Helis d'Ambray, currently standing guard behind the royal thrones, fails to keep the delighted surprise off their face, but ends up frozen for a second, until the guard deputy-captain steps up to take their post and pushes them forward with a grin.

They circle around to the center, make a low bow several steps before the thrones, approach, and kneel.  They manage to be reasonably graceful about all of it, having practiced until it felt comfortable - they like court, and aspire to one day be one of those shiny people who look natural there.

The royalty smile at them with their classic poise. The Queen says, too quietly for anyone else to hear, "It's been lovely seeing you jump in to everything. You have exactly the sort of enthusiasm we love to see, and your art is beautiful. And you've been so helpful at events."

The King projects his voice enough for the front half of court and most of the other people behind the thrones to hear. "Helis, ever since you joined you've been learning and helping. You've been making beautiful garb. You've been guarding her majesty at events and during court. I've seen you fight, and how you're not afraid to try things and fail and learn and try again and you're already improving. And whenever there's something that could use an extra pair of hands during setup or cleanup, there you are, making it happen. And so we would do this."

He gestures to the Jewel Herald, who holds up a beautifully illuminated scroll and starts reading. He's projecting well enough for practically everyone to hear, because you don't volunteer to be Jewel Herald if you don't like to make noise. "It is the joyous duty of a ruler to see and reward the achievements of the populace. Helis d'Ambray has come to Our notice. They defend Our Sylvan lands by force of arms, and spread beauty with the work of their loom and needle. When duty calls, they appear. Therefore do we," absolutely flawless enunciation of the royals' foot-long Italian names, "award them Arms and name them a Noble of Our court." Then there's a bit more metadata with the date and event name and such but the important thing is that Helis gets to keep the scroll and also stand up. 

Just before the King says "Noble Helis, turn and greet the populace," the Queen slips a second piece of paper into Helis' hand beside the scroll. 

"For Noble Helis!" yells the Jewel Herald, and everyone raises a hand to do the V sign.

"VIVAT! VIVAT! VIVAT!"

There's a quiet and heartfelt "Thank you, Your Majesty" or two, and the traditional delighted noise at how amazing the scroll is (it's absolutely amazing and they're going to frame it), but luckily the ceremony does not call for Helis to say or do much of anything. They beam at the populace, turn around again to back away properly and bow as they're dismissed, and then there's a whirlwind of congratulations and hugs from their friends and neighbors. People keep saying so many kind things that they barely make it back to their guard post before the end of court, and need to wipe their eyes as they do.

The SCA token-gifting culture has given them the right reflexes for what to do when someone quietly gives you some small thing, so they carefully put away the Queen's little piece of paper without looking, don't lose it during the next few hours, and remember to take it out and look at it once they finally have a quiet moment - after they have talked to everyone (and mostly managed to remember all of their titles), gotten so much advice and praise that they're not sure they can remember it all, accepted multiple drinks and snacks, and helped carry everything that needed carrying as the event wound down. It's surrounded by a little pile of other tokens by then, but upon examination it doesn't look like a token itself, just a piece of paper with writing on it. What does it say?

Can you meet us at our car after the event? We'd like your help with a secret project. Thank you!

Then there's a license plate number, corresponding to one of the last cars left in the parking lot. 

A secret project!! And oh no, Helis wishes they had read it a little earlier than this, but in their defense they really weren't expecting anything time-sensitive to be conveyed in writing.

They make their way to the car immediately, with the slightly awkward half-bow of a person who realizes nobody involved is in garb any longer but still can't treat their royalty like they're just normal people.

"You wanted me for something, Your Majesties? I'm sorry I made you wait."

"No need to be sorry--or to stand on ceremony. The thing we wanted to talk to you about is somewhat more serious than most of what we do here. It's an opportunity to help a lot of people, but there are risks. Something like joining a volunteer fire department, albeit much less time consuming. If that doesn't sound like the sort of thing you want in your life, we can all forget we ever had this conversation and you won't have to worry about it again. Or I can tell you more--but only if you promise to keep it a secret."

Those sure were some words. Why... is... the SCA... running a secret volunteer fire department? Or is it the SCA doing it, rather than Their Majesties in their personal capacity? Presumably they wouldn't be asking a new noble at an event if it was not at all an SCA thing... Well, Helis can come up with some things that are wrong with the world and might need a secret project to fix, although it being not very time-consuming is pretty surprising. Then again, nobody in the SCA is well calibrated about how time-consuming any normal projects are. But Helis can also come up with some hypotheses for secret projects they would not want to be involved in at all, and they don't actually know Their Majesties that well as people.

