POWER UPGRADES from canon update

POWER UPGRADES

Dreamwalking upgrade: It’s now MUCH harder to tell if Alex is dreamwalking with you. When she dreamwalks, she’ll seamlessly integrate into the dreamscape (how is ENTIRELY up to the person to whom the dream belongs: she might end up as a tree, or a rat, or anything at all). Characters who are naturally extremely twitchy or perceptive or who have psionic/magical powers that have to do with mental manipulation can still catch her.

Sight: Alex will have the ability to detect people’s emotional state by both looking at and concentrating at them. She can see these in two ways: either as colors, or as shadowy manifestations of creatures symbiotically or parasitically bonded to the person.

It’ll be up to the player in question to figure out what colors mean what emotions, but part of the package is that generally Alex can tell what this means.

As for the creatures, again, their appearance is up to the individual, but in terms of their color, negative emotions tend to be black in color, while positives tend to be white. They are integrated into the person’s body somehow (so if happiness is a bluebird, it might be fused to someone’s upper left shoulder).

Alex can’t use this power over recordings of any kind, so she can’t see emotions through video posts. She also must have line of sight to a person --- she can’t see through walls. Finally, if someone is actively trying to hide their emotions from her, these things will show up as hazy and indistinct, or not at all if the person is concentrating on it.

Emotional Manipulation: Alex influence the emotions of others now. While awake, this is very, very, very difficult, and can trigger the safeguards placed on her (see below) if she pushes too hard; she can, however, temporarily calm an angry mood or encourage a happy one through concentration.

In dreams, Alex can manipulate the dreamscape in a way that lets her attack the source of an emotion. If, say, a memory is making someone sad, Alex can remove the emotional connection to that memory to make it so that it no longer causes that effect. However, this is extremely dangerous, and can have drastic consequences. It is difficult to tell the difference between certain feelings, or to see how far an emotion goes; if a condition is endemic, it may be hard to find a single source (ex: if someone has clinical depression, the feeling of sorrow may be tangled up in all aspects of a person’s psyche). In fact, just before coming to Sing, Alex accidentally made it so one of her students lost all capacity to feel any emotion at all in trying to cure her depression.

Given that last incident, Alex hates using this power at all, and will probably refuse to outright. That said, she can also be stopped in the same way she can be stopped from dreamwalking period --- if her presence is noticed, she can be forced out.

Bending, and Limits: Thanks to Iris removing a few of the limitations on Alex’s abilities (limitations set in place on every human being on the planet by the Sentinels), Alex now has a minor ability to bend reality. These are as follows:

1. Dreaming while waking - Alex can see the dream versions of real landscapes. In her universe, there are two versions of every place: the one that exists in the real world, and the dream version. Imagine it like the real and fictional versions of Hollywood: the real version can be a brutal and difficult industry, while the fictional or imagined versions are places where anyone can be a star. Alex can see both of these simultaneously if she wishes, and even interact with the dreamscape (to other people, this will just look like she’s poking the air)
On Sacrosanct, since people don’t collectively dream, this won’t really do much, as there isn’t really a “dream” version of Sacrosanct (unless the mods want to talk possible plot implications with me of a ghost version of an idealized place) created by a collective unconscious. She’ll be able to see her own version, and manipulate it, but again, nobody else will see this.
She can also superimpose entirely different dreamscapes --- anything she’s seen. Again, only she can see it, and this doesn’t affect anybody else’s dreamscape, just her own personal version of it, as there isn’t a collective Dreaming in Sacrosanct.

… basically in Sacrosanct it’s just IMAGINATION++ and doesn’t even matter for anyone else; the only reason it’s significant is because of the latter two powers

2. Illusions - Alex can show other people these dreamscapes, basically creating illusions as she draws them into the dream while waking. The images are easily seen as surreal and superimposed on the real images, and though they can be interacted with, do not feel solid, cannot cause damage, and can’t affect other objects.

3. Reality warping - Alex can warp reality to a degree, drawing things out of the dreamscapes and making them real, altering her own abilities (to add flight, telekinesis, etc). this isn’t permanent and the effects disappear as soon as Alex stops concentrating; she also can’t change anything larger than her thumb.
HOWEVER.

