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JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME
JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME
Welcome to July's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: DREAM HORROR.
All Test Drive Memes contain at least one clue to the Deerington's upcoming in-game events for the month! Keep your eyes peeled! But...not literally.
Characters may die during TDMs, but you do not need to count it towards a game-canonical death unless you want to. Consider it a freebie. All TDMs can be considered game canon as TDMs introduce minor aspects about the world of Deerington that can be revisited by characters later on in the game. You may also use TDMs for your application writing sample as well as AC.
CW: Violence, Freddie Kreuger references, fire, forced sleep with some drug-like references, stabbing, nightmares, monsters, possibility for extreme alcohol consumption, and lobster festivals
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!
WHEN THE BOAT COMES IN
It’s July and July in Maine means lobster! The Lobster Festival springs up seemingly overnight down near Koji Pond. In the morning, there’s a large parade that makes its way through town, starting from the top of East Main Street and all the way down through West Main St until they hit the festival. There are tents, a few rides, games, arts and crafts, and most importantly, food pretty much everywhere behind the hotel and you can help yourself to free ice cream at the ice cream shop! Lobster ice cream and Blueberry ice cream are pushed to the forefront, but you can get just about any flavor you could possibly dream of in the long run. You can hear live music playing and a stage has been set up on the roof of the arcade. Live bands play everything from folk music to jazz to classic rock that you may or may not have heard in your lifetime. There’s a tent where local artists (including sleepers) are selling art, a craft tent where people are selling goods they’ve made such as pottery and homemade fudge, and a Do It Yourself tent where people are teaching you how to make your own buoy decoration for your front yard or how to weave your own baskets!
A seafood cooking contest is held for anyone who may want to show off their culinary skills. Any kind of seafood dishes are allowed, but they highly encourage showing your abilities to cook with lobster! Think you can beat the longstanding champions from Deerington? It’s pretty unlikely, especially since it looks like the townspeople keep trying to sabotage your meal as you’re making it. Did you mean to put in an entire half cup of salt to your stew? Oops. Guess you better figure out how to work with it anyway.
Across Koji Pond, there are floating crates set up for the great crate race! See if you can make it across the lake fastest – challenge a friend! These lobster crates wobble pretty heavily, but each runner is given a life vest for when they might inevitably fall in. Be careful if you do! Some of those strange looking fish in there definitely bite.
Each morning at the festival there will be an all you can eat blueberry pancake breakfast. Surprisingly, nothing drastic seems to happen, so have as many pancakes as your body can hold! They’re delicious, after all. Through the rest of the day, it’s easy to get your hands on lobster rolls of varying sizes, full steamed lobster meals (with corn on the cob and a buttered dinner roll), lobster salad, steamed mussels, scallops, haddock (baked or fried), fried clams, lobster stuffed risotto balls, blueberry cobbler, and strawberry shortcake are all available at any of the food stands. All the food seems perfectly safe. But you’re gonna need something to wash it down with…
The drink stand has a great deal to offer, but every drink seems to come with a particularly strange side effect to it. People who enjoy the hand crafted beers will find that it gets them drunk twice as fast and can even make people who would normally never drink completely wasted after just a glass or two. Every glass you have makes you thirstier than the last and it can be easy to want to reach for another beer to try and get yourself together. In fact, it’s particularly hard to reach for anything else. Urges to drink the beer will last for at least one full hour or can be cut short by being responsible and going to drink some water instead.
So maybe beer isn’t your thing; that’s okay! There’s also blueberry lemonade which will turn you the color of blueberries from head to toe! Fresh iced tea will make you feel particularly sarcastic, prone to mocking even your closest friends and gossiping with complete strangers about the things you may or may not have heard about the town. Got a juicy secret you were trying to keep for someone? Well, it’s out in the open now. Cream sodas will make you extremely cuddly, wanting to cozy up next to the closest person to you for a little while. The more you drink, the more touchy-feely you may get, so maybe try and stick to just one or two unless you’re looking for some afternoon delight. Hot tea will make you feel calm and relaxed to an extent you never have before. To the point where you might even want to just go lay down on one of the docks and take a quick catnap in the middle of the afternoon sun. Hopefully you wore sunscreen.
Effects from any drink will last for one to three hours or until you have some strawberry shortcake from one of the food vendors.