They feel like they've been quiet for too long, but probably this is expected, given how serious this sounds.

"I... am very confused. Probably everyone is, when you first ask them?" They shake their head, trying to put the confusion aside - it can't be resolved right now, so they should really talk about the things that can be resolved. "It sounds like the sort of thing I probably want in my life, especially given the circumstances you're asking under. I will keep your secret, but before I swear to that, may I know if I'd be swearing it to the crown, or to you as people, mundanely or not, just so I know what-- what category this goes in in my head?..." They know it's an odd and probably unnecessary question, but it feels important to know, for some reason.

They nod understandingly like that's a totally normal response. "I've explained this to a dozen people in my time, and there's really no way to explain this that doesn't make it sound weird. Frankly, it is weird and you're entirely right to have questions. As for who exactly is asking you to keep a secret--well, if we weren't ruling right now it would be someone else asking you, but I think it would be better if you thought of it us as ordinary people asking you as an ordinary person. If it would help to talk to someone you know better and have more reason to trust, we've asked Malcom to stick around as well."

The King waves and Malcolm comes over from where he was leaning casually against his car watching the trees and definitely not waiting for this.

That continues to be confusing! It is an SCA thing but it's for some reason better to act like it's not? Possibly Their Majesties they don't realize how bad Helis Vic? is at being an ordinary person.

But if Malcolm is in on this then it can't be a cult, and probably isn't the bad sort of illegal conspiracy either. "Thank you! That should really help. But, secrecy oath before we do any talking, right?" A bit of an embarrassed smile. "I'm sorry I'm making a big deal out of it, it's just that I'm bad at secrets, and it sounds like you seriously want me to keep this one, so I need to make a big deal of it so it sticks in my head properly." They stand quietly for a moment, thinking about how to even sensibly swear a mundane secrecy oath in a way that will feel like it means the right thing. And whether they're really willing to do that. They haven't sworn a single real oath in their life so far, because they take both their word and their independence too seriously for any of the usual reasons to be worth it - but secrecy isn't that much of a duty to take on, and this has to be something important, given everything about this conversation. If this is something wrong, swearing to keep the secret is still the right thing to do unless it's the sort of thing Helis could have figured out independently - and they sure haven't noticed anything about it in their entire SCA life so far, and they know they're not the sort of person to figure out secrets, so this isn't much to give away in exchange for the opportunity to openly talk people out of whatever wrong thing they might hypothetically be doing. And anyway they really almost certainly aren't, and if this is a good thing then they very much want to be in on it.

"I swear on my mind and honor that I will keep your secret, no matter what it is and no matter how I feel about it, for as long as I live." That wasn't very good, but that's what you get when you only have a minute to think of an oath, and it will do well enough. Helis takes a deep breath, stops looking solemn and goes back to looking confused, but smiles anyway. "Now someone please tell me what this is about, because yes, it's already very weird and I'm not sure whether to expect it to get weirder from here." They look between the crown and Malcolm, not sure who to expect the explanation from.

Malcolm attempts to arrange his face into a reassuring smile, but Malcolm's face never does what he wants it to. 

"The fact that you take this sort of thing seriously is important in more ways than one. And there's no way to explain this slowly with every step making sense, so. The world of dreams is a real place, it's haunted, and a supermajority of SCAdians fight monsters in our sleep to stop them from killing people. We can prove we're not crazy, but only by bringing you into the dreamrealm, and once you've been there it will happen every time you sleep and the dreamwyrms will know you're a threat. Some nights you'll have to fight them just to wake up.

I know you have a million questions and we'll try to answer all of them, but first I want to say: the SCA is also what it pretends to be. We really are a bunch of dorks having fun hitting each other with sticks and making art and studying the past and having fun together and you're going to get to keep that whether you decide to fight monsters with us or not. Unless you decide you don't want to, which is also fine, but I'd be sad because you're cool."

Malcolm is very good, and Helis is used to the face thing. Perhaps his ability to make normal facial expressions was stolen by dream monsters No, probably he was just always like this.

The rest of this sure seems like a great opportunity to suspend judgement and try to build a model of what's potentially going on without trying to convince your brain any of it is real until some point later in the process. Which is very convenient, with how Helis's brain is absolutely not taking any of it as real.

"I'd be sad too! You're great, all of you are great, the SCA is great, and I guess I'm really not surprised that you all decided to fight dream monsters in your sleep given that this is apparently a thing. I mean, I don't really know whether it's a thing yet, because what the fuck, but, uh, hypothetically." Some part of Helis feels bad about not entirely believing what their friend and the crown they admire are telling them, but they were right, this is clearly the sort of situation to treat like an ordinary-ish bizarre claim first and apologize later not apologize at any point because no sane person would want an apology for not believing in the existence of dream monsters on their bare word.

