Scene #2731: Emi Hoshino and the Observer

Owner	Pose
Emi Hoshino	With Ami having questions on her mind about the nature of the dreamscape, the only person to really ask who might be able to answer them is Emi Hoshino, the resident 'expert' in all things dream. This is a title she would strenuously deny but there are few about who might know more than her about the dreamscape as of yet. She agreed to meet after an exchange of texts, having decided on the campus garden, where she is seated against one of the trees. She appears to be taking a nap at the moment, hands pillowed behind her head, her parasol offering her a little extra shade. She smells like a cigarette right now.
Sailor Mercury	It was still early enough in the day to find Ami in the school. While finals drew closer and classes ran out the last of their curricula before the summer break, the blue-haired senshi was left with a surprising amount of downtime. It wasn't as though excessive cramming would help her at this point. Ami was, for the most part, more concerned with where her friends' grades were headed. Fortunately, though, she had time out even from that. Time enough to meet with Emi, curiosity for the dreamscape tickling in the back of her brain. "Hello E--" Ami cut herself off with a curious blink, stepping a little closer to the tree and the terriically relaxed girl beneath. "I didn't think I was taking quite that long to get here."
Emi Hoshino	"Don't worry," calls a voice from above in the tree. It's sweet and cute and feminine and ... ... it belongs to spider with a palm-sized torso clinging to the branches of a tree, "She'll wake up in a moment. I'll let her know you're her!" The prismatically colored spider sitting on said branch stays put a moment, just staring down at Ami, before Emi in turn rouses herself from her nap and sits up with a deep breath to fill her lungs. "Mmn. Oh. Hey. You made it," she tells Ami. "Cool. Okay. I was just checking on Molly," she explains.
Sailor Mercury	There was some surprise evident upon her features following the spider's address and Ami drew her eyes to look it over. Neither the voice nor the appearance of it seemed to bother the senshi at all and, instead, she just smiled pleasantly with a gentle bob of her head--"Thank you." And then Emi was waking. "Do you feel rested after sleeping like that?" Ami's questions always managed to come easily, as though simply watching the other girl wake was enough to inspire such an inquiry. Though, manners were still important. Ami cleared her throat. "I mean--hello Emi-san. Is Molly-san doing well?"
Emi Hoshino	"As well as can be expected," is Emi's answer. "She's been through hell and it's not even close to over yet." The spider waves its forelegs at Ami and introduices herself, "Hi! I'm KenKen! Emi's friend to the end." "Why are you making a Child's Play reference, KenKen," asks Emi, flat toned. She rubs her eyes. "Wanna plaaaaaaay?" says KenKen. Emi throws a little rock from the ground at KenKen's branch, who squeaks and huddles back a bit on the branch. "Ignore her," she tells Ami. She gives a one shouldered shrug. "Depends on the dream. Now, you had questions?" She give a slight bow towards her from her seated position, "I will offer what answers I can."
Sailor Mercury	Ami, for the most part, looked to be entirely oblivious to the references. She wasn't particularly well studied up on western movies, unfortunately. Particularly older ones, save for the sorts of slapstick-comedy that Masato had forced her to watch. Even those were usually in the form of cartoon cats and mice, doing things she scarcely understood. She did smile though, right up until Emi caught her attention again. "I can empathise with some of what she's going through at least." Ami stated earnestly, fully cognizant of how her previous life had come to a violent end. Heck, at this point, they ''both'' probably were. "I suppose I do." Ami nodded again, shifting the heavy backpack from her shoulders so that she could settle down beside Emi, shuffling her way into the tree's shade as well. The sun was still rather warm. "But, it's one of those things that becomes a little harder to manage in practice. You know--being curious about ''so much'' that you don't even know where to start?" She hummed quietly to herself, a pondersome note that saw her lips twist a little this way and that. "What is a ''machine elf''?"
Emi Hoshino	"Yeah, I get that feeling," Emi agrees, nochalantly. She fiddles with her lighter in one hand. Smoking on school grounds, Emi? FOR SHAME. In fairness, Hinoiri has mostly succesfully bullied her into quitting, but there are occasional times where she wants a cigarette, and it seems like she lost this particular battle this time even if she isn't smoking right this moment. "They're dreamscape entities. I don't know a lot about them. Most dreams and nightmares know very little about them. They come from ... somewhere deeper in the dreamscape and you don't noramlly see them because they blend into the fabric of the dream. I'm guessing you saw it because you were going into detail. Sometimes, they're full bodied. Other times they're, mmn, you know ... it's like looking at a manga page and recognizing that all the panels on the page actually for something. The first time I saw one, the entire brick wall I weas leaning against turned out to be the face of an observer. I don't know what they are or what they do, but I call them machine elves because they look a lot like the hallucinations people report when they're on like a psychidelic drug. The dreamscape is a pretty ... colorful place." She shrugs her shoulders.
Sailor Mercury	"The Mercury Computer--and the Visor, by extension--is a pretty powerful analytical tool. Beaking things down into fine details is pretty much what it's designed to do." Ami responded quite factually, though she didn't let herself go quite so far as to use a word like ''quantisation'' to explain it. There were plenty of ways for to get someone's eyes to glaze over and she was fairly certain using long, boring words was likely to be one of them. Her nose wrinkled a little for the scent of tobacco smoke, though she didn't say anything directly. Did she have to? Saeko Mizuno was an oncologist. Ami was well lectured on the dangers of such things. "''Most dreams and nightmares know very little about them.''" Ami echoed thoughtfully. "Do you mean to suggest that the dreams and nightmares are, themselves, aware?"
