6250/The Vizier of Ennui

The Vizier of Ennui
Date of Scene:	17 May 2021
Location:	Zeitgeist Sea, The Dreamlands
Synopsis:	The group fights the Vizier of Ennui after resiting his initial salvo of terrible ennui, getting so much attention that they are all moved...elsewhere
Cast of Characters:	Cliff Steele, Colette O'Connail, Kate Bishop, Terry O'Neil, Michael Hannigan, Amanda Sefton
Tinyplot:	Sailing the Zeitgiest Sea

---

Cliff Steele has posed:
Cliff wakes with a start on the deck of the ship. An unknown period of time has past, and he found himself in some freaky castle fighting demon hounds with the justice league. "Freaky Shit..." he muttered to himself as he saw the sun set and the stars slowly come out. Cliff rubbed his eyes in disbelief as he saw a giant pair of eyes staring through the clouds and stars down on the tiny ship...

Far away, the Vizier of Ennui, one of the powers of the Dreamlands, reaches out his hand and mists and clouds begin to gather and the weather started getting rough.

"Oh fuck no, none of this three hour tour shit..." he looked at the captain as the Brazier started to light, "We need to get out of here. Stat."

"Unless you can get out and push," the Captain said sardonically, "I dont see how..."

"Don't mind if I do." He grabbed a rope and tied it to the end of the ship, slowly lowering himself off the edge of the ship and began to kick, faster and faster. It started slow at first but the ship actually managed to increase in speed.

Meanwhile, as more and more dreamers began to appear, lightning pealed in the darkening sky and color slowly drained from the area, tinting the whole dreamlands in shades of black and white.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Oh no, not again.

    Famously, (and inexplicably) these are the last words (according to Douglas Adams) of a whale spontaneously brought into existance high above the planet Magrathea, shortly before plunging to its inevitable doom.

    So too are they the thoughts that go through Colette's head as she awakens to this particular corner of the dreaming, and plummets to her inevitable annoyance to the deck of the captain's ship.

    She picks herself up with a sigh. looks around, glares at a random dreamer, then demands of the captain where 'Robot Guy' as she refers to him has gone. The captain points mutely to the front of the ship.

    Colette makes her way to the front, not seeing Cliff there. It takes a few moments before she notices the wake ahead of the ship, where Cliff is apparently dragging the boat faster.

    "I'm not helping," Colette announces. "Fuck that. TERRY! KATE! RAVEN GUY! WHERE ARE YOU?"

Kate Bishop has posed:
Kate has actually enjoyed the time off from this messed up lucid dream land of doom and pianos. She assumes the Brazier just hasn't lit for a while since they definitely haven't dealt at all with the core problem.

This is despite having the aid of a Chaos Cat, a Magician, and Whatever Colette is supposed to be.

I mean Kate, she is just sass and arrows so it isn't like she is the dream expert. To quote Dante, She is not Even Supposed to Be Here Today!

And yet here she is, on a boat, 'waking' up to this whole mess one more time. "Who is Guy?" she blinks a couple of times and then just slumps back where she was sitting against the mast. A sigh. "I doubt Raven is going to come save us since Terry keeps being victimized by this place to be honest...."

At least it isn't the asylum and Hawkeye is in her full kit, if slightly swashbucklery in thematics due to the dreams window dressing.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry figures that Colette, insofar as party configuration goes, is the pugilist. She certainly seems eager to punch him every time she has the chance. It is, therefore, a boont o bring her alongg. All you have to do is get her angry enogugh to want to punch someone /else/, and you're golden!

However, this particular party has recruited another ace up its sleeve in the shape of an actual sorceress! A little sleep-over at her pocket dimension slash library (don't mind the Asgardian squatter, and do not mention 'slash' and 'library' to him in the same sentence or else some very dire consequences for the internet might arise from that), some precautions, and the intrepid adventurers set foot on the ship as if by... well. Magic.

