It’s gross even for an extraction job, leaves her feeling vaguely ill and dirty, and she ends up taking on a good old fashioned wetwork gig in Berlin afterwards just to get the feeling out from under her skin.
She’s still there when she gets the letter.
or, a historical birds inception au. 2k.
The first job Kol takes after the clusterfuck at IEM is its own kind of disaster. Some of that’s her fault, of course. She’s not used to running point without company resources behind her, and running an extraction job in the back room of a crowded tourist bar is a lot messier than a slick private cabin in the bought-out business class car of the Budapest-Berlin overnight train. There’s information she should have that she can’t get her hands on, people she should know that she can’t track down. Each shortcoming leads to another, a cascade of good-enough that comes out to a total smaller than the sum of its parts.
It’s not all her, though—which is almost as bad as if it were. Their architect is green behind the ears and vague with the wrong details; their local muscle is surly and careless; their extractor is a jumpy debt-ridden asshole who dreams with one eye open, which is exactly the sort of paranoia that turns projections feral before the job starts. Their budget is shoestring; the bribe they scrape together after they’ve got their gear is enough to get them the bar for the night but not enough to keep the place’s owner quiet afterwards, leaving her with one more disaster waiting to happen.
It’s not even the resources she misses, really. Getting her hands on PASIV is laughably easy these days even outside the corporate sector, and chemists are a dime a dozen if you don’t care too much about the hangover (there’s a reason, in the end, they settle on the bar). Mostly it’s the people. Professionals. The kind of team members she knows she can rely on to do their jobs right the first time around. It isn’t trust—nobody running extraction jobs for IEM is stupid enough to trust anyone in this business—but a chemist who can cook up a solution that won’t fry everyone’s brain and an architect who remembers to get the right decade for the college campus architecture they’ve dreamed up and an extractor who keeps cool under pressure would be a damn sight better than the shit she’s dealing with.
But this is what she has now: half measures and desperate strangers and a dozen burned aliases and disappeared contacts. The best she can do is take whatever two-bit job she can get her hands on that will keep her paid and out of IEM's backyard for as long as possible. Fifteen years of good honest work—as honest as extraction gets, anyway—and here she is, rootless and friendless with a skillset that makes her good for one thing and one thing only.
It’s a marvel, in the end, no one gets killed or arrested. Honestly it’s a marvel they get the job done at all, even if it’s a slapdash finish that ends in an ugly collapse of brutalist collegiate architecture. It doesn’t matter; she’s out as soon as she has her share in hand. She’s got a hell of a hangover, barely enough cash to cover a plane ticket, and word of a man in São Paulo who’s looking for a point man for a private sector job and won’t ask too many questions.
She leaves eastern Europe via Amsterdam, lands four hours earlier than they take off, and doesn’t look back.
.
None of them had started with any proper interest in extraction, except maybe Sora. Kol had been in it for the architecture, mostly, and the puzzles, and the way they went together in dreaming—the way impossible things could be real, the way the world could change with a thought. Dreamsharing was still proprietary tech back then, classified military shit. Training kids to fuck each other up in dreams before they went out to fuck each other up in real life. What they didn’t say, what Kol didn’t realize until later, was that it didn’t matter when you woke up—it was just more violence on top of the violence, and it all hurt exactly the same.
But that was after, or maybe in between. When it started, it was mostly Sora, and curiosity, and camping out after-hours in the lab. Dr. Ryn was a visiting appointment at the school, ostensibly lent out to the neurology program but mostly operating at the intersections that dreamsharing demanded: neuro, architecture, engineering, art. She’d brought a PASIV—unwieldy in those days, an oven-sized contraption like the old computers down in the informatics lab, not the sleek silver briefcases everyone would have in twenty years—with her.
It was happenstance, really, how they’d managed to get into her lab. Not for Sora so much, who was starting a doctorate at that point and figuring some stuff out—personal shit, mostly, but the chance to work in Dr. Ryn’s lab had been a dream come true, literally. Kol had been finishing up in the architecture program, putting off her parents’ probing questions about what she’d do after, and it had been easy to wriggle her way into the inner circle with Sora there to vouch for her. Elodie, of course, could talk her way into just about anything when she wanted to. As for Bug, Kol had always had the sense that she’d go along with anything if Sora was doing it.
