<div class="floatright">(http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p121/Mab_faerie/Elliquiy/Fatal%20Frame%20RP/3d87bccc-3262-498c-9304-e5ce4bd1ac06_zps54265354.jpg)</div>"Guilty!" the man sitting behind the high judge's bench shouted down at Cassandra Vernier, who was sitting all by herself in the gallery, with a bewildered look on her pale, slightly chubby but feather soft features.<br/><br/>"Guilty, guilty, guilty!" he repeated over and over, almost like some kind of tantrum instead of the proper decorum to be expected from a judge. But this was no judge, no... Cassie knew exactly who this man was. He was Malcolm Renault, a dark figure from a part of her past that she had been spending the last two years trying desperately to forget. And in the waking world, she had been fairly successful in doing so, as much as could be expected given what he had done to her. But in her nightmares... not so much. His long black hair, deep emerald eyes, thin sneering lips, pointed hawk-like nose, in her dreams she saw him over and over again, each time seemingly more caricatured than the last, and making her wonder how she had ever been attracted to him.<br/><br/>As her teacher, her principal, her parole officer, a rude customer, an overbearing manager, and now her judge, of all things, he seemed to be omnipresent no matter what she was dreaming about at the time. She tried to tune him out as he prattled on about her trangressions this, her crimes against humanity that, she knew he wasn't real so why should she even care? That was, until he literally threw the book at her, a small tome with a leathery cover the color of silvery platinum that just happened to match her preferred hair color and also just happened to hit her square between the eyes, which certainly did regain her attention.<br/><br/>"So I sentence you to..." his voice trailed off and that sneer came back, with more than a hint of mischief lighting up those striking emerald eyes. "Oh dear Cassie... wouldn't you like to know? We had<em>so</em>much fun last night, maybe I will just claim seconds..."<br/><br/>"It wasn't last night! It was two years ago! I'm done with you..."<br/><br/>"Oh no, the fun is just beginning," he insisted, before a burly officer seemed to appear beside her. "Take her away, she needs some time to think about the consequences of her actions."<br/><br/>"<em>My</em>actions?<em>You</em>are the one who..." but she didn't get a chance to finish as she was dragged out of the empty courtroom and unceremoniously tossed into a dank cell that didn't really seem to have any connection to where she had just been taken from, but in her dream it seemed to flow well enough.<em>Fuck this, I'm waking up,</em>she thought with a surge of determination, and she was able to do just that.<br/><br/>She awoke with a start, bolting up into a sitting position as she clenched her hands tightly into trembling fists, shaking her head as beads of sweat dripped from her forehead and the evenly cut platinum bangs that hovered just above her deep blue eyes. Another lucid dream, damn it why couldn't she just forget her dreams like most everyone else did? And why did it have to come on the night before she had a major research project due? It had seemed so real, yet thankfully she knew it wasn't, that she hadn't really faced him again. It was all in her subconscious, all part of her attempt to struggle with a betrayal that had cut her so deep she was still trying to recover and move on, two years later.<br/><br/>None of it had been real, that was, except for the small silvery platinum book which rested on her nightstand, right next to her once again wholly unnecessary alarm clock. She noticed it as she went to turn off her alarm- no sense in possibly waking her roommate when she was already awake, herself. But that book... she<em>knew</em>it hadn't been there the night before, in fact she had never seen it before it had figured into her dream. But there it was, and for the life of her, she had no explanation- logical, magical or otherwise- for how it might have gotten there. She was actually a firm believer in supernatural phenomena, had actually taken part in a few herself, but there were certain lines that weren't crossed. Physical objects just didn't cross over from a dream into reality... or did they?