BLUEBERRIES FOR SAL
So maybe the lobster festival isn’t your thing or you got tired of all the crowds and wanted to go and do something else fun. Strangely enough, some of the fields out near the farmhouses apparently have a bunch of blueberry bushes that no one’s ever noticed before! They’re in full bloom and the berries look ripe for the picking. Perfectly round, juicy, warm from the sun – you could eat a whole handful of these and maybe never feel more satisfied. They’re deliciously sweet, perfect for pies and cobblers. And a whole basket seems to be reasonably priced, so why not go out and pick as many as you can!The longer you’re out in the fields, the more you’ll start to feel a little groggy. It’s easy to shake off as just being from the sun at first and you might think about heading back, but something in you wants to keep picking. So you trudge in deeper into the fields, and that sleepy feeling becomes more and more difficult to ignore. Eventually, you might find that you’re ready to just lay down and take a nap in the shade of a particularly large blueberry bush. It seems like a good a spot as any – the ground is nice and soft. Just curl up for a little while and close your eyes. Even people who are normally not prone to sleeping will find that they are compelled and even capable of taking a quick nap in these fields.
Any dreams you may have while sleeping will feel more vivid than normal – to the point where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Did you actually manage to find your way out of Deerington and back home? You can pinch yourself, but you won’t wake up, and it’ll hurt like a bitch, so it’s hard to be sure. Dreams seem to mostly be pleasant ones, but the occasional nightmare might find its way in to your otherwise restful sleep. Anyone who stumbles on you asleep in the fields might even hear you talking in your sleep, rambling out conversations and feelings you might normally have kept quiet. Got feelings for someone you were trying to bury? They might just hear you mutter them out loud if they’ve found you there in the dirt. Wanted to make sure no one in Deerington found out you had no home to go back to? That sucks, it sounds like you might have just spilled the beans without even knowing.
The real question is if the person who finds you will wake you up or just keep listening to find out more of your secrets without having to pry for them.
NINE, TEN, NEVER SLEEP AGAIN
It’s not just in the blueberry fields that sleepiness seems to be catching. Throughout Deerington, people seem to be having a harder and harder time staying awake for long stretches. The desire for a quick nap or even a long snooze becomes harder to fight as each day passes and you might find yourself nodding off in places you normally wouldn’t – behind the wheel of a car, in the middle of a store, at work… Hopefully no one gets too hurt or loses a job during these strange episodes.Only unlike in the fields, when you do give in to sleep, the dreams you have are now far from pleasant. Nightmares are running amok in your mind, but that vivid realism? That inability to tell when you’re awake or asleep? That has definitely not changed. You might not have even realized you’ve fallen asleep at all – most of the scenery around you seems to be Deerington itself, but something just seems off. You don’t have time to think about it though because it’s then that things start to get scary. Whether it’s reliving your most traumatic experiences, running in to your worst enemies, or seeing monster of your own creation popping up and chasing you, danger and fear are permeating every corner of these dreams. Horror movie fans might find they’re being chased by Freddie Kreuger, hunted down by Jason, cornered by the aliens from Alien. Or maybe there are terrifying monsters from your own world that have started to come for you and are trying to tear you limb from limb. It feels impossible to outrun, and maybe in the end, you don’t. But if you die in your dreams, you don’t really die in real life, right? So you might just snap awake with a particularly frightening jolt.
You think when you wake up that everything is fine. That sense of fear is gone and you’re able to just breathe. But as you go about your day, you start to see images from your nightmares out of the corner of your eyes. Was that Freddie’s claws scratching against the blackboard? Did you just hear the strange clicking of alien feet against the tiles? You hope it’s in your imagination, but this is Deerington. When does anything ever stay normal?
The danger from your nightmares is definitely invading your personal space and it will try to kill you. Anyone else can see these images just as plain as day as you can and they are welcome to either sit and watch or help you fight. Whatever is trying to kill you will go down in the same manner it would have back home – that means that it could be as easy as a bullet between the eyes or it could be as complex as an intense ritual. Guess you’ll have to figure it out for yourself before it really does kill you.
Character Arrival
You can read how all characters arrive in Deerington here.There is not a collective "all these characters showed up at the exact same moment" occurrence in Deerington. Since characters fall asleep, die, or pass out at various times throughout all their worlds, it wouldn't make too much sense if they arrived in game all at the exact same time. There should be some discrepancy between character arrival, whether by a couple minutes, hours, or even days up to a week.
