Encounterlogs
Avriels Odd Encounter Sr Lauren 240529
In a twisted dreamscape, Avriel faces the surreal horror of returning to a dilapidated version of his childhood home, only to discover it's a nightmare orchestrated by a dream stalker. The once familiar surroundings are now fraught with eerie distortions and the chilling absence of his family, replaced by unsettling manifestations like a detached, skeletal hand with his mother's wedding ring. Despite his initial intention to assist his apparently neglectful parents by moving back, the increasingly sinister events prompt Avriel to reconsider. Urged by an unknown force, he attempts to contact an ally for help, only to find his phone transformed into a literal brick, underscoring the futility of seeking external aid within this dreamscape.
Faced with the grotesque realization that his parents' voices are being mimicked by malevolent entities, Avriel is forced to confront the nightmare's demand for him to enter the house. Leveraging his wits and a desperate need to escape, he attempts to use the brick — initially a symbol of his isolation within the dream — as a means of self-defense, only to ultimately recognize it as his tool for escape from the dream stalker's clutches. His decision to use the brick to force himself awake is a grim reflection on the lengths one must go to break free from the grips of a relentless nightmare. Avriel's harrowing experience concludes with him awakening in his actual bedroom, plagued by a severe headache but with a renewed desire to reconnect with his real family, perhaps as a means to affirm his safely escaped nightmare and to cherish the reality he momentarily feared lost.
(Avriel's odd encounter(SRLauren):SRLauren)
[Tue May 28 2024]
In a retrofitted home gym plastered with band posters
Utilitarian grey carpeting has been laid down in what was a spacious home gym, now hybridised into a rather sporty bedroom. The weight rack has been left intact and pressed up against the western wall, but no machines remain in the room - instead, a comfortable bed takes up most of the space in the corner of the room. A floor to ceiling mirror takes up the northern wall, giving the illusion that the space is much larger than it actually is, and various motivational quotes and band posters decorate the eastern wall, right next to a high end treadmill.
It is night, about 62F(16C) degrees, There is a waning gibbous moon.
(Your target has been singled out by a dream stalker who's invading their dreams. They cannot be woken, but their allies may be able to go into their dreams after them to help them fight off the invader and survive the nightmare.
)
The sky above is a deep, oppressive gray, with heavy clouds hanging low, threatening a storm that never seems to come. Avriel is visiting his home. That's his childhood home right there, with his parents presumably inside, waiting for him if he'd let them know of his arrival. And yet, there's something /off/ about the place he once called home, something that smells like mold and regret; the paint's peeling off the walls outside, and the colors aren't quite as vibrant as he'd remembered them, as though the overcast sky has leeched its depressive gray into everything that surrounds him. The pathway leading to the house is broken, weeds sprouting through cracks in the pravement as though the place has been abandoned for months.
The lawn that may have once been neatly manicured is now overgrown with tall, wild grass, swaying eerily in the cold breeze. The garden beds are now choked with weeds as well, the flowers long dead and forgotten. The old oak tree behind the house - was that always there? It had to be - stands twisted and gnarled, its branches like skeletal arms reaching out in silent lamentation.
He has his guitar. It's a small mercy, perhaps, that he can feel the weight of it slung over his shoulder, even as the chill of... it certainly can't be late May anymore. It's colder, relentlessly frigid, seeping through his clothes and into his very bones. One such breeze flies in from behind, whipping up his clothes in the air, as though urging him to step forward, move in, closer, into the house that awaits his return. A whisper upon the wind almost seems to croon in his ears, carrying the weight of inevitability: "Go."
Leering at the ramshackle state of his parents' home, Avriel kicks lightly at a clump of overgrown grass and lets out a sigh. His parents must have fallen into quite a lethargy once he moved out... but it hadn't even been a year, yet. Maybe he should move back in, keep an eye on his folks - it's not like he had a girl he needed to impress by having his own place at the ripe old age of eighteen. They wouldn't be surprised to see the guitar still slung around his back; it had been his father's gift to him several years ago now, and he'd rarely been separated from it since... And he was finally the right size for it, too. It'd dwarfed him at first.
