The Great Dance of November 2024
Dec. 27th, 2025 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRawlin: Our greatest dance so far was on November 2, 2024, initiated and led by myself to open our mind to another world, for the sake of rescuing Bob’s family there. Unbeknownst to me, the already challenging task was made more difficult because it required repealing a decision made in 2007 by all active crew members and landscape at the time, made to lock the headspace to all newcomers. I, however, had not been involved in that decision; I was a free agent.
My first step was to sync myself to the landscape. We chose a video game soundtrack, a rhythm game and thus well-timed for a person’s natural movement pace. (For the curious, it was the Crypt of the Necrodancer soundtrack by Danny Baranowski.)
Because I was embarking on a complex task, the syncing took much more time than the simple morning wards. Stamina was mustered, trust and consent established, and dancers amassed in preparation for the exertions to come. Once the beat was set and the dancers in place, the labor began:
• obtain unanimous agreement (including that of the landscape) to open a world-door in our mind
• learn the appropriate location in the abyssal waters in which to open said door
• get to that location safely, opening the waters and holding them at bay for all following tasks
• opening the door
• extracting Bob’s family safely
• exiting the door
• shutting the door and locking it so no one could follow
• leaving the waters
• closing the waters
• releasing the dance (and dealing with our new, deeply upset tenants)
I took the spearhead position, since opening doors was one of my specialties, twenty years ago. We united in our conviction that the emergency justified opening a door and having reached consensus, we marched for the end of the map.
Our headspace is a small habitable bubble, completely encapsulated by the abyssal waters. Entering them is dangerous, for the depths erode your sense of self even when they aren’t agonizing to the touch. So when we came to the wall of the water at the edge of the land, we worked together to open a dry channel to enter.
For this, I could not run point alone. Here, Mori joined me in the point position, having dance-partnered me the most in the past. We alternated surging forward and falling back, taking turns opening further and further into the abyss, while the others fed us strength and held the channel open. When we reached the correct location, I resumed point alone and focused on opening the door, while the others bolstered me and held the waters at bay. It was more difficult than expected, fifteen years of disuse under five or six layers of lock, and every one had to be removed safely.
All the preceding took roughly half an hour or more, but once the door was unlocked, we had to move quickly. The entering and extraction (what one might call the “exciting part”) only took three minutes, tops.
Because Mori had died in the world I entered, she could not join me. Rogan took her place, focused entirely on holding the door open so I would be neither trapped nor distracted. The territory was not in my favor, inside a human-scale house. At my size, I could neither stand nor kneel, only crawl, and there were people in the house who, once they recovered from the shock of my sudden appearance, could easily stop me. Erring on the side of speed and safety, I compelled them to leave the house (a special gift of mine, and in this case an easy task, since they were caught by surprise and wanted to get away from me anyway) and quickly grabbed all of Bob’s relatives as I found them, throwing them to Rogan, who passed them through the door to the others. I was just as terrifying to Bob’s relatives as I was the others in the house; at least two screamed when I grabbed them, for which I am sorry. One woman had hidden with her toddler in a bathroom; they were the last I found, but one person remained unaccounted for. He had already been taken out of the house.
I opened the front door but couldn’t locate the missing man. Furthermore, all the parties I’d ordered outside were there, and the compel was rapidly wearing off, along with their confusion. Since the front door was too small to easily let me exit, I hastily closed it and thought-called back to Rogan, “I don’t know what to do about that.”
Because we were synced, the communication was nigh-instant. Without words, he informed he that he could take care of it, if I managed the door.
We exchanged places.
Rogan is a workman’s dancer—my impression up until then was that he was solid and reliable but neither flashy nor impressive. It was then that I learned that he was capable of impressive work, though for very short increments. Being human-sized, he had no trouble with the scale of anything, and being blind, he also didn’t rely on vision to track his environment. He effortlessly latched onto the missing man’s thoughtstream, located it as locked in the back of one of the vans, and lurched directly into said van and grabbed the man without opening any doors or appearing in intervening space. He then lurched back to me, and we bolted back through the world-door.
