It is about 60/i>/span/i15C) degrees. The mist is heaviest At Carnation and Blackstone/span>/span(Your target discovers a cursed antique shop where items grant wishes but extract terrible prices. The elderly shopkeeper seems desperate to give away inventory, claiming each sale brings them closer to freedom from an ancient bargain.)

shrugs. Then a loud noise, almost like an explosion, occurs outside. She flinches and stares out the window, the cockatiel loudly chirping in reply and tilting its head curiously.

It appears that somehow a shop has…landed in the middle of the road. Some kind of tent-based thing with an old man gripping a chair for dear life.

“What on earth?” Eloa shrieks at the explosion, ducking down behind a rack of faux fur panties as they swing on the rack. “What is happening?” It’s a miracle the cockatiel isn’t flapping it’s way out of the place but it’s wings are probably clipped. When there’s no follow up explosion, Eloa lifts her head up from behind the rack to stare wide eyed at the tent in the middle of the road.

Constance squints out at the road… “Looks like an antique store. Probably full of cursed shit. I guess you have competition,” she snorts at Eloa.

“Um… They fell out of sky. They no have business license downtown.” Eloa tells Constance with a frown as she gets out from behind the rack and starts down the stairs to her shop. “Ola mister? You cannot park tent there.” She tells the man.

The man turns and stares at Eloa with big, wide blue eyes. “Please buy something,” he whispers. “Everything will grant you your heart’s desire. I’m trapped until I clear the stock. Please. Every time someone buys something I get deposited somewhere else. I’ve been running this store for thirty years now.”

“Wait so if eloa buy something from you. You disappear and go park tent elsewhere?” Eloa asks as she looks around the various objects scattered at the tents. “Geez you need sell stuff faster if you’ve been stuck for thirty years??”

He sighs in longsuffering pain. “Yes. But at least it used to be an entire bazaar and now I’m down to the last tent,” he murmurs. Eloa finds many strange amulets, odd pendants, and other doo-dads hanging from chains and on display in boxes, most of which appear to be labelled about granting certain wishes – about health, about love, about wealth. They’re also tagged with disclaimers about the price that will be paid by the wearer…generally in one of the opposite areas.

“Oh these items all look cursed.” Eloa frowns as she looks at the charms and pendants, leaning in a bit to read them. “Dick will fall off in 10 weeks however can use non stop until then.” She giggles as she reads the lable. “Maybe we can give this to someone as gift..”

The man nods encouragingly. “Please! That piece just goes for thirty dollars,” he states, eagerly.

Seeming quite excited, Eloa then seems to remember she needs to behave and she sighs, “Sorry can’t actually give it. What if dick falls off for real! That’ll be terrible for whoever Eloa give it to. Miss Constance?” She calls over her shoulder at the other woman. “You want a cursed object?”

Eloa glances over her shoulder, “Miss constance?” She calls out, trying again.

Constance shrugs. “I’m hoping to find something good, you know, like in the Cities Between, not all this street rubbish,” she snorts. “I guess he’s just fucked?” The man slumps behind his counter, somber.

“Why don’t you drop in the middle of university. Then you will have lots of students taking all the items! And buying them of course!” Eloa tells the man nodding and pointing towards the northwest, “You just need head that way!”

He sighs. “I don’t choose where I go,” he mutters. “The demon picks.”

“Well how do we get rid of demon then? You can’t help demon spread all this all over the world.” Eloa tells the man with her hands on her hips.

He groans. “Don’t you think I would have if I could? You can’t just break a pact so easily..”

“Well .. you cannot park here!” Eloa tells the man crossly looking at the items, “What did you agree with with the demon anyways? What is pact?”

He squints at Eloa. “Why, are you some kind of exorcist? I wanted the ability to have a successful store…so now I have to sell. I used to be good at it but at this point I just don’t give a shit,” he sighs.

“Well.. Eloa is a ritualist. Can try banishing the demon.” Eloa tells the man as she looks around but is careful not to touch anything. “Do you have anything that can tame a hippogriff? But put the cost onto like.. someone not the buyer?” She asks peering at something that draws her attention.