Emi Hoshino	"Oh, yeah," says Emi, her expression darkening for a heavy moment. "There are dream and nightmare entities that have their own persistent identities, have their own thoughts and ideas and can take initiative on things. Understand, everything in the dreamscape flows outwards. Our dreams leave an impression on the dreamscape, which takes after it. It's why there's a Dream Tokyo that isn't -just- the Tokyo of the people who live here, but the dreams people have -about- Tokyo. And from there, those things flake off and flow into the deeper dreamscape, where as best as I can tell they comingle into new things and flow back into the dreamscape. Sometimes, all that energy coalesces into an idea of something that can think and take action, dream or nightmare. The Machine Elves could just be elder examples of the same thing, but then again, maybe not. Maybe they're something else entirely. What I do know is I don't really want to go digging into them."
Sailor Mercury	"Unfortunately for the both of us, digging into things is something that I can't really help myself about." Ami grimaced a little apologetically. And it was definitely true. The Guardian of Love and Intelligence was very nearly compelled by some deeper nature to try to find answers to her questions. As many of them as she could conceivably answer and more than a few that she couldn't. "But, that makes sense when you think about it." Ami bounced neatly back to the subject. "Since the dreamscape is shaped by dreams and the echoes of dreams--well--that's all just minds anyway, isn't it? They might be sleeping, but there's still thought and awareness pretty much baked in. Which leads into another thought I'd had when we were doing the training. I don't think I asked directly." She lifted a brow. "How much of a dream that we might be in is shaped by our expectations of things? Not just the dreamer, of course, but us as... uh--visitors? Observers? Other people?" The brow dipped lower to join it's partner in a slightly confused furrow.
Emi Hoshino	KenKen has curled into a ball on the branch and her legs dangle over the edges of it, wrapped around it to cling. She is ... is she purring?! It sounds a little like it. Vibrating. Emi kind of nods, though, agreeing wiht her. "Our minds fill in the blanks a lot of the time. Maybe sometimes, something from the dreamscape will feed in, but for the most part, our dreams are own dreams and they are in fact dictated by our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. What you're asking is a tougher question that I don't have a good answer to, though." She holds her hands out, "I know a lot, but there's even more I don't know." "I'd argue you don't know a lot, even," adds KenKen. "Thanks, KenKen. I needed that." The spider gives a little one legged salute.
Sailor Mercury	"Well, she knows more than I do." Ami smiled at KenKen with a gentle shrug. She was rather skilled at finding tougher questions to ask. Fortunately, for the most part, Ami was also pretty good at figuring out the right sorts of answers to them with enough time and information. That was the problem with the dreamscape, however. It was pretty difficult to gather good information on, even with her access to Silver Millenium technology to assist. "I haven't made much headway on the data recorded from when we were trying to find the dreamer." She sighed. "There's something uniquely irreducible about the dreamscape. Even putting it all back together, in a kind of ''broad picture'' form, all I get is the machine elf thing that was looking back at me at the time." Ami pulled a face. "And, at this point, I'm not ''entirely'' convinced that it can't ''still'' see me from there." The thought ran down her spine like ice water, and Ami wriggled and shivered against the tree for a moment. Sleep had been a little trickier since, for sure.
Emi Hoshino	"I mean, nightmares can take someone over. Who's to say the Machine Elves can't lurk in someone's mind?" A beat. "This isn't helping, huh," she tells her with a faint smile. Still, she says she has problems sleeping and Emi's eyes take on a little bit more of a concern. "Tell you what. I'll come by your dreams. You'll sleep later. And I'll make sure there are no machine elves peeping on you. Okay? Maybe I'll even show you your dream liminality -- the space that serves as the doorway between dream and dreamscape."
Sailor Mercury	"Would you?" Ami perrked a little. Not that she was particularly depressed about anything, for the most part the blue-haired senshi seemed relatively happy. But, finding an easier rest on the back of what she'd accidentally seen within the depths of the dreamscape was a pretty lovely offer, actually. She smiled. "Thank you, Emi-chan. I'd like that."
Emi Hoshino	"Yeah, of course I will. Ensuring you get a good night's sleep is part of the duties of one Oneiric Guardian Emi." She considers a moment, then holds her hand out to KenKen who crawls down the tree to rest in her palm. She hnlds the spider out to her. "Take KenKen with you. She'll be my way in." KenKen is a spider, so she doesn't exactly beam but she somehow manages to exude that energy somehow, and because sleeping with a giant spider hanging out nearby will be TOTALLY easy.
Sailor Mercury	There's a surprising lack of concern as Ami extends a hand to receive the spider. At some point, you just get a little bit used to the magical speaking creatures that accompany mahou. Between Pretty Cures, their fairies, and the trio of talking cats associated with the senshi, Ami was well and truly at that point. "I'd offer to feed her a special treat, but I'm not sure what dream spiders like." The senshi hummed and mused, images of kaleidoscopic flies flashing through her mind with a wrinke of nose. She banished the thought with a shake of her head.
Emi Hoshino	"I eat nightmares," says KenKen, happily. "She sure does," says Emi, putting her hands together behind her head. She kicks her feet out and then closes her eyes. She is immediately asleep again.