After several hours at this, Leareth is tired enough that his vision is swimming, and also EVERYTHING including the concept of being a person who exists over time is starting to feel very fake. He should....probably sleep? 

...How does sleep work again. Right. Lie down, close his eyes, wait for...oh right he usually has Maitimo sing him to sleep. Not an option. Probably if he just lies here for long enough then the sleep thing will eventually just happen to him...? 

Leareth spends a long time waiting for this, mostly stuck in random miserable thought-spirals, occasionally fuzzily almost drifting off and then snapping awake again with his heart racing because he drowsily tried to check his room-shields and they weren't there. Unfamiliar surroundings are TERRIBLE. 

This is such a stupid pointless problem, and eventually Leareth gets up and chugs the entire bottle of alcohol that Lucy left for him, maybe that will make sleep happen. Hopefully it doesn't taste too horrible. 

It tastes like fermented mushrooms. Not that terrible if you're expecting fermented mushrooms, but. 

Leareth was not expecting fermented mushrooms, but he's experienced a variety of weird fermented drinks and was expecting something in that space, and besides, 'bad-tasting drink' is really not that high in his ranking of possible unpleasant experiences. 

It's hard to know how much alcohol is actually in the drink, but he's already exhausted and it hits him hard. Leareth flops on the sofa and feels dizzy and sick and like the room is rotating, but also the sharp edges of the world are sort of padded and muffled, and his thoughts feel less like jagged broken glass, and eventually he sleeps. 

- he's drowning and the surface of the water is in sight but it's too far to reach, his body isn't working - 

- a blurry form seen through the water, diving to reach him, silver hair streaming back in the water and Leareth recognizes it - 

- carried, lying on wet sand, a melodic baritone promising that everything will be all right

- vaguely tries not to pay attention or feel anything but fear and hope and horror and gratitude are all tangled together anyway - 

- cold, so incredibly cold, trying not to do any things but can't stop shivering - 

- silver haired man murmuring to him, lighting a fire -

- anticipation of what's coming, no no nononoNONO - 

- and of course the suspense is drawn out and for a while nothing happens and it's only when he starts to relax again that Sauron wearing Vanyel's face takes a burning branch and brings it to his cheek -

All of this is being projected VERY LOUDLY in involuntary Mindspeech at whoever's within range. 

Dreams are strange in the Neath. The people in range are not the people in the vicinity of his physical body. 

He is watched by the denizens of Parabola. Many of them drink in his fear with relish. 

One forward-thinking soul slithers off. There is favor to be curried, if information reaches the right hands. 

"Alright," she says to the snake in her mirror. "That's very good to know. I'll be right over." 

She pulls a bottle of honey out of a drawer, and takes a spoonful, and vanishes. 

She reappears in an intensely green forest. 

The dreams hit her at once. 

She closes her eyes briefly, then strides towards the dreamer, and shakes him--not awake. But lucid. Here. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

What - where - 

Leareth tries to make eye contact with her for a second, but he's confused and dizzy and everything about this is too bizarre to interact with and probably anyone with a face is actually fucking Sauron again and he doesn't want to play. 

He lets his entire body go limp, drops to the ground in a heap, doesn't move. 

"Your powers are very inconvenient," she observes. 

The unwanted consequences of a collision between two systems.

Leareth is only half processing that and besides, what is he supposed to do, apologize to Probably Sauron?

He doesn't move. (He is at least not projecting anymore.) 

She sighs and pillows his head on her thighs and gives a pointed look to the surrounding Fingerkings and starts singing. 

It isn't a human voice she's singing in; it's her words of fire, in a voice like crystals tumbling in a rushing river. She sings about freedom and life and self-determination and not having your body snatched by mirror-dwelling snakes. 

Leareth tenses briefly when she touches him, but goes limp again, his eyes still squeezed shut. Events are going to happen, probably, and Leareth is neither trying to form any predictions nor take any actions about that. 

...Her singing is very distracting. 

For a long time, it drives out all the experiences other than hearing her voice and feeling the emotions and concepts she's singing about, and then eventually he's calm enough to leave room for thoughts as well, and he can try to piece together the last few hours - try to sort out which experiences were real and which ones were nightmares, but this is a lot harder when literally everything is weird enough that it could be a nightmare, and also right now kind of feels like a dream. 

A long time later:

:Where am I. Is this real: 

"You're in Parabola. You're dreaming, but it is real." 

The realm of dreams and mirrors, created from the slain egg of a Judgment, blurring the distinction between reality and unreality.

He wants to wake up. Specifically he wants to wake up in his room in Tol Eressea with the wards that Vanyel put on the walls. 

He wants everything to stop.

He wants Maitimo there. 

Wanting isn't safe– no, that isn't true anymore but he's so tired and confused. Probably he needs to...make a plan? Take actions about the situation? It feels way too hard. 

Instead he starts sobbing uncontrollably, which is arguably an action although not a deliberate one. 

She pets his hair and keeps singing.

Having his hair petted is initially VERY WEIRD in the context of, well, mostly interacting with Elves. Judging by her surface thoughts, though, she doesn't mean it that way. 

Everything else is...well, mostly it feels confusing and meaningless, right now, but it's something that could be comforting and reassuring if she were a person he trusted? 

Leareth barely knows her and has no real reason to think it's a good idea to trust her. He has only a couple of brief snippets and he could easily be pattern-matching to the person he wants her to be. 

But he's so lonely and scared and - at first it seemed like maybe he could cope with this place (if any of this is even real, of course), but now he's less sure. He's so tired, he's depleted all of his willpower and mental resources, and resting feels impossible if there's no one here he can trust. 

He will...tentatively trust her, he decides. Ready to change his mind later, even if that will hurt a lot. 

:Sorry: he manages. 

"You have nothing to be sorry for."

The fundamental limits to the resources of any being and the lack of virtue in pushing past those limits to the point of damage.

Interesting - is that concept just a word in her language? 

Something he can worry about later. 

He's cold, or maybe he's just shivering for unrelated reasons; whatever the cause, he curls up closer to Lucy, and listens to her sing, and his mind doesn't exactly stop making random flailing motions in the direction of things he can't have, but eventually it's less emphatic about it, easier to let go of. 

Probably this is inconvenient for his - host? rescuer? whatever she is - but he tries not to worry about that right now. 

She notices his shivering, and pauses briefly in her singing to speak a word that warms the air.

It's still hard to tell, subjectively, if he's cold or just terrified, but either way the warmth helps. 

Leareth drifts for a while - vaguely follows her voice as he slips in and out of lucidity and just-dreaming, but not nightmares, her singing leaves no room for anything except freedom and life and self-determination and, and, and - 

Eventually, just by dint of utter exhaustion, he sinks fully into deep (dreamless) sleep. 

He vanishes out of her lap. 

She stands and dusts off her dress and speaks to the various Fingerkings, and then leaves the forest. 

She's going to need to figure something out if this happens again, but she's extracted a promise from the Fingerking who brought her the first time to let her know if it happens again tonight. She's going to need to do something really nice for them soon.

The honey wears off. She reappears in her room. She pockets a hand-mirror and goes about her business. 

Leareth is VERY tired, and sleeps dreamlessly for a while, but eventually, most of two hours later, he's back in Parabola, though oblivious of this fact. 

It doesn't start out as a nightmare, just one of those disjointed mundane-life dreams - in this one he's trying to find a particular book in his records except for some reason he can't read the categorization system and also whenever he puts a book down it turns into a snake. (In the dream this doesn't seem weird, just a bit startling and inconvenient, he was using those books.) 

Most of Leareth's dreams turn into nightmares sooner or later, though, and this one is no exception, though it's a pretty boring garden-variety nightmare, just a lot of orcs suddenly smashing down the doors to his room and revealing that it's been inside Angband the entire time and then torturing Vanyel in front of him and laughing. 

Sometime around the shift-to-nightmare, he starts projecting terror and despair again, though more quietly and with less additional sensory-impression leakage, he managed to check his shields before falling asleep. 

Parabola being what it is, this doesn't really merit comment. 

Eventually Leareth claws his way out of the nightmare and fully awake, though with an obnoxious interlude where he's mostly awake but still can't move. 

With a jarring effort he shakes his way loose of that too - in the process, projecting a brief bolt of frustration/panic/confusion to the immediate physical surroundings - and sits up, holding his head in his hands. He has no idea how long he's slept, but going back to sleep isn't appealing at all. 

(In fact it's been about five hours, counting the semi-lucid time with Lucy in Parabola.) 

It's still dark out. It's always dark out, underground. If anything that happened since he fell asleep wasn't just a dream, there's no proof of it here. 

Leareth remembers, vaguely, Lucy telling him that he was dreaming but it was real? 

The realm of dreams and mirrors, created from the slain egg of a Judgment, blurring the distinction between reality and unreality.

The lack of any physical evidence of this entire interaction is disquieting. Also Leareth's entire body is achy for some reason - probably the reason is 'not enough sleep' - but he makes himself get up and pace back and forth anyway, until some of the glue in his head clears. 

Okay. Still in the bizarre other world with its powerful alien magic. Still no sign of Maitimo or Vanyel. He's on his own. This seems INCREDIBLY UNREASONABLE on reality's part. 

...He remembers making a decision to provisionally trust Lucy, but it's unclear how well he was able to think at the time, given that he was asleep. 

Can he find her with Thoughtsensing?