Enough constraints remain that if Alex attempts either of the latter two (ie, anything that affects anyone who isn’t her), she’ll die on the spot. Cause of death will be a burst cerebral aneurysm. She will NOT be able to do much with these, and won’t even be aware that she can use these powers. Any attempt will likely result from extreme stress, such as a life-threatening situation.

This includes if anyone tries to teach her how to control these abilities. She just plain can’t use them without dropping dead immediately after. Yay!

CANON UPDAET

THINGS THAT HAPPENED RIGHT BEFORE ALEX GOT TO SACROSANCT:


Iris de Hautdesert teaches her the basics of proper, controlled Dreamwalking (as opposed to her usual just VERY INTENSE dreams and the dreamsharing everyone in her universe does), as well as the very basics of using dreams to help people work through emotional problems. They go through a few tests, Alex gets in trouble for screwing it up a lot, but keeps trying. Iris tells her never to do this unaccompanied, and also just don’t do it because the Sentinels will get you. Alex is bad at listening.

THEN A SACROSANCT HAEPN.

Alex comes back and Iris beats it into her that she needs to be subtle---they don’t want to risk Awakening others and thus putting them in danger, so Alex is taught how to enter dreams undetected and integrate herself into the dreamscape

⇒ NEW ABILITY: stealth dreaming (Alex can dreamwalk and unless you’re either psychic or have other defenses against psychics, you won’t know she’s there unless she wants you to)

then we have a series of shorts, from the perspectives of different characters

Andrew (Andrea) Jones: Andrew Jones has been Alex’s friend for many years, but he has a secret: he’s actually a she, Andrea Jones. She’s physically male, but for a very long time she’s been female. She’s afraid to come out because of what her friends might think, and worse, she might risk her career. Of the three friends, Andrea has the highest paying job, as she works at a high powered investment firm, a very conservative firm. She stands a real chance of losing her job and not being promoted if she comes out, and it’s tearing her up inside.

Alex finds this out accidentally when she stumbles into Andrea’s dreams and finds not the Andrew she knows, but a beautiful, tall, and powerful woman. Stuff Happens, and it is Very Heartwarming as Alex helps Andrea come to terms with things; in the real world, Alex can’t quite completely confront her friend (since that would blow her cover) but she extends the sentiment that no matter what Andrea is like, she’ll be there for her friend; confessions and stuff follows. nothing is quite *solved,* but there’s at least reconciliation and a knowledge that she has a friend

it’s tooth-rottingly adorable okay :|


Iris takes Alex and then teaches her to See, both by taking off some of the locks on her power and by showing her the way. Seeing lets her see the dream-parallel of a given location, or even overlay an entirely different image of a dream location. Every real place has a parallel in the dream world, a composite of everyone’s impressions of a place. A place where a murder may have taken place is twisted and terrifying; a church may be suffused with light; a city may be brighter or darker than it is in the real (this phenomena is also where a lot of supernatural sightings come from in this universe).

In turn, Iris teaches Alex a few different ways of seeing emotions, and seeing nightmares. The two main ways are through color, or through seeing them as literal monsters (the latter is the one she uses most often for seeking out Nightmares). She’s then taught to fight them off by focusing her *will*. Again, at first she’s terrible at it, and again, Iris urges caution. Throughout the next chapters, Iris takes Alex various places in Dream and the Real to kill large swarms of Nightmares, without explaining why.


Jasmin Dyhani: Alex’s other best friend, Jasmin is normally the irrepressibly cheerful one. She dropped out of college, disappointing her parents (they wanted her to be a doctor) and instead started her own Etsy business of selling crafts, jewelry, and clothes.. She’s actually very good at it. She hopes one day to start a meatspace store, but the economy is terrible. Still, she keeps a positive attitude.

She gets attacked by a Nightmare and begins suffering from severe depression. Alex notices this and decides to hell with Iris, she’s going to help her friend, dammit.

She nearly ruins this, but through a series of Dream Shenanigans, Alex figures out the source of the problem and helps Jasmin fight it off. Jasmin isn’t completely “cured,” but she is at least on a path to recovering.


Iris has Alex destroy a thing she calls a Nightmare in Dream that alex isn’t quite as sure about; it doesn’t seem threatening, but Iris assures Alex that it’s okay. Iris. also teaches permanent destruction, how to tear out a nightmare intrinsic to a person rather than a parasitic one (ie, difference between getting rid of an artificial anger construct attached to you and ripping out your actual emotion of anger).

