>>5899230The bed that your hosts have provided you may not look like much, but as you flop down upon the plush, white surface—cottony and irregular—you find it doesn’t just LOOK like a cloud: it feels like one! Well, not really, of course. Clouds are collections of water vapour that you would pass right through, or hover atop perhaps in your <Free Movement> form. They’d be cold, hardly tangible, not exactly ‘plush’. Rather, this bed feels like one might dream a cloud WOULD feel by looking at it. It’s like you have fallen asleep atop one of the fabled counting-sheep which people envision to force sleep. Almost immediately, the overwhelming array of experiences and revelations and activities which you have engaged in ever since the New Moon Festival began turns hazy, out-of-focus. You close your eyes and you are with your nameless bird, up in the lunar sky, arms outstretched like wings. You fly alongside the celestial hummingbird, among ACTUAL clouds, and gaze down upon a world that is not your own: a world that is strange, strangely perfect, a world of boundless possibility and yet sterile of so much that you take for granted as part of life’s grand tapestry… A world that YOUR world could be like, maybe, for better or worse or both.
When you awaken, you feel refreshed, invigorated. The dream lingers, troubling you somewhat, but as with all dreams it begins to dissipate into intangibility—like clouds, like the past, like best-laid plans for undetermined futures. The last dregs of it are banished as your eyes land upon a small, ornately-decorated tray (ornately decorated with embossed reliefs of the sky and of a sacred grove) that has appeared on the table beside you, with a glass of milky-white liquid and a collection of nuts, seeds, and queer alien fruit upon it. One of your faithful attendants must have set it there while you slept… And you note, they’ve removed your hat and the outer layer of your robes, as well!
You flush furiously at this, though your shirt and pants have remained, to imagine them handling you so tenderly as you slumbered. As you rush to retrieve your robe, you are again reminded of the garment’s plight: pierced through the shoulder with a spear, stained indelibly with blood. You frown, and the frown deepens as you looked down at the matching red-brown reminder upon your ragged shirt shoulder. You are healed, yes, but this was not just your favourite outfit… It has been your ONLY outfit since you became aetherial in substance! Are you doomed to forever look like some harried vagabond?!
