Malcolm is great. Everyone is great. Helis manages to get out of the Chipotle before they start saying things like this out loud. This is definitely the drunkest they've ever felt after a dry event - and after most of the ones with alcohol too, really.

They're also much too keyed up to go to bed at a sane hour. They go out and whack a tree with a sword for half an hour to get the energy out. They grab a cheap Ikea picture frame from their drawer of Things They Meant To Decorate With But Never Got Around To It, glue decorative paper from their long-unused scrapbooking supply over it to make it look fancier, and put their Award of Arms scroll in it and put it up on a wall where they can see it from the bed. (Every time they look at it, they remember the King saying "I knew we could count on you," or the Queen's hand helping them up.)  They listen to the song on their SCA playlist that best matches the mindset the King told them to try for, and it only takes a couple of times to get it thoroughly stuck in their head. They brush their teeth, and turn the lights off, and go to sleep.

And wake up.

The dreamrealm has color, but not shape. It has enough light to see by, but no sources of light. It has up and down, but no gravity; Helis is not in free fall but their body weighs nothing. There is nothing below their feet but more color, but there is no need to stand on anything. They are clothed, or perhaps they are clothes; looking down they can see the garb they wore this afternoon but there's no sense of a body inside it. Their sword is at their side, but it isn't the duct-tape-and-rattan construction they remember. Instead it is a gleaming blade, the sword they would imagine if they were asked to imagine a sword, the idea of sharpness given form and a hilt.

The King and Queen are here, looking every inch a king and queen, resplendent in brocade, crowned, and armed with sword and shield and rapier and buckler. They always look amazing when they're On, but here they look realer than real.

They do, and Helis kneels and cannot think of anything to say.

(The motion works, although they aren't sure how it worked without a body to feel and move; they would be breathing too fast, the way they do when something awes them half as much as anything about this place and this moment, except that they don't seem to be breathing at all.)

If they had woken up here on their own, they'd immediately get distracted by how the place worked, what all the strange not-quite-sensations translated to, what other not-quite-motions were possible - but they told the truth when they said they would be more useful and coherent when they had something to do, and this is a situation with something to do, so they focus and wait to be told what it is. There will be a time for experimenting, and the Crown will tell them when and how, and their curiosity has no trouble fading into the background to wait.

The shape of time in the dreamrealm is such that even with the widely varying sleep schedules of three generations on a Saturday night, everyone shows up at about the same time. They arrive half-sorted and start sorting themselves further, grouping into baronies and shires and households and guilds, peers with their students, friends with friends. Some people are choosing one of a dozen places they would fit; others have a single obvious place--but no one is alone.

One group stays with Helis beside the royals: Their own household, plus a couple people Helis doesn't recognize, looking young and almost as new as they are.

"Helis, hi!" says a Pelican they've met a couple times at Troll and when tearing down events. "I'm glad you chose to join us."

All right, Helis is entirely capable of stopping being ridiculous if prompted in that direction.

"Hi! I'm glad to be here. What a place." They take a moment to look around properly. Oh, but those colors are really something... And the people are really something too. They've never seen so much of Æethelmearc in one place, and the lack of the SCA's usual array of pavilions and baskets and chairs makes them look much more like an army.

"So, what do I do now?"

"We wait a couple more minutes to give everyone who's joining tonight time to arrive, so they're less likely to appear mid-fight, and then we all match off that way." She points in a direction which is for no discernible reason the obvious direction to go in. "You might want to do a few practice sword-swings in the meantime, just to make sure you're used to the weird gravity and whatnot."

Wow, the directions are a trip.

"Great, yes."  It's a lovely sword, and they weren't sure how good an idea it was to draw it with people all around, but if it's fine then they would like nothing more than to try it out.

They step away far enough to have some space to move, they draw, and swing, and-- it fits their hand perfectly, it's weighted better than anything they've ever held, it gleams just like the dream-sword it is. It doesn't make them perfect with it, but it's easier - they don't have enough of a body for their wrist to twinge if they twist it wrong, there isn't enough gravity for their swings to pull them off-balance if they don't hit anything. Skill still matters more than the minor conveniences, they don't feel faster or more accurate than they usually are, but it feels like skill will be easier to build, with reality getting out of the way like this. Although they may end up having some arguments with reality if they build habits here and try to use them back in the waking world.

Other questions to investigate, if there's time and nobody interrupts them with almost certainly more important things:

- There's no ground and no gravity - does that mean they can move up and down, or is there just a single level they're obviously staying on for no discernible reason?

- Does their sword hurt them, and how easily? They don't intend to take stupid risks, but it matters whether this is the normal sort of sharp blade that will cut you if you try a normal amount of hard, or the magical one of the sort that will just cut anything it touches no matter how lightly, or the magical one of the sort that won't cut you because it's yours.

- Does anything else hurt them, or feel like anything, for that matter? The degree to which they have a body here is disturbingly ambiguous and they'd like to-- no, disambiguating it as much as possible is not a good idea, don't impose your expectations on the dream or it might get less convenient. But they'd like to pay enough passive attention to it to get used to how things work, while keeping an open mind about the concept of not having a proper body.