The players are entirely in control of how/when they want to play their characters arriving in Deerington. For TDMs, you can play it like your character has just arrived and that can be maintained as your game canon, or you can wait until game events for that moment. Or you don't need to acknowledge it at all. The flexibility for character allows a bit more of an organic feel to the character arrival situation, so please play it to whatever feels right for you.
If you are interested in having an "arrival" introduction for one of your TDM prompts, you are more than welcome to explore that option.
I know, they're the softest boys and I love them!
He really hoped he wasn't making it weird.
When Crowley reacted to the light jab, he found it easier to breath if only for the way it made him laugh softly, a small grin spreading across his face despite himself. "Enjoyable it may be, for you-" Aziraphale's currently-dreaming predicament notwithstanding "that is still quite an unnecessary amount of sleeping, and there were quite a few interesting things to happen in the 19th century! The first telegraph, the first light bulb, the first telephone, the first car! Nicola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell and their absurd feud, the gavotte, and Oscar-...Oscar Wilde" His voice had slowly begun to regain it's usual chipper tone as he spoke, until breaking on that name, the name of one of the only humans he'd allowed himself to become close to, and remembered vividly how badly that had ended. All while he had slept.
Not that he blamed Crowley, of course. The demon was prone to his fits of fascination and a slave to whatever caught his whims. It was just how he was. It had just been lonely. They'd taken to seeing each other more and more frequently over the centuries, until nothing but silence from Crowley, and Aziraphale left to continue on, seeing all of the new wonders of the world as the humans experienced a burst of inventive genius, as their cultures around the world had surged forward in leaps and bounds that left him dazzled with all of it as it happened. And always, in the back of his mind, with a small, niggling worry that something had happened to his friend.
He face he made when the information about the blueberries hit him was offended to say the least, and he curled his nose down at the small basket he'd set next to himself before settling down against the post. He plucked a handful of them from inside, smelling them curiously as if that would tell him what had given them that unusual effect, and then tossed them out with a click of his tongue.
"What absolute rubbish. Why would I dream up berries to put myself to sleep when I was already dreaming???" He glanced back up at Crowley with a small sneer when he teased him about his weakness for the blueberries, though the expression looked more as if he were trying to hide a smile then actually pout. In retaliation, he reached up and wiped the dark, staining juice off of his hands onto a couple of Crowley's wide primary feathers, the expression on his face undeniably playful, now. "That sounds more like something you would concoct. If this weren't my dream, I'd say you had something to do with it! I may even have half a mind to scold the real you for it when I wake up anyway!"
But then he froze as Crowley reached out to pluck the fluff from his wing, his eyes watching the hand sharply, expectantly. He barely felt the contact, but it was enough to make his face flush to a subtle shade darker red, his wings flexing gently, as if they had wanted to follow the hand against his will. It had been such a long time since he'd properly groomed his wings, yes. He always had other things on his mind; books to catalogue, scrolls to decipher, rare tomes to acquire.
It had nothing to do at all with the fact that the way Crowley did it was always so soothing, sent strangely itching, tingling relief through the skin hidden beneath the feathers in such a way that if he forgot himself, it could turn him into a limp heap of limbs and feathers on the sofa. Or with the fact that Crowley always seemed eager to do it, with that same snarking, bemoaning attitude he always had when he was trying to pretend that he didn't want to do something for Aziraphale. He never could understand why, but Crowley had always seemed to enjoy doing things for him, and curse his curly white hair if it didn't make him happy in turn.
"Well-...it can be hard to reach them, sometimes. And the bookshop is rather cramped." That wasn't a small pout on his face, not at all.
"How do you mean? It's difficult to tell how much time has passed since I've been asleep." He pondered the question for a moment, bewildered by what he meant. "Even when I do sleep, it's not for very long. Should I be waking up, now? I wonder what time it is."
And then his eyes narrowed at the way Crowley's mouth fumbled over the words, an eyebrow lifting knowingly at him.
"Crowley. What did you do?"
His voice dropped low into his chest, attempting to sound scolding but sounding far too amused. He'd long since stopped suspecting Crowley of being capable of harming children decades ago, possibly even longer. But the demon certainly had a guilty conscience about something, and that was such a rare event that he was going to enjoy exploiting it.
