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Once upon a time, there was a Lux. A Lux who loved to sleep, and was very good at Dreaming. Not just dreaming, but Dreaming. The sort of dreaming that comes with clues, if one is terribly good, or terribly lucky.
Sleep comes easily, and Lux descends from waking down to their favored default dream...
Lux has built up a city that is all their own over the past couple of years. Parts of it look like Philly, parts of it have pieces of memories from New York City, and other parts are completely made up, whimsical buildings of glass and chrome and glowing neon signs. It's a place that often felt more like home than waking does. Made in defiance of The City, Her City. This is Lux's city. Full of color and music and art, where they've painted hundreds of murals that cover much of the buildings, always expanding, always building up higher and wider.
Lux threw themself into the city in the middle of a wide square, a huge fountain full of crystal clear water that reflects the colored neon light from the surrounding buildings, making the water look prismatic. Lux looks up at the fountain for a moment, thoughtful, then flick fingers to make the stone sculpture in the middle shift, changing angles to send the water spraying into rainbows through the air.
The water sprays up into the air, making rainbows, but there's a moment where the water takes a rather strange shape in the air. It's hard to catch -- it happens so fast, here and gone again -- but somehow it looks for a moment like the water forms itself into angular shapes, almost fractal, rather than the smooth, glass-bead droplets which liquid takes as it arcs upward into the air and then down once more.
They blink, eyes flicker-flashing as they open and close. A little frown curls at their lip, eyeing the water. They watch it for a long moment, making sure that it doesn't change again.
The angular shapes--was it any sort of shape they've seen before?
It almost looked like a map, but that didn't seem quite right, until Lux realized that it looked like not a geographical map but a systems map, like someone diagramming the way that wires connect, or perhaps even a subway map. Not a representation of up/down/left/right, but of this-connects-to-that.
The fountain hushes along now, and any strangeness in the movement of the water is no more and no less than it should be. Sometimes the water in the fountain pulses like their heartbeat, and sometimes it runs steady, and that is only such strangeness as one expects in eidolons not immediately being shaped.
Lux spends some time squinting at the water, but then shrugs it off, letting it pass as some sort of... weird glitch. They turn away from the fountain and start walking down a street, their gaze kept up on the numerous lights that they pass, attention shifting from one bright light to the next. There's all colors to be found here--except for green lights.
... which should make it all the more strange to Lux when lights turn green, then back to their normal color, in sequence. First, a streetlight just above them, and then a neon swoosh on a sign a little bit down the street and to the left. Another streetlight further up the way. The tail light on a car parked even further down the road, right by a cross street. A streetlight almost out of view, to the left, on that cross street, illuminating a street sign whose letters flinch and wiggle like a gif created by AI art, almost like LOMBARD but also like RAMPART and maybe it says WALNUT?
Lux stops abruptly at the first flash of green light, eyes widening, the green reflected in their own lights. Flickering chaotically as they stare in a daze, growing dizzy as their head jerks from one green glow to another, until they manage to wrestle control and close their eyes tightly, teeth gritting. "Stop," they kiss, then cautiously open their eyes to look around again, suddenly more on edge and cautious. Can they feel any other presence in the dream?
Lux goes sprinting at a building, running up it in ways that defy gravity and physics past even their usual parkour skills--but what is physics in a dream? Up the wall, nearly to the rooftop, where they grab a security camera that--had that even been there a moment ago?--is aimed down at the street. It's snatched, ripped off, and thrown upwards. Lux continues running until they're launched into the air as well, following it. The camera shifts and remolds its self into binoculars in that split-second where it hovers, before it falls. Lux grabs it, landing an elegant tuck-roll on top of the roof of the building. They straighten, hopping up onto the edge of the roof and putting the binoculars to their eyes, searching.
There's no one there. The city is empty, quiet, in that perfect four-o-clock in the morning way where an entire metropolis seems to hold its breath, and a single footstep out of place on concrete rings loud as a gunshot. Lux knows there's no one there but them...
But they see the glint of light off of the quartz crystal in the sidewalk a block away, a silvery rivulet running along the cracks. Angular. Sharp. Unnatural. There it is again. That pattern.
Their eyes narrow at the glint of light, watching it move in that angular pattern again. The binoculars are tucked away, and they jump back off the building to the street below, moving over to where they'd seen the pattern. Is it still there? Does it move to something else in the dream? Is it the same exact pattern as the water had been in, or just similar?
Lux draws out across the wall beside the pavement, trying to replicate the angles of the pattern, sketching it out in wild jerky strokes to memorize and analyze.
They draw the pattern easily, and it's there in front of them, so solid and so real somehow. Yes. That's it. It's exactly the same pattern, and immediately, suddenly, they know that the pattern is the thing. This is what is in their dream. The wild and jerky strokes of the chalk -- or spraypaint -- or ink -- melt into silver-white, sinking into the smooth concrete of the wall.
It's a map. They know it's a map.
There are holes in the pattern, they can see that now, and it breaks off on all edges. But there it is. Some sort of system map.
You know how Wile-e-coyote paints the tunnel on the side of a cliff and it becomes a real tunnel, because cartoon logic? It's kind of like that, except Lux is spraypainting a frame around the symbol, so that they can reach up to pluck it off, like it were a painting that was always meant to be removed from the wall.
They paint a frame around the beautiful, shining-white impression on the concrete, and reach up to pluck it from the wall as if they're peeling down a poster from a show that's been soaked by the rain and is dying to come away from the concrete...
... and the moment that it pulls away from the wall, it shifts in Lux's hands, becoming not a piece of paper, nor a layer of paint peeled away from recalcitrant concrete, but... cloth.
In the silence of the city they created, surrounded by streetlights faintly pulsing to the beat of their Winter heart, Lux holds a length of linen bandage -- about a foot of it -- in their hands. Rust-colored stains on the cloth pattern themselves into a map interrupted, a systems diagram but only part of it, a subway guide showing only fragments of routes.
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