence, something- in the way? And it just grows anyway and, in time, envelops the thing that was there? It looks like that's almost exactly what happened with this old man. His hair is white and wispy, eyes cloudy and half-blind, unable to even move, for the tree.

He will speak to you. The man is as old as time, and the wisdom and grace that comes from that doesn't leave his speech. He'll bid you to sit down and talk with him, give him some entertainment, for he never sees anyone before, and talking with Mortality gets boring, after awhile. He's intelligent, he's wise, but like Yuca, he doesn't give a damn about humanity.

After a few moments of conversation, Mortality will poke his head around the tree trunk and smile. This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the damsel after you fight the dragon, everything this has been leading up to. Mortality will giggle at Eternity's harsh words and take your hand, happy and full of love. He'll lead you through the gardens- if questioned, you're utterly locked in, there's no way he can escape. But he's happy here, surrounded by his living flowers (happy flowers- some sunflowers, daisies, and other flowers with kind connotations), and he'll lead you through long, winding conversations. He's soft, he's happy, he's what Yuca used to be. If anyone ever actually plays this out that far, Mortality just- spends happy, loving time with you until you feel the pull of yourself waking up.


Flowers
Forget-me-not - ...sort of obvious
Love-lies-bleeding - hopelessness
Rosemary - remembrance
Lavender - distrust
Marigold - grief, pain
Oak tree - longevity
Daisies - simplicity, purity
Sunflowers - happiness