(Untitled)

[grinninggrifter]

Characters: Grift (grinninggrifter and OPEN TO ALL
Date/Time: September 5th/Midnight
Location: ~IN YOUR DREAMS WHOOO~
Rating: PG-13 for Grift
Summary: Grift sleeps. Come see him in his dreams? And please feel free to alter the dream to your liking for a merging of dreams and all that or they can have weird era-blending adventures! Pime Taradoxes are

Comments

[coughcoughshank]

Souji had been wandering through a city - familiar, in the unplaceable way dreams were. But the low wooden buildings with their tiled roofs had slowly started to shift to tall buildings, stone and glass. Not wholly unfamiliar - but not home.

He followed one of the streets, not sure where he was going. There were people here, unfamiliar and unidentifiable, but they paid him no heed. Then he spotted someone more familiar - Grift. Walking and talking with another man, one Souji didn't know. They headed around the side of one of the big buildings, and Souji followed, keeping his distance. Curious.

[grinninggrifter]

Grift didn't see Souji in the bar with him at first. He set the suitcase on the bar and stared at the guns inside. His hands glided along the familiar surfaces and he took one out to stuff into his pocket, safety on. The rest went back into the suitcase lined with soft cloth, and gazed around the bar with sharp eyes.

Didn't take long to spot Souji. No one else in the bar was anything but white or black and maybe a bit of both, who was Grift to ask, to care? Souji stuck out like a sore thumb. And anyone who stuck out like a sore thumb in a place like this was just begging to get roughed up. He wasn't sure why Souji was here. He didn't belong here. But Grift didn't know where 'here' was.

He stared at him levelly. "If I asked you why you're here, would you be able to give me an answer?"

[coughcoughshank]

Souji gave him a grin - only a touch sheepish. "Not really. I was wandering a city, and then it... sort of became a different city I didn't know. Then I saw you." The chain of events seemed logical enough, even if their surroundings didn't. In a place like Edensphere - well, logical surroundings would have been a bigger surprise, really.

[grinninggrifter]

"So you followed me into this bar," Grift said, then took a packet of cigarettes from out of his pocket (where did that come from?) and lit it with an expensive looking silver lighter (where did that come from?). He blew out the smoke slowly. "If I recall correctly, you don't smoke, do you?"

He placed both items back into his pockets, then asked, "Do you know where you are, exactly?"

[bloody_pens]

Castle was standing before the hidden entrance to a bar.

Beneath a flower shop.

God, was he stuck inside a cheesy film noir?

That this was a dream didn't mean he didn't hesitate in following the sounds of singing, of music, of people, of life, and the familiar smells of cigarettes and alcohol. He was an alcoholic still struggling a little with his addiction, after all- so a bar was one of the last places he wanted to be.

Did this represent his temptation?

"...Since when do I think dreams have any deep, hidden meaning?" he grumbled to himself, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette, sticking it into his mouth before fishing for a lighter, it not occurring to him that he didn't smoke at all.

"To hell with it," he said, and began to make his way down the stairs.

[grinninggrifter]

When Rick emerged from the stairwell, Grift was still perched at the bar, watching the huge figure of the man lumber away from him. His boss, he had gathered throughout the conversation. He glanced down at the suitcase, far too large to be inconspicuous, and opened it. He took out a tommy gun, then sneered. "Doesn't know his spy work, does he? Noisy, unreliable and prone to jamming long enough to get a man killed."

At the flicker of movement, he glanced up, gun still in his hand. Rick. Somehow, Rick being here didn't seem to strange. He always seemed like a man of discerning taste to Grift, and this fine establishment housed enough pretty broads and nice booze to attract a man like him. "Rick," he said with a nod. He didn't see the point in saying much else.

[bloody_pens]

Rick blinked and cocked his head to the side when he spotted Grift and a large suitcase. Drifting over to the man, he turned his head from side to side, taking in the environment. It was familiar and foreign all at once.