"So... questions. First, uh, why? I assume there's a reason we're fighting the dreamwyrms, but so far you've only said that they try to kill people who opted into it. If normal dreams don't happen in the dreamrealm then what... is... the dreamrealm and how sure are we that any of us need to be there?"

The King scowls the scowl of an old soldier. "Oh, they'd quite like to kill everyone. When someone 'passes peacefully in their sleep', that's dreamwyrms. When a baby dies of 'failure to thrive' or 'sudden infant death', that's dreamwyrms. When a coroner's stumped and puts down 'natural causes', well, sometimes they're just bad at their job, but a lot of the time it's dreamwyrms. They prey on the weak, on anyone whose soul is less than perfectly connected to their body. But they have to get through us first."

"The fight is older than the Society," the Queen adds. "Probably over a thousand years old, though I'm not sure anyone alive knows how it started. There are other groups on other continents. It's very difficult to interact in the dreamrealm with anyone you're not connected to in real life, so we don't coordinate much, but I suspect one of them is descended from the Knights Templar."

Malcom nods. "I've looked at some graphs of US infant mortality statistics versus SCA membership and of course everything's confounded to heck and back but they do line up encouragingly. People have tried to communicate with the dreamwyrms; as far as anyone can tell they're dumb as particularly evil rocks."

The King gets another half-bow with Helis's hand on their heart, because really, pretending to be ordinary people or not, how can you not react to someone saying things like that.

Malcolm gets a grin and a nod. Numbers!

"Why in the world did we end up having to deal with particularly evil rocks?? That's awful!"  Really, of all things.

And yes, it's 'we' and has been so for the last few sentences, oops. Helis knows they need to actually think about this at some point, but emotionally they're somehow skipping the part where they believe this is happening and getting right to the part where they'll obviously get involved. Which, they suppose, is the real order of operations here anyway, so that's well enough.

"And I genuinely cannot tell whether by 'encouragingly' you mean we're somehow less likely to die than random people who haven't opted in, despite what you said about someones needing to fight to wake up, or we're more likely to die, which is evidence for the battle not being made up but not evidence for it accomplishing any-- wait no, ignore me, I'm an idiot, you mean having more SCA membership lowers the overall population mortality in the area, yes, good, it just didn't occur to me that being in the same geographical area would matter. Which is the sort of thing it'll be easier to explain to me once I've tried it."

"So, what do I really need to know before I try it... Am I getting it right that normal people who are dreaming are not usually in the dreamrealm, since you said I need to do a thing to get there? Is it that they sometimes accidentally get in, or that the dreamwyrms sometimes get out?"

Malcolm attempts to answer, gesturing with his hands a lot the way he does when he's worried what he's saying doesn't make any sense. "So, it's sort of like--everyone's soul is in the dreamrealm while their bodies are asleep, but mostly the souls are also asleep, but if you're a dreamwalker your soul is awake. So you don't really perceive the dreamrealm, you just get glimpses that your brain tries to make sense of with normal dreams about, like, being late for a dentist appointment with no pants or whatever. Dreamwalkers can perceive the dreamrealm for what it really is, which is actually a lot weirder than being late for the dentist with no pants, and move around in it and do things."

"Locations in the dreamrealm are only loosely connected to locations in the waking world," adds the king, "but there's still something it means to get between the part where the sleeping souls are and the direction the dreamwyrms come from. It'll make sense when you see it."

"Ohhh. Yeah, that makes perfect sense." And neatly solves problems like 'are we invading the dreamwyrms' home dimension where we wouldn't normally be', not that someone else wouldn't have already figured that out.

"So... what's it like?" Their voice softens, wistful. "And am I just never going to have normal dreams again?" They'll miss them. Even the ones with randomly being naked, but mostly the ones with flying.

They'd miss the ones about war, too, but that sounds like it'll be more than covered.

"I haven't had a normal dream since I started," grins Malcolm, "but I like that. My dreams usually sucked."

The Queen makes the tippy-hand "maybe" gesture. "I get normal dreams a couple times a year, on airplanes and bus rides when I don't fall asleep deeply enough for my soul to wake up properly. I think people vary."

"A few times a year would be nice," they smile. "I mostly like my dreams, and I'd miss flying if I knew I could never have that one again."

"Not that I'd say no just for that, but it makes a difference. So, how do I do this thing?"

