Very weird dream. I can appreciate where elements of it came from, but others have me competely confused.

I don't actually dream about Lord M as much as you might expect: perhaps twice in my entire life. And one of those was two weeks after it all began, and dead creepy at that. It involved Amador and I rushing off to rescue my future wife, an event which hadn't occurred yet in real life but ultimately happened all the time. But I don't think anyone suspected M. and Autumn would end up married, not least me, and at the end of the dream we were dancing outside, with Amador looking on in disappointment, which is something which actually happened some six months into the future.

The other involved me standing Viminalis outside and telling her "Lord M's last secret". No one in real life knows it, and the idea of it has always terrified me, in that "never means never", because it's so huge, and because if it did come out - the repercussions would be as nasty in real life as within the game. It's also not the only secret I am aware of with that magnitude. I came closest to telling Viminalis, and we did numerous deals and trades which one of us always backed out of. So maybe this was wish fufilment, telling someone - and getting to enjoy her reaction.

So the suprise comes in actually having a full, coherent dream about three other characters from the game. Not that Oscar, Anna and dear Scarlett aren't special, but Lord M. does occupy alot more brain space in real, daily life. The story of Oscar and Anna is, to my mind, one of the Flame's most tragic - but then, I was at the epicenter. The pair were fire and water - he was all angst and drama, and the local Mafia never let him escape from it's finger - she was quiet, restrained, cold even, and possibly the only Flame character ever to be concerned about public decency.

The pair met and fell in love, but Anna heard several nasty rumours about his behavior, so turned him down because it was simply not proper to do so. When they met again ten years later, he did ask again and she couldn't make the mistake a second time. That's Anna's tragedy, that she turned him down to spend a life half-lived, and then accepted to be in a situation almost as miserable, because all she had feared first time were true. All she wanted was a nice life, and he never made good on his promise to get on the straight and narrow, always vanishing for days on end, or turning up covered in blood, and not explaining what he was doing in those strange hours. He loved her, but just couldn't change for her. And that's his tragedy.

So the pair were, intermittently, very happy together, but in time this wore her down, and her inability to have children contributed to her sense of bitterness. She did, eventually, adopt a daughter - who curiously enough, was called Emily. Things kept happening - Oscar's old, dead wife Scarlett turned out not to be dead, Ivy claimed to be the mother of one of his bastards, which was extremely cruel at the time, Oscar turned out to be having an affair with his cousin. That was the one that killed her. From an authorial standpoint, I can appreciate Oscar's actions as tragic, and that fierce love for his cousin as a very interesting character point when you examine his whole life: I confess, the two were always in love, in a special way no one else could understand. But at the epicenter, it's harder to be reasonable, as both were married to my characters at the time!!

The pair have recently died: Oscar of a drawn out illness, and several months after that, Anna was found shot in her parlour and her daughter abducted. This series of events is one of the most genuinely upsetting in the Flame to me, because Anna had spent her whole life hating Oscar's criminal world, so to be finally taken away by violence is just not fair. And the overkill: Anna is not a woman who needed to be murdered, there was never a character more normal. It upsets me that Emily is never going to know, now, who she really is.


In any case, the dream was in a city, and we could see fires on the horizon. Everyone was trying to escape, so Anna and I tried too. That was the weirdest part, that I was Oscar for the dream - and a very accurate one at that - not Anna. We roused her to trek to safety, in a really Oscar-ish manner. We travelled through a deserted opera house, and I found a friend there who had resolved to stay and meet death. We caught a bus, we kept travelling down chaotic streets. At some point, Anna's shoes were stolen. Oscar, furens, went to retrieve them.

Scarlett Skye turned out to be behind it, dressed as I had always imagined her. The Skyes always had an agenda. They were overcomplicated, had a strong sense of self-denial and duty, and usually ended in tragedy, but hey - I loved them. And as I mentioned before, she was Oscar's wife-from-the-grave. If you just imagine a femme fatale, then you're a good way to understanding what I mean by "Skye".

So he challenged her about it, and the whole situation got quite violent and nasty - again, I'm amazed just how Oscarlike I was in my dream. But then she revealed her master-stroke. While he had been searching, she had found Anna and again, very Skyeishly, had worked on her fears. They had left Emily at home, Oscar had said there was no time to go back - and was probably right - but Scarlett played on that, and Anna had left to retrieve her. At that point, things looked like they were to get even more unpleasant for Scarlett and Oscar - and I was glad to wake up.

Obviously, the apocalyptic London comes from the sheer amount of War of the Worlds I listened to last night, and the disturbingly rapey overtones in some of those threats doubtless stemmed from a tenser-than-usual episode of The A-Team. But I have an Anna day maybe once a month, and less often now she's gone, so the fact I dreamed of her was odd - especially because I was Oscar in the dream. He's not a character I have ever empathised with, I even for a time played his arch-enemy. But weirder still was how in character the three were - it's a situation I can easily believe, with all three acting as they did. And I'm still a little weirded out.

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