And for a while, it had been about as close to perfect as anyone could imagine. Other people came and went—eager dreamers, curios architecture students who couldn’t get their heads around the potential, the odd drama student who could change their face for flickers of dreamtime, which was as fascinating as it was unsettling—but nobody quite stuck with it the way they did. Privately, Kol thought nobody quite understood it the way they did. Dr. Ryn had encouraged them to experiment—the grant she’d received had been for non-military applications of the technology, which meant anything went as long as they wrote it down after.
It was sort of hard to say whose idea it had been, in the end. Sora had been thinking about it, Kol knew—she’d never said so outright, but she’d asked the sort of questions that meant more than mere curiosity, that had a pointedly practical bent. And Kol would be lying if she said she didn’t want to know too. They talked about it sometimes, in vague and hypothetical terms, at the campus bar afterwards, trying to capture the experience enough to put it down in words—which was, of course, as imperfect and imprecise as capturing a dream.
But regardless of who thought of it first, it was Elodie who had been the one to say, sipping on the dregs of a beer while Bug picked fries off Sora’s plate, “We should do it. A dream within a dream.”
There had been a recent paper—Dr. Ryn had shared it, Kol had read it and so had Sora, and afterwards they’d sketched it out for the other two. A team in Europe had tried it, riding a breakthrough on the question of stability and compounds. That had gotten Bug on board, Kol was pretty sure—the chemistry made sense to her in a way it didn’t quite make sense for anyone else, and there was something nice about watching her creep out from beneath her cousin’s long shadow.
There were other things to consider, though. Should they keep the same dreamer or switching roles. Should the same architect build all the levels? What was the time dilation? How deep could it go?
It was like opening a floodgate—like they’d been given permission, finally, to work in more than hypotheticals. Sora brought out the books, and they all stuck with it, which meant something back in those days of drifting attention and college experimentation.
There had been something like an agreement, too, not to bring it up to Dr. Ryn. Better to ask forgiveness, or something like that; they’d never quite said it in so many words, but they’d also all kept their silence without having to be told, even Bug. It wasn’t all that unusual, not really. They were always haring off on some whim or another, and six months of decent lab work—Kol always wrote up the reports, even if no one else would—left them a startling amount of free rein. Which was the point, maybe: turn a bunch of overeager college students with something to prove loose and see what they could dream up, literally. Push the boundaries. Figure out what was down there, in people’s heads, and how to dig it up.
The four of them went in two weeks before graduation, in the lull of dead week when no one was around to care too much about what they were doing in the lab after hours.
Three of them came out again. It was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty good odds.
Maybe, Kol supposed afterwards, when they were carting the empty shell that had been Sora off to wherever they kept the vegetative failed dreamshare experiments, maybe it would have been better if they’d told someone. If they’d run the whole thing past Dr. Ryn before they’d gone in, before Sora’s mind had collapsed around them and sent three of them tumbling out and Sora tumbling deeper in, somewhere nobody could get to him.
She didn’t really think so. Partly because it seemed pointless to regret it after it was done, and partly because that was the point of turning a bunch of college students loose and seeing what they could dream up. Mostly, though, because Dr. Ryn had come to them afterwards and asked to see their notes, and then taken all of it with her when she’d left a week later, vanishing with the PASIV and what was left of their dreams.
Her parents didn’t make it to graduation—something about taking care of the business; they hadn’t specified and she hadn’t bothered to follow up. She’d enlisted right after, finally giving into their insistence that she do something useful with her life, and in a brilliant, bitter twist of irony found herself using the tech the way it was meant to be used, learning what it felt like to pump a man full of bullets and then eat across from him in the canteen that same night.
She couldn’t say if she lost contact with the others because she meant to, or because they meant to, or because being shipped off to six countries in two years made it impossible to keep track of the mail. It was easier, honestly, not to care. She got pretty good at it, alongside the fighting and the dreaming and the following orders.
And then, afterwards, when her CO told her Imperial Energy & Mechanics had a job for someone with her skillset, who knew dreamsharing inside and out and wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, she’d said yes.
It had gone okay for a while. Then the whole thing had blown up in her face, because that was just how things went, and came out the other side entirely on her own.
.
São Paulo goes better than Budapest, though that’s a low bar to clear. It’s enough to keep her on with the same extractor—Marcus, also ex-military, quicker and smarter than she gives him credit for at first glance—for a second job. They have a forger for that one who knows a guy in Hanoi who’s looking for someone to run point on a run-of-the-mill corporate espionage job, and then there’s a woman in Hong Kong hiring hands for some kind of five-figure private eye shit rooting around after an affair. The money is good but it’s gross even for an extraction, leaves her feeling vaguely ill and dirty, and she ends up taking on a good old fashioned wetwork gig in Berlin afterwards, no dreamsharing to speak of, just to get the feeling out from under her skin.
