She felt better off earlier, then she was using a half-truth form and had solid legs. But taking that shape means embracing the lie she was telling herself, and after baring her soul to Arielle, well, she can't really do that. So her spindly, weak legs ache to get her up, and up, and up. She isn't getting tired, but it sure feels like she should. Everytime she looks up, there's more tower than they've cleared looking down.

The garden, though, is a delightful breath of fresh air. She takes a crouch by some young dogs to coo to them as a way of changing her ideas for a bit, and also because she wants a puppy in her next apartment. A magic puppy, ideally. Maybe Ari can whip something exotic for her when she has a pet-ready apartment.

"It's a really neat dream." She stands up. "...kind of sad that it had to involve someone dying, but it's cute." She heads up to the ladder and runs her hand along the surface of it. "Looks like it is. ...welp."

She takes a deep breath, then grabs the rungs and begins to head up. "No two ways about it. Come on."

She freezes and looks up, brows shooting up at the grotesque appearance of this... this thing that comes to eat up on dreams. That's disgusting! To think she and Ari and everyone give birth to these monstrosities with self-doubt. The fallen world is really a piece of work.

Valerie lets out a yelp of her own at the sudden rumble and shake of the entire thing, grabbing the ladder tightly for stability. She waits for Ethan and Arielle to be down before she loosens her grip to slide back down as well before it starts knocking it around or anything.

"Right, okay, chutlhu's ugly cousin. Uhm... how do we deal with that?" She raises her rod. ..She could zap it. Now seems like it'd be a good time for that.

Valerie raises up the mage armor of Matter upon herself, solidifying her clothes and her amnion's plates as though they were made of iron. She steps up to Arielle's side and licks at her lips. She's already seeing the issue that she's never swung a thing at anything else before, or hit anything besides a stationary object, and she doesn't feel confident in her ability to move around in melee. And she's never really thrown or... Well, only one way this goes down.

She points her rod violently, willing Call Lightning to emerge from it, leaping out of the rod and towards the thing like a quick, magical tracer round.
_{(Call lightning: gnosis 2, forces 3 (artifact,) willpower 3. Aimed. Free reach on instant cast.)}
Zb7OP_dW8d10

_{(Aim: Finesse 1, willpower 3)}
6d10 (ignore last two dice)

_{(Reroll 10s)}
3d10

Final damage: 5 successes on casting, which I am spending on ignoring Withstand levels.

Aiming gets 1 success.

Lightning bolt: 10 base bashing, +4 with Ethan factor, +1 aiming, +2 potency for 17B (assuming call lightning gains potency. it's not listed, but I'm guessing it would? I mean, what's the point of having Potency as its primary spell factor if it wouldn't do anything)8d10·6d10·3d10·14d10

Massive whiff! Even Valerie is fast enough to fend it off, gross tentacles slapping at her. The damage helped.

She feels magic fill her as Ethan casts again - like she could make the perfect cast. (Rote spell casting action.)

This time, she obliterates a set of statues lining the walls, sending chunks of stone everywhere.

Growling with animalistic fury, Arielle performs a flying kick, casting a spell in midflight. Her strength multiples and the kick ripples through the monster, blasting it into pieces.

The pieces slap wetly about, wriggling unpleasantly.

"Ew. God! Sis, let's clear this crap."

(You still have Rote for this turn.)

Swirling it up and away, she scoops it from their bodies and the garden and kicks it out. It puffs into clouds as it goes, changing and flowing once again.

The garden shivers, and a verdant female figure moves through the crowds of frightened animals. She looks at them for a bit before holding out her hands. The vegetation grows from it, firming into three ripe fruit of mysterious provenance.

A rush of energy fills her, and knowledge settles into her mind.

(Gain two WP points back and learn a rote you can cast.)

Seeing them okay, Ethan devours his.

"Awesome." Arielle beams. "Thanks, Ms. Mysterious plant mage," she chirps in High Speech.

The animals chirp and cheer their rise, and with her spirits so lifted she hardly even feels it, her mind doing all the work for her as she rises.

It's a good thing she refreshed, because the Dreaming Earth takes her breath away.

They emerge from a bare hut into a vast, primeval forest upon a hill. The Ecstatic Wind blows fiercely here, touching on their Amnions if nothing else, and as she looks out over what she recognizes as the Bay and the hills of San Francisco in the dream about what they might have been - or could be.

The roads are faint, overgrown, and nothing remains of the city but little patches of worked stone or the low shells of concrete. If they followed those they might return to the Swath.

The Earth, like the Ecstatic Wind, seems to want very much to grow and overtake them, to wash humanity away into nothing.

Storms rumble on the horizon, but she's too excited for that to have much impact here, with the way the skies follow her mood.

"We need to go into space next," Ethan comments, taking her hand in quiet awe.

