Caren Birchlime Caren Birchlime is the youngest of the dream princes. She was born in Manchester in the 1950s. In the 70s she worked as a chemistry engineer in London, specializing in hallucinogenic drugs and tranquilizers. She was very interested in how drugs affect our dreams. That was how she learned the Art of Dreaming. With the aid of drugs, she progressed much faster than anyone before her. In only a couple of years, she had built hundreds of dream worlds. But the drugs had unforeseen side effects. Birchlime lacked other dreamers' natural caution near Vortex. She created dream worlds closer to chaos than anyone had done before. And she lost her sanity quicker than any of the other dream princes. Birchlime's dream worlds haven't slowly been deformed; they were dark nightmares from the very beginning. Into them she lures her victims, to kill them slowly or drive them insane. Her dreamworlds are distorted images of the hospital where she performed her drug experiments. They contain sick rooms, operating theaters, morgues, autopsy rooms, padded cells and tunnels in an endless labyrinth. Here and there, these are intersected by other worlds created from Birchlime's memories: run-down residential blocks and schools from her childhood, echoing college halls, slum environments which had provided the people she experimented on. In a soiled room with tiled walls, near Vortex, chained to a bed and constantly drugged, lies Birchlime herself. From there, she creates and reshapes her dream worlds. Birchlime has an ability to find people with weak minds and lure them into her dreams, where they are slowly bereft of their minds, or killed. She lets her servants, impersonal Wanderers in white frocks armed with surgical instruments, hunt and kill her victims. In rare cases, she may leave her bed and go after a victim herself. She prefers driving people mad to killing them. When they have lost their senses, she can bind them in her world and make them her servants. She possesses drugs which can be given to the dreamed self to prevent it from waking up. The dreamer is bound to the dream world, and within 2d10 days his sleeping body will die unless it receives medical care. Birchlime's dream worlds are open to all hospitals and institutions. There are permanent portals from those hospitals in Manchester and London where she used to work before she disappeared into dreams for good. Caren Birchlime is a short woman about thirty years old, with short red hair and glasses. She wears a white hospital frock and has marks from hypodermic needles at her elbows. Her pupils are always enlarged and her eyes bloodshot. When she hunts through dream worlds, she assumes the shape of a large, gaunt dog with no fur. Both forms have the same abilities. Kiff "Kiff" is a new drug Caren Birchlime has introduced in the streets of Miami, via a dreamer named Renee Deladier, a Haitian immigrant. Unlike most mind-altering drugs you smoke from a pipe (marijuana, hash, dmt) kiff is highly addictive. It brings darkness--not a fearsome darkness, but warm, wombing, wet, a comfort in darkness, world without end. After a while, however, all the positive, supportive feelings begin to disappear from the experience, and it becomes only more and more deeply oppressive. The use of Kiff actually attracts the wandering nightmare known as "The Living Darkness," and gives it ingress into the user's waking mind. After only a few months' using kiff, an addict has gone hopelessly insane, dying in a dry need or consumed by relentless, molesting shadow, Deladier herself seems immune to kiff's harsher effects. This is due to the fact that the nightmare has invaded every pathway of her mind, and its strange sentience controls her every movement. She has become a nightmare walking, and possesses monstrous, nightmarish powers, even in the real world. Just by touching someone, she can physically pull her or him into the world of dreams, where the Living Darkness is ready to shroud them in a suffocating scream; and she can also bring the Darkness here, sending it pouring from her mouth, eyes, nose, and the twin spaces between her legs. She can produce a cloud of the Darkness large enough to cover a house, and in the morning the house will be gone. Deladier seems sane, most of the time--she'd have to, to run even a small drug cartel successfully--but incomprehensible thought processes shine behind her eyes, and an insane hunger to drown the world in darkness drives her.