Same! <3
Those yellow eyes stayed locked on Aziraphale. Taking off his shades in the angel's presence was just a natural response. He knew he could be himself around the blonde and it was relaxing. "I should have been there for you with Wilde. That's my only regret." Because he did enjoy the long nap.
The demon gave Aziraphale a look that said Was that necessary? when he wiped the juice on his well-kept feathers. "I swear, Angel." He puffed a bit, but ran his fingertips through Aziraphale's feathers, situating them back into a more unruffled rest, as they should be, but weren't. Aziraphale's outburst about dreams and the berries, however, stilled his hands, mid preen of those white feathers. What was he on about?
"Real me?" The angel wasn't drunk, he could tell that much. But he was certainly babbling nonsense right now. Crowley gave the man's shoulder a pinch. Not too hard, but enough to be uncomfortable. "You're not dreaming me up, Angel. I'm actually here, you silly idiot." He went back to preening the angel. "Oh, don't worry, I'll keep you groomed." He teased, but still wasn't sure what to think about that dream nonsense.
"This isn't normal sleep, Aziraphale. We're all dreaming together. There's no waking up and you're not concocting me--why would you even? Wouldn't you have better people to dream about? I'm real."
Crowley moved his hands down one wing, still working the feathers back into place proper, but now he couldn't hold eye contact with the angel. "I didn't do anything! She's a little girl. I would never!" Yes, the angel already knew that, but still. "Like you, I'd fallen asleep out here and she found me. She misheard one of our conversations--rather, my side of the conversation--and mistook something I said. Now she has a mess of ideas in her head." He hated feeling like he was being chastised by the angel. Made him all huffy.
no subject
"It's alright. I don't blame you, really. To be honest with you, in a way, I'm just glad...I'm just glad that you hadn't been forced to be the cause of it." Not that he would have felt Crowley capable of inciting such blind, violent hatred on his own, anyway. He remembered the way he had reacted to the Spanish Inquisition all those centuries ago.
Though at the same time, the fact that the humans were capable of it all on their own was little better. Everything about it had been absolutely heartbreaking. He shrugged gently, shaking his head and giving a small smile in an attempt to lighten the mood on his own.
"Besides. If you'd been there, I'm sure you would have just gotten yourself into trouble somehow, at my expense. I know how they see me. Even then, they suspected me of being a...'deviant.' A bachelor, who looks the age we do? Never showing any interest in courting the eligible young women, and did you hear? Why, he was even spotted leaving one of those gentleman's clubs just last evening!" His voice lilted in a soft imitation of those old, gossiping spinsters as he spoke, the ones who had stood on the opposite corner from his bookshop the day the investigators had come to speak with him, around the time of Oscar's trial. Aziraphale wasn't dumb, and though he may have been a little out of touch, he still knew enough to know exactly what people thought of him. He wasn't ashamed of who he was, but the humans' understanding of those matters for their own kind was rocky at best. He hardly expected them to understand the way it was for them. It was just the nature of their creation.
"Regardless, it's water under the bridge, my dear. Things are better now then they were back then. And you woke up in time to save me from my own foolishness during the Blitz, so I'd say you more then made up for it, in time."
He chuckled softly at the indignant huff Crowley gave him when he rubbed his hands on his feathers, making a note to himself to clean them off for him, later. The black wings may not have shown the stains, but he knew how particular Crowley was about them, and how he would fuss over the sticky juice once he was finished futzing with Aziraphale's.
The feeling of his fingers running through his own feathers made him sigh, his eyes sliding closed in contentment as he felt the subtle ache of them sliding into their proper places, allowing the skin that held them to relax for the first time in a good, long while. He hummed a wordless reply at the confusion in Crowley's voice, glancing back when those hands stilled with just enough time to see the pinch coming but not enough time to pull away, and though it didn't really hurt, he still gave a startled, indignant yelp as his wing flinched and he reached up to rub his arm, giving the demon an offended look.
"What was that for???"
He stared at him as he rambled on, and something in Aziraphale's mind seemed to grind to a halt behind his eyes as the dawning realization of the possibility finally occurred to him. And if he hadn't been blushing moments before, he most certainly was now, the expression shifting to a mixture of slight horror and denial.