- Armor - is it a thing? Is anyone wearing it? Are people acting like it makes a difference or as if it's just a visual effect?

- Shields - those are clearly a thing, and interestingly Helis didn't show up with one, but probably they can just... focus on having one? Does that work?

- Can they feel people? They were told they could feel people. If they close their eyes and turn around a few times (putting the sword away first), can they tell where anyone is, in some way? What's it like?

There is an up and a down but no clear way to traverse them; one step might land higher or lower than another for unclear reasons but if there's a way to get the same one repeatedly it isn't intuitive.

The sword is sharp when wielded with intent to cut, to strike, to harm. Without that intent it is as dull as a memory of a blade.

In this moment, nothing hurts. Introspection will cause Helis to notice they can detect neither their own heartbeat nor their own breath nor any inclination to breathe. Speaking involves no specific movements of the lips or tongue.

Thinking of themself as the sort of person who should be carrying a shield right now gets them a shield! Likewise armor.

Closing their eyes and focusing produces a vague sensation of [duty honor obligation importance] with a direction that turns out to be the approximate direction of the King and Queen; when they open their eyes they are several steps farther away from everyone else despite not having moved in a direction and the Pelican is hovering watchfully in the manner of, well, a mother bird.

The sword is the best sword! The not-landscape is confusing and should be investigated further, but maybe not right now.

Oh no, what, that was definitely not good and they're glad the Pelican was watching out for them!  "Uh, what just happened? Is closing my eyes just fundamentally a bad idea, or is there a trick to not drifting off like this?"

"Closing your eyes is generally a bad idea. It looked like you were trying to learn to navigate by vibrations, and that's a valuable thing to learn, but you'll pick it up over time and it's safer to keep someone from your squad in your field of view at all times. Unless you're the one in front navigating and then you have to trust that everyone else is behind you, but you don't need to worry about that yet."

A slightly embarrassed smile and nod. "Learning to navigate is an overstatement, I was just trying to figure out if I felt any... vibrations, apparently... in the first place, but I can figure that out more slowly and without closing my eyes. Anything else I definitely shouldn't do?"

"Nothing else as tempting as that. Don't try to hurt yourself or anyone else, it goes by intent. Don't lose sight of your group. If you were an artisan I'd say don't get between the fighters and the dreamwyrms but looks like that's not relevant to you tonight."

Groups are starting to roll out, now, and it looks as strange as anything else. One member of a group will take a step, the others looking at them, and suddenly none of them are here anymore. The King looks around to make sure his whole squad is close up and looking at him.

Helis is now definitely paying attention to everyone else instead of experimenting, and thus notices what's going on and makes sure to be close up and looking at the King when people are starting to do that. They are almost certainly still going to do some things wrong today, that's how practicing a new thing goes and they don't think anybody's going to blame them, but they can at least try to minimize it. Especially now that something is happening.

They wish they knew if they should be expecting an immediate dreamwyrm encounter or something else, but probably nobody really knows, and in any case it should be obvious in a few seconds.

Does going places require any more volitional action than looking at someone who does it and intending to be with them?

Making walking motions with their legs isn't strictly necessary for motion but makes them go faster, and everyone else is doing it.

Today they get a few minutes of walking before anything happens, but it's clear from how everyone is looking out around them that this is never guaranteed.

Ohh, right, just that the other groups looked like they disappeared doesn't mean this is going to feel like disappearing and appearing somewhere else. This place is so strange! Helis can make walking motions and feel only mildly weird about it. Maybe if they keep doing it they'll develop an intuition for whatever the deal with stepping up and down is.

They try to stick to the middle of the group, which seems like the thing to do as a newbie, and additionally makes it much easier to look around without accidentally losing sight of the other people. It's a good thing everyone's wearing fancy enough garb to counteract Helis's usual instinct to just not look at people at all when not talking to them.

With no landmarks, it's impossible to tell how far they've gone, but after some amount of travel--

Something horrible looms out of the colour ahead of them. It's almost entirely mouth, teeth ringing a terrible sucking emptiness, and it rears up taller than a man to try to bite the King--

And meets his sword.

Fighters crowd around the dreamwyrm, stabbing at its thick, oily-dark hide. A seamstress does something imperceptibly fast and its body heaves like it's being crushed.

Helis is not the screaming type, but they would've stopped breathing, if they had been breathing in the first place.

And in the next not-breath they're there with everyone else, not quite as fast, but with just as sharp and deadly a sword as the others. Finding the killing intent for this thing took no effort at all.

With this many people around them it's hard to even feel afraid, although they're sure the dreamwyrms will manage to do something about that sooner or later.

The wyrm's hide is thick and sticky, trying to rip the blade from Helis' hands or corrode it away to a useless hilt if their intent should falter even for a second. Its wounds gush forth a foul ooze, mud-slick underfoot, reeking of death and rot and the filth that accumulates in the forgotten crevices of the world. Its gaping mouth is here and then there and then here again, twisting space to put itself wherever it can best do harm.

Bright swords pierce it in a hundred places, and its teeth glance off shields bright with heraldry and hard as a promise.