[ I already play Vasya (m1895) but figured I'd toss someone on the TDM this round! Character warnings. Freddie's a former-military, 33-year-old lapsed Catholic commercial pilot who has spent the past 4 months skating under the radar with severe undiagnosed bulimia. He's friendly, genuinely kind, and can be fun to be around, but he has some serious commitment/intimacy issues stemming from the parental divorce that made him a devout atheist at age 7 and getting cheated on during his first deployment ten years ago which have left him chronically incapable of attaining the intimacy he craves. Instead he just chases it with a life full of hookups, which he consistently self-sabotages by ghosting or calling it off after two or three meetings before he actually gets the kind of affection he's seeking. Despite his poor body image and repressed feelings of inadequacy, he gives the impression of someone confident and in-control - when in reality he spends each day feeling like he's holding on by his fingernails. Synopsis & full info! ]

[ Freddie Lavoie—LAVOIE, FRÉDÉRIC IAN on the last page of the passport in his back pocket—hasn't been to Canada in... Christ, at least five years? It'd have to have been at least three, because he definitely hasn't been since before his last deployment. He can't really remember what was on the radio at the time, so there's not really a good way to pin it to any one moment in the past decade.

When he was last here is getting into the weeds. He needs to focus on the situation at hand, and he does so deliberately. Why, exactly, he's shuffling up to a sign that reads MILTON, CANADA — 2 KM AHEAD in his dreams remains unclear, though he's sure a therapist would slap a bright red "Daddy Issues" label on it and call it a day the moment she heard about the okayish Québécois father part of the equation that makes up whatever the hell is going on with him now. At the moment, Freddie finds himself significantly more concerned with the bone-chilling voice that woke him from sleep-within-sleep in some rickety old shack and his seeming inability to wake despite recognizing this as a dream. That's pretty fucking unnerving.

There's an element of absurdity to all of this. He's not dressed for the weather in the dream in the slightest; while his pilot's jacket provides at least some measure of protection against the cold as he pushes open the front door and it almost falls off its hinges, it's not nearly enough, and he's cold within a few moments of standing outside— made worse by the snow getting into his black dress shoes and soaking through his matching unwarm polyester men's dress socks as he traipses through the snow in the direction of the road's dead end. There is no driveway to connect the shack to said road.

He's not sure what, exactly, he has to do to wake up. He's tried pinching himself several times, and he's felt the pain as vividly and clearly as he would while awake. The chill is more vivid than it should be in a dream. Usually that kind of discomfort would wake him up; even the uncomfortable burn of the acid reflux he's developed of late has been enough to jolt him from sleep in the past.

So why can't he wake up now?

He doesn't know, but he knows he might as well follow the dream's logic and see if there's anyone to ask in the town ahead so he can wake up and stop freezing his ass off in dreamland. Once he's on the road, he follows it, walking along the edge of the cracked asphalt and stepping over gaping ravines torn into the pavement by what he assumes to be either some sort of tectonic activity or grave misappropriation of construction equipment.

It takes about thirty minutes of this before he reaches the next breadcrumb: a sign planted to mark the city's outer limit. Milton, Pop. 947. Smoke from someone's chimney trails into the air beyond the treeline. And then there are people, all going about their daily activities while paying no mind to the man in the crisp commercial pilot's uniform that stands out so starkly against their well-worn winter clothing.

Milton, Canada. That's an Anglo name, so it's fair to say he's not dreaming about anywhere he's personally familiar with, but the French-Canadian population has scattered across the country enough by this point that half of these people might be Francophone.

...There's also a distinct possibility that they might not be, and might feel a little equivocal about their daily activities being interrupted by some fucking guy named Frédéric and start anticipating an attitude; at worst, whether he's being rude and interrupting or asking for help might depend on the twin accents aigu on the Canadian passport in his back pocket. Best to keep that card in the deck until he knows if disclosing his father's point of origin would be shooting himself in the foot, especially given that, as far as he's concerned, the specific genre of French-Canadian accounting for half of his parentage haven't exactly gone out of their way to endear themselves to the rest of the country, or assimilate, depending on who you ask.

And if one asks Freddie Lavoie, well, he gives less of a shit one way or the other than he probably should, but he's never taken the extra three seconds to set himself apart from all the Smiths and Taylors and Browns of the world by writing the diacritics omitted from his American documents, so maybe he's in the business of appeasing the Anglos too.

