Event #3: Shooting Star Wishes

[beautifuldreamermods]

YUMEMIGAOKA

As it is every year, Yumemigaoka's annual Tanabata festival is held at the street just outside of the Hikawa Shrine. The street and the shrine itself have been closed off during the day beforehand, save for the volunteers running back and forth in the miserable weather to set things up and decorate every inch of the festival space. And all their efforts do pay off - by the time the festival starts at seven in the evening, the street has been transformed into a lovely spectacle; hanging lanterns twinkle with raindrops and cast a warm glow over the street, paper stars are fluttering gently down from strings strung between lampposts and stalls line the full length of the street with food offerings, festival games and just about everything in between. Unfortunately, the month's poor weather hasn't let up yet so the festivities are a little dampened by persistent drizzle, though it seems like everyone's absolutely determined not to let that ruin the festival atmosphere!

For folks looking for games, they can enjoy:


⧖ The most popular stalls, the shooting games! Using a gun loaded with paper bullets (so, you know, mostly harmless) the aim of the game is to get a clean hit on one of the prizes along the back of the booth and knock it down! The prizes are mostly candy, snacks or kids' toys but they're deceptively hard to get a good shot at...
⧖ Goldfish scooping, a summertime classic! Using a scooper with a thin sheet of paper for the net, try your best to catch as many goldfish swimming around the water below. Do well enough and you'll win a prize and you might even be able to take your goldfish home - make sure to take good care of it!
⧖ Senbonbiki is basically pure luck - bundles of prizes, usually candies and small toys, are strung up along the top of the stall and you just have to give the corresponding other end of the string a tug. Whichever bundle of snacks comes down is yours! Of course, if you're particularly unlucky then you might get a dud or penalty prize... but surely nobody's luck is THAT bad, right?
⧖ Ring toss! Throw rings onto targets marked "1" through "10", each worth different amounts depending on where they land. Beat the high score and you'll win a prize! Though do you really want to walk around the whole festival with a giant plushie under your arm all night...?

There's also a ton of options for Japanese street food; some traditional, others more modern takes. There's fried stuff, grilled skewers, rice balls, all manner of delicious noodle dishes and mountains of sweets too; taiyaki, chocolate covered bananas, shaved ice, cotton candy, and just about everything and anything else you'd want to spend an evening stuffing your belly with. And naturally there are plenty of drinks available including freshly squeezed fruit juice and tea and some booze for those who feel like playing with fire.

Aside from the rest of the festivities, the main event is really the hanging of wishes - it is Tanabata, after all. A few tables at the top of bottom of the street have been set up to carefully shelter them from the rain and have a whole rainbow of tanzaku for people to write and hang their wishes on the bamboo trees both in the street and in the shrine down below. You can hang as many wishes as you like, if you're feeling particularly greedy, but...

The festival doesn't really reach its peak until darkness falls and, undeterred by the continued drizzle, the Hikawa Shrine lights up the sky with its famous annual fireworks show - it's always pretty spectacular but perhaps out of spite for the nasty weather, it looks even more fantastic than usual this year.

With the fireworks done, the festival begins wrapping up and it's time to head home. But as you settle into bed for the night and drift off, it becomes apparent that the night's festivities have only just begun...

THE DREAM SPHERE

It's happened almost every night for a week now - when you drift away to sleep, your regular dreams are slowly, gently interrupted by a strangely vivid image, an enormous bamboo tree with a wide canopy of leaves under a dazzling night sky. It's maybe not a surprise, given the upcoming festival, but as the nights go by it just gets more and more intense... until the night of the Tanabata festival itself and suddenly everything changes. As you settle down to sleep for the night, whether you went to the festival or not, the moment you close your eyes and drift off... you find yourself distinctly Somewhere Else.

The dream – and surely, it must be a dream – unfolds as an expansive open field, drenched in the silvery light of a magnificently star-spangled sky above and cut through with a river of flowing water that reflects the sky so clearly, it looks to be filled with stars of its own. A fine, steady rain falls and fills the field with a soft mist and the fragrance of the hundreds of tiny, bell-shaped flowers swaying lazily in the grass. And at the center of the field is a familiar sight – that bamboo tree from your dreams, somehow huger and with branches even more widely spread than before. This time they hang low enough for you to reach out and touch and you'll realize as you draw close that the tree is weighed down with tanzaku strips, all glowing softly as if illuminated from within by the wishes upon them.

It's then that you also realize that you're not alone here. And that you're here at all – in the Dream Sphere. Slipping over to the other side isn't uncommon for Dreamers, but... hold on a second! Aren't some of the people here just regular people too? Whatever this strange dream is doesn't seem to have discriminated between Dreamers and the regular folks – maybe it's thanks to the magic of those two starcrossed lovers but somehow, the lowercase-d dreamers of Yumemigaoka have also crossed into the Dream Sphere tonight! The effect will only last until morning, at which point the dream will unravel, so you might as well enjoy it while you're here. Many of the mundane dreamers will find they're able to move differently in the Dream Sphere, running faster and jumping impossibly high and long distances with nary a scratch to show for it; no magic of their own yet, but at least enough to have a little fun while they're here.