The King smiles. "I knew we could count on you. There are two parts to it. First, you need to go to sleep while thinking about the dreamrealm, with as much accurate detail as possible. That's part of why the secrecy: it's possible to become a dreamwalker on accident by worrying about it too vividly.

The second part is to make sure your soul wakes up near us, so we can help you get oriented and watch your back while you learn to fight. Even when you're highly experienced, there's safety in numbers. That means you also need to be thinking about how we're connected on the level that the dreamrealm understands: the level of myths, of archetypes, of concepts and relationships old enough and deep enough for the dreamrealm to understand. It's easy to find one's parents or children in the dreamrealm. Likewise spouses, siblings, close friends--and kings." another momentary smile, this one tinged with acknowledgement of the ridiculous, then he turns serious again. "The most reliable way we've found to get new people in the right place immediately is for them to think of themselves as soldiers of their kingdom forming up under its banner."

Ohh. Is that why everything about the SCA is the way it is? Helis loves the way the SCA is, the web of heartfelt hierarchical relationships that feel real even though on some level they aren't, the way people will describe someone as their squire-brother or apprentice and sound like it really matters, how everyone bows when passing before the thrones. Discovering that there's a deeper meaning to it... It's permission to treat it all as real, and they're not sure they've ever wanted anything more in their entire life.

They go down on one knee, because this is what they're like, and apparently being like this helps.

"That I expect to have no trouble at all with, Your Majesty."

The King claps them on the shoulder and says, "I'm glad to hear it." The Queen holds out a hand to help them up.

(Malcolm, who will never tell anyone whether he had trouble with this, smiles at a random patch of air.)

"I think that's everything that you absolutely need to know before you go to sleep tonight, but we'd be happy to answer more questions, and if you want to be sure you'll get there on the first try we should tell you more details about the dreamrealm."

The royalty are wonderful, and Helis appreciates them so much for gracefully putting up with their half-baked emotional gestures. (Also Malcolm looks like he might need a hug, but Helis is not socially graceful enough to know how to do anything about it.)

"I'll take more details, if you have the time." To be sure they get there tonight, because it'd be terribly disappointing not to at this point, and to know what sort of place to emotionally prepare for, and maybe just not to be left alone with all this yet. "But I shouldn't keep all of you, especially in this parking lot. Malcolm, do you want dinner or anything, or is this not a hanging out with people sort of evening?" Figuring out social plans always feels awkward, but hopefully someone better at it can take over if needed.

"Yeah, I'm down to get food!" Malcolm fishes in his bag for his phone. "Let me see what's good around here."

"There's a Chipotle up the road," says the Queen, who has been to a dozen events at this park over the years.

"Good with me if it's good with yinz! Helis, what's your opinion on Mexican food?"

Chipotle's nice, and if everyone else thinks it's a reasonable place to quietly hold secret conversations, Helis is not going to argue with them - they've been doing this for probably decades. The trip and the food ordering provide some downtime to try to settle their thoughts about the entire revelation, although honestly it only ends up feeling weirder and more incongruous in a well-lit fast-food place than it did in the parking lot at dusk.

"I don't know that I'll really manage to emotionally prepare for whatever ends up happening, but details seem like they should help." They give an uncertain smile. "And I'd hate to wake up tomorrow having not managed it at all." Well, it might be nice to have one more normal dream - except that it would probably be one of the unpleasant ones, and then they'd want one more try at it, and they know this sort of gambling until a positive outcome is not a good pattern.

There's nobody here but the staff; if they take a booth opposite the counter they'll be difficult to overhear. The King talks in a voice that doesn't carry.

"The first thing to know about the dreamrealm is that space and time are weird. I know we said that already, but it bears repeating. Some nights you'll be in there for five minutes, some nights for five hours. There are tales of people getting woken up in the middle of the night, going back to sleep, and running into their own past selves, and I don't exactly believe them but I'm less sure than I'd like. It's shaped like a big corridor with one end pointing towards Earth and the other towards where the dreamwyrms come from, but two groups can go back and forth all night and never run into each other. How far you can see varies from moment to moment, and so does how far a step will take you. You'll learn to recognize fast ground and slow ground, but for your first several months all you'll need to do is stick by your squad leader. With me so far?"

"I... think so? It's useful information that I think I can remember, but also I have no idea how to imagine it at all."

"I would love to say it will all make sense when you see it," says Malcolm with a rueful smile, "but it won't."

