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Mab has a dream. The warmth of summertime has chased the snow away, and her son's garden thrives again. She feels as one with her surroundings, enough that she could... dissolve into the air...

Mab wakes up to the sound of the house creaking under the weight of the snow. It's comfortably warm inside, but outside remains a white wasteland.

Finley's long-awaited promotion to lead reporter is finally here.

Those who didn't appreciate the politics of some of her wartime articles aren't thrilled about it, but Finley now determines what the town reads, what they know, and what they care about... at least as far as events in their little humdrum community go.

The underling reporters do a lot of the leg-work for her now, but Finley still finds herself attending dull parties just to listen in on the latest gossip and people's concerns.

She's surprised how few hosts think to serve food.

Mage lessons.

Reve's psychic abilities thrived around the influence of three other psychics, so Finley didn't think he'd have much of a problem learning some defensive magic.

She was wrong. Reve has trouble focusing his energy, and no amount of force of will seems able to funnel his latent power into spells. Use of the wand only seems to make it worse, more spastic, so Finley allows the kid to do without.

"Follow my movements," she instructs.

Finley has much on her mind, but on the surface is her focus on the protective hexes she's crafted to keep Reve from accidentally hurting himself, should any of his attempts backfire.

"I'm trying," Reve complains.

"We can stop whenever. If you're not interested in this, I won't push you."

"I'm trying!" Reve repeats.

Hunched over in intense concentration, Reve manages to conjure up a purple glowy sphere, which vanishes after only a few seconds.

"I can't do it," Reve sulks.

"Maybe someday," Finley tries to comfort him, though senses her words are ineffective.

"I feel..." Finley mumbles the odd, gloomy statement into her cup of hot cocoa on a quiet morning, "a... strange sense of dread."

"It's not from Junpei," she tries to dispel Occam's Razor, when Mab takes a drink instead of answering. Her voice drops into a soft-yet-accusing tone, "You feel it too, don't you?"

"There is unrest in these mountains," Mab answers carefully. 

 "What do you mean?" Finley questions, taken by surprise.

Mab shakes her head. "I don't know. It's just... a vibe."

"I guess it's the snow. Is it ever going to end?"

Finley's sense of danger is vague, coming from no discernible source. Late at night she goes to the gym, to the room where sim-fu classes are held, and takes some of her annoyance out on the dummies. Her mind wanders and she thinks about the bizarre, exciting and dangerous beings she's encountered, and about her young son, who can't cast a spell to save his life. 

Since she comes here so late there are no wise senseis to guide her, and at first she feels silly kicking and poking at the training dummies. But day by day, she's less self-conscious about this sport, and finds the physical activity comforting.

Finley dreams about the mountains, the river, and a grove deep in the forest. It pulses with an unease that draws her closer. She feels as though she's under a spell, drowsy, compelled...

The first person Finley finds here has fallen to her knees. "The only thing..." Accalia isn't crying, but her words are croaked out as if she were, "...for... ...is for... ...to do nothing..."

"Accalia!" Finley calls out as if they are worlds instead of inches apart.

"I told you to stay away from the colony," Accalia warns.

"I don't know how I got here." Something strikes Finley as odd about this situation, but before she can decide what it is, it slips her mind. "What are these lights?"

"The scales. Only a balanced trade can be made. Beware the river."

"Okay." Finley flexes her toes. The grass is wet, and her socks are soaked. The feeling reminds her of another time, lifetimes ago, but etched in her memory...

"Mom senses something from the forest," Junpei says. 

Was he always there, beside her, or did her uncompleted thought summon him?

"Poof," Finley says lazily. "There you are."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"You know... what I mean."

"This is a dream." Junpei frowns, realizing the truth of the matter much more quickly than his sister. "We can do this?" Suddenly, panic. "We can share dreams?"

And just like that, Junpei is gone again, leaving Finley alone in the woods.

Junpei wakes up first.

Finley's concern for her brother's weird antics drifts away.

She wanders further into the woods, until she finds a tree with golden spirals for leaves. The spirals look like they'd have a spongy texture; at the same time, they appear as if filled with fluid.

"The tree isn't important, Acheron," Loki interrupts.

"Aahh! It's you!" Finley bristles. She finds herself tactless. "Get out of my face!"

"It's the river I'm concerned with, I don't care about the tree," Loki informs. He speaks to her with a familiarity, warm but at the same time, irascible.

Whatever anger Finley should have for him subsides, for no other lethargic reason than she doesn't feel threatened. "You're just a bad dream. You can't really hurt me."

"Well, regardless, it's troublesome." Loki reacts to something she did not say. He glances in the direction of the river. "I'm troubled. I'm having trouble forgetting about it. About them." He begins to gesture meaninglessly as he talks. "The world's not safe for hedge mages. It's a pretty little town, and they think they know its secrets, but they don-"

"Stop waving your hands near my boobs!" Finley complains.

"You're not Acheron," Loki observes, as if this is amusing news.

Finley stares at him. "Are you real?"

"I exist but I don't know if I'm real. Are you?"

"I'm... Finley."

"If you were Finley, I'd tell you the dryads are more important than the tree."

"I would support you over the others," the darker one is saying, in a muddled accent.

"I appreciate that," Nesswen replies drearily. "But I never asked for it."

"They have that conversation a lot," Loki says, when Finley loses interest and turns back towards him, annoyed and confused, her mind and world blurred and too colorful.

"Did you cause the snow?" Finley asks.

Finley sits up in bed and slides her feet down to the floor, needing to feel grounded. "Wh... wh... weird dream," she mumbles.