He walks up to the front door, ignoring the spooky wind voice and the enormous red flags sprouting up around him, which was how he generally got through life in Haven as a normal human kid. His knuckles rap against the wood, and he calls out, "Hey, mom? Dad? You guys home? It's Avriel!"
With a low creeee-eeee-ee-ak, the rap of knuckles against the wood has the door swinging open - it wasn't locked. Or... maybe the lock has just decayed and worn away. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make when one takes in the immediate interior of the house, looking - and smelling - as though nobody's set foot in it for months, if not years. The walls are streaked with grime, the wallpaper peeling in long, curling strips, and the wood beneath his feet is creaky and almost unstable, each footstep stirring up clouds of dust.
His greeting had returned no response. There's shadows in the corners of his reflection if he looks into the mirror in the foyer for too long, warped and eerie, and the pictures hung in in the hallway are similarly distorted, as though their faces were melting off the photographs. But really, how often does one look at their own pictures in the hallways, right? Cobwebs line every corner he can lay eyes upon, and yet, there's no spiders to be seen. No life at all, it seems, inside the house apart from Avriel himself.
Or is there? Beneath the mildew and the dust, there's the scent of something chocolaty carried from further in the house. His mother must have been waiting for him, and she would have baked his favorite, fudgy brownies and set them out on the kitchen table... right? The thought itself is enough to lighten up the house a little bit, perhaps, if anything could lighten it up at all.
Well - ignoring shit was how Avriel /generally/ got through life in Haven. Ingratiating himself to the faction that liked to help people was also a winning play, and brownies were not enough to tempt the very vincible young man into the fucking black mold death trap. He was pretty sure now that something was amiss. He pulls his phone from his pocket, thumbing it on to try and pull up his contacts. His parents were fine; Miss Fairfax would be able to fix the problem. Easy, peasy, she could punch holes through brick walls if she needed to. So long as he focused on the solution and kept the problem firmly sequestered at the back of his mind, didn't pay attention to it or think about it, he would be good. The beauty of a smooth brain, of course, is how much will simply glide off it, like water of a duck's back. Brains were largely fat, fat was oil-soluble, and thus it was hydrophobic. The ADHD tangents of his thoughts helped add stratum to his mental defenses, too.
He tries to call Harriet, Warden of the Order.
That would have been a grand idea, were his phone not simply a brick when he pulls it out of his pocket. It's not dead or anything, it's just a literal brick in his hands. There will be no calling anyone here, least of all the Warden of the Order.
Well, maybe there will be /some/ calling. From deeper in the house, the direction of the kitchen, he can hear his mother now: "Is that you sweetie?" Does she call him sweetie, normally? She does here, in this warped, twisted version of his house that turns warmth into bone-chilling coldness. Her voice sounds a little raspy, but it's definitely her. "We're in the kitchen!"
Well, there it is, then. They're in the kitchen, and he's armed with a brick. If Avriel looks behind him, he'll find the door back to the outside missing - though another look may reveal it to be found /inside/ the mirror. There's only one way forward: to the kitchen.
... or, there's another way forward, up the stairs that look like they can barely hold weight anymore, and upstairs, to his room. If he gets in bed and climbs under the blankets, nobody can hurt him, right?
Aha - he was now armed with a brick. And on top of that, as he was pretty sure that there were no brick-based martial arts being developed out there, Avriel was just as good at using a brick as a weapon as any other person around. His mother did call him sweetie, though, and lots of other sugary-sweet names beside - he and his parents had a very warm and loving relationship. He missed them dearly, whether he wanted to admit that in the heart of his independent breakout era or not. Still, he knew that something was amiss, and he just god damn was not going into the fucking dilapidated shell of his childhood home.