"It will make a little bit more sense every time, though," says the Queen. "Anyway, the next thing to know is how to fight. You can't bring things into the dreamrealm, so everything revolves around being able to shape the raw material of the place into a useful form, and the better you know that form and the more deeply associated with it you are, the more powerful your creation will be. The most straightforward example is a sword. I fence: in the waking world I wield my rapier and learn to think of it as a dangerous weapon. In the dreamrealm, my thoughts create a killing blade and my mind knows how to use it. Many people, especially when they're starting out, fight with a sword or a spear or a bow."

"Or a ballista," grins Malcolm. "When there's a really big one."

"It does sound like that sort of place." They return Malcolm's wry smile. "But at least it has swords! I suppose I'll find out if I'm familiar enough with mine yet." Or if they will be after they go out to whack a tree with it for another hour or two this evening, just in case.

"You and ballistas!" they grin back. "I don't think I could keep an entire one of those in my head, but I expect I'll be very glad someone can."

"Oh, they're absolutely a team effort. If they weren't they'd only be as powerful as arrows--the amount of damage an attack does depends on how much will is going into it and how focused it is."

"Just so. But setting that aside: there are ways to fight that don't rely on traditional weapons. The activities sometimes called 'the peaceful arts' need not be peaceful, in the dreamrealm. Artisans can turn the stuff of dreams into any material they understand well enough, and use it to do what I can only call casting spells. It's far more abstract and harder to explain than melee combat, but I've seen an embroidery Laurel take down half a dozen dreamwyrms in a single strike. On the nights Malcolm isn't crewing a ballista, he's a combat weaver."

Will and focus and abstract understanding... They wonder if they'll do better at melee or at craft-magic, and what features determine that, but really there's no point in asking, they'll just have to try both and see. They wonder if one can do magic with bare math. Probably not, for whatever reason, or else half of their terminally nerdy friends would already be doing it.

"Call him a battle weaver and it'll sound like one of those Norse poetry phrases. What a thing to exist!"

A moment of wonder, then a moment of thought. "What do the Pelicans do, then? Coordinate all the rest of us?"

That gets a chuckle from the Queen. "You're not wrong. Most folks pick up some kind of offensive option, but there are also scouts, people who know enough people well enough that they can get separated from everyone else, find where the fighting is, and then call the rest of us to them. They also find anyone who gets caught in a patch of slow ground and separated accidentally. You don't want that to happen, but if it does, focus on the night's head scout and keep moving until they find you."

"I've seen some cooks use it for healing," adds the King. "If you take a hit and someone shoves a piece of bread in your hand, eat it."

"Eat food, got it, I can do that." Probably. Hmm. "Does it... taste like bread? Does any of this feel like anything normal?"

The Queen rests her chin on her hand, thinking. "The healing food tastes like--if there was food that was so good and so healthy that it healed you. Getting bitten by a dreamwyrm feels like the worst thing ever. Casting spells feels like--it's been too long since I've done it. Malcolm?"

"Ah, hmm, geez. You shape the dream stuff into a loom and threads and get into the zone--time gets really bent when you're casting, weaving a spell takes as long as swinging a sword from the perspective of the overall battle but sometimes it's twenty minutes for the person doing it. It's like a cross between a TTRPG action economy and real life. Anyway, you do the thing with the threads and mentally tie it to the effect you want to achieve, and if you execute the one correctly the other goes off. Some people have a specific pattern for each thing they want to do, one for damage and one for entangling-snare and so on. Some people just do whatever their current project that they're working on while they're awake is. IDK if that answered your question or not."

"Kind of! And some other questions I didn't have time to have yet. You're really standing there doing things with a loom, rather than some more abstract mental action I was imagining, wow! But I'm glad food tastes like food and pain feels like pain, not something weird and incomprehensible."

"Yeah, dreamwalkers have basically all the same senses, just getting unusual inputs. That's all I can think of for useful details, but I haven't been doing this very long as things go . . . ?"

"You have enough information at this point that I confidently expect you to wake up in the dreamrealm tonight," says the king. "But I should repeat a few more times how important it is not to get separated from everyone else. Bringing down all but the smallest dreamwyrms is a job for a team, and while they're not clever enough to try to lure you off on your own, it's very easy to pursue a wounded one straight into a pack of them. So don't. Stay in formation. If your squad leader says chase, chase; if they say hold fast, hold; if they say retreat, retreat. We fight on their turf, but they can't coordinate like we can, and that's our biggest advantage. Never forget that."

"Yes, Your Majesty." It's very good to have someone who can confidently tell you what the right things to do are. And to have already gotten practice doing the right things with the same people. The SCA seems like such a good setup for all this! (Although it should really do something about the problem where "hold" means two different things - but that conversation has already been had a dozen times.)