"Yo," he said easily, sliding into a stool next to Grift, then realized how unusual all this was and blinked at him. "...So, here you are and here I am. And this place looks vaguely familiar, only not. If I'm dreaming, this is a hell of a dream. Can't say I mind the company, at any rate."

[grinninggrifter]

"Dreaming?" Grift said, blinking at him as if the thought had occurred to him for the very first time. Though he hadn't been particularly pleased to hear that he was going to do a hit, it came as a surprise to know that even that dirty lifestyle was preferable to the one he led in his waking life. A dream, then? That was disappointing.

"That would make sense," he said slowly, sliding his glass easily between his two hands. "However, there is one odd thing about this if it is indeed a dream. Which is not this place itself." The easy way he gazed around the bar and soaked up the ambiance of it made it plenty clear that this wasn't the sort of place that he was entirely unfamiliar with in one form another.

"No, it is your presence here. No offense meant, but I cannot say that I often find you in my dreams. So perhaps it's not."

/some fractional time unit after the Castle thread, then?

[weaver_girl]

The dress was definitely slinkier than anything Kagerou could remember having in her closet. It was a very pretty wine red, though she suspected it actually clashed horribly with her hair, which was somehow wound up and away from her shoulders and piled on top of her head in some gravity-defying contraption.

The bar seemed familiar, its walls and dimensions and scents, but something about the decor was off. She turned her head and a table had moved; she knew every face at Smoke's, yet none of the dapperly dressed people moving leisurely through the room were familiar.

Except for one. Her high-heeled shoes clicking on the floor, she went to Grift's table, drew a chair for herself, and leaned her elbows on the table, forearms tucked close together and her chin rested on her palms.

"Hello," she said, glancing about. "Do you happen to know where we are? I'd say this is Smoke's, but... the details don't really add up."

certainly!

[grinninggrifter]

In this dream, time had a certain way of blurring and turning unclear. Had Daitou been here, in this very bar asking for sake? Had he and Rick had a discussion about this entire thing being a dream? Truth be told, Grift wasn't sure. All he knew was that somehow, he was back in the bar.

Whether or not the other two were here before didn't matter, he decided, and he settled into his seat once again only to be joined by yet another familiar face. He had barely seen hide nor tail of Kagerou since his return to Edensphere, and that was the way he preferred it. Nevertheless, he couldn't say seeing her again wasn't a welcome change.

And she did look very pretty in that dress of hers. "Hello, Kagerou," he said, leaning forward to greet her. "I cannot say I do. I've just been enjoying the, ah..." He waved a vague hand through the air. "...ambience."

[weaver_girl]

"Well, there is that!" She chuckled, a little uneasy. While she loved the bar in Edensphere, this place was somehow a world away; it seemed to have sprung from some hard-boiled detective story, smoky and seedy and raggedly glamorous.

Now that she thought about it, she couldn't quite remember how she had ended up here. There had to be a door behind her, but she didn't know that she had walked through it. Neither had she ordered a drink, she knew, yet now there was a tall glass of yellow lemonade fizzing at her elbow, for all that this place was surely not the sort to serve lemonade, even if you asked for the bottle behind the counter that you knew was there.

"Is this where you've been hiding?" she asked, suddenly bold. "I mean, I hope you don't mind, but I've hardly seen you since you came back. I do worry sometimes, you know."

[grinninggrifter]

Grift's eyes flicked at the lemonade by Kagerou's elbow. The stray thought that that wasn't quite right flickered through his mind, but it was quickly smoothed over by the very mechanics of the dream, and suddenly it seemed to make perfect sense. Even a bar such as this one would have something appealing to the taste of young ladies such as Kagerou. It wouldn't do to alienate such an important age group, after all, and not all young ladies were hell-bent on strapping down their chests and guzzling whiskey.

"No," Grift said. "This is the first time I have been to this establishment - I have hardly been hiding unless you count hiding in plain sight."

He knew what she was saying, but that didn't mean that he wished to address it. "You needn't worry," he added on. "I am still whole and well, and if you wish to question that fact, I am only a journal page away."

Whole if not well, anyway.