and no one tells you where you went wrong [open]

[yourattention]

⭐ Who: Connor (yourattention)
⭐ When: Throughout June
⭐ Where: Most prompts are waking world, but there's a Dream Sphere one too!
⭐ What: June catch-all
⭐ Warnings: Will warn if anything comes up!


1. 'cause i'm tap tap tapping on the glass [social media]

[His near complete radio silence in April did not go over well with the PR agent who works with his unit, so he was given a personal calendar with helpful suggestions about when to post and what. He's mostly been ignoring the calendar, because it always feels inauthentic when he's posting to a regimented schedule and his followers are used to small amounts of radio silence. On June 1st he posts a selfie to Instagram showing off his new manicure: bi flag ombre. It comes with a caption:]

New nails for wrath month. If you're in Yumemigaoka, come find me at Pride next weekend for a little gift!

[The rest of his Instagram posts in June are mostly promoting the videos on his YouTube channel with a few more Pride posts sprinkled in and also a singular thirst trap. You know, to keep his PR agent on her toes. His video uploads for the month to Myosotis are a glowing review of Heartstopper a Netflix show based on a queer graphic novel he previously reviewed, a negative review of an ARC he got off Netgalley about a Hunger Games clone he felt did not have good worldbuilding, a tier list ranking his personal book boyfriends along with some fan suggestions (his current book boyfriend is Ronan Lynch the main character from a YA fantasy series he recently read), and a recap of everything he read in June. Most of it was good, aside from the ARC he did a lengthier review on.]

2. i try to speak but nobody can hear [promised morning]

[School... has never really been Connor's strong suit. It's not that he's not smart. It's that he just doesn't vibe well with structured learning and he finds a lot of topics kind of boring. Literature? Connor gets that. He understands how it works. Math? That's witchcraft and the fact that he's bad at it cascades down into science sometimes. None of that really matters, though.

What matters is that because he arrived at school a little late, Connor was semi-randomly assigned a club. If his transfer hadn't been so sudden, Connor assumes they would have tried to keep a continuity to his extracurriculars and given him a spot on the swim team. He missed try-outs, though, so he was given a list of five clubs that were lacking members and that is how Connor ends up in... ikebana club. It's both not funny at all and hysterical to him that he's spent his whole life pointedly learning nothing about flowers because he hates being Dreamer Forget-Me-Not only to end up here, but nothing about his life is going right so he's trying to find the humor in it. And also learning a lot about ikebana.

Aside from regularly attending ikebana club, he also shows up to tutoring frequently, because if he goes to tutoring then he can avoid questions about why he hasn't been doing Torment Hunts or excursions. He's studying! He's still getting adjusted! No, he is definitely not avoiding doing those things because he's pretty sure everyone thinks he's useless as a Dreamer! Which is why he is also enrolled at Yumemigaoka Language School to improve his Japanese.

Is all the studying in-between his influencer work making his brain feel like mush? A little, but honestly not much more than most of his high school career so he's taking it as a win.

For people in his class, though, Connor might stop them at lunch or just after school toward the middle of the month and produce an envelope.]

Um... June 30th is my birthday, so party on August 1st? For Dreamers.

[He does not seem particularly enthused about this fact, but that might just be a consequence of his struggling to form coherent sentences. Listen, he has had marked improvement in the last few weeks!]

3. so i wait around for an answer to appear [asagi public library]

[By far the place Connor spends the most time, though, is across the river at the library. It's the closest thing to home he has in this foreign city, and he is still feeling homesick. Ostensibly, he's supposed to be planning his birthday party beyond the fact that he hired a DJ and booked the venue—a smaller nightclub in Koubai that were happy to let him take over for a private event and several thousand dollars. There should probably be some sort of catering and he still needs to figure out photo coverage.

So actually he just hired someone and told her to plan him a birthday party, because the one good thing about being a reality TV star is being able to hire people to do stuff for you. It frees up time for him to sit in a quiet corner of the library and struggle through some easier books in Japanese intended for children. It's still sort of studying, but he learned Spanish by brute force in three months the same way to talk to some of his teammates and this is the same thing. These aren't going on his reading tracker, though. Not everything he reads goes on there, even though he thinks his subscribers are probably under the impression that when he shares what he read in the a month it's literally everything he read. He reads a lot for reasons outside his channel, though, and keeps that to himself on purpose. People don't get every aspect of him. They don't.

Occasionally, Connor can be found in the children's section surrounded by two or three younger kids and reading to them in English. They sometimes stop him to ask questions and he answers in Japanese. For whatever reason, he seems much more at ease around the kids than he does when he's talking to people his own age or adults.]