Her mother's notes and the primers given to her by Ikenga warned her to be careful in the Dreaming Earth. Unlike the spirits of the Temenos, the ones here may be intelligent, but they're primarily concerned with being animals. The only way to appeal to them is to appeal to the concepts they represent.

Like the chasm, she suspects this will require some degree of dream logic.
(You may roll Int + Occult for ideas or come up with notions ex nihilo~)

This isn't Valerie's wheelhouse, but she's a clever girl and studied up wherever she could.

The all-pervading intelligence, of the trees and the wind and the soil and the animals that make their nests and hunt and kill in these woods, watches over them with neither malice nor sympathy, for here they are but animals. They feel tiny here, the roots of the trees each a wall, towering over them and the works of men.

She does remember something odd, though - the Dreaming Earth responds to blood, pain. Ecstasy, arousal. Life is a pulse of mutual devouring, and sex, hunger, and death are its primal languages. Arielle is especially at home here, being a Disciple of Life, but it's almost like a childish reflection of the Primal Wild in a way.

(You or one of you could attempt a Wits + Manipulation roll representing the gift for instinctive communication to try and make an appeal, such as for a giant eagle to pick you up or a tree to allow you to climb its bole.)

In the distance, they see enormous wolves wading across the bay, their sides marked with signs in blood and silver. They probably aren't super friendly, but they're far away.

"Those might even be werewolves," Ethan agrees, keeping low. "Probably a bad idea unless you know them personally."

Arielle peers about, peeling the Veil from her eyes with Life. "I'm looking for anything of interest in the sky and - ah hah. A big ol' golden eagle. This must be their original range."

They make their way south a bit, into the hills. It takes nearly an hour, but they get to a nice, high place where the terrain is dry enough that it's clear. (roll Gnosis +2 for Ecstatic Wind damage!)

"Now we just need like - a sacrifice. Or you two can do it like wild animals here, but I dunno if an eagle god-spirit would care," Arielle says.

(Wits + Manipulation, describe your method)

The sight of it is terrifying when it dives. It's majestic, a creature great and terrible with wingspans as long as a large ship. Arielle holds herself ready, in case it decides to be hostile, but Valerie's got this. She swoops, her wing out, using it to kick herself up into the sky, and sends the feather up higher.

The beast seems to understand. It doesn't attack them - it snatches them in its talons, and begins to rise, snapping the feather along as it goes.

Like all birds of prey, it knows how to grip without piercing, but boy, industrial drill-sized talons are uncomfortable to have around you. The Bird Master takes them into Neuth, the realm of the sky, and then higher.

The Dreaming Earth falls away, the Bay with its towering mountain dreams vanishing as they rise higher and higher, and higher, until the atmosphere fades, and the stars shine brightly around them.

The cool lights of Mars, Venus, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars are all spheres here, strangely close, and yet impossibly far. She knows, from Ikenga's warnings, that she could commit to travel to the distant star of Fomalhaut - if she wanted to spend a subjective eternity traveling at the speed of light there while only seconds pass on Earth.

The Bird Master lets them go here, to drift in space, and figure out where to go next as he turns back to earth with his prize.

It's so beautiful here. Valerie could spend a lifetime just meditating on it if she liked, but she isn't equipped for that sort of thing. She has to measure her economy of motion so that she gets to the edge of the Ocean Oroboros, then the Winds won't trouble her.

In this stark, beautiful realm, the silent universe of planetary dreams, they drift on stardust.

"I could probably do something about that if I learned a little more Time," Ethan says in hushed awe, afraid of disturbing the perfect peace of the moment, "but I think we're done. I'll see what I can do to keep this brief for our sanity."

Reaching out their hands, Ethan and Valerie link up with her. With a little Forces push, they're moving. They take aim for the darkness, for their goal is the end of space, the end of time, and it's always surprisingly close. Sometimes, it's right in your head.

They slow as they approach an unexpected world. Its surface hisses silently with purple plumes of radiation, and when Valerie looks back she finds the sun a tiny, bright ball behind her.

"Wow," Ethan says. "This must be the ninth planet, the one after Neptune and Pluto in the Oort cloud."

The closer they get, the more they see a tiny blip on the surface. It swells into a vast complex of towers, a regular, complex pattern that reminds her of the shapes of metamaterials.

They fall towards the center and land on a platform, the sky lit with an eerie radiance that makes strange shadows. Giant letters in High Speech have been carved into the remains.

"...oh my god," Arielle whispers. "This is - Atlantean? I'm not sure that word has any meaning here. This can't really be here, can it?"

"This isn't the Temenos," Ethan comments. "This is a dream of something real, and its own dream, not a person's."

Everywhere, there is the Wind, calling for her to join with the peace of this place.

(1 turn has passed. Gnosis + 3 dream damage roll.)