The man nods repeatedly. “Yes!”, he states, offering Eloa a bag of dust. “You put someone’s blood in this dust and it binds them to their life – they have to obey the beast and the beast obeys them, but beasts generally don’t have the ability to give orders>”

“What that is the most stupid thing ever. I would be cooking and feeding the thing all day. It is a hippogriff! Smart! Even a cat would have Eloa cooking all day. No deal!” She tells him, frowning as she looks at her phone. “Eloa really should go raid..” Eloa mutters.

The man is abandoned to the streets as Constance gets on her horse, likewise to go to the raid…

(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.
)

Constance is standing on the street outside her house, stretching, grimacing from mild wounds sustained in a recent skirmish with the Sixty-Third Legion as she stables her horse, Yfandes.

Just another late night on the streets of New Haven. A woman such as Constance would be no strangr to it. Yfandes flicks their ears and ripples their coat, hooves clip-clopping into their usual shelter. The beast of burden is tired, and so is Constance.

Sleep tugs at the edges of her perception. A strain weighing heavily on her eyelids. The body is tired. Perhaps now is a good time to stable herself, as well?

Constance takes a deep breath and heads into her manor, heading to her room where she heads into bed.

For a flicker of a moment, it almost feels as though Constance wasn’t alone in her bedroom. But, looking around, the place is empty. Not a single thread out of place. Pillows call to her like a warm, cozy soup, and deep into a dream, the woman sinks…

Or does she?

Something goes *bump* in the night. A sound scratching at her window, like claws or something sharp and spindly.

Constance reaches underneath her pillow and withdraws her shotgun, standing up and heading to the window, which overlooks the alley next to her house. “If this is another fucking demon I’m going to kill them,” she mutters, her fatiuge giving her a temper.

What a shotgun. Its gilded and black barrels gleam in the lunar light when she parts the curtains. The design is almost too sharp, too perfect. But as Constance looks outside her window, she finds not the usual alley, but rather a set of luminescent stairs leading right to the moon. They almost sound like they’re humming.

Constance squints. “Well, I’ve heard of stairways to heaven, but in Redstone it’s probably gonna take me ‘up’ straight to hell…” She opens the window and reaches out to put a hand on the stairs, to see if they’re real.

It’s a peculiar sensation. Constance’s palm rests atop one step, finding it surprisingly solid. Also quite cool to the touch. Beneath her fingers, the impossible structure reverberates with a low thrumming energy, one that seeps into her arm with a minty fresh electricity.

Looking up to see where they lead, there are merely more and more stairs.

Constance hasn’t gotten where she is by ignoring things like this – she clambers out her window, which takes some doing with how big she is, and tentatively stands on the staircase, beginning to ascend.

Things get a bit disorienting the instant Constance steps off of her windowsill and onto the lunar staircase completely. Since when had she gotten so high up? Her manor can still be seen, but the estate is a diminutive shape miles and miles below.

“C-Connie?” a shy, young voice wonders, from right beside Constance.

Here stands a filly of pale skin, the young girl seeming oddly familiar to the woman.

Constance slowly blinks, shouldering her shotgun as she stares down at ‘herself’. “…Yeah,” she mutters. “What…what the hell. I don’t remember this, so…”

That bright-eyed younger version of Constance smiles up at her. “It’s alright, Connie. You’ll understand soon,” she reassures gently, slipping a hand into the older one’s. “Come on, our parents are waiting!”

Whipping around, she begins leading the tall, looming woman in a dash up the staircase. “Careful, don’t trip!” she giggles.

Constance gets led up the staircase at a run, but her balance and acrobatics are supernaturally enhanced – so she has no issue with tripping.

Large, molten comets streak past in the corner of Constance’s eyes, but there is no smell that comes with it. Peculiarly, it looked a lot like a burning rose.

All manner of debris falls out of the sky the higher they climb – giant bullets clattering like rain, and a colossal St. Peter’s cross creaks heavily as it stabs into the planet. It feels like an eternity passes of just running. The stair shrink in and twist into a single luminous thread of light. “Look, there they are!” the young Lucida points to the other end of the string.

Two silhouettes wave in the distance – Constance’s mother and father, so it feels – their voices distorted like glass pieces shredded by razors, “Constance. Constance, we’ve missed you so much. We’re opening presents by the fireplace.”