She’s still there when she gets the letter.
It arrives in her apartment while she’s out, tucked between a magazine subscription she’s taken out to help with her latest cover and a flyer for half off on her next trip to Aldi’s. There’s no return address, which is unsettling. The name on the envelope is her own, which is worse. She opens it with the point of a knife, breath held in case there's anything poisonous inside, half afraid of what she might be unleashing.
There’s only the one piece of paper, folded in half. The note doesn't even take up the full page.
Heard you’re working in dreamsharing, it says. Kol holds it tentatively between her fingers, staring like it’s in some foreign language. I’m putting a team together for a job in Naples. I want you on it.
It’s signed with a name she hadn’t thought she’d see again. She hadn’t even known Elodie worked in the field. Not that that’s saying much—almost nobody who digs into dreams does it under their own name, not if they value the sanctity of their own mind. Still. Something about it stings. And the curiosity—well, that just burns.
Three hours later, her apartment is cleared, her bag is packed, and she’s on the road.
I made a OC character traits bingo card and filled it out for some of the kids! shout out to minah's one million bingos that girl can fit so many Issues
today in d&d kol spied a curious leather-bound book in an infinite wizard library that caught her attention and (having been told by the head librarian that a book might call out to her) picked it up
and then immediately failed her wisdom save and secretly took it home with her. it's probably fine.
The stone sits comfortably in the palm of her hand, still warm from an evening spent in her pocket. It’s a small thing, light and oblong and more purple than grey when the light hits it, but only barely. She raises it to eye level, peering at the faint twist of imperfections inside.
Attunement is still a strange thing—to sit with an item until boredom sets in and then a little longer still. A study in learning the intricacies of a magical item, she assumes, though there’s only so much to learn about a rock. Its heft she had understood as soon as she’d first held it; its warmth is a mutable thing. The color and shine are perhaps more nuanced, but even then, a stone is a stone is a stone.
The sword had been easier. Even mundane blades require care and cleaning and practice, and taking oil and whetstone and polish to a magical weapon had been no different from honing and tending any other sword she’s ever owned. There is, she will admit, a strangeness to the faint lingering hunger that seems to coil in her throat whenever she draws it, but even that is little different from the thrill of a good fight—or at least she can convince herself there’s little different from the blade's hunger and her own. The bleeding is the same, either way, and so is the relief that comes after, and so is the gut-clench desire to drive her fist through something solid and alive and let the hurt echo up her own arm. She’s no stranger to viciousness, no matter what form it takes.
(It is, perhaps, a relief to wield something that seems to desire the hurt as much as she does.)
The stone, though—the awareness of the pure magic of it—sits differently. It puts her teeth on edge. A part of her wants to look away, but she can't let herself.
Up on the top bunk, she stretches a leg out, leaning back against the small mound of pillows she's accrued as she settles in for an hour of careful focus. She’s pilfered the pillows of the lower bunk too, almost guilty for the comfort of extra support at her back and beneath her knee, which aches a little from the fight. But—no. She isn’t meant to be thinking about the unnecessary comfort of an extra pillow; she’s meant to be thinking about the stone. A tiny thing, heavier than it looks but lighter than gold or steel.
If she concentrates, she can feel it buzzing against her fingers, ever so faintly. Like the feeling of being outside before a thunderstorm, maybe, or standing too close to Cleo. The impulse to drop it is nearly overwhelming, but she’s meant to be using this. This is a protection against future spellcasting—meager, certainly, but protection nonetheless. She cannot throw away a tool this useful over a modicum of discomfort.
(She grows tired of reminding herself that she cannot throw away a useful tool over the discomfort it brings. But comfort is for the rich and the powerful and the useless. She is meant to be a soldier—for a different fight, perhaps, than the one she thought she was made for, but a soldier nonetheless. It is not for her to refuse a tool over the discomfort of using it.)
She sighs and lowers her hand, letting the stone rest warm and tingling in her palm, curled in her lap. An hour of this. Well. She has spent hours focused on worse tasks than one that leaves her sitting in a comfortable bed in a comfortable room in a comfortable lodge oceans away from the Empire. She can, she thinks with a thin smile, manage this much.
And—and there is a small, stupid, childish part of her that holds onto curiosity and wants to know what it will feel like to know how to use this object. To be one step closer to magic without fear.
Kol sighs and rubs faintly at her aching knee, then steadies her breathing and focuses on attuning—whatever that means—to the stone.
