Dreams and nightmares as worldbuilding inspirations

>>55418345

I remember a piece where I was sitting beside a campfire and retelling the story of Jesus, emphasising on his mercifulness and his belief that everything can be redeemed and can go to heaven, all the while I was seeing the shadows of the souls, children and adults, sitting all around me and listening.

This one I supposed happened after I had become to be known as the Shepherd, as I was wandering on the surface, without a gas mask, feeling the benevolent souls of the dead protecting me.
I meet some elite Red soldier or some shit, and I must have loooked horrifying trough the soul-bubble, as his first action is to open fire on me.

Now, in Metro is stated that people instantly die when the souls of the dead start behaving aggressively against a living human, as literally your soul is ripped out of your body.
So I was absolutely freaked out when I saw the souls jumping straight at the Red soldier and screamed at the last second "NO!"

The souls stopped at the last moment moment, before making contact with the poor man, that was still clenching his hands around his rifle, still pulling the trigger, and I could see streams of tears of terror coming down from his eyes.
"FORGIVE HIM! Only with forgiveness can you redeem yourself!" And then I said to the soldier "Come here" as we started to walk to each other.
When we were face to face I hugged him and fucking hell I wish I could have been on the receiving end of that hug, because his looked then at me in the eyes and he looked like they were seeing the Truth or something, then there are some confused moments, and after that I see him giving me a hug, turning around and go towards the nearest entrance to the Metro, having an aura in a fashion that might suggest that he had become my disciple or something. After that I turn to the souls, and say something among the lines of "You understand".

>CONT

>>55418354

Then they disappear.
Like that.
I'm left alone.
All the presences that I felt a second ago were gone.
And yet I felt something was still wrong in Moscow.
It weren't the souls that I hadn't freed yet. Nay. It was something far more dangerous and strong.
It was the Cremlin.

(to make things clear: in the Metro universe the commie stars where disguised pentagrams made by the great warlock Lenin and the great red stars on the Cremlin should be the place where the lords of the demons resided)

This also made Glukhovsky present WWII as a sort of battle between sorcerers, as Stalin was using the power of the demons VS Hitler who was using the power of the Sun with his swatikas

When I went into the Cremlin I found the blobbish monster that Artyom and some stalkers found on the way to D6 and started talking gibberish as I if I was casting magic against it, the battle soon took the aspect of a clash of wills, with neither me or the evil blob of evilness gaining the upper hand.

Then others blobs appeared and slowly started to merge with one another to overwhelm me, and I could feel the stars of the Cremlin glowing.

I don't know why in my mind I decided that those blobs where the incarnation of the demon lords, but still, I had a very strong fever

At some point during the clash of wills, right about when I was starting to be overwhelmed by the demon blobs the souls reappeared and started helping me.

At this point I was phasing in and out of consciusness, in I seem to remeber I was crying of happiness and mubling something like "I'm so happy you all came back" and then with a last final push the demon blobs vanished, and the grey skies got istantly clear and the sun finally started to really shine on dead Moscow.

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>>55418543

Then the souls start to glow and go out in a flash of light, making me understand they were finally free for real.

And this is how it ends the story. Or so I remeber , because, again, 41 degress of fever are no joke, and have some broken memories of other adventures I had as "the Shepherd" as the metro-dwellers came to call me.

>Walking trough the metro, not knowing in which direction
>The souls with me are few, so the adventures of the Shepherd must have just begun.
> Start hearing noises coming from all aroun me
> Can't see anything because it's dark in the tunnels and I was walking relying on my guts
> The noises increase and become ever more clear, revealing that I'm being surrounded by mutants
> Some try to attack me, the souls immediately kill them, others just stand there sniffin loudly in my direction and yet others start running away as soon as they get close to me.
> I just sit down and decide I'm fed up with the darkness
> Let's light on fire something
> I manage to light on fire something, can't remember
> I don't know whether I was more scared to see the litteral tide of mutants surrounding me
> Or were they scared of the sudden light and the crazy distorsion the souls gave to it.
> After some seconds of me standing perfectly still the mutants run away
> It flashes in my mind an advice Melnik gave Artyom "Rats are wherever it's relatively safe to stay, if there are no rats, turn back and run away, because you don't want to know what's there"

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>>55418818

It happens usually in my more vivid dreams to change point of view, so sometimes I'd see myself from out side or trough another's eyes.

>be some random man sitting in front of bonfire, AK in hand, speaking croatian (I sincerely don't know why croatian exactly) with other guys around the fire
> feel like guard turn should be over soon
> figure come out of tunnel, hands raised yelling he is a friend and is just passing
> is a man with neck-long hair, a short, not well mantained beard and a horribly worn coat with a worn hoodon his head
> I offer him a glass of whatever drink I found myself having in hand
>he accepts and and askes is we can sit around the fire
>"we"? there's only him! is he fucking using the royal us?
>but I say that's fine and he sits
>only then everybody notices the distrotion in the air behind him
> it clicks and I realize he is the Shepherd of Souls
> he asks if we want to hear and old story of a generous man

from this moment this segment is very unclear in my mind, but I remember vaguely stumbling my way to the bathroom to take a piss and then inventing a modified and Metro-fied version of the Pater Nostrum prayer

File: Tunnels are of safe stalker, well, not often really, but hey, but anything's of better than surface!.jpg (551KB, 1200x655px) Image search: [Google]

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But now, has anyone ever had a dream like that?
This made me preapare a campaign I would never run set in Moscow after Metro 2036