Constance attempts to snatch her hand away. “You’re in fucking Pennsylvania, not the moon,” she hisses. “What the hell is going on? What is this about?”, coming to a halt.

“Ah!” the child squeaks when Constance pulls away from her, the apparition dissipating in a cloud of ash.

“Tsk tsk tsk. Language, Connie,” one of the voices grates out, suddenly sounding a lot closer than it was originally. The string unboxes itself like ancient geometry, stretching a carpeted floor in a living room with couches and a Christmas tree. One of those perfect ones you see at department stores. A fire crackles in the hearth. “But we -are- in Pennsylvania. You’re home with us now. Safe. You need a break from all this.. demon business.”

On the ceiling, a large pair of red eyes slowly opens. “You need to rest.”

Constance draws her shotgun and experimentally fires into the roof. “I *am* fucking demon business,” she snarls. “A break? I already TOOK a break. Get the hell out of my head!”

Those red eyes crinkle at the corners, humored. Right before Constance’s shotgun blasts a big-ass hole in between them. The ceiling rips like paper skin, showing just a darkness there. Ugly laughter makes the skin goosepimple, whether out of eeriness or an utter dollop of cringe.

The form of Constance’s mother takes shape on the couch, smiling patiently at the shotgun-toting woman. Somehow it feels off. “Connie. Ohhh, if only you had married that one suitor, you be so happy.” On the mother’s forehead, an extra pair of red eyes open, their irises akin to that of a goat’s. “Are you happy with your life, Connie?”

Constance takes a deep breath, and then applies Head-On directly to the forehead as a rather extreme method of trying to wake herself up. With the butt of the shotgun. If that fails she might end up just pulling the trigger.

In the realm of the waking, Constance hasn’t gone anywhere. Her body lies in bed, breathing deeply, peacefully. Those sensitive to such energies might sense the disturbance, but all she has with her in the room is a small, grey cockatiel, shrieking with all its might. Animals tend to be sensitive.

A shudder of displeasure quakes within the confines of Constance’s dream existence. “What are you- no! Stop that. Don’t do that! That’ll never work,” the entity hisses, stumbling in a moment of confusion when the large woman just sends a great big gun-butting to her forehead. It hurts like a bitch.

The Christmas-decorated living room gets literally smacked out of reality, sending the woman landing right back onto her bedroom floor. But the waking Constance is still there in bed, she can now see directly. Hanging over the woman’s head is a dreamcatcher of sinister design and charred corn, its threads woven the opposite way with intent to trap its victims in their slumber.

The small, grey cockatiel preens its feathers and cocks its head at Constance, as if it could see the woman. It chirps a complaint.

Constance does the exact opposite of whatever the dream-cursed sentience wants them to do, because being contrary is surely the method to wake herself up. She brains herself with her shotgun, three years too late for the 27 club. Her spiritual form, anyway. That’s a hell of a ‘pinch’.

Surely it is. With the dream-cursed sentience being, well, something of an amateur, it doesn’t take much beyond Constance’s hard-headed solution and figurative balls to pull the trigger. But another normal human might’ve never had the guts. “NO! You’re mine! I’m so close! My promotion–” the dream stalker wails, like a shelf of bottles crashing.

From one layer of dreams, Constance had booted herself with a wallop.

From the next – and first – layer of the dreamscape, this time the shallower level barely beneath the surface, that trigger does more than rouse her. It wakes her up with an agonizing sting right where the shotgun slag would’ve bursted through, all her head warmed by the psychic impact. Waking up from this is a violent endeavor, leaving her heart pounding and with a cold sweat around the woman’s head.

Overhead, there is the furious flapping of a cockatiel clinging to the dreamcatcher – pecking at the pieces of burned corn and daintily ripping the strings out of its pattern.

Constance reaches out with a clenched fist to shred the dreamcatcher to pieces with her supernatural strength. “Sons of bitches,” she snarls, grabbing the cockatiel right out of likely midair with her other hand.

The last remnants of magic within the dreamcatcher dissipate as Constance helps her feathery companion finish the job. Wriggling in her grasp, the cockatiel once again melodiously chirps its complaints – probably because it’s had quite a day with the large woman already.

Constance says “Ugh, I forgot to fucking give you back to Eloa…“