The RossShelf region is a charter region in Antarctica. At first the residents could read each other’s minds "the closest the Thunderhead got to a failure". Now they share minds during REM sleep.
The Grand Rêve--the big communal dream that the residents of RossShelf shared. The people you knew in waking life - friends, family, neighbors, teachers--rarely crossed paths with the people you came to know in the dream. And the Thunderhead's rules on privacy made it against the law to seek out a dream friend in real life. Speaking of home while in the Grand Rêve is against the law and besides, while you were dreaming, the details of waking life were hard to recall. Once waking up your dream will fade away in the waking world.
"If the dream feels wrong, run." It was advice every kid living in the RossShelf region of Antarctica was told from the moment they began communal- dreaming -which was usually the same time they started school. Not that dreams could harm you-they couldn't. But sometimes they did. Or more accurately, it was scythes who could mess with the dream.
RossShelf Scythes[]
RossShelf scythes had free reign to do whatever they wanted in the communal dream, just as scythes had free reign in waking life everywhere else. Dreamscythes can glean in any form they like, and their targets we're allowed to run unless they present themselves as a scythe, in human, robed form."
If you're gleaned in a dream, you have 12 hours to find the scythe who gleaned you in the waking world to be gleaned.
Geography[]
RossShelf is a huge region, with many cities, towns, and rural icefields. A five-hundred-mile-long leading edge of the shelf was always calving into the sea. Even though the Thunderhead had slowed the glacier flow to nil, the homes built into the shelf face didn't last long. A ten-year “shelf life“ at best.
Life is spent in ice tunnels and huge human-made caverns carved directly in the deep blue glacier. Some parts of RossShelf region are breathtakingly beautiful, but mostly it was monotonous and utilitarian, making vivid dreams all the more important
Most RossShelf schools have an expansive open design full of ice pillars and movable walls.
Residents[]
- Dayne
- Alex
- Dayne’s Mother
- Dayne’s Father
- Ophelia
- Gertie
- Lonnie
- Mr. Ramos
- Scythe Borgia
- Scythe Gallico
- Scythe Crawford
Trivia[]
- “Slumber collective” is an old-fashioned expression to call the Rêve.