"Smells great, mom!" he yells. "Could I get a hand bringing something out of the car? I'm having trouble." He scoots backwards a little bit. He was not going to fucking go in there, for god's sake. Not even for brownies. He turns around to look for his car - he did drive his car here, right?
"Okay, dearie, I'll send you a hand! But come in soon, okay? I made your favorite brownies!" She calls out from inside the house again, and- send? There's silence for a few moments before he can hear a click-clack of bone against wood. The hand comes into view soon after. It's... well. A hand. It's got all twenty-seven bones accounted for even if the muscles could use some work, torn and bloody and most of them falling off the bones, and it's even got his mother's wedding band around the knuckle of the ring finger. It's a little loose, threatening to fall off from the lack of flesh to keep it securely in place, but it's still attached so far, gleaming gold even with the lack of sun there to make it really shine.
The hand makes its way over to Avriel and attempts, immediately, to clasp onto his ankle to hitch a ride out to his car. And hey, that's his car there behind him when he turns to look, just as he'd left it. Nothing to worry about, surely, apart from the bony hand severed a the wrist that's curling around his ankle.
At least when Avriel shrieks, it's not immediately feminine or emasculate. No, there is a baritone to it, a musicality; his fear has the hallmarks of a true thespian. And lo, with full vibrato and a promising career as a male scream queen, Avriel rockets his leg up to the sky like a cheerleader, trying to shake the severed hand off. "AAAAIEEEEAAGGH WHAT THE FUCK!" He just about falls on his ass trying to slap the thing off, stumbling backwards into the hood of his car in his wrestling with the dismembered thing. He absolutely would not allow himself to be dragged backwards into the household like Paranormal Activity. He'd seen those movies too young and they'd scarred him /enough/ and he didn't want more!
"Mind your language, young man!" The house creaks - or, no, that's his dad's voice, from somewhere within. He's listening, though it's unlikely anyone in the neighborhood /isn't/, what with that very masculine scream. Is he watching, too? "That's no way to treat your mother." Yes, he's watching too - and referring to the skeletal hand as his mother. "Get in here, Avriel." And oooh, the full name. He must be mad - there's stern authority radiating from his voice.
As for the mother and/or hand itself, it goes to the floor somewhere between Avriel slapping it off and him attempting to climb the hood of his car backwards. There's no attempts made to drag him into the house. On the contrary, the hand simply goes limp and stops moving entirely once he throws it off and away, sprawled sideways with fingers slightly flexed still. For a few seconds, it gets too silent. Too still.
And then, a scream.
"What did you do- WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR MOTHER?!"
She doesn't stop screaming.
Oh, god. No, this wasn't real - these weren't Avriel's parents, this was a sick trick being played on him by some bastard in town - the real town. He was probably asleep. He knew about this kind of thing. An Orderite had taught him about the nightmare and dreams; he even had his own nightmare charm. This was a dream, he was convinced. He'd wake up to some grinning shithead standing over him... wherever he must've fallen asleep. Oh, god - he stares at the brick in his hands. He knows the only way out - or thinks he knows, anyway - but that doesn't make the prospect much easier. Things /felt/ real. His stomach churns sickly, protesting against the act taking root in his mind - but then, with a shift of perspective, with the thought that he'd be fixing his parents more than freeing himself, he sets his nerves to steel, and drives the brick with lethal force into his skull.
The hand keeps laying there, the voice of his mother keeps screaming, his father keeps yelling, the house keeps groaning and creaking and the wind keeps rustling, on and on for an endless moment. It seems to be intensifying, the noises echoing in his ears, the house in its entirety swaying in the wind as though, were he to keep watching, it's going to collapse in on itself entirely.
He smashes the brick against his skull...
... and wakes up in his bedroom again.