"B-...but that's preposterous! You can't share dreams...! And-...a-a-and besides, a dream wouldn't know it wasn't real, anyway! That's just what you would say!
Right?"
The fact that the thought hadn't even occurred to him yet was probably more then enough evidence to show that he hadn't been there for very long at all, and in fact he had only woken up in the small house he'd been assigned that very morning. He had, of course, been completely bewildered and more then a little suspicious of the fact that he'd been seemingly knocked unconscious and carted off somewhere without once knowing, but the friendly - and somewhat foreboding - letter in the welcome basket in the kitchen had only made perfect sense. Of course, he was only dreaming! It certainly seemed real enough, but he had read books the humans had written regarding a form of dream in which the sleeping individual could, under the right conditions, induce a dream state that was so vivid and alive that it felt real at the time. It had seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation, this morning.
He carefully avoided the question about why he would even want to dream about Crowley of all people, but the blush on his face reached right up to his ears, now. Why, indeed? He couldn't think up an answer quickly enough that the pause wouldn't raise even more questions, so he ignored it and hoped he wouldn't notice.
And then, all while his wing continued to press and angle itself into the grooming with unconscious thought, he found himself gaping at him in mildly suspicious confusion.
"What do you mean 'ideas?' What on Earth could she have heard in one of our conversations that would give her ideas that have gotten you this out of sorts?"
Anthony J. Crowley, what have you been up to while he was gone?
no subject
At the forgiving comment, Crowley scoffed. "Never liked that saying, water under the bridge. Of course there's water under the bridge. Not like it would flow over the bridge, so long as reality wasn't broken. That's the point of a bridge. To go over water. You wouldn't need the bridge else wise." He knew that wasn't the point.
"That was proof, is what it was for. I don't know what you're getting so worked up over, Angel. This isn't our universe. Dreams work differently here, and there's easily a hundred trapped souls here, including ours." Crowley combed his fingers through Aziraphale's feathers, nearly finished with one wing. Just checking for anything he missed. You know, like a stray crape or a lost book--he wouldn't put it past the angel at this point. "Sorry about the most unfortunate news, but I am real, Angel."
It irked him a bit, or perhaps it was just frustrating, that they could be this close. This co-dependant on eachother. That Crowley couldn't go a century without a visit from the Angel. That he had to skulk through the shadows to keep an eye on the angel so he didn't get himself in trouble. It irked him that, thinking of Aziraphale alone after Wilde made his chest hurt and it shouldn't. He shouldn't feel that way. He'd done some of the most absurd things to keep the angel safe or on Earth because he couldn't stand the thought of not having him around. He knew it was nothing the angel would understand. He knew better. Holier than thou and all that. The number of times he had to fight with the blonde that they were, in fact, friends despite his objections was ridiculous. The angel would never get it and the demon would never get over it.
"Ducks." He answered awkwardly. "She heard us talking about ducks and lunch." The demon withdrew his fingers from the angel's feathers and after a brief moment of debate, he crawled across the angel's lap to get to the other side of him without breaking their wing-dome. Once he'd hauled his entire lanky, slender body across the angel, very reminiscent of a serpent, he settled back into the grass beside him and started on the other wing. "She's just a child with a wild imagination. But she's here alone." There was another pause and his voice dropped in volume as if ashamed. "I offered to cover her living expenses. But she may be under the impression that you and I are more than friends. She says 'ducks' and the link are 'date code'."
Crowley, despite seeming calm and relaxed, was very, very still. Often, he blinked to mimic normal human autonomy, but where he was in his head at this moment, he was forgetting to be human. He'd noticed Aziraphale artfully ignore his question, which had really been a self-depreciating retort. So now, he was reading the angel for a reaction while simultaneously trying not to show that he was focused that intently on the angel.
no subject
"Yes, my dear, I suppose there's nothing left for me but to march myself back down to Hell, is there? I'm a lost cause." And then the demon was off, babbling one of his trademark non sequiturs to cover up his discomfort at being shown that small bit of gratitude and forgiveness, and he let him continue with no more interruption then a small, knowing smile.
A smile that quickly dropped again when the implications of what he was saying hit him, and Aziraphale's brow furrowed deeply.
