Lysander Oriol

## Main Profile

Lysander’s story began on the west coast, not as Lysander but still the same bouncing baby boy. Beach-side glory, saltwater waves teaching him how to move with the flow, to not fight against the current, and how to be silent. He was a happy baby with a happy mother, a happy older brother, and a perpetually unhappy father.

His mother, tired of the yelling and belittling, began searching for peace for herself and her children. She’d found a church, a community of people who promised to absolve her of the burdens of the world that hung heavy on her shoulders, a weight not held up by her husband despite the muttered and whispered vows shared on their wedding day. Lysander didn’t know it then, but the friends he made wandering through a building too big to be real weren’t always real. Imagination and reality didn’t seem to have the same separation while they stayed with their new family. Memories are fickle, and though Lysander knew his mother loved him, he found himself slowly forgetting her face, the faces of his brother and father. One day he would wake up, still loved but not assigned to the family he’d once called mother and brother.

Life in the Compound was not particularly scary, nor was it hard. Lysander didn’t want or need for anything. As a young boy, he found himself enamored with arts and was given free rein of paints and pastels to color on anything to his heart's content. Anything not meant to hold the markings of paint or pastel simply didn’t retain the material used to mark it with, as if a cosmic sponge was wiping the walls clean every time Lysander looked away. It became a game for him, to find out what he couldn’t draw on. As he grew older he was able to discern some of the patterns in the spellwork that kept the compound walls mostly clean of his scribbles, one day finding a critical foundation spell and breaking it without knowing much of what it was or meant. That day he was able to paint on anything without the threat of the Cosmic Sponge coming to wipe any of it away. The next day the spellwork was back in place, the flaw in its casting corrected and further hidden from his prying eyes.

Although the Compound had other children, Lysander didn’t often find himself playing with them in the way he had when he'd arrived, though he never really felt excluded. Sometimes he’d engage with a game of tag, hide and seek, and sometimes he’d find some of the older children producing sparkles from their hands, ecstatic laugher emanating from their bellies as make-believe became reality within the compound walls. Lysander desperately wanted to know the secret to this emanating fantastic fireworks trick; he'd search for stashes of fireworks or glitter convinced that while there was magic that kept the compound *clean* there was no way magic could create fire. He always came up empty-handed, no fireworks, no glitter, not even an inkling of gunpowder.

Papers scattered across the floor crisscrossed and marked aggressively with all colors of lead and ink, smeared to oblivion and completely illegible, save for one word that stood out among the others. “Dreams.”

The Program wasn’t intended for children, necessarily, it was aimed at providing an environment for the Gifts of Man to flourish; at least this was what Father had spoken during his sermons. Sacrificing temporary pleasures of the world to further one's own, thereby benefiting everyone else.

When he began showing signs of a Gift, Lysander couldn’t be sure, though it had to have been around the time he’d begun sleeping by himself at the Compound. Though not refined enough to be officially considered for classification, Lysander had begun traveling during his unwaking hours, sitting at the edges of the subconscious of both the familiar and unfamiliar. Initially, he couldn’t maintain more than a ghost-like form, unable to interact with his own personalized bubble of unconsciousness. After months of strict practice, isolation, and meditation, he was able to project a physical form into his own subconscious. Though when attempting to travel through the In-Between he was unable to maintain this astral-physical form for very long. Sometimes he could feel this form rip apart at the seams, the pain it sent him into upon opening his eyes to find himself in his room, whole, without a mark on him was excruciating and made it difficult to parse what the true divide between real and unreal was concerning the unconscious and the In-Between.

While practicing these things Lysander saw into the unconscious world and mind of others, mostly strangers and the mundane as most magically adept could patchwork a veil over their unconscious without much effort, and it didn't take much skill to keep the fledgling magician out of places people didn't want visitors.

Neural Wanderer, Dream Walker, Unconscious Traveler, there were many names and ways to describe the Gift that Lysander had the makings of; none of which seemed to satisfy Father or the others that helped guide their insular community. Issues tended to arise when discussing Gifts as though they were one-size-fits-all, and notably, when children and young adults were growing into an ability or talent that might otherwise lay dormant or required specific stimuli to trigger, it became a convoluted game of sorts when diagnosing any particular Gift or ability.

