Characters:
specificities &
forgedindreamsSetting/Location: The town of Lere'unfru, outside one of the candy shops.
Date & Time: Day 23, early afternoon.
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Adult Arthur and tiny baby Eames meet up.
(
the sky above us shoots to kill )
But that aside.
"Seeing as there's no logical reason for all of this," he commented with a vague hand gesture, "I'd suppose the only explanation is that there isn't any." Eames had to smile at that, too. "It fits right into those paradoxes that you so love, don't you think?"
Eames leaned back into his seat then, deceptively calm now that some of the things that had bothered him have now been addressed. Not enough of them have been, though, and it showed in the way Eames carried himself, even when seated - how this whole... whatever this is has bothered him. It's not as if the concept of self-deception didn't hold any with Eames; it happened often enough in real life that it wasn't much of a stretch for it to happen in dream state as well, but that was usually accompanied by a unique equation of trauma and timing, and that, more than the rest, made him restless.
In echo to the words said when things went pear-shaped in the first level of the Fischer job, the deeper the damage, the strong the deception. What had happened? They have absolutely nothing to work with, here.
"So what do we do?"
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"The caravan is headed for a place called Loophole," Arthur began, cupping the glass between his hands and pushing his thumbs along the curve of it. "Obvious name choice aside, they're saying it's supposed to return us to wherever we were last." He knew how ridiculous that sounded, he didn't need to look at Eames' face for an expression to solidify it. The entire sound of it suggested that something was able to pull them out of separate times, aside from separate areas. He shook his head briefly, not liking the way it sounded in his own head.
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It was the sort of place Philippa might come up with if she were ten and armed with crayons. Or Mal's precocious talent for the dreams.
Hmm, maybe not.
"It's a pretty silly name for a place, yeah," Eames began, his gaze wandering when Arthur delved into his thoughts deeper than he had the patience for. The sleeves of his shirt were wet with the water droplets from the glass, and they left damp patches along the inside of Eames' arms with every gesture he made. It's another useless detail that doesn't help; even texture, even taste is vividly real in this place.
How could anyone come up with so much detail and keep the dream up like this?
"What did I do while I was here?" He was already starting to consider just slopping his feet on top of the table, scuffs be damned, but Eames figured Arthur wouldn't take too kindly to having dirtied soles shoved into his line of vision. "What have you done, as well?"
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"You were trying to see if you could get any information out of the people here, but you disappeared before we could collaborate intel on it." With Eames' disappearance had come Mal.
"I've been testing the limitations of the dream. We can't do much of anything here, and the people populating the environment don't operate like your usual set of projections."
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Eames picked up a pebble-sized candy, something a bit soft and sticky to the touch, then dropped it back into the bowl. He'd have preferred something less pedestrian with his confections, really, but he supposed this wasn't the time and place to be picky. He didn't switch glasses with Arthur this time, at least.
"What sort of tests? Other than the part where you offed yourself." He's had his share of re-entering dreams after being untimely exited, one way or another, but this would be the first he's heard that doesn't fit into any of the tenuous rules they have for dreams. Say he's really been here before - why didn't he remember? And what if Arthur was a projection, what about that line of thought? Eames certainly had enough material to make a believable forge of the point man, but this was a little too detailed to be a projection. Even the way Arthur folds his fingers was exact in a way Eames would have expected; frankly it's a little creepy.
Eames popped what looked like a jelly bean into his mouth. He made a face; it was a little too sour. "I suppose it couldn't hurt to do the same as my previous version, if we're really just going to wait until the kick comes."
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"I'm not seeing any alternatives other than to wait to see if anything else occurs," he said - though that answer didn't satisfy even himself. "It'd be pertinent to find out how we got here, first, before we can find a way to exit - considering the usual ways aren't working." He didn't exactly want to attempt shooting himself again - and he doubted the man with the weapons would let him use them after the first incident. "We need to know exactly what it is we're actually dealing with. If this is limbo."
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"This is some hole we've fallen into, hm." They know what they don't know - that was a good start. They have a list of things that weren't acting according to how they should act, a list considerably longer than the one enumerating the things that worked. What does that tell Eames? He has too little to work with. They both do. "Good old-fashioned hoofing it, then. Traditional sleuthing would likely yield us more than theorizing would."
There was only the small matter of Eames being, well, small.
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