"What happened?" Junpei asks. A conventional sibling relationship wouldn't have a guy burst into his sister's bedroom in the middle of the night, but the twins are beyond all hope of having one of those.

"You were really there, weren't you?" Finley shakes her head. "I remember, I thought you were just being silly. I didn't think I was dreaming, even after you said we were."

She looks up sharply. "Dammit! I saw Loki! And other crap! And I couldn't really think about it, you know? I couldn't question it! I was in a dream! Do you think it meant something? And what did you mean, Mom senses something?!"

"She does think there's something odd out there," Junpei explains. "And at one time, she'd have crossed any line to sate her curiosity."

"If there's something wrong with the forest, we should be able to feel it too," Finley protests.

"There's nothing wrong with the forest. Only a sense of... unnaturally prolonged death. From someone in the forest. Mom's trained herself as a medium, so she's sensitive to certain things we're only mildly aware of. It's something she'd be inclined to investigate, if not for me."

"She thinks it's the colony, then." Finley frowns, remembering the woman who forced Junpei's spirit back into his body appeared in her dream. "She feels indebted to them."

"She won't meddle in their affairs."

Probably a wise choice, but Finley resists thinking this way. There should be nothing she's afraid to investigate. "When did she tell you this?"

"She didn't. I didn't mean to pry. It hit me during the dream." Sometimes being psychic is easier when one isn't awake.

"Is this... is this the visions all over again?" Finley worries. "Is someone trying to tell us something? I did see Loki."

"I think it was just a dream influenced by anxiety."

Finley relaxes a bit. The intended result. It was just a funny dream. "Well... when will the uneasy feeling go away? Can we MAKE it go away?"

"We don't know where to go or what to look for."

"He called me... 'Acheron'," Finley says distantly.

"Our great-grandfather Acheron, or the river Acheron?"

Finley blinks, suddenly remembering something about a river. Some dire warning about a river. "I... don't remember. Just never mind, I guess." Loki mistook her for one ancestor, Cayenne, and now a different one, Acheron. At least, that's what she thought. Acheron the precognitive dream explorer. Now there's doubt. Acheron, a mythological river of the underworld. Sense tells her Loki's words were all merely the product of a dream, of the frenzied and abnormal logic of an unconscious mind. Her heart tells her the experience was something more.

"I'm going to go back to sleep, then," Junpei says.

As coincidence would have it, Junpei proceeds to have a memorable dream as well.

Reisa wrote an article in the paper daring Junpei to swim for three hours in the icy cold river.

This absolutely cannot be ignored.

"This is serious!" Junpei cries, but Finley can't be bothered to care, because they have company.

Suddenly, the Archers have a coffee maker, and it's possessed by an evil spirit.

"Uncle Junpei, what are you doing?"

"Reisa called me a chicken! Nobody calls me chicken!"

Junpei shivers in the water that's supposed to be cold. His dream can make him terrified of freezing to death, but can't make him truly feel cold. In reality, he's snug and warm in bed.

OH NO SHARKS

SHARKS WERE THE REAL DANGER

Junpei is relieved to wake up and find the Archers do not own a coffee maker.

Also, the newspaper doesn't issue dares.

Ha ha, real dreams are hilarious...

Finley questions Accalia about dangerous rivers.

Accalia becomes defensive. The colony worshiped the river, in the past. But it's just a river.

Having decided dreams are stupid again, Finley puts the episode out of her mind. After work she finds herself at Fiddler's Green, and in a more outgoing and competitive mood than last time she was here. She's kicking ass and taking names at shuffleboard. 

Names so far: Reisa Chesterfield, Ottoline Nali, and Nicola Song.

WINNING.

Junpei is quietly reading a book in the corner, minding his own business, when Ottoline—having suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of Finley and Nicola—saunters around the half-wall and sits down to try flirting with him. She and Carlen went through a nasty divorce, and she still has his surname for now, but the past won't stop her from chasing romance in the present.

Although, she could have picked a better target. Junpei mostly tries to ignore her.

"I've read Abstract with Turkey," she says, giving up on telling him her boring life story. "How far are you? I don't think it's quite as good as Abstract with Bulgaria, but it's a lot better than Abstract with Greece."

"I'm on page two hundred twenty-six," Junpei replies.

"Hey, you okay?" Finley catches up to Junpei as they go to leave and drapes an arm around him. "I saw Ottoline making a nuisance of herself..."

Junpei reaches up with his right hand and curls his fingers around her wrist. He doesn't know why. Is it like a child clutching a security blanket? Or was he going to remove her arm from his person but went all 'meh' halfway through, leaving the action incomplete? "I don't know what's wrong with me," he says. "I care about people, generally, their well-being, and such, but if a stranger tries to talk to me all I end up wishing is that they'd go away. And I'd probably freak out if anyone ever tried to touch me."

"You don't get upset when I hug you." Even as Finley speaks those words, she knows this isn't some battle to be won with rationality.

"You're family. You don't count."

He's not getting any younger, and he kind of assumed he'd feel more sociable once the psychic link with Finley had a way of being shielded away with magiscience... but it never happened.

"Hey, it's not your fault if nobody in this town is interesting or appealing," Finley says. "That's why I don't have a replacement boyfriend. There's no shame in it."

"I think you're just scared of being hurt again," Junpei answers.







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Etc.: I bought the Archers a hot beverage machine to test out the 'have coffee with me' mod. I know the mod is in the game since it does change the words 'hot beverage' to 'coffee', but I couldn't figure out how to make my sims share it with guests, and then the game crashed itself out of its laggy misery, dooming the hot beverage maker to nonexistence. It was just a d r e a m.