There's a little bit of natural magic at play here in the environment, too. If you approach the tree with a wish in mind, there's no need to write it down; it'll appear in pretty, sparkly ink on an appropriately colored tanzaku strip, already tied to the tree. Or if you go to peer at your reflection in the river, you might see it take on a shape that reflects the wish you're carrying in your heart.

... Except...

What sort of things are you really wishing for? The things you won't admit out loud to anyone, or even to yourself? The deepest wishes right in the darkest part of your heart that you want more than anything? Unfortunately for you, this tree seems to be of a mind to grant wishes and once it's gathered enough of everybody's tanzaku, there's a bright flash of light...

And suddenly everyone's secret wishes have been made manifest... though only in the Dream Sphere, of course. These can be anything from silly wishes to something more serious - the important part is that these secret dreams and wishes have been pulled out of your head and put on display for everyone here to see! How on earth are you going to deal with this gracefully?!

Regardless of what you choose to do, the apparitions only last for an hour or so before fading away and the sky lights up with a beautiful meteor shower that seems to go on forever. You're free to stay and watch the meteor shower and enjoy your last moments in the Dream Sphere for as long as you like but eventually, as you're watching the stars streak down from the sky, the dream around you begins to gradually fade away until you find yourself stirring in your own bed. Though it was an exceptionally busy dream, you find you're well rested and... okay, maybe a little embarrassed after all that.

Nobody will be able to return to that strange field or find the dream to stabilize it but... maybe that's fine. Aren't some things all the more special for only happening once a year?

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Comments

[flatcola]

I need to remember everything so I can write it down!

[ Forgetting shit is way more frightening than, like, everything happening right now. ]

[saynotobugs]

Okay, calm down, will you? Here, let me help. What's important?

[flatcola]

Obviously, it's a large shared dream. Both sleeping Dreamers and non-Dreamers have been indiscriminately brought to the same place en masse, without any sign of any dangerous disruptions. Essentially, everyone is in the same circumstance, due to the lack of Torments - no one seems to be in a bad enough mental state to change that, or else the general positivity is outweighing anyone who otherwise might be.

[saynotobugs]

Basically. Keep in mind that it also seems to have a general theme. I mean, look around. A holiday all about wishes and a story about wanting something you can't have, and then we all wake up here and see things we can't get?

[flatcola]

It's consistent with a current real world holiday, and I have yet to find anyone who showed up to any kind of different circumstance, so it was already like this when everyone got here. It's normal for our thoughts and state of mind to affect the Dream Sphere, but what's happening is a lot more specific, showing everyone their desires, than what is usually seen. I'll need to cross reference locations with high Dream Sphere activity and especially deeply held holiday traditions to see if anything else like this might have happened before.

[saynotobugs]

No kidding. I've never heard of this happening. Weird stuff's been going on in the Dream Sphere, from the reports, but it's usually related to that missing-person search.

[flatcola]

...y-yeah. We might be entering a stage of major changes.

[ Could... Satsuki have seen this coming? Was that what made her so desperate to dive deeper? Couldn't she have told people things more clearly??? ]

Which is as exciting as it is scary.

[saynotobugs]

What's scarier? That the Dream Sphere is changing on its own, or that someone out there might be behind it instead?

[flatcola]

To me? It's the latter. I'm sure some people would like an enemy they can punch and call it a day, but just the thought that a single intelligent entity can make huge changes is terrifying.

[saynotobugs]

You've got a point. It's like politicians or billionaires. Having a concrete enemy sounds good, but it feels hopeless unless for some reason you can punch it.

[flatcola]

Plus, that means there might be more where that comes from - and they might change things in different ways. A natural change is more likely to follow the path of least resistance.

[saynotobugs]

So it comes down to figuring them out, if there is a "them," huh.

[flatcola]

Then seeing if we can stop there from being another them.

[saynotobugs]

Yeah, if it turns out that way. You're already thinking ahead to copycat criminals?

[flatcola]

It adds so many possibilities that I'm going to be up at night being worried.

[saynotobugs]

...I can't tell you not to worry, especially if you turn out to be right. But I can say to focus on one thing at a time.

[flatcola]

I know it, and may yet succeed at doing that one of these days.

[saynotobugs]

Tough for you, huh? Guess it doesn't come easy to everyone.

[flatcola]

I live in a delicate balancing act, on the edge between highly productive and my brain turning into spaghetti.

[ There's no way this is sustainable for the rest of her life. ]

[saynotobugs]

That just sounds like the average work day.

[flatcola]

Right. We're all being strangled to death by it.

[saynotobugs]

Even the ones who didn't waste their youth on some wish. [Maki shakes her head.] Well, we have what we've got now.

[flatcola]

Just gotta make do. Improve a little here and there. At least we work for a pretty responsible group.

[saynotobugs]

If not always responsible individuals in that group.

[flatcola]

That's just groups. Gotta look at the average.