The most basic mission is to enter some dreamworld, find its heart, bring them back to the ship so the dreamworld can be shielded through them, then return them to their rightful place. However, Roberts and Took aren't just playing defense. They're also investigating this strange ethereal assailant, seeking a deeper understanding of dreamworld hearts, and acquiring wealth and power. Everyone tells you you don't need to sleep, but you're getting sleepy. They say just ignore it, it'll pass, you're already a dream. But you /can/ sleep; early on, just let it happen. You don't really get hungry, but a meal can heal you. This is like HyperactiveMetabolism, except dinner is still this hour-long thing. [Make much of the drive, then let it go. — D] The Fast And The Curious: Tokyo Drift One dreamworld remains in the cluster, and the crew of Royal Revenge is going to shield it. They want to bring the four rescued from the cluster, on the grounds that this is their neighbor and that might be helpful. The dreamworld is a young weaboo's idea of the Toukyou street racing scene, all neon lights and bad boys and sleek cars. The dreamer doesn't speak Japanese, of course. She's young, she'll learn. She's Madison Bailey, a white teen from LA. She thinks she's het. The baddest racer is Haruko Tanaka, a japanese ChristmasCake bad girl, a villainess looking for heroes to tear down. She's the only biker at the high end of the scene. She's the heart; getting her to come along will take some doing, but the hard part is figuring out she's the heart. Haruko drapes herself over people as a form of dominance, and loves tropes like IHaveYouNowMyPretty and BatheHerAndBringHerToMe. Aiden is the local hero and a teen heartthrob, like the "I would die for Riley" boy from Inside Out. (His race is supposedly "mixed", but clearly white with dashes of other things.) The dreamer is away, so he's a sort of wandering white knight of the street racing scene. He drives a custom car, a weird four-door low-slung speed machine, which lengthens and contracts to add and remove the back seat. Think of dude's white Infernus from GTA:VC, and that one commercial. The monthly Chiba Cup is soon, and Aiden is worried because Madison hasn't been back in a while. He's sexually strictly loyal to her, but needs a "muse" to win the race(that is, to beat Haruko). After a race, he loses all his accumulated muse-ness. Haruko can build toward ultimate victory with a series of racing wins. (Hum Layla.) [Which officer leads this away team? — D] Haruko will initially latch onto Venia as the hero to beat. This idea comes readily to her, and can be used to manage her aggro as it were. If Aiden sees Tessa's "reversible camcorder", he'll suggest publishing compromising pics of Haruko as a way to defeat her. She won't respond to this by backing off like he expects, but neither will she get violent; she'll treat it like some kinky coup-counting. It's a way for a hero to build toward ultimate victory. A lot of data about this dreamworld can be found out by masquerading as locals; this is often meta data, like that Aiden is in a supporting role and Haruko matters. Look for juicy bits to slip Joker. The sleep thing comes to a head at this point. Longcut Roberts has approved Took buying a shadowbath. [If one of the PCs has signed the articles, then they're put in charge as a shakedown, and told to take Took and 6 figments. If multiple have, then maybe we can take a sub-ADHN group for a bit of realism? — D] This dreamworld is a noir city by the bay, the perpetual drizzle met with trenchcoats and fedoras, on both genders. The subway here is a great way to catch the Ouroborous Car, in part because the station lets you dial in how many stops you want a ticket for. First, as intruders, you must obtain passage from the local Don. His goons aren't above sending applicants a little lime jello, if you know what I mean. Go to the Market Street station, buy a ticket for 16 stops, and wait. There's only 15 stops north(clockwise) or south(widdershins), and soon enough a dingy old subway car with no engine will pull into the station. Its ads are in ersatz Mayan with "furigana" in Sanskrit, its lighting is dim, and its air is tinged with old sweat and the ureic evidence of countless past passengers. [But who's already in the car? What stops will it make before yours? — D] In another dreamworld, a minaretted lighthouse emerges from an ocean of maze, curvy loops forming twisty passages, all alike. Getting in without going through the maze is difficult, but one way is to take the Ouroborous Car to the only subway station in the dreamworld, at the base of the lighthouse. The keeper of the lighthouse is a "retired" merchant. Dreamed into being as a merchant, he loved and lost and retired here to forget… but his true self — the maker of deals, the procurer of obscure goods, the haggler — lies just beneath the surface. The dreamer is lost in the maze, and the heart is a grubby girl-next-door who searches the maze with him. She's already been treated. Neither is particularly findable. Won't You Join The Dance The Dancing Scaleblade is, these days, just a blunt green sword with nonsense carved into its face. Took keeps it, shut in a wooden box for superstitious reasons. It's still a dream artifact, which maintains its own existence like an ethereal does. Supposedly, the knowledge of how to reawaken it is contained within the Codex Of Socks. However, to even look upon the Codex will drive anyone mad — or perhaps apocalyptically sane. The Codex is contained in a midnightsteel box, which lies within the Stonecloud