Strange dreams have been had, recently. Lights in your mind, swaying across the darkness of your mind. A blazing heat licks at your mind's insides, before flash freezing into a bone-chilling freeze. Akin to spontaneous combustion, immediately counteracted by the sensation of being submerged deep under an icy river— swept away under the current. The ice above you prevents you from escaping before you're pulled deep beneath the current. At first, you were on fire— your body alight and your skin boiling. Now, you're pulled beneath the depths of an icy crypt, with weights dragging you further down into the crushing depths. All the while, you remain blind, the lights in your mind flashing brighter and brighter. Everlong.
Finally, you awake from your dream with a sudden start. At the counter of a bar you barely remember stumbling into, you're able to see down the bottle of foul-smelling alcoholic beverage. The sun peaks in through the windows, warm and hot. The ground outside the saloon doors is dusty, and sandy. Moments before you can even contemplate how the hell you got to New Austin, a hand swipes away the barely filled bottle of beer. The bartender before you seems absent, but the words he speaks feel like they barely come out of his mouth. More as if the sounds he makes just travel to your ear, an illusion you trick yourself into thinking is all in your head.
"Let me get you another, fella." As if he barely recognized that you were asleep at the bar. Were you asleep? Or did you just get here? Have you been here all night? Or did you wander in minutes ago? Did you submerge into the realm of unconsciousness? Or did you simply lose focus? The sounds around you, the song playing at the piano. A man's fingers wander against the keys, but he's been playing the same few notes in succession. It sounds like a song, and everyone treats it like a song, but is it a song? Or have you just fallen out of tempo with it? A woman moves across the saloon, a tray of beer in her hand that never seems to have less than two glasses, even when she gives one to a patron in the bar— she's briefly obscured for but a moment and one glass turns back into two.
Five men sit at a nearby table, playing poker. Meanwhile, two men seem to share a conversation that never ends. The bar seems like it never progresses a single second in time. It's always just as it always is, nothing more and nothing less. Your eyes finally return to the glass bottle. There's condensation on the glass, but it remains undisturbed. Even as your hand wraps around it, the droplets don't even tremble. However, something about it calls to you, in more than just the normal way that such a vice would. The aroma of what had previously been foul seems more hypnotic, like a scent creeping into your mind. You've been holding the beer bottle for about a minute and a half now—
BANG. The bartender breaks the bottle cap off of the beer bottle, filling your empty hand. A phantom sensation flees your palm before the glass fills it again. Are you even aware of what just happened? Do you even question it? Do you even know what to question? You're not spiraling. You know you can't be. Just take a drink. It won't be too bad, the aroma creeps back into your mind. The bar suddenly gets extremely loud. People are talking, but words don't slip from their mouths. They swirl around you, but they simply just play inside of your ear. They're always just in the back of your ear, but never surrounding you. Never in front of you. Just take a drink.
A hand covers the top of the beer bottle. A piece of purple cloth wrapped around the top of the bottle. Eyes trail over to a man in a navy coat. It's seen better days, stitching at the seams has come loose. Heavy bags weigh down tired blue eyes. Silver hair is messy, almost bed-headed. A brown waistcoat is buttoned over a white shirt and a patterned tie rests underneath a collar. The man seems out of place, wearing boots that are laced up and cut just an inch below the knee, with dark green pants tucked into the boots. He speaks, and it seems to break the mode of what the cowboy's already been subjected too. Sound comes out of his mouth precisely where it should be, and functions exactly as you'd expect: Normally.