> Though informally settled on, Dream Walker was the term used when discussing Lysander’s particular innate gift, though underdeveloped and difficult to objectively observe.
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Despite no formal training or instruction, Father and his advisors left Lysander to figure out the workings of his gift mostly by himself, believing that any interference on their part would result in a diluted expression of his true gift. While they may observe, both internally and externally, what he did and who he interacted with while Dreamwalking, Lysander was not to be disturbed or otherwise interfered with under any circumstances, even up to and including death or possession. Once he'd experienced what he could only describe as close to a seizure as he'd ever been while traveling into the mind of a dying stranger, having been wholly unprepared for the onslaught of stimuli Lysander was unable to break the connection in time to protect himself.

*"Leave him."* A voice had bellowed from underneath his skin, vibrating his skull and even attracting the attention of the person that for all intent and purpose should *not* have been able to see or hear Lysander or his advisors. He kneeled down, ignoring his better judgment, not recognizing that this person was beginning to fade from their own unconscious. A whisper of a shadow in the In-Between. When they reached out to grip his arm it was almost as if Lysander had been struck by lightning, despite the pleas coming from the wretched soul Lysander couldn't unclench his jaws to express the pain that had all but sent his own unconscious form into a full lockup.

Later, when he'd awoken to find himself on his side on his bed in the Compound, Lysander found that even his physical body felt as if it had been locked up. Everything felt tense and heavy despite the fact that he'd apparently been unconscious himself for several hours. His joints felt like they'd become petrified wood in the absence of consciousness, creaking and popping as floorboards do in the winter.

*"I told you—"* The voice came again, this time from within the room instead of from within his own mind. Lysander rolled to his back, looking up into the face of the man the Compound only ever referred to as Father, his face contorted into a caricature of disgust and contempt, an expression Lysander had rarely seen, let alone directed at himself. *"— to leave him. This was a lost cause, now he is dead and you could have followed him into oblivion too. Your utter lack of self-preservation or coordination in the In-Between is concerning and juvenile. Prepare better for your next attempt."* With a gust of wind that forced Lysander to cover his face Father and his advisors were gone, leaving him to stretch in his own failure.

Every so often Lysander would find himself in the place of the dying, and during these visits he'd learned to keep his distance from the subject despite their pleas or instance that he be the one to take them from the misery that was their unconscious death. Some mistook him for an angel there to deliver them from death to the pearly gates, or to the river leading to hell, despite the lack of eyeballed wings that should have been firmly attached to his back if that were the case. Lysander rarely spoke, choosing instead to listen. Several times he was able to parse out the calling of other magically adept while he searched for places to travel to when meditating, though he rarely found their sources. The first time he found the calling of someone who'd called out was a shock, both parties unsure of who the other was, though the assumption was that they were cut from similar cloth.

**"Who are you?"** He'd called out before something hit him in the chest and he felt himself flying backward, back toward the silent abyss that he'd walked through to get there. He awoke back in his room, chest aching, feeling utterly frustrated that he didn't know how to do more than what seemed to him now as a parlor trick. He could do something akin to reading minds in his sleep while others could have a full-on battle with forces beyond his ability in theirs.

After some time to himself to think about his options, he knew that his best bet was to get out of the Compound and find somewhere or someone to teach him properly, as the compound's way had not only seemed to have failed him but led him to danger repeatedly while shifting the blame to himself despite doing what he thought he'd been taught to do. Lysander wanted real answers, not parsed together mind reading that he wasn't even all that great at in the first place. Not sure where he'd go, Lysander packed up his meager collection of belongings that he could take with him and began searching the compound for any magical signature that might indicate a portal of sorts, he'd have to take his chances.

**`((comes up from the portal door/fountain into.... somewhere he shouldn't be (not sure where yet). this should lead into how he finds his adoptive parents and family and also informs the reader about their family business(es) of ghost hunting, book shop owning, and coffee business (attached coffee shop).))`**

Ultimately he found a fountain, and despite every instinct telling him not to try swimming to the bottom of a Compound fountain just to drown, Lysander fought the feeling and found himself scrambling wildly out of a different fountain, feeling as though his world had just turned upside down. A small family nearby came to his aid, helping him to his feet as he coughed up water and tried catching his breath. It was difficult to meet their eyes, so full of questions and worry, something he wasn't necessarily used to.

**`((Highkey might just scratch this and have him crawl out of Woof Fountain or something damn.))`**

## Notes & Dev Resources

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