It's right as he'd left it when he'd gone to sleep. There's nobody else around to be seen, no shitheads standing over him. There's just a throbbing headache that makes thoughts difficult, and a trickle of wetness - blood - out of his nose. Avriel has the worst migraine of all time, and the niggling feeling that perhaps he ought to call up his parents and see how they're doing. Perhaps visit them, if his headache clears up soon? Maybe if he lets his mom know, she'll bake him some brownies and bring them over for him. Maybe...
Faced with the grotesque realization that his parents' voices are being mimicked by malevolent entities, Avriel is forced to confront the nightmare's demand for him to enter the house. Leveraging his wits and a desperate need to escape, he attempts to use the brick — initially a symbol of his isolation within the dream — as a means of self-defense, only to ultimately recognize it as his tool for escape from the dream stalker's clutches. His decision to use the brick to force himself awake is a grim reflection on the lengths one must go to break free from the grips of a relentless nightmare. Avriel's harrowing experience concludes with him awakening in his actual bedroom, plagued by a severe headache but with a renewed desire to reconnect with his real family, perhaps as a means to affirm his safely escaped nightmare and to cherish the reality he momentarily feared lost.
(Avriel's odd encounter(SRLauren):SRLauren)
[Tue May 28 2024]
In a retrofitted home gym plastered with band posters
Utilitarian grey carpeting has been laid down in what was a spacious home gym, now hybridised into a rather sporty bedroom. The weight rack has been left intact and pressed up against the western wall, but no machines remain in the room - instead, a comfortable bed takes up most of the space in the corner of the room. A floor to ceiling mirror takes up the northern wall, giving the illusion that the space is much larger than it actually is, and various motivational quotes and band posters decorate the eastern wall, right next to a high end treadmill.
It is night, about 62F(16C) degrees, There is a waning gibbous moon.
(Your target has been singled out by a dream stalker who's invading their dreams. They cannot be woken, but their allies may be able to go into their dreams after them to help them fight off the invader and survive the nightmare.
)
The sky above is a deep, oppressive gray, with heavy clouds hanging low, threatening a storm that never seems to come. Avriel is visiting his home. That's his childhood home right there, with his parents presumably inside, waiting for him if he'd let them know of his arrival. And yet, there's something /off/ about the place he once called home, something that smells like mold and regret; the paint's peeling off the walls outside, and the colors aren't quite as vibrant as he'd remembered them, as though the overcast sky has leeched its depressive gray into everything that surrounds him. The pathway leading to the house is broken, weeds sprouting through cracks in the pravement as though the place has been abandoned for months.
The lawn that may have once been neatly manicured is now overgrown with tall, wild grass, swaying eerily in the cold breeze. The garden beds are now choked with weeds as well, the flowers long dead and forgotten. The old oak tree behind the house - was that always there? It had to be - stands twisted and gnarled, its branches like skeletal arms reaching out in silent lamentation.
He has his guitar. It's a small mercy, perhaps, that he can feel the weight of it slung over his shoulder, even as the chill of... it certainly can't be late May anymore. It's colder, relentlessly frigid, seeping through his clothes and into his very bones. One such breeze flies in from behind, whipping up his clothes in the air, as though urging him to step forward, move in, closer, into the house that awaits his return. A whisper upon the wind almost seems to croon in his ears, carrying the weight of inevitability: "Go."
Leering at the ramshackle state of his parents' home, Avriel kicks lightly at a clump of overgrown grass and lets out a sigh. His parents must have fallen into quite a lethargy once he moved out... but it hadn't even been a year, yet. Maybe he should move back in, keep an eye on his folks - it's not like he had a girl he needed to impress by having his own place at the ripe old age of eighteen. They wouldn't be surprised to see the guitar still slung around his back; it had been his father's gift to him several years ago now, and he'd rarely been separated from it since... And he was finally the right size for it, too. It'd dwarfed him at first.