Helis has never been one of the people who go off to do their own thing in melee; they have sometimes been one of the people who fail to follow orders because they didn't hear them or were too distracted or weren't sure what to do, but it sounds like this might actually be easier in the dreamworld, with how you can feel where your people are? Well, they'll find out, and do their best to adapt to however things work, and try not to die. It's all starting to feel real, finally.

They take a moment to get used to the feeling, and to eat some of their food, which they've completely forgotten about until now.

Do they have other questions? "How do I tell who in the SCA does this, and who said they didn't want to know the secret, and who knows the secret but didn't want to get involved?"

"Everyone gets the option when they get their AoA, and about two thirds take it right off. Some of the ones who refuse get more and more curious until they change their minds. Anyone you see in the dreamrealm fights with us, of course. Royalty practically always fight--if someone who doesn't signs up for Crown Tourney with a consort who also doesn't, past royalty tell them horror stories of how much work it is until they're demoralized and then the MOLs match them against somebody really good in the first round. If they win anyway, the previous royals stay in charge of the dream army until there's a prince and princess. There are arguments about whether peerages in general or the Chiv in particular should be restricted to dreamwalkers but in practice they aren't. If you're meeting someone from another group and want to know if they're a dreamwalkes, the traditional thing is to say, "Did I see you in the Walmart yesterday?" and if they say "Maybe, I was wearing a green jacket and buying tomato paste" that means they're a dreamwalker. In practice you'll basically never need to do that, but why pass up a perfect excuse to have a secret password?"

"Okay that's hilarious. What a conspiracy though... But yeah, if you started restricting things to dreamwalkers in an obvious manner you'd have a way more obvious conspiracy and I don't think it'd really go well. Although now I bet half of the polling order gatekeeping arguments are secretly about that, huh..." Helis shakes their head. "Hopefully I can continue making those not be my problem."

"So every time someone you know gets their AoA you get a cliffhanger until you find out what they said? Yet another reason to try to show up tonight and not make people wait to find out. I bet it feels so weird when someone says no, though..."

Malcolm doesn't have a GoA and would be shocked to get one any time in the next five years minimum; he raises his water glass in a loose approximation of a toast. "Here's to not caring about polling order gatekeeping arguments!"

The Queen is a MoD and a Fleur in addition to being the Queen; she smiles wistfully at the innocence of youth. "It is always a reason for happiness when someone chooses to join our cause. It's convenient that you were the only person who got their AoA today; when we give out more than two or three in the same court we tell them spread over a few days so everyone can have plenty of help their first night."

Helis joins the toast with a grin, although to be honest half of their brain always assumes Malcolm has half a dozen more awards than he really does - he got them into this hobby and so he always feels like he's surely been here forever and done all the things he's interested in doing.

Ah, great to know they're going to be useless enough to need the entire group's help their first night. The Queen is so diplomatic in pointing these things out! Helis admires her greatly, and also feels like they're getting to the limits of their ability to not be embarrassing in front of royalty for one day.

"And so you have the time to talk to all of them individually, I bet. You do so much work!"  They were already doing so much work, and now there's a whole other layer of secret work on top of that, oof.

"This is our second reign; we wouldn't have signed up for it if we didn't think we could handle it. But it certainly helps that we can get a good night's sleep at the same time!"

The King chimes in with, "Everyone fights with their royals their first night, because the same resonance that makes us easy to find makes us harder to lose track of. So we want to take the chance to teach every new person one on one, and help you figure out what you're good at and figure out where you'll best fit into the order of battle. If you haven't been to a big war before, you might not have a sense for what it means when a majority of Æthelmearc is in something resembling the same place at the same time. Do you have a guess yet about whether you'll prefer to start with the sword or an art form? You'll have plenty of opportunities to try different things."

Oh wow, it's just going to be everyone in one place? They had been imagining smaller groups than that. "I've been to melees with a couple hundred people, but I think we have... more people than that..." Yeah, that's Helis's intimidated face. They missed even seeing the Pennsic war, because it was too hot to live that week. (Hopefully it's not horribly hot in the dreamlands, right? It seems like that shouldn't be a thing!)

"I'd feel better with a sword, but I don't know whether that's the deciding factor, or whether I'd be more effective with something I'm less excited about but more skilled at." Not that they're not excited about crafts, but in a way that doesn't seem like it'd carry over that well to battle spellcasting. Presumably battle spellcasting doesn't result in shiny new things to wear, and most of the joy of crafting is in making something you like that, you know, continues to exist. But who knows if they live in a world convenient enough that joy is relevant to what the best role for them is.