4. when you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around [dream sphere]

[There's no escaping the Dream Sphere, really, but Connor has been trying to stay away from it as much as possible. He's well aware that even among other American Dreamers, who are sometimes not particularly well-respected in the Dreamer Community, The American Dream as a whole is like. Widely not considered to be... good. This is sort of what happens when you're created as a PR thing first and a functional unit second. It doesn't help that his signature move is... uh. Well.

It's like setting off a bomb. He has no control over the way the light bursts out of him, the way it burns across everything and purifies. Does it almost always work to take out a Torment? Yeah, but it also blinds all his teammates which has not historically worked out well. The unit calls it "bringing an atom bomb to a gun fight," which is roughly true. Theoretically, he should be able to do the same thing at a smaller level and refine his control of light, he just hasn't figured out how. He knows how manipulate the amount of light and shadow in a space and to pull the shadows around himself and step out in a different spot. Those are reliable, but even figuring out he could do that was like pulling teeth and for a while everyone was unsure if he had powers. After all, what kind of weapon is a paintbrush?

Still. After two months of sulking, it's possible to stumble on him in the Dream Sphere desperately attempting the do something, anything with light. Currently this is taking the form of the nearby area getting abruptly brighter and then darker like someone is incessantly flipping a light switch. Eventually, it ends in Connor sprawled on the ground and staring up at the sky.]

"Just take a little of the light," she says. If it was that simple I would actually be good at this. Fucking... "most potential we've seen" my ass. This is not as fun as I thought it would be when I was a kid.

5. will i ever make a sound? [wildcard]

[i'll match format, if you want to do prose instead of brackets. feel free to just make shit up and toss it at me if you have a different idea. it'll be fun! i'm open to whatever. you can also contact me via plurk/discord (flyingthesky+#0332) to set up something or if you want to talk it out before throwing something at me!]

Comments

asagi public library

[hanamane]

[With Dreamer stuff having an unexpected impact on his health and the train station being out of commission for a week, Amane hadn't really been able to get to the library for the better half of the month-- and boy, had he missed it. The bookstore near his school was nice, but there was something much more satisfying about stumbling across a new title while browsing the shelves, titles that he might not have picked up otherwise on his own, for free, no less. And because he had been away for this long, he was itching to stock up on whatever new stuff that came in... which, based on the stack cradled in his arms, seemed to be quite a bit.

He was just inching past the children's section when his ear picks up on some familiar English words, and he pauses to glance at the little impromptu story time happening close by. Was this something they always did? Now that he had a Trainee who spoke mostly English, maybe it was high time to improve upon his language skills a bit further, but he'd probably stick out like a sore thumb as the only middle schooler among a group of children, even IF the guy teaching them seemed closer to his age...

Fate seems to have much more embarrassing things in mind for him, however, as it's just in that precise moment that some of his books succumb to gravity (ironic, given they're astronomy books!!), sliding off the top of his stack and onto the ground with a loud clatter. Amane gapes, horrified, cheeks turning a brilliant red as he scrambles to find a spot to put his other books down, before hastening to collect whatever just spilled out.]

Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to-- [Wait, no, English, English--] I did not mean to make mess, please ignore me!!

[... well, close enough??]

[yourattention]

[Connor looks up and is about to ask if the person who dropped what sounded like quite a few books needed help, but he blinks and absently tells the kids that he'll be back in a moment as he walks over.]

I know you—I've seen you, I mean.

[Hand slipping into his pocket, Connor pulls his Sandglass out and and lets it hang from the chain it's on. His is unusual, maybe, in that the sand in it is pitch black. It's his actual Sandglass he's showing, after all, not the false one he wears when he's appearing at a PR event. If someone caught him doing this back home, he would be in serious trouble but he figures it doesn't matter here. Who's going to see it? The kids he's been reading to? They don't even know who he is.]

[hanamane]

[Amane's so busy collecting his books that he doesn't even note the other boy's approach until he's there, blinking owlishly at his statement. He wasn't one for keeping up on celebrity culture-- it took him an embarrassingly long time when he was younger to realize that his Auntie Ai was in fact a big frickin' deal-- so the boy next to him is a complete and utter stranger in his eyes. The confusion on his face is genuine as Amane stares back up at him, the words not quite registering despite their simplicity.]