He walks up to the front door, ignoring the spooky wind voice and the enormous red flags sprouting up around him, which was how he generally got through life in Haven as a normal human kid. His knuckles rap against the wood, and he calls out, "Hey, mom? Dad? You guys home? It's Avriel!"
With a low creeee-eeee-ee-ak, the rap of knuckles against the wood has the door swinging open - it wasn't locked. Or... maybe the lock has just decayed and worn away. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make when one takes in the immediate interior of the house, looking - and smelling - as though nobody's set foot in it for months, if not years. The walls are streaked with grime, the wallpaper peeling in long, curling strips, and the wood beneath his feet is creaky and almost unstable, each footstep stirring up clouds of dust.
His greeting had returned no response. There's shadows in the corners of his reflection if he looks into the mirror in the foyer for too long, warped and eerie, and the pictures hung in in the hallway are similarly distorted, as though their faces were melting off the photographs. But really, how often does one look at their own pictures in the hallways, right? Cobwebs line every corner he can lay eyes upon, and yet, there's no spiders to be seen. No life at all, it seems, inside the house apart from Avriel himself.
Or is there? Beneath the mildew and the dust, there's the scent of something chocolaty carried from further in the house. His mother must have been waiting for him, and she would have baked his favorite, fudgy brownies and set them out on the kitchen table... right? The thought itself is enough to lighten up the house a little bit, perhaps, if anything could lighten it up at all.
Well - ignoring shit was how Avriel /generally/ got through life in Haven. Ingratiating himself to the faction that liked to help people was also a winning play, and brownies were not enough to tempt the very vincible young man into the fucking black mold death trap. He was pretty sure now that something was amiss. He pulls his phone from his pocket, thumbing it on to try and pull up his contacts. His parents were fine; Miss Fairfax would be able to fix the problem. Easy, peasy, she could punch holes through brick walls if she needed to. So long as he focused on the solution and kept the problem firmly sequestered at the back of his mind, didn't pay attention to it or think about it, he would be good. The beauty of a smooth brain, of course, is how much will simply glide off it, like water of a duck's back. Brains were largely fat, fat was oil-soluble, and thus it was hydrophobic. The ADHD tangents of his thoughts helped add stratum to his mental defenses, too.
He tries to call Harriet, Warden of the Order.
That would have been a grand idea, were his phone not simply a brick when he pulls it out of his pocket. It's not dead or anything, it's just a literal brick in his hands. There will be no calling anyone here, least of all the Warden of the Order.
Well, maybe there will be /some/ calling. From deeper in the house, the direction of the kitchen, he can hear his mother now: "Is that you sweetie?" Does she call him sweetie, normally? She does here, in this warped, twisted version of his house that turns warmth into bone-chilling coldness. Her voice sounds a little raspy, but it's definitely her. "We're in the kitchen!"
Well, there it is, then. They're in the kitchen, and he's armed with a brick. If Avriel looks behind him, he'll find the door back to the outside missing - though another look may reveal it to be found /inside/ the mirror. There's only one way forward: to the kitchen.
... or, there's another way forward, up the stairs that look like they can barely hold weight anymore, and upstairs, to his room. If he gets in bed and climbs under the blankets, nobody can hurt him, right?
Aha - he was now armed with a brick. And on top of that, as he was pretty sure that there were no brick-based martial arts being developed out there, Avriel was just as good at using a brick as a weapon as any other person around. His mother did call him sweetie, though, and lots of other sugary-sweet names beside - he and his parents had a very warm and loving relationship. He missed them dearly, whether he wanted to admit that in the heart of his independent breakout era or not. Still, he knew that something was amiss, and he just god damn was not going into the fucking dilapidated shell of his childhood home.
"Smells great, mom!" he yells. "Could I get a hand bringing something out of the car? I'm having trouble." He scoots backwards a little bit. He was not going to fucking go in there, for god's sake. Not even for brownies. He turns around to look for his car - he did drive his car here, right?