Chantry, among the artifacts guarded by the monks there. Even when it comes time, the monks won't hand over the Codex, and Royal Revenge has acquired a shadowbath in which it can be safely stored. It's time to raid the Chantry and take the Codex, along with some valuables for their trouble. The mountain pierces the sea of clouds alone, clad in impossibly-slender conifers and flowing gracefully up to meet the ship like cloud turned to stone… And given what it's home to, it may indeed be so. Short of the peak, the Chantry is a squat, sturdy building of white marble, in faux-roman style. It likely would've been a single story if it'd been built somewhere flatter. It's always night; there's no sun, but rather than the frigid hollowness of a rogue planet, it's like night on Earth. There are trees, as if there were day for them to photosynthesize, but there isn't. The trees are easy to stay in, and the whole civilization happens in the branches. The civilization is a SchizoTech Stone Age with a mall. The dreamer is the chief of one "tribe", and the heart is his unfazeable butler. Irregularly, they take expeditions to the mall, to buy things from the mall elves. Yellow Goblin Blues This dreamworld is being taken over by wood-panelled indoors, with myriad doors at strange angles, which link up seemingly at random. This is the Goblin Kingdom. Some of the doors open onto meadows, but if you spend too much time there a goblin force will show up to conquer it. The indoors is peppered with goblins running sleazy businesses, but it's too big for them. There are rich and poor areas — with their own flavors of sleaze — but some strange "tracks" divide some rooms. In rich and middle-class areas, they're assisted by child slaves, a mix of goblin and human. The dreamer is an adult in the waking world, but here she's a human child, Rachel. The original dreamworld she created as a child, but in time it was destroyed; by feeling its loss, she created this one, where the childhood is self-conscious. She's part of a rebel faction, which sneaks around freeing human slaves. The near-mythical Twelve Founders of the rebel faction are tweens — the oldest humans here — and based on characters from the original dreamworld. They've all been captured by the goblins, although four have since been rescued by the rebels, and rule the rebels as an incomplete Council Of Twelve. Aaron, Beth, Maddie, and Shaun. The Goblin Kingdom has a royal family, the largest of their number. The goblin king is a rotund AdiposeRex, and his late wife bore him a son and three daughters. The goblin princesses are Gretchen the skinny hideous one(think yuurei), Gina the mousey one(but BewareTheQuietOnes), and Glinda the "bountiful" one(looks roughly like Fiona as an ogre). The goblin prince Gareth is tall and bishy, with long and floofy white hair — basically David Bowie, of course. He's the heart. Intruders will be slowly transformed into human children, but the goblins already see them as such and will seek to enslave them. Each human has a "native age", up to 12, which they naturally flow towards; the Twelve Founders are tweens due to some kind of inner maturity. Legend says the Twelve Founders were once the royal family of the kingdom the goblins conquered. (This is a distorted memory of the original dreamworld.) Supposedly, Gareth was to be married to Beth, but to his parents this was just a ruse to make them vulnerable to invasion, but nevertheless if Beth and Gareth marry they inherit the combined kingdom. This legend is the endgame for the rebels. In the short term, they want more Founders back, to be better at rebelling. Gareth will see "human children" as slaves or rebels. The straightforward way to get him to come out for treatment is to rescue the rest of the Founders, get Beth in to see Gareth, and have a private wedding for them, then appeal to him as king. Some deviousness is required to do it more quickly. Dream Tortuga The ship is putting into port at Seahaven. The dreamer here is comatose or something, and has been lucid dreaming for a long time. She's turned her dream of Seahaven into a playground for her lucid dreaming; by now she's an oracle of lucid dreaming skills. You don't want to meet her, think Haruhi Suzumiya. Today, Seahaven is a dusty western town; at first there seems to be just the one row of buildings, along Main Street(which is liberally dotted with green street signs), but the little alleyways open onto hidden warrens. Visible on the northern horizon is a mayan step-pyramid temple, where the Mayor(the dreamer) and her love(another dreamer who visits) stay. The Mayor today is a white-hatted gunslinger, and her love is identical but for a black hat and a bright fuchsia handkerchief. Before the pyramid is a walled plaza, where messages scrawled on the walls slowly fade. Royal Revenge is here to buy supplies(since food heals), and drop off the refugees. This is their last chance to sign the Articles. Hers is the mayan writing of the Ouroboros Car. Lab 26 Once a dark fairy-tale realm(the Ice Kingdom), now twisted with technology. (Wandering imps have jetpacks and wield syringes, etc.) The Director was a chrome devil, but is turning into the Ice Queen she slew. In another dream, the dreamer is jacked in, used as a conduit for computer constructs to enter the memetic realms. This chrome devil is a worm that infected the computer that dreamer is jacked into, turned into an ethereal. She took over the Ice Kingdom for a place to experiment with this newfound reality, but is unaware of how insidious it can be, and is metaphorically hugging a tarbaby.