Rogan, exhausted from his labors, fell back. I too was feeling the strain, but only I knew the procedures for closing the door I had opened. I did all the opening procedures in reverse, and Mori rejoined me for the closing of the waters—again, the steps of opening in reverse. When we returned to safe, dry land, I collapsed, and thus ended the dance. I spent the rest of the day horizontal or sleeping.
My first step was to sync myself to the landscape. We chose a video game soundtrack, a rhythm game and thus well-timed for a person’s natural movement pace. (For the curious, it was the Crypt of the Necrodancer soundtrack by Danny Baranowski.)
Because I was embarking on a complex task, the syncing took much more time than the simple morning wards. Stamina was mustered, trust and consent established, and dancers amassed in preparation for the exertions to come. Once the beat was set and the dancers in place, the labor began:
• obtain unanimous agreement (including that of the landscape) to open a world-door in our mind
• learn the appropriate location in the abyssal waters in which to open said door
• get to that location safely, opening the waters and holding them at bay for all following tasks
• opening the door
• extracting Bob’s family safely
• exiting the door
• shutting the door and locking it so no one could follow
• leaving the waters
• closing the waters
• releasing the dance (and dealing with our new, deeply upset tenants)
I took the spearhead position, since opening doors was one of my specialties, twenty years ago. We united in our conviction that the emergency justified opening a door and having reached consensus, we marched for the end of the map.
Our headspace is a small habitable bubble, completely encapsulated by the abyssal waters. Entering them is dangerous, for the depths erode your sense of self even when they aren’t agonizing to the touch. So when we came to the wall of the water at the edge of the land, we worked together to open a dry channel to enter.
For this, I could not run point alone. Here, Mori joined me in the point position, having dance-partnered me the most in the past. We alternated surging forward and falling back, taking turns opening further and further into the abyss, while the others fed us strength and held the channel open. When we reached the correct location, I resumed point alone and focused on opening the door, while the others bolstered me and held the waters at bay. It was more difficult than expected, fifteen years of disuse under five or six layers of lock, and every one had to be removed safely.
All the preceding took roughly half an hour or more, but once the door was unlocked, we had to move quickly. The entering and extraction (what one might call the “exciting part”) only took three minutes, tops.
Because Mori had died in the world I entered, she could not join me. Rogan took her place, focused entirely on holding the door open so I would be neither trapped nor distracted. The territory was not in my favor, inside a human-scale house. At my size, I could neither stand nor kneel, only crawl, and there were people in the house who, once they recovered from the shock of my sudden appearance, could easily stop me. Erring on the side of speed and safety, I compelled them to leave the house (a special gift of mine, and in this case an easy task, since they were caught by surprise and wanted to get away from me anyway) and quickly grabbed all of Bob’s relatives as I found them, throwing them to Rogan, who passed them through the door to the others. I was just as terrifying to Bob’s relatives as I was the others in the house; at least two screamed when I grabbed them, for which I am sorry. One woman had hidden with her toddler in a bathroom; they were the last I found, but one person remained unaccounted for. He had already been taken out of the house.
I opened the front door but couldn’t locate the missing man. Furthermore, all the parties I’d ordered outside were there, and the compel was rapidly wearing off, along with their confusion. Since the front door was too small to easily let me exit, I hastily closed it and thought-called back to Rogan, “I don’t know what to do about that.”
Because we were synced, the communication was nigh-instant. Without words, he informed he that he could take care of it, if I managed the door.
We exchanged places.
Rogan is a workman’s dancer—my impression up until then was that he was solid and reliable but neither flashy nor impressive. It was then that I learned that he was capable of impressive work, though for very short increments. Being human-sized, he had no trouble with the scale of anything, and being blind, he also didn’t rely on vision to track his environment. He effortlessly latched onto the missing man’s thoughtstream, located it as locked in the back of one of the vans, and lurched directly into said van and grabbed the man without opening any doors or appearing in intervening space. He then lurched back to me, and we bolted back through the world-door.
Rogan, exhausted from his labors, fell back. I too was feeling the strain, but only I knew the procedures for closing the door I had opened. I did all the opening procedures in reverse, and Mori rejoined me for the closing of the waters—again, the steps of opening in reverse. When we returned to safe, dry land, I collapsed, and thus ended the dance. I spent the rest of the day horizontal or sleeping.