"Okay, dearie, I'll send you a hand! But come in soon, okay? I made your favorite brownies!" She calls out from inside the house again, and- send? There's silence for a few moments before he can hear a click-clack of bone against wood. The hand comes into view soon after. It's... well. A hand. It's got all twenty-seven bones accounted for even if the muscles could use some work, torn and bloody and most of them falling off the bones, and it's even got his mother's wedding band around the knuckle of the ring finger. It's a little loose, threatening to fall off from the lack of flesh to keep it securely in place, but it's still attached so far, gleaming gold even with the lack of sun there to make it really shine.
The hand makes its way over to Avriel and attempts, immediately, to clasp onto his ankle to hitch a ride out to his car. And hey, that's his car there behind him when he turns to look, just as he'd left it. Nothing to worry about, surely, apart from the bony hand severed a the wrist that's curling around his ankle.
At least when Avriel shrieks, it's not immediately feminine or emasculate. No, there is a baritone to it, a musicality; his fear has the hallmarks of a true thespian. And lo, with full vibrato and a promising career as a male scream queen, Avriel rockets his leg up to the sky like a cheerleader, trying to shake the severed hand off. "AAAAIEEEEAAGGH WHAT THE FUCK!" He just about falls on his ass trying to slap the thing off, stumbling backwards into the hood of his car in his wrestling with the dismembered thing. He absolutely would not allow himself to be dragged backwards into the household like Paranormal Activity. He'd seen those movies too young and they'd scarred him /enough/ and he didn't want more!
"Mind your language, young man!" The house creaks - or, no, that's his dad's voice, from somewhere within. He's listening, though it's unlikely anyone in the neighborhood /isn't/, what with that very masculine scream. Is he watching, too? "That's no way to treat your mother." Yes, he's watching too - and referring to the skeletal hand as his mother. "Get in here, Avriel." And oooh, the full name. He must be mad - there's stern authority radiating from his voice.
As for the mother and/or hand itself, it goes to the floor somewhere between Avriel slapping it off and him attempting to climb the hood of his car backwards. There's no attempts made to drag him into the house. On the contrary, the hand simply goes limp and stops moving entirely once he throws it off and away, sprawled sideways with fingers slightly flexed still. For a few seconds, it gets too silent. Too still.
And then, a scream.
"What did you do- WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR MOTHER?!"
She doesn't stop screaming.
Oh, god. No, this wasn't real - these weren't Avriel's parents, this was a sick trick being played on him by some bastard in town - the real town. He was probably asleep. He knew about this kind of thing. An Orderite had taught him about the nightmare and dreams; he even had his own nightmare charm. This was a dream, he was convinced. He'd wake up to some grinning shithead standing over him... wherever he must've fallen asleep. Oh, god - he stares at the brick in his hands. He knows the only way out - or thinks he knows, anyway - but that doesn't make the prospect much easier. Things /felt/ real. His stomach churns sickly, protesting against the act taking root in his mind - but then, with a shift of perspective, with the thought that he'd be fixing his parents more than freeing himself, he sets his nerves to steel, and drives the brick with lethal force into his skull.
The hand keeps laying there, the voice of his mother keeps screaming, his father keeps yelling, the house keeps groaning and creaking and the wind keeps rustling, on and on for an endless moment. It seems to be intensifying, the noises echoing in his ears, the house in its entirety swaying in the wind as though, were he to keep watching, it's going to collapse in on itself entirely.
He smashes the brick against his skull...
... and wakes up in his bedroom again.
It's right as he'd left it when he'd gone to sleep. There's nobody else around to be seen, no shitheads standing over him. There's just a throbbing headache that makes thoughts difficult, and a trickle of wetness - blood - out of his nose. Avriel has the worst migraine of all time, and the niggling feeling that perhaps he ought to call up his parents and see how they're doing. Perhaps visit them, if his headache clears up soon? Maybe if he lets his mom know, she'll bake him some brownies and bring them over for him. Maybe...