No sooner has a particular someone hit the deck that some sort of frenzy seems to come over some of the members of the crew who do not happen to be named characters in this drama. A fiddle, out of nowhere, begins to wail a hornpipe, and the voices of the sailors sing in unison-

~Vorp's the lad, Vorp's the lad, always gay and frisky, oh!
Vorp's the lad. Vorp's the lad, to lower the rum And the whiskey, oh!
At keeping his feet he's handy, oh! his legs are rather bandy, oh!
A rollicking, frolicking son of the sea, is sailor Vorp the Dandy, oh!~

Vorpal, however, is still Vorpal, even when he is, as is the case right now, rather resplendent in his sailor clothes, and rather deft at dancing the hornpipe.

He stops whe nthe last note dies and takes off his hat. "Hm. I think we're at the right place..."

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Nick wasn't lying yesterday when he told Hank over facetime he needed that laugh. The begining of the week had its challenges, but this particular day has a different type of challenge associated with him. But, being overseas he managed to to avoid a lot of the things that stirred up the pot.

And then Terry showed up. And then there was Amanda. And then, well... Back in the US before popping to- wherever Amanda's work. There's a bit of stirring. The plan seemed simple enough. It's much easier to focus on just one or two people who are specifically going where you want to go than constantly peeking at dreams at random and just hoping. So, when they go under, he breathes, closing his eyes. He watches. Waits.

As the view of Cliff comes into view and a statement of being in the right place, there's the slight upwards tilt to the side of his lips before shaking his head. Another breath. The scar on his lower right forearm fades and reappears to his left as the mirror image looks up. Focusing upon the dreamscape before stepping through.

There's a twist to the plane as something pushes against the backdrop from the other side before popping through. The phantasm finishes his step, leaving no trace of his entrance on the scenery behind.

The musician takes a moment to look around. Unlike Vorpal's transition into dreams His attire didn't switch out entirely. It just reversed itself. Which being it is a solid colored shirt- Well. Who can tell, really?

Amanda Sefton has posed:
Amanda knows virtually none of these people. She has passing acquaintence with Terry. Even thinner with Mike. But she steps onto the ship and looks around at the faded landscape. "Cheery place," she murmurs, a wry smile on her lips as the sailors sing of Vorpal and the Cat appears like the star of Pirates of Penzance. She'd expect little else from him.

For her part, she is in her usual leathers, a hood over her blonde hair, tiny runes sewn into the edging to serve as protection. "I've never drempt in black-and-white before," she tells the Cat, glancing over to Nick. "This should be interesting."

Cliff Steele has posed:
Cliff Steele kicks and kicks and vaguely remembers that the water is really bad to touch but keeps going anyway. He's fine, he is a brain in a jar after all. But he is relentless and so the boat starts to move faster than the storm, but this is no ordinary storm and soon the waves are as tall as small hills, ten stories tall each as the boat moves in and out of them, the captain bravely trying to steer as best he can.

The Vizier casts the dark mist into the now black and white world, slowly the ennui that is his staple picks up. Rather than orderlies made of dreams to whack or pianos to burn or sick giant musicians on, this attack is far more insideous and indirect, reaching into people's minds and memories to pull forth the thing that will elicit Ennui; depair and depression of hoplessness. He is leery of the sorceress, but hopes this attack will give him what he wants and needs; which is to steal that brazier.

Cliff is not affected by this, too lost in the effects of the sea as vision after vision has him being a robots; he is a pair of droids in Star Wars. He is a car driving across the desert sands, red eye rolling back and forth, he is the object of a song being thanked, on and on and on, but somehow he keeps kicking.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette's not touching the water. No metal body, so best not to. Not after the warnings.

    On the other hand... it could be fun. She leans on the railing, staring out over the edge into the monochrome waters below. Water that causes intense, crazy dream-visions? It's basically drugs. And there's a whole ocean of it. Might be more interesting than this turgid black-and-white dream reality. What a boring dream. No doctors with glass skulls to mess with. No pianos. Just endless dreary ocean, without color or interest.

    It is, to Colette, faintly reminiscent of drifting through the vastnesses of space. There wasn't a whole lot to occupy her attention back then, either. At least not after the first million years or so, when the space ship she had been inhabiting finally succumbed to the ravages of materials fatigue and micrometeorite impacts and fell apart. Then it was just darkness and distant stars. For a long, long time.