I am sorry, I do not understand--

[And then the boy brings out his Sandglass, and he could practically feel the blood go ice cold in his veins. Somehow, it felt like this day was coming-- the amount of Dreamers he had run into here in the Waking World had been getting increasingly larger, despite the size of this city-- but he didn't expect it to be from a foreigner he never even met. (Or had he?? Maybe he had passed him on patrol at some point, possibly?) Still, he had prepared for this eventuality, and he allows his eyes to light up in recognition, but not quite the type the other boy might have expected.]

Oh! You are a Dreamer! [He laughs a little, hoping it would ease up the nervousness in his voice, though he could always play it off as being flustered over dropping his books too.] My brother is one, too! We are twins, and look the same, so we get confused a lot. Or... "mixed up"? Is that the saying for it?

[The best lies always involved a kernel of truth, and Amane can only thank his lucky stars that Tsukasa was banned from all library trips with him. That excuse fell apart real quick the moment anyone actually saw them interacting with each other.]

[yourattention]

[Connor tilts his head to the side, considering. Realistically, he knows most Dreamers aren't like him in that their whole life revolves around it and there was never any question of it being that way. He does know other Dreamers in America who are regular people, but for him, there's no concept of being a secret Dreamer. So it simply doesn't occur to him that he's being lied to because someone wouldn't want to connect the two halves of their life together.

And he's pretty sure he is being lied to, if only because he has a lot of experience matching up Dreamer Personas with Waking World People, so obviously a made-up identical twin is like a Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada.]

Identical twin, right. [He absolutely doesn't sound convinced.] Tell your brother Dreamer Forget-Me-Not is having a party on August 1st and he's invited, then. Details are on the bulletin board in the DU office.

[Normally he would offer a physical invitation, but he wasn't really expecting to run into a Dreamer here at the library.]

[hanamane]

[Amane's not so naive to think that his lie sounds entirely convincing-- after all, most people didn't have an actual identical twin to use as a convenient identity smokescreen. Still, he can't help but feel a bit irked that this other boy thought he was faking the only part of his excuse that was, in fact, the truth.]

It's true! [Oops, he got so indignant, he slipped back into Japanese, but he course corrects back into English as he continues:] It does not sound real, but I have a twin brother, honest! I can show you--

[And he reaches into his pocket to grab his phone, to pull up one of the photos he has of them--

But then the other boy offers up that invite, and he pauses all activity, momentarily stunned. Amane for sure had missed that notice, given he wasn't one for going into the DU offices often (or... at all, really), and it sounded like it was extended across the board to all Dreamers, but... well. It was the first time someone near his age outright invited him to a party, even indirectly, and it takes him a few seconds to recalibrate and figure out a way to answer.]

... oh. Cool.

[Okay, so the invite wasn't technically for him, and he had to remember to act as such, so he clears his throat a little and adds:]

Um... my brother, he is busy and does not go to the Union building much, so... can you send me the details on your phone? I will make sure to send it to him so he knows. I am sure he will be... very happy to go.

[yourattention]

[Something is still sus about this situation, but it's not really Connor's job to care about what lies other people want to tell. That's mostly his PR person's job and even then only when the lies are about him. This isn't that, so Connor just pulls out his phone.]

Sure. [He pulls up Line QR code and holds it out.] Add me on Line. Or give me your email, I guess.

[The fact that nobody texts in Japan has been... such an adjustment. Emailing people??? Insane. Line is pretty cool, though, so it's not all bad.]

[hanamane]

[Well, crisis averted... maybe?? This other boy isn't questioning him further about it, at least, so hopefully he might have convinced him otherwise. Which was a pretty impressive feat given he managed it in a language he wasn't all that good at!! At Connor's words, though, he nods, resuming to pull his phone out of his pocket.]

Ah, yeah, give me a... minute? Is that how you say it?

[More like "moment", but his brain blanked on the phrasing. Amane manages to retrieve his phone, finally, the round moon charm attached to the case knocking against his hand as he scans the code offered to him. One wouldn't think he had Line, given his lack of a social life, but his mother insisted the boys install it, just for ease of communication between the family. The profile that pops up on Connor's phone is an incredibly simple one-- the background is just a starry, moonlit sky, and the icon is a rather cutesy version of Teki-Terra itself (because Amane really couldn't be much more of a nerd if he tried), but other than that... nothing else. No status updates, no media, no extra bells and whistles... it's almost as if he uses it just for messaging, and didn't bother with the rest.

Amane's going to take advantage of having his phone out while he can, though, and pulls up one of the latest photos he has of Tsukasa and himself. Sure, the subject seemed to have been dropped, but at least he wanted to prove he wasn't lying about the twin thing!! He turns the screen to Connor, a picture of himself and a boy who looked almost like a carbon copy of him (aside from maybe the sharper looking canines, but they were harder to pick up upon in this resolution) grinning in front of a shrine around presumably New Year's.]