Alex goes to Aaron about this and asks him, and he is a cagey bastard, but later feels bad. He resolves that the NEXT time she asks, he’ll have to tell her, regardless of the danger. Seriously. Really really. At this point, he’s aware of his sister’s transgressions, but 1. feels that there’s nothing he can do and 2. fears that if he interferes, the Sentinels will unmake him.

Alex witnesses a fight in a subway station that rapidly escalates into a full blown riot. In a panic, she reaches for the Sight, and sees the crowd attacked by nightmares. Instinctively, she attacks them as she would in a Dream, her mental construct overlaying the reality, fighting in two planes at once. When she finishes, it’s as though the fight never happened in the first place, and she collapses, feeling sick.

In the real world, she’s taken to the hospital and nearly dies; in Dream, Aaron rushes to her rescue, finding her in the dream version of the station. As it turns out, she accidentally triggered one of the failsafes against using Deva abilities set in place by the Sentinels, and were it not for Aaron breaking the rules and turning it off, she would have died. Iris discovers them upon hearing about Alex’s collapse, and instead of being grateful to Aaron for saving Alex, she is furious, and tells both of them that they are forbidden to see each other, informing alex that her brother is a dangerous crimminal, and telling Aaron that she’ll have him executed if he does that again.

Iris drills it into Alex’s head that THOU SHALT NOT DO THAT SHIT AGAIN, ONLY FIGHT NIGHTMARES IN DREAM, YOU WILL DIE IF YOU TRY OTHERWISE, YOU AREN’T READY, ETC. At the same time, she takes off a few more failsafes, allowing Alex to at least take down nightmares properly while awake. At the same time, she locks down Alex’s ability to create illusions in a tighter way, keeping those abilities from even being accessible.

One of Alex’s students is clinically depressed, and Alex wants to help (and has for some time). Though Alex sent the kid to counseling, it doesn’t seem to be helping, and the student keeps coming to Alex for help. Alex decides that perhaps she can help after all. Alex at first assumes that the depression because of a normal Nightmare, but finds that the problem goes much, much deeper, and is in fact the kinds of “natural” nightmares Iris told her about --- just part of someone’s personality intrinsically. Still, Iris indicated to her rather specifically that this was OK to mess with, and in fact encouraged it. Alex thus goes about the difficult process of taking the thing out.

Unfortunately, this is kind of like removing a tumor by just reaching in and cutting it out, and Alex is not a surgeon; the creature is bound up in other feelings and emotions that this kid has, and Iris didn’t really teach alex to differentiate at this close of a level (alex can “see” negatives more easily, but when she looks closely positives show up, and they actaully aren’t that much different to her eyes). She accidentally not only removes the depression, but all of the student’s ability to feel any emotion whatsoever. Permanently. Shellshocked and horrified, Alex goes to Iris for help, hoping to fix it, only to have Iris actually tell her that 1. can’t fix it and 2. she totally did the right thing and Alex should be proud of herself. After all, the kid isn’t in danger any more and isn’t going to hurt herself or ever feel sad again. Alex angrily counters with “well she will never feel happy again either” and Iris responds with “a small sacrifice.”

Confused and angry, Alex leaves in a huff, and gives zero fucks about “don’t go talk to that Aaron guy.” She first goes to Jasmin and Andrea, telling them that she’s in trouble, no there’s nothing they can do to help, but if they don’t hear from her soon call the police, etc.

She goes to Aaron, explains the situation much more fully than she had before, and finally he tells her his side of the story. He’s not sure what Iris is up to, but he explains (reluctantly) that no, Alex ISN’T some magical chosen one (“Iris told you that? Lies. I mean, no offense. But it’s lies.”) and tells Alex what she’s really been doing. He expresses concerns about his sister’s sanity, and mentions that she’s been behaving oddly for some time. Alex isn’t sure what to think, and says that she feels that she needs to talk to Iris, that desptie how harsh Iris was, she was a good teacher, and Aaron agrees, saying that a Deva seemed to be the only way to fight the Nightmare and it needed to be done; he just wishes Iris had been more honest.

Alex resolves to confront Iris. She’s still torn, as Iris was her mentor, and so she hopes that there’s still some way to resolve all this. She goes off to do so

and then SUDDENLY SACROSANCT AGAIN