    The first few thousand years there had even been a sun. It had never been particularly big in the sky; at about the size of a penny, and getting ever smaller. That was quite interesting, in some relative way. Watching it grow smaller and smaller over the decades and then centuries, until it was no bigger than any other star in the sky.

    Perhaps this voyage will likewise last an eternity, with no particular signs of change. If you wait long enough though, everything does change. Over the course of mere thousands of years, you can watch the effect of parallax on the stars. They make different patterns. Clusters separate or come together, to greater or lesser degrees. You can quickly (mere millennia) start to tell which clusters of stars are just a few dozens of light-years away, and which are all the way across the galaxy. It's almost interesting.

    This isn't. It's boring. But you know what? They don't make boredom like they used to. Colette remembers watching a supernova burst into a vast tapestry of colored light and then fade away to nothing, over the space of just a million years or so. That had been quite exciting, but after that there had been basically nothing for... how long? Two or three hundred million years, something like that? Now /that/ had been boring. This? This is amateur stuff by comparison.

    Besides, there's Kate, and there's Terry, doing Terry things. And he's brought that... what was her name? Amanda something. The magic-person Terry had said he was going to bring. Presumably that's her over there. And there's Nick. Maybe someone's going to blow up a catacomb again. That's the kind of thing that happens when Nick's around, and that's kind of interesting. Not like staring at a sky full of stars that changes on a timescale that makes the growth of mountains look enthusiastic by comparison. Not like this voya...

    Colette blinks a few times and looks around. "Uh. Is anyone else..." she starts. "Is someone fucking around?"

Kate Bishop has posed:
"Ah there we are." as if Vorpal and the Wizards two. Wait. When did we get an Amanda.

"Vorpal. I can almost see why Raven always wants to drown you after that entrance my furry friend...." she is teasing though. Honestly she is glad he is here.

She doesn't manage to lever herself to standing though before a shadow falls over her.

As Kate sits there a teenager that has a very strong family resemblance to the archer looks down at Kate sitting leaned against the mast.

Kate blinks several times behind her shades "...u.." but the teenager just carries on "Mom...." pause "Dad... " it looks like the teen has been crying. "Dad wanted me to tell you that mom won't be coming home... there was an.. there was an accident."

Who sends a teenager to tell someone else that.

Yup someone is fucking around.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
It hits him like a ton of bricks, because although the Cheshire cat is mischief and madness and, usually, immune to ennui, he also is impulsive and ended up canoodling with a mortal woman, and thus the Cheshire cat became a little human, too.

He may be on the deck, but he is also somewhere else as well, where there there are long corridors and bleak light coming through windows and tall, forbidding figures in black and white who ordered the world in black and white, and left him in a grey fog.

Confíteor Deo omnipoténti
et vobis, fratres,
quia peccávi nimis
cogitatióne, verbo,
ópere et omissióne:

The vaulted ceiling seemed to reach up into the infinite itself, into darkness, and the procesional of tall Brothers and Sisters who walked up and down the aisles, and up and down the naves, left the shrinking figure of Terry O'Neil feeling as if they were the living bars of a moving prison that would never open for him, that would always surround him.

mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea máxima culpa.

He glances across the pews to the only other occupant. The young man who had floored him at the creek, for saying words that no man should say to another. The glance he returned was that of pure disgust. The disgust of man and the disgust of god, mingled in one.

Ideo precor beátam Maríam semper vírginem,
omnes angelos et sanctos,
et vos, fratres,
oráre pro me ad Dóminum Deum nostrum.

Michael Hannigan has posed:
Getting his barings and leaving the others to tend to whatever comes their way, Nick starts to focus on his part of the plan. Get Cliff and the brazier the hell out of here. Walking over to the side of the ship he caught glimpse of Cliff at, the approach slows as another figure steps in his way.

Turning his head to take a look to the figure, his eyes widen at the person staring back. She does not seem that threatening in her housekeeping attire. Hands clasped together. She is smiling to Nick. Although slightly older looking, there is no denial to a bit of resemblance to the brown haired woman before him. The jawline. The cheekbones. The blue eyes.

Well- eye. Exit points can be messy.

"...Mom?"

