Reflections on Communication

Well, he's officially missing again. Not that the Watchers could be bother to tell little ol' me, of course. No, I got the word from our friend Billy, after my boyfriend failed to come home for three days in row. And I had to call them in order to find out.

In their defense, Billy and Crystal apparently assumed that I knew already. They were... "appalled" is a good word... that I hadn't been told. So the blame pretty much falls on the Watchers, or the Elders, and until I learn better, the woman who's supposed to be training my boyfriend: Kate.

This is Claire, of course, in case you hadn't picked that up already. You know, the Deranged Cultist's girlfriend. Or just the Deranged Girlfriend. The more I think about that, the more it seems to fit.

Anyway, apparently my boyfriend was watching this researcher - let's call him "Dr. Fine". Dr. Fine was trying to see if there was any sort of psychic connection to be found between his sleeping subjects: shared images, a collective unconscious, atavistic memories... stuff like that. Now, all those things exist - but most of the time, for most people, they're completely inaccessible. That's... a lot less true for a lot of my boyfriend's fellow cultists, apparently.

According to Billy, they decided to send my boyfriend in to take part of the research and find out more about what Dr. Fine was doing. They chose him because he doesn't have any of those dream connections. (That led me to wonder: the business with the Place Of Mists started as a series of dreams, so maybe they were wrong about that? I don't know. Maybe we'll find out. But that's something I can check, so I'll do that tonight.) Anyway, my boyfriend went to the sleep lab and joined the test subjects, and... something went wrong. About midway through the night, the bed was empty.

Crystal thinks that whatever Dr. Fine was doing interacted with the way that one of the Watchers was observing my boyfriend. She thinks so because while that Watcher is still around physically, he dropped into a deep coma at precisely the moment that my boyfriend disappeared.

Dr. Fine and his staff are panicking. They haven't actually reported that they lost one of their test subjects, but they've been working steadily to figure out what happened and how to fix it. I don't think much of their chances, but that's something at least. And the fact that they haven't told anyone else actually makes it easier for the Watchers, who also want to keep the whole thing secret.

I spoke to Kate, and she's pretty sure that my boyfriend is still alive. I get the impression that the Watchers might have been panicking some, too, because she said she should have called me in immediately - and she said it with that "I'm an idiot" tone in her voice. So I'm working with them, sort of, at a safe distance, and we're all trying to find out what happened.

I'll keep you posted.

Oh, right, I almost forgot: "Reflections of a Deranged Cultist" is a work of fiction. People don't really disappear just because they have the wrong sort of dreams. Promise.