[Oh Japan is wonderful! We were there for a month in 2014 and we absolutely loved it! Whereabouts are you going? Have you got it all planned already? Also, when you get to thinking about your London trip, I can make lots of suggestions for nice neighborhoods to stay in, things to do, etc.]
Once again there was a pause of assessment, and then presently:
"All right then," Aurus spoke as though he accepted this rather oblique and still evasive answer as sufficient purely at face value. (He did not.)
At some point, he thought, the other shoe was going to drop for Charles on this whole matter, and he dearly hoped that when it did it would be too late for him to backpedal his way out of the thing to save himself the risk.
That wasn't a malicious sort of hope. It was actually quite well-meaning. The trouble was, that the more Charles evaded, the more he made Aurus's interest in him grow. It was not a matter of conquest or anything so blunt as that, but there was something alluring about forging a connection in the face of high odds. (What were Aurus's relationships with every Legend that he'd collected if not connections forged against high odds, after all? How many people not only struck out to find the spirit of the most venerated being in their culture, but found him, studied under his tutelage, and then convinced him to accompany them through life as friend and companion as much as spiritual advisor or tutor?)
"We can try tonight, if you're amenable. Of course I will need to be asleep or at least something close--a sort of trance-state. And though I understand you wish not to use any enhancements yourself, I will be taking something to facilitate my own openness to the Dream. Something to make sure that the channel is stretched wide, as it were.
"Would you prefer to attempt it in my bedroom or yours--or do you have some other place where we can be comfortable and undisturbed?"
no subject
Once again there was a pause of assessment, and then presently:
"All right then," Aurus spoke as though he accepted this rather oblique and still evasive answer as sufficient purely at face value. (He did not.)
At some point, he thought, the other shoe was going to drop for Charles on this whole matter, and he dearly hoped that when it did it would be too late for him to backpedal his way out of the thing to save himself the risk.
That wasn't a malicious sort of hope. It was actually quite well-meaning. The trouble was, that the more Charles evaded, the more he made Aurus's interest in him grow. It was not a matter of conquest or anything so blunt as that, but there was something alluring about forging a connection in the face of high odds. (What were Aurus's relationships with every Legend that he'd collected if not connections forged against high odds, after all? How many people not only struck out to find the spirit of the most venerated being in their culture, but found him, studied under his tutelage, and then convinced him to accompany them through life as friend and companion as much as spiritual advisor or tutor?)
"We can try tonight, if you're amenable. Of course I will need to be asleep or at least something close--a sort of trance-state. And though I understand you wish not to use any enhancements yourself, I will be taking something to facilitate my own openness to the Dream. Something to make sure that the channel is stretched wide, as it were.
"Would you prefer to attempt it in my bedroom or yours--or do you have some other place where we can be comfortable and undisturbed?"