There is a sweet, almost complete smile except for the side missing the eye. "Hello Michael. Have you come to join me?" She doesn't wait for an answer as she collapses to the deck, Eye glazing over as blood starts to pool around the opening. Nick freezes, looking to the body below, shoulders raising in a deep breath he shouldn't have needed to take.

A different female voice echos, "You've got to do something!"

"Why won't you help us?!"

" He's not him. Don't do this. HELP US."

Sobbing. "...I'm tired, Michael."
Nick glances around, looking for the owner of the voice as it echos around him. But as it sobs away, he's left finding no trace of her.

'The long smile as he tips up the drink,
A weary look no telling what I think
But I walk up pulling out a seat
This isn't the last chance that we'll meet.-'

There's pair of voices laughing. Hearing another familiar voice, Nick glances back up, seeing both a brown haired man and a black haired man. Slightly older looking and taller than Nick, they too have seemed to have seen better days as the darker haired one's neck is slightly askew. No blood though as the pale figures seemed to have been washed clean but the 'Y' shaped stitch marks are not all that assuring.

The brown haired man holds up his drink in a toast to the visibly younger man, "You should have come with us, Mike. You'd have had a HELL of a time."

The pair start to laugh, holding up glasses of alcohol, grinning crazily as they continue to sing drunkenly

'Hey hey, bartender keep those things going
When we'll stop, there is no knowing.
Hey we're just keeping this on the level
For tonight, it is drinks with the Devillll...'

Amanda Sefton has posed:
Amanda is, truth be told, one of the more mentally resilient people in the world. Good thing, really, given the weird shit she sees on a regular basis. Elder Gods? Been there. Screwed up homelife? Yep. Seen that, too... It just took a while.

She glances over her shoulder as a young man appears behind her. "*You know she's just using you, right?*" Stefan. Her brother. Dead years ago, needfully, at the hands of someone else she loved just as much. He speaks in a gypsy tongue.

"Schisse..." she sighs, her German accent overpowering the British. "*Go away, Stefan,*" she tells him, switching to Romani, the language of their birth.

"*She craves power. That's all.*" He responds in the same tongue, strutting in that overbearing way certain Eastern European men will. "*All of us -- you, me, Kurt. We're just means to an end.*"

"*Mother knows what she's doing...*"

"*Yes. She does. And she doesn't care. You'll be the one who pays, little sister. Never have a life of your own. Husband. Children...*" The man, in his black pants and white shirt, a sash at his waist, leans closer to her. "*Freedom. Adventure. A life away from this mad Circus.*"

Her eyes flare with amber power. She thrusts out her hands in an an arcane gesture. Power ripples out from her. Stefan evaporates like a whisp of black smoke, curling away from the deck.

"That's quite enough of that," she says, British accent reasserting itself with authority as she banishes the apparition. She turns to look toward the Brazier... and from it to look out over the bow. "This is a dream. And as we are each aware of it, we can control it. So... Let's find out who's behind this, shall we? See if we can't put an end to it."

Or at least try.

Cliff Steele has posed:
Cliff Steele is kicking faster and faster and faster as the boat moves of increasingly insane speed. It is fantastic but he is lost in a dozen dreams, focusing more and more on just kicking since he can do little else.

The captain, just as affected by everyone else stops steering the ship causing it to spin in an outward sprial in larger and larger spirals, the stars leering above and their original destination in a sea that touches most any part of dream shaking and shuddering to parts unexpected and unknown. The Brazier sliding up and down on the deck, fire incrasing, thankfully still few non heroes have arrived but that is changing as more and more clouds appears slowly indicating innocents are being drawn to it.

The Vizier is quite pleased with himself, and steps through the shadows ready to take it, but then eying Amanda. He casts a large chain made of liquid night at her, "Call me the Vizier of Ennui" in answer to her question. Normally attacking six heroes at once is beyond him...well...five...since Cliff isn't in any condition to -

-CRASH-

The ship hits a rock and moves to the right, some kind of land mass appearing while the Vizier reaches for the Brazier that is sliding all over the hull.

