[ closed / incomplete ]

[specificities]

Characters: specificities & forgedindreams
Setting/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.

Comments

[counterfeiture]

Fitting name, Eames agreed without voicing the thought, folding one leg over the other. There weren't any toothpicks to bite on, he noticed; no salt-and-pepper shakers, none of the usual things you'd find in proper diners, but then this is a saloon, yes? Or whatever "saloon" entailed, in this quaint little town straight out of a fairytale.

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?"

[specificities]

"You were ill for awhile," Arthur responded, pausing and leaning back as the old woman came around again with a fresh set of glasses - water for himself, a bright red fruit juice for Eames - and a small bowl of multi-colored candies, taking their empty glasses. Her movements seemed to creak with age. She didn't say a word, looking - to Arthur - almost solemn and slightly sad, as if she wanted to be anywhere but here. What was a woman her age doing working in a saloon, of all places? He waited until she left before leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table, linking his fingers together and resting his chin against them in brief thought before returning his attention to Eames.

"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."

[counterfeiture]

Candies.

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."

[specificities]

"Manipulations, kicks - neither have been successful." Obviously. "As for now, I've been trying to determine whether or not all of the people here are- projections or, somehow, individual people. If there's a theme to what they last remember before waking up here." He didn't have any sense of mechanics for it, how - if all of these people were real, if Mal was real - they would have managed to even get into the same shared dreamscape. Or why some of them claimed to know timetravel, or why Mal seemed to be confused about her death.

"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."

[counterfeiture]

"Kicks are off the list, forging is off the list, deaths, shades are off the list with a penciled strike-through," Eames listed off, one counted for every finger of one hand. This dream seemed to be tied down to more rules than they're aware, the actual rules have been hidden away from them instead. "Either we're dealing with someone who knows more about dreaming than we do, or there's more here than we're seeing."

"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.