The Queen nods. "My advice is: if you feel like a warrior who makes art sometimes, use the blade. If you feel like an artisan who fights sometimes, use your art."

They smile tentatively. "Well, a warrior who makes art a lot, but if we're talking about-- personal identity rather than habits, then yes, the blade it is."

Malcolm: "When I'm awake I scribe more than I weave, because courts ask for scrolls and nobody asks for trim. But weaving is what comes naturally, so it's easier to build spells into."

They nod. "Makes sense that it'd work that way."

"Although it's also... How do I even say this sensibly..." They don't think they can. It's late and so many things have happened today. They keep talking anyway. "...It's so good? Everything works the way that makes me happy. I don't know that I'm going anywhere with this, just, isn't it weird?" Yeah, acting embarrassing in front of royalty, there it is.

"As extradimensional monster invasions go it's honestly pretty rad," says Malcolm, who then also looks embarrassed about having said this. 

"Some people say the dreamrealm has been shaped by human minds over the millennia to work the way it does," adds the Queen, "but of course that raises additional questions and doesn't explain the dreamwyrms."

Helis is so incredibly glad Malcolm is here.

And then the Queen entirely understandably responds to the thing they said, and... "Oh god, now I'm-- no, I think I should take at least a week before starting to worry about whether my unconscious desires do actually explain the dreamwyrms." They really might. And probably there are nonzero other people who are like this. No, seriously, no thinking about this right now. "I'm sorry, Your Majesties, I'm emotionally scrambled and I should just really stop talking, unless there's anything else that needs figuring out before tonight. I promise I'll be much better once there are actual things to do."

And to Malcolm: "You I'm not apologizing to, you voluntarily talk to me and you're not allowed to stop now."

And now they're going to eat their food and try not to think about confusing things until someone tells them what to do next.

Malcom laughs, friendly and cheerful, and polishes off the rest of his burrito bowl. And then it's time for everyone to be getting home and, well, going to bed.

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.

Spinners draw webs from the air to entrap it, and embroiderers stab it with silver spell-blades. A herald shouts with the voice of an angel's trumpet, and strength surges through Helis' limbs as the wyrm staggers.

The horrifying twisting thing does succeed in making Helis afraid, in a way melee and pain never has - but they're surrounded and supported by people they trust and admire, even though they don't know most of them, because they've built a community that lets them rely on strangers. (One that has flaws and conflicts and pettiness and the occasional evil, of course it does, but this is not the time to think about those things.) This battle is what their kingdom is for, and they will not fail it.

And violent intent comes easily to Helis, in any case. It always has. Some part of Helis has always wanted something real to fight, and now it has that, and they're not going to stop until it's over.

After maybe a minute, or five minutes, or thirty seconds, the dreamwyrm loses cohesion with itself and collapses into fully inanimate muck, swirling away into the general substrate of the dreamrealm like a drop of ink being lost in a bathtub and then sucked away down the drain.

"And there's your first fight won!" says the King, battle-glee burning in his face. 

"May we have many more!" comes the instinctive answer, the sort of thing Helis can say sometimes, when everything feels too right for overthinking. They will remember this moment forever.

They were half expecting to collapse in shaky exhaustion after the battle, but the King's words are enough to ensure they don't, and they're not even sure there's any magic involved.

With fierce grins all around, their little band marches on. The pelican from earlier falls into step beside Helis and says, "Good job back there. Want to start learning how to find fast ground?"

"Thank you!" Helis grins. "I'm guessing this wasn't a bad one, but I think I can keep doing this." And the fact that this apparently counts as a good night's sleep will help.

"And yes, please. Also, ah, I know we've met before, but remind me of your name and title? I'm all right at stabbing things, but my memory is terrible."

"You're right, that wasn't a bad one, but most of them aren't. I'm Mistress Elvira, and don't worry about it. You'd think interacting as disembodied souls would help us all learn each other's faces but I'm afraid not." She makes the tossing-aside forget-about-it gesture.

"So, fast ground. It's basically what it sounds like; places to put your feet that let you get farther with each step. The only real way to learn is through practice, but it helps to know what to look for--and to have someone stopping you from getting lost while you focus on it. Link arms with me?"

"Not getting lost sounds great, thank you." They link arms and start looking more closely at the not-ground, in case it has some features they could figure out on their own. It probably doesn't.

It has colors and the colors move! Different bits of colour are different sizes and have different densities of swirlyness and intermix more or less with the bits to either side! 