Cliff Steele has posed:
The Vizier is tall, over seven feet in long flowing robes of black, eyes that are black as night with pupils of souless boring gray. To look into them is to know despair. e shifts and flickers when he is not seen in the corner of the eye and to directly look into his gaze is to know Despair incarnate. He is an echo of Dream's thoughts on his sister, and takes full advantage of those fears and perceptions feeding on the dreams of those in the dreamlands that have such unfullilled needs. He is almost eternal as the endless, but seems quite solid here.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette is not getting any response to her suggestion that someone was fucking around, which only goes to make her even more convinced that someone is fucking around. Colette does not approve of this. Colette is aware she should probably try to do something about it. The only problem is she's not sure she can be bothered.

    That's not the ennui speaking, that's just how she rolls.

    Colette sighs, looks heavenwards and yells out "You're not making any friends here, you know!" However her directionless accusations find themselves a target when the Vizier appears. Nevertheless she doesn't redirect her attentions to him. He seems occupied with Amanda. Should she help? Nah, Amanda's supposed to be some kind of magic using type, she can probably cope. Besides, something something affairs of wizards.

     Time to do something about the others, then. Might as well. Colette looks at Nick. She walks over to Nick. She considers him a while, thinking about what she knows about him, and speculates briefly on what he might be seeing and experience. She quickly concludes that she barely knows him and has no idea. She leans close to his ear, to whisper something to him.

    "WAKE THE FUCK UP, NICK!"

    Next she looks at Kate, thoughtfully. After a moment's consideration she gently takes Kate's hand, and places her phone in it. She loads up a video of cats reacting to cucumbers on Youtube and pushes it towards Kate's face. "Watch," she orders.

    Then Vorpal. This is easy. Colette knows how to deal with Terry. She has experience. Colette punches Terry on the arm, quite hard.

    "TERRY! Snap out of it." To emphasis the words, she snaps her fingers in his face. "Stop moping around and get performing! Your audience is bored to tears. Give them a show. Music! Spectacle! An extravaganza, a veritable son et lumiere! Show us what you're made of, Cat. Give us cows playing saxophones! Give us fire hydrants singing show tunes! Give us Lady Gaga riding a flaming Tyrannosaur! Give us Jung and Freud settling their differences in a battle to the death with living boxing gloves! Give us fucking... MONKEY BUTLERS ON FLYING MONOCYCLES!"

Kate Bishop has posed:
Kate is just staring up at her older sister crying and telling her that her mom died in this depressed sort of sads. This is a moment that haunts her still. Even if it was instrumental to help make her who she is today it was a wreck of a moment.

Then there is a phone in her hand playing cat videos as her hand is pushed up to her face blocking the vision of her crying sister.

"Wut."

That is about all she manages to blurt out there before the ship hits the rock hard and everything goes sliding "Jesus.. fuck... what....." as she slides along towards the railing trying to keep ahold of Colette's phone.

Not her finest hour.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
The black and white is replaced by black and blue- or at least it will be replaced with that, nce his flesh has had time to process that punch.

"OW! What's the big idea-" Terry says, turning to Colette. And it is Vorpal who finishes turning, rubbing his furred arm. "... ah. I see."

Green eyes fix on the Vizier of Ennui, and the Cheshire Cat lets out a low growl. His mind is the nightmare of telepaths, woe betide anyone who should try to manipulate it, for they would end up tripping balls for /days/ . It's not something he's used to, having his mind manipulated. Figures, that it would have to come under the Trojan horse of a dream.

"Vizier of Ennui? Oh how /charming!" the cheshire cat says, sarcasm dripping from every syllable "What are your other titles? Are you also the Exchequer of Existentialism? The Deacon of Dissatisfaction? Tudor of Tedium? The Whiny Little Shit of Malaise?" and suddenly dark blue inky tendrils explode from him, shadowing the area temporarily.

"You tried to shame me with my past. You think I'd crumble? You think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I-"

And then there is a wave of glitter, always glitter, and the glare of spotlights.

And the smell of lilacs, for some reason.

~I am what I am
I am my own special creation.
So come take a look,
Give me the hook or the ovation!~

There are places that are just a dream away, when you are in certain spaces. The deck of the ship is very different now. For starters... it is a street. It is a street, while at the same time it is a street that is suited for the deck of a ship. It is, also, extremely chic, with storefronts and locales exquisitely decorated, and with bannners strewn across the street written in Polari, of all things.