Look? See? My brother and I. I did not make him up!

[Though he wishes he did at times-- Tsukasa was a bigger pain in the ass than he could be, and that was saying something.]

[yourattention]

[Part of Amane's confusion might be cleared up if he decides to snoop on Connor's profile. It's not run as rigorously or consistently as his other social media, but there are a number of posts of him at various events around Yumemigaoka in his Dreamer Forget-Me-Not persona. The username is also Myosotis to match all his other social media.

Connor doesn't bother snooping, though, just pulls up a new chat and pastes in the invite he has in a note on his phone. Once sent, he looks at the picture Amane's pulled up. Huh. The identical twin might be real—or that's a really elaborate photoshop, but that seems like a lot of work. He's definitely seem people go to that amount of effort, but it seems pointless here.]

Okay, Thing One, I get it. You have a Thing Two, but you have to admit that was super sus.

[Still is sus, but he's not about to grill this kid in the middle of a public library. Better to try and catch him in the Dream Sphere or something.]

[hanamane]

[It takes a moment for Connor's little reference to click, and he can't help but pull a face in response, muttering a bit to himself in Japanese:]

Not like I haven't heard THAT one before...

[Unfortunately, somebody thought it was a good idea to show them a certain cursed live-action adaptation of a beloved book when they were little, with the adults thinking they were so clever sticking them with those nicknames for a while. Which probably wouldn't have been such a big deal, except... look at these things. Could you blame him for not being thrilled about it?? (Even if the monikers were more than fitting)

But he brings back his phone as it vibrates from the new chat message, pulling it up and giving it's contents a once over. August 1st, huh? Given his track record with both the Dreamerversary and Pride, he was only going to pray he doesn't come down with some sort of illness (normal or ejection-based) by that time...

He gives a small, sheepish shrug as a response to that last part, however, playing it off as a benign misunderstanding instead of... y'know, blatantly lying to Connor's face.]

Yes, well... it can not be helped. It sounds like a fake story, but these things are true, sometimes. It happens.

[While he'll probably leave the full snooping to when he gets home, Amane's at least curious enough in the moment to pull up Connor's profile to get his full name-- and happens to spot an article there about a certain recent event instead. It looked like it was in English, but he recognizes the photo just enough to get him to raise his eyebrows.]

Oh! You were at the Festival last weekend? How was it? I wanted to see someone perform there, but I was sick...

[yourattention]

[The real answer: Connor was voluntold that he had to perform. He couldn't just not show up at Pride—not with such a huge portion of his fanbase being because he's a prominent queer teen. That's not really something he's about to say to someone who might not be a Dreamer, though, if they're going along with that assertion. It's inter-DU politics stuff and he wouldn't even say it to most other Dreamers. They're, like, regular people who do important work in the Dream Sphere.

That's not his job at the DU and he doesn't like to bring it up unless he knows a person fairly well, lest the it make the DU look bad. He loves working for them. It's just that... he wishes he had more of a choice in the matter.]

It was good. I met a lot of my fans and they gave me a bunch of, um. Kit Kats? Which I guess is some sort of thing here?

[Someone did try to explain what the Kit Kats were for or meant, but it was loud at the festival and his Japanese was not good enough to catch most of it so instead he just took them and thanked everyone profusely, trading them for the stickers he ordered. He doesn't actually eat a lot of candy, so it's mostly just been sitting in his fridge and he eats one every few days.]

[hanamane]

[Admittedly, Amane's got... a tiny bit of an idea of the messy stuff behind the scenes when it comes to celebrity Dreamers. Growing up with the PR face of the organization using his parent's cafe as a place to spend precious time with her children-- children the public didn't even know about, even-- made him at least a little aware of how fragile these front-facing images can be. It's nothing he would wish upon himself, nor others, and for how attention-seeking he could be in the Dream Sphere... he's just glad he's got his privacy here. He wouldn't have the energy to deal with all the stuff that Ai does, let alone Connor.

He does shoots the other boy a puzzled look at his response, however-- why would people give him candy just by attending the festival? Did he miss something here? (Yes, clearly he did)]

Your fans...? [But then some sort of realization dawns across his face, and he adds:] Oh, are you a popular Dreamer, then? I do not follow much American stuff, so...

[... wait, hold on, he shouldn't go making assumptions again, like he had with Jeannette--]

Um... you ARE from America, right? Not Europe or another place that speaks English?