Dreamer

Dreamers are the few individuals who can remember fragments of time between activation as sleeper agents and completing their tasks. Dreamers each were programmed with a special mission in mind when they were released back into the larger world. This mission is usually a mystery even to the dreamer, and many dreamers spend all their waking hours trying to discover it.

Overview
The message comes in the flicker between channels 57 and 06. The mission is activated after the cartoon ducks but before the smiling, orange travel host can express his delight at the avocado-eating dog he has found. Do violent movies encourage antisocial behavior? Do comic books create deviants? Chemtrails, demonic backmasking, subliminal messages, vaccinations, water fluoridation. Something has put a mission into the dreamer's head, and with a single trigger an identity is gone and an asset is born.

She may have been selected for an outstanding service record or lacking anyone who might come looking. Sometimes it is simply about making sure the wrong group is responsible for the right actions. The first step in building the better weapon has never been to encourage independence or morals. When somebody decides to make an elite killing machine for clandestine assassination the first thing to go is always the ego. No two dreamers recall the same things from their programming. Some can recall in stunning clarity the burning in their veins of the injection that came with the new faceless doctor in the ER, but can’t recall the date. Some speak of sterile, white lights and surgeries that lasted for hours. There are those who just remember that the ATM told them to go kill somebody. In all cases though they agree that something was added to them that they didn’t have before.

The Mission
Each dreamer is an asset put into the field for the explicit purpose of fulfilling a mission: typically the death of one or more individuals. There are exceptions to the rule, but dreamers are seldom in a place to appreciate the novelty of electoral fraud. Missions are, on average, things that a typical human being would never agree to follow through with. The fielding of a fire-and-forget sleeper agent means that the powers that be are planning something alarming enough that typical leverage is not an option. Dreamers very quickly come to realize they are the tools of a war that no one would willingly fight.

Very few individuals who have been through the process can agree on who is responsible for their repurposing. There are often rumors spread about groups seeking to create a new world order, but those are only the tamest of suspicions. Alien visitors, time travelers, the Devil, reptilians from the center of the Earth, and even certain copyrighted children’s cartoon characters have been blamed. Surprisingly the government and the military are unpopular choices, simply due to their tangible ability to just have someone killed the old-fashioned way, without all the mind control.

Missions are carried out in stages to make sure that the objective action goes off without a hitch. While consciously most dreamers are completely unaware of their purposes, they have been secretly briefed with times and places for their missions. Initial activations often are concerned with familiarizing themselves with mission locations. It is not unknown for dreamers freshly activated to wake up to find themselves gainfully employed at the mission location, or amateur fans of the architect responsible for the building. Missions usually move on to more active tasks of insinuation, removal of mission risks, and control of the objective zone. Positions like stage manager, network administrator, security specialist, and independent contractor are all roles that dreamers might find their unconscious selves have placed them in.

Conditions

 * Missing Time: There is a taste in her mouth like red, red meat. She are somewhere else and she's not sure how she got there. Something else is driving her actions and it has its own mission.
 * Endgame: The Dreamer has accomplished the groundwork and her mission parameters are approaching final execution. This is the last chance for a Dreamer to prevent herself from committing atrocity. The situation has been primed for her to act — there will be no resistance from security, no amount of trouble smuggling the weapon to the intended point, and the target will be precisely where it has to be. All that is left is pulling the trigger. In hours her programming will be activated and her sole motivation will be the completion of her objectives, known to the Dreamer or not.

Merits

 * Subliminal Conditioning · to ·: The Dreamer has been subliminally conditioned by a group to function as a human weapon. With a little effort, she can scratch at the raw wounds left in her psyche to access that training for her own benefit.
 * Basic Control ·: With basic control, the Dreamer generates a