What is Vorpal's go-to idea to combat Ennui? Of course it would be a musical number. And the rhinestoned, be-feathered monstrosity that he is decked in is fairly conservative, as far as ensebles go, when compared to the rest of what surrounds him, as the members f the Perpetual Cabaret spill out onto Danny The Boat and join in

~It's my world that I want to take a little pride in,
My world, and it's not a place I have to hide in.
Life's not worth a damn,
"Til you can say, "Hey world, I am what I am!"~


Let us all remember: Colette asked for this.

Michael Hannigan has posed:
The British clip combined with a bit of spacey banshee wasps through the scenery, striking through the corpsey crooners making for a swift death. Nick cringes at the scream "AUGH! I'M NOT ASLEEP, COLETTE!" Nick snaps back.

As the visage dissapates, Nick shakes his head. Right. Tasks. Glancing around, the phantasm moves on form starting to crawl with an shadow with each step replacing the previously felt despair with anger. Despite the ship's sway, his strides remain level as he continues towards the railing. Upon reaching it he steps on it and over. Feet firmly set on the outer side of the boat, he peers over it to Robotman hands resting on his hips. "Hey Cliff! Your UBER is here! Can you come up or do I need to come down and get you?"

Amanda Sefton has posed:
With the pitching and rolling deck, not to mention the sudden appearance of their apparent host, Amanda lifts herself up on edritch winds so she's no longer subject to the crazed bucking of the deck. Beyond being magical, however, she's also an acrobat. Stefan wasn't being metaphorical about the Circus. The dark chain lashes out at her and she twists in the air narrow avoiding it and launching herself upward in case it decides to act all living serpent like and coil back on her.

She blinks some as Vorpal transforms the entire thing into a Gloria Gaynor production number. This... is still not the strangest thing she's ever seen in her life. But it does mean she can dispense with the classy quips her foster brother might give. Vorpal's got that covered in song.

Instead, she counters the darkness with light, incandescent whips of witchfire flowing from her fingertips as she responds to the attack against her. She sees the Vizier heading for the Brazier. Her choice is to try to get to it before him -- which would probably require opening a portal, which could, given the ritual in play, interrupt the dream entirely -- or to catch him with her fire. She opts to try the latter because it has a lot better chance of working, though a passing thought does suggest to her that, if interrupting the dream frees the innocents starting to also appear, it's not necessarily a bad sacrifice.

First things first, however. Snare Mr. SadMeister before he grabs the powerful magical artifact of unknown origin.

And, of course, when it comes to Witchfire... only Hellfire is harder to extinquish.

Cliff Steele has posed:
Where to begin?

The Dreamlands? The Dreamlands have woken. It reacts to the symbols of mortal dreamers and this is chaos incarnate. A giant pale hand comes down, seeming to put this chunk of dream back where it belongs so chaotically far from everything not QUITE paying as much attention as the caretaker should note, but what was once a sea shifts and blurs and the hand is gone, the ship in the harbor of a giant metropolis. Indeed, it IS Metropolis and New York with Gotham visible on the horizon...only its not QUITE the same since all of these buildings are made of legos...indeed, our heroes would find a slight transformation, as all of them (well...except Robotman) are turned in dream into Lego versions of themselves.

The Vizier of Ennui is no exception, very close to grabbing the object as he is suddenly ON FIRE and not very happy about it. For any lesser foe, it would have been his demise but he is a Greater Power in dream, ask an archduke in Hell how hard it is to take them on in their home turf but he is NOT expecting the attack and flames move up and odwn his oddly now legofied body as he SCREAMS in agony.

The brazier, brazenly stolen by telekinetics as a Gorilla (Lego at that) on a Speedboat grabs the thing, giving the middle finger to the Vizier of Ennui, for there is a history there and not a kind one. How did Lego Grodd know to wait here? Only he can say...

Robotman looks up from the bottom of the boat and nods to Nick, "Fuck yeah." On being helped up on the boat, he looks around at the legos and rubs his eyes, "What. The. Fuck?!"

And Pause...until "Everything Is Awesome"