#issoria

Storplettet Perlemorsommerfugl (Issoria lathonia)

[Annie’s ‘symptoms’ get worse the less sleep she gets: she hears more of the real world, and she can rarely see herself in the mirror, and clocks and books are unreadable. Her doctor says that’s sleep deprivation messing with her mind. But Annie knows it’s just that as she gets weaker here, she gets stronger in the real world. If she can exhaust herself enough, she’ll wake up.

The nightmare, of course, has its tricks to keep her here. At her checkup today the doctor had said if Annie didn’t sleep soon they might have to consider sedation, because her sleeplessness was ‘endangering her health’. Annie’s been sedated before, and it’s awful. It knocks her out for hours and hours. So eventually she agreed that she’d sleep for an hour; an hour spent in the infirmary under supervision to make sure she actually slept.

It was upsetting to lose what progress she’d made, but the one silver lining is that when Annie checked her PDD, she found the words on the display made sense again. She could read. It had been days since she’d last been able to read, so she heads immediately to the library -- she can take out a book and stay up late reading tonight.

Running her hands along the shelves, Annie beelines for one of her favourites: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh. She never read it in the real world, so she’s not sure if her mind made it up -- it does feel pertinent to Annie’s life in many ways -- but she’s found a lot of comfort in it over the years. She reaches out for it, but her hand collides with another. Annie pulls her hand back as if she’d been scalded, pulling her sleeves down over her fingers. She doesn’t think she’s seen this person before, but she’s immediately upset at having (possibly) inconvenienced her. She’s really pretty, the intimidating sort of pretty: seraphic and serene looking, and Annie feels gawky and frumpy in comparison.]

S-sorry, um… you take it. I’ve read it like a million times anyway. [She tries to smile, and hopes Issoria won’t think she’s weird.]

Leaving home for the first time can be difficult. Especially if you were raised almost completely isolated. 

Sometimes you play around with what would have made your DnD character turn evil. 

In Red’s case, all it would have taken is his boyfriend being a little more upfront with him about the work he did.