Sorry, Papa. Too late to stop now, especially given the circumstances. ]

Excuse me. Where am I? [ If it's a year other than 2025, Freddie's not aware of it, so one had better believe he's shoving a hand into his back pocket and holding up his closed Canadian passport. For all he knows, Milton could be some right-wing natalist cesspool in rural Saskatchewan. ] I'm a citizen. Do you know what's going on here?

[ But there's still reason enough for a citizen to know French without being French, and it's entirely possible that this person speaks English as a secondary language, as is the case with Matthieu Lavoie, and would very much appreciate the gesture of addressing them in their own language and their own dialect. Appreciate, ie, be more likely to help, especially if they recognize him as like.

And that's what he needs. Help.

So Freddie immediately offers the translation on the heels of the initial probe in English, not realizing, of course, that they're both just going to come across in the same language as the listener's thoughts, albeit accented. Anyone who can set apart I am Québécois from a mention of the same group at a native speaker's tempo, he figures, is at least sympathetic enough to put time into learning more than Je m'appelle Chad. ]

《 Hey, excuse me, are you able to help me? I'm Québécois. I don't know where I am or what's going on here. 》

[ Even in his dreams, Freddie purges.

Because that's what this is. A dream. And that's what he's doing. Vomiting in another unfamiliar bathroom.

It's rough this time, like it sometimes is, and he has to use his hand, like he did back when he was new to doing all of this—but he has to do it. The alternative is far worse, no matter what the old man said about diseases stalling in their progression here: Freddie Lavoie isn't in the business of just believing random old dream wizards, first of all, and second of all, he doesn't even want to think about how many calories he just consumed after discreetly inhaling his bodyweight in red meat and bread because he'll probably throw up a second time, not on purpose. Even if his blood sugar should be stabilized here (sounds unlikely), his weight sure as shit won't be. And that's motivation enough.

So is the rising sense of anxiety, the feeling of being a rat trapped in a flooding cargo hold. He wants to wake up. He wants to wake up.

The feeling of absolution after he's emptied himself is the nearest substitute, even if his throat sears and the insides of his cheeks are on fire and it's making his eyes water. He sniffs, straightens up, wipes his mouth, flushes and rises to his feet. He needs to wash his hands before he lances himself and uses the familiar battery-operated meter he found little too conveniently in the shack beside his passport and gun.

The old man told him he won't be able to find many strips other than the ones he came with, but that he shouldn't need them. Well, that was before Methuselah presumably saw him consume enough bread to feed a small village, which should be enough to convince him to revise that answer. It's worth expending a strip. He'll try harder tomorrow.

He stifles a hard, reflexive cough when a little residual acid prickles at the back of his throat on his way to the sink. And then he realizes someone is staring, like they've just heard the whole gory thing. The back of his neck burns; it feels intimate, voyeuristic, a violation, regardless of whether or not they just wandered into it. His tone is more than a little indignant, questioning. ]

Can I help you?

[ Well, no matter where he ends up crashing tonight, it's going to be one hell of a downgrade from the apartment in Queens in every regard except for floorspace. So that's what Freddie tries to focus on: not the loss of electricity, or the lack of takeout, or lack of hot water, or shitty insulation, or the fact that all of the houses around here look like something from a shitty New England horror movie or the cabin in the woods from Cabin in the Woods, but the floorspace. And he'll have a yard, even if it's covered in snow all-year-round.

He'll be a homeowner in hell, but he will be a homeowner...

He has no fucking idea where people are and aren't occupying, though, because he doesn't know the area. And he needs somewhere to sleep tonight if he's going to sleep (and then hopefully wake up in the real world). Being that there are no real estate agents here, he's just going to have to ask for help—in his first language this time, given that people seem able to understand you no matter what you're speaking. ]

Hey, excuse me, sorry to bother. My name's Freddie, I just got here. Do you know where people are moving to, generally?

I couldn't find a realtor.

Feel free to shoot me a DM on discord @ redmaresociety or PP bluehellgazette if you'd like to plot something! In general, Freddie's going to be spending most of his time exploring and trying to scrounge and stockpile any useful items he can.