"You want to look for the bits where the edge between two bits is soft and blurry instead of crisp, and sort of slide your foot through the blurriness into the next section and let the momentum build up. It's a bit like ice skating or rollerblading, if you've done that, except instead of pushing off with the back foot you let the front foot get pulled along. Eventually you'll be able to do it without thinking."

The colors are very pretty and fascinating to look at, Helis just does not trust this place to have a correspondence between color behaviors and other features that is at all intuitive.

Honestly it would be really fun to spend a week trying to figure out all the unintuitive dreamworld movement mechanics on their own, but unfortunately this would absolutely get them eaten by dreamwyrms, so instead they will have to attempt dream-skating with instructions. Which still sounds pretty fun, luckily!

Their first instinct is to try sliding their foot along a blurry edge between colors, and they only realize a second later that what Mistress Elvira said probably meant the other direction. Does this turn out to work anyway, or just not do anything, or cause some interesting third result?

Sliding along the blurry boundary rather than perpendicular to it results in: traction problems!

Exciting! Helis is physically coordinated enough not to fall over, but trying to do all this while holding on to another person sure results in some flailing. "Right, not this, the other thing, sorry. This place continues to work differently than my brain thinks it should."

"Mind if we hold hands or something instead? It'll be easier to figure out weird new movement options if I'm less, uh, attached." They're one of those people who hate having someone else help them keep their balance while doing a tricky thing, because that just adds more complications to the motion. And possibly because even despite the SCA they're still bad at trusting people on some basic level. "Not holding hands at all would be even better, if you think a couple minutes of that won't get me lost and eaten."

Elvira is, at least in the dreamrealm, one of those tiny old ladies it's impossible to unbalance either physically or emotionally. "Holding hands is fine, but you really do need someone preventing you from getting separated so you can focus on your feet."

It's a little unpleasant, feeling so tethered to someone they barely know, but Helis calls back the memory of the battle, of everyone being in this together, and manages to stop feeling uncomfortable about it. Mistress Elvira is being genuinely helpful, and knows what she's doing, and this is a good thing. (They can complain to Malcolm later about how much this feels like some sort of exercise about relying on people. Their therapist would have so much to say about it, if they could tell him.)

Holding hands does feel better. Helis locates another blurry edge, and slides their foot into-and-across it, and wow that's a weird feeling! They were prepared enough for something strange in that general direction that they don't end up off-balance much, but they don't know what to do with the extra momentum either. The second time they have better luck, and the third time they try multiple steps in a row, which makes the entire motion work much more naturally. (Wow, Elvira really is magically good at not getting in the way of all this sliding around. They mentally apologize to her for their slightly uncharitable attitude earlier.)

They stop and look around to see if anyone else is still visible or if the dreamrealm has disappeared them.

Elvira has kept her eyes on the royals the whole time while also keeping pace with Helis' variable speed without getting ahead or behind enough to tug on their hand, so everyone is right where they ought to be.

Elvira is so good at multitasking! Helis is not sure they'll ever be any good at that part, but they suppose stranger things have happened.

Having looked around, they pick a point at the far edge of the group, and try to slide in that specific direction instead of in a random walk, alternating looking at their goal and the dream-ground colors. Does this basically work? Are there enough blurry lines on the right path, or are they going to have to pick out a meandering route, and will they get entirely turned around if they try that? They're half-decent at sliding and not very good at keeping their eyes on things, but they manage not to have breaks longer than two or three seconds.

On second thought, possibly keeping their eyes on people doesn't matter because Elvira is doing it anyway? But the practice at moving in a specific direction still seems useful.

There aren't enough blurry lines to use them all the time; sometimes it's better to go out of their way a bit and sometimes it's better to take a non-accelerated step. They can get to the place they're going eventually and without much in the way of false starts, though it's slower than a similar maneuver would be in the waking world.

Except before they quite get to the spot in the formation they're aiming for, the whole left flank is attacked by a swarm of smaller dreamwyrms ranging from the size of leeches to the size of rattlesnakes.

The Queen impales three in a single flash of her rapier.

The space around the swarm shivers and splits; some dreamwyrms fall to pieces and others are slowed down as they navigate the rifts.

Some of Helis's battle instincts are very good - a wriggly thing shows up at the edge of their vision and they're swinging at it before they have time to think, the blade appearing in their hand as if it didn't need to be drawn. But these small dreamwyrms are hard to hit, for someone used to human opponents twice their size, and the thing Helis's battle instincts do about this is to use their half-practiced new movement skill to chase into the thick of the swarm, where there's enough of the horrible little creatures that every slash cuts a few in half. This is perhaps less good, when they were separated from the formation to begin with.