"B-...But that can't be possible. The only being who would have the power to create something like that w-...would be God!" And how did that fit into her Ineffable Plan? His heart gave another twinge at the self-deprecating way Crowley apologized, as if that were the reason it was causing him to be out of sorts. Not...that that was...wrong. But the part of his mind that allowed him to acknowledge the reality of his feelings knew that it wasn't for the reason Crowley intended. He huffed softly, quiet for a moment before he shook his head, looking at a tuft of feathers on Crowley's wing just behind his shoulder. "I will admit...if I were to believe that any of that is true...I feel I would be much less comfortable with the situation if you weren't here..."
Small concessions, whispered softly, unsuredly. They'd been through so much together. Crowley had been his strength through so much. Being thrown into something so unnatural without his friend to accompany him would have been terrifying. Because as much as he hated to admit it, he had become dependent on Crowley for attention, had begun to crave the other's presence in his life far more then he should have. He wanted the demon there beside him every day, felt so much safer when he was next to him and so much happier. Every visit they had was a blessing, followed by the curse of having to watch him go home in the evening, because that was what friends did. They got together to talk, to drink, to reminisce about the good old times, and then they went home to their respective houses and slept in their respective beds, and let the other live their own life without interfering. The pangs he felt in his chest when he had to watch Crowley walk to his car, get in, and drive away were the worst.
The bewildered glance he gave Crowley when he finally muttered about ducks and lunch lasted for all of an instant before the demon was practically slithering across his lap, and for a brief moment, Aziraphale forgot to breath. His entire body froze as he waited for him to get situated on the other side of him and begin working on the other wing, that blush returning to his cheeks. He didn't even initially register what he was saying as he continued to speak, as he fought down the sudden, inexplicable mental image of Crowley sprawling himself across his lap, perching himself there so that Aziraphale could wrap his arms around him and hold him tightly against his chest. When he finally blinked again, flexing his fingers unconsciously as if he had almost reached out to do just that, it was like he had blanked out for a brief second and was coming back to himself.
And then the surprise on his face flashed rapidly between realization, pride, followed by confusion and then amusement. And then right back to surprise. When he laughed, it sounded a little high, almost false. It wasn't the thought that Crowley had offered to help the child now that she was lost and alone in a strange world. That, despite all of his attempts to appear uncaring and aloof, was very much something he could have imagined Crowley doing under the right circumstances. No, it was the fact that he wasn't exactly sure how to react to the girl's confusion over their relationship without giving too much of himself away. Part of his mind shouted "Oh, yes, please! That would be wonderful, please, that's what I've wanted for so long!" But the rest of his mind tried to shove that part of him down so that it didn't react first and, to quote his friend, "cock it all up."
When he glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes, it was in quick looks, as if it was taking some effort to remain nonchalant.
"O-Oh, dear." He tittered again. "That must be a new one I've yet to hear. Children always seem to be the first to invent new meanings for words. I never would have expected 'ducks' to take on quite that meaning."
Keep it easy, light. Don't make more of it then it was. Crowley would only bristle and snarl and get his feathers all ruffled. It wasn't his fault that the mere suggestion of what the girl thought made a happy flutter in Aziraphale's chest that made him want to smile like a fool.
Already, he could feel the demon tensing next to him, probably expecting Aziraphale to lash out at the thought and declare to the sky that the idea were preposterous! And just as he should, by all rights. But this wasn't the middle of the end of the world, and despite what he'd said at the bandstand, the last thing he wanted was to push Crowley away simply because of his Fallen nature. He hadn't even then, truth be told, but had felt so trapped, so lost, and had been so very frightened that Crowley, if he had continued to waste time trying to convince the angel to leave, would miss his chance to reach safety. And that he would have to watch him die, would have to watch Crowley abandon the friendship they'd built up and take up arms with Hell against Aziraphale and Heaven, or have to...have to be the one to cut him down when the battle began. He wasn't sure what would have been worse. He glanced over quickly as he waited for him to start moving again, giving a shaky smile that he hoped covered up his own discomfort as he tried to defuse the situation.
"We have rather gotten into the habit of caring for children these past few years, haven't we? I suppose looking after one more wouldn't be too hard, while we're-..." Oh. Oh this was so very strange. "I'm almost afraid to admit it, Crowley, but...I think I'm starting to believe you. About this...not dream..."