#&&anni

[artificialnocturnc]

@xflashbastardx liked for a starter

Black irises watch, flicking backwards and forwards across the scene as she wrinkles her nose in…maybe a little bit of disgust? Or non-understanding? The mortals were funny little creatures and she brought out the worst in them at times, dragging out anxieties and fears like unravelling threads. 

The little nightmare shouldn’t be here, the Dream Lord would be unhappy with her stepping into the waking world, though that wasn’t something that she really concerned herself about. He wasn’t here, and The Dreaming had become a sandy wasteland blowing on the wind. 

The little half pint looks up at the demon, vastly older than her, barely a baby in cosmic terms…and then back at the little rabble of teenagers all taking over each other, showing each other noisy little things on the thing in their hands. Laughing and making fun of each other in ways that shouldn’t make each other happy but it seems to. 

“Why are they so…weird…?” 

She doesn’t get them, maybe who could blame her, she was not mortal, crafted with one job in mind. A tool rather than a being, maybe. “I know that one,” a little nod of her head, “he dreams about all of his teeth falling out in front of her…”

[artificialnocturnc]

“You look like you could use a friend.” —Nia @ Anni

@hodgepodgebitches

A blink. 

Anni watches the woman with a locked-in gaze. Those were not words that she has heard very often but then again this woman does not seem human. She’s mortal yes, and she thinks maybe physically with the humans…she feels like Earth and this feels like an Earth dream but…

Canting her head to the side slowly, Anni thinks, hard. 

She knows her people, knows they dream strong, more capable of things than other species, but truth be told, all of the mortals kind of bled into one for her. Their words were more similar than they thought, and in strange ways, they went through the same kind of thing. 

A hum leaves her, “maybe.” Then a shrug. People could make observations without intent, and when it came to dreamers, she’d found spending too long around any singular one of them usually ended up in a mess. 

“I’m not meant to…” she pauses looking for the word Lucienne had used, “loiter.”

[artificialnocturnc]

@somniumtextor gets a starter

A frantic whisper as she walks down the hallway of the castle, half under her own power and half 

“I don’t wanna ask Murphy - you said he’s mean. I don’t wanna be the one!” Anni’s comment is hissed, though in this environment of stone and hallway the sound travels far further than it had any right now. With a small shove she trips through the doors, barely catching her footing and keeping herself up right. 

It was too late now. There went her secondary plan of sneaking right back out the room like she had never been there.

Anni can not help but feel like she has been tricked. A glance over her shoulder and the other nightmare is gone. Having skedaddled at the first opportunity they could have. Anni realises that she was right, she has indeed been tricked, offered as sacrifice because sometimes when you send the youngest one in to ask, people take pity upon them. 

“Um…hi?”

[artificialnocturnc]

@forgaeven gets a starter (Hob & Anni)

It seemed safer to ask Hob than anyone else, mostly because…well everyone else was busy. Far too busy to be interrupted. Too busy for a little wayward nightmareling who liked to poke her nose in places where it didn’t belong. 

A small spin on the ball of her foot as she took one small step then another, feet perfectly placed within the small paving stones on the sidewalk. She’s listening, carefully, and intently to the musician thats playing on the street corner. Some young twentysomething with a guitar singing about anxiety - rather fitting for the young nightmareling but she doesn’t truly understand it.

She comes to rest beside him, those dark irises flick up at him and for once, Anni finds herself rather calm, and secure enough in his company, that she asks the question on her mind. 

“Why do they do that?” A nod of her head at the musician. Why bother? Why create? Why make art? Why express themselves? It wasn’t a drive that she had, it was not her purpose and it wasn't why she had been created. She was made to be a mirror, to drag the worries out of dreamers so they could confront them. 

Though, to be fair, she had done her fair share of inspiring too, even if she was utterly unaware of it. 

“The…” she waves in the direction of the musician, “whatever that is.”

[artificialnocturnc]

@idontkillorphans continued from x

There’s tears.

A pained cry leaves the nightmareling as a hand wrapped around her upper arm and squeezes tight. 

Anni, uncharacteristically, cries. For all of her nerves and anxiety, she has never openly weeped in front of someone, as if she was too scared of even doing that and showing everyone how she really felt.  This kind of fear was different though. It wasn’t her own mind running wild and inventing all the things that could go wrong and it wasn’t her catastrophising. It was real. Tangible. There was blood on her clothes and a wound in her arm that proved that. For once, her fears had come true and it shook Anni to the core in a way that nothing she had encountered so far had, then again, her life so far has been very short. 

Her other arm pointed back into the dense and now decaying forest of The Dreaming. “It was in there.” Something that shouldn’t be, something dangerous. 

While it was true that The Dreaming held many dangerous things, nightmares capable of terrifying things, they were rarely physically violent. While they didn’t all get alone, and maybe it was in their nature for such creatures, the absence of the The King and the slowly crumbling world seems to have brought out the worst in them. 

“It bit me!”

[artificialnocturnc]

@esoptron gets a starter

Two little eyes peeked around the tree. Irises so dark they almost looked black constricted to focus on him, not that one could tell. Instead there is something unsettling in her wake, at least to the mortals, like being watched by something. Sometimes that was all it was, the idea of being watched. Teenagers and tweens really disliked the idea of being watched she had found, as if their every movement was being judged and scrutinised by something that was a little too Uncanny Valley to be comfortable with. 

“Are you back?” 

The question is quiet, a little timid, and yet she was brave enough to ask it. Yet, awkwardly she leans out from her hiding place. Violet eyes and jet black hair, she has at least modernised from the last time she saw him, even if the dark blue sweatshirt with little white cat pawprints on it and the pink pants was borderline garish. The kind of combo that would get a high schooler ridiculed on the first day of term.

“Is His Majesty back?” 

Ah, there was the question she had actually wanted to ask. She thought so. The Dreaming seemed to be…better. As if it were more together. She could walk it as it was, rather than hiding in the shadows of teenagers dreams. It had been a long time since she had seen either of them. So long that she had stopped counting. Annie had only briefly seen Lucienne while she was conducting her census and even then she’d refused to come out of the shadow.

“Is everyone back?”

[artificialnocturnc]

@songsofithaca gets a starter

People are capable of creating their own nightmares, sometimes they’re scary…sometimes interesting. Like they are a strange character study on a person and a window into what’s actually going on inside their minds. What people thought and what they did were often different, but to Anni there was no real distinction. This place was all thought to the beings who dreamed, and all action to the beings that inhabited it. 

Anni finds herself watching with interest from her spot on the thick tree branch, legs dangling over the edge as the young nightmare trains black irises on him. She’s almost human, teetering on the edge of an uncanny valley. Though, maybe that is the point of her, to be a little unnerving? It was the purpose of a nightmare, to pull out the unspoken. To identify the little pieces of a psyche that do not want to be exposed and draw them out like a splinter into the open. 

A pause as she raises her palm to rub her nose, itching it with her palm before she sighs. “Is it working?” She asks nonchalantly, tilting her head to the side and watching for a reaction. What it is he is trying to achieve she has not figured out yet. Anni wonders if even he has worked it out what this fruitless endeavour is in aid of yet. “Whatever…” she waves a hand at the situation, “this is…” she doesn’t know how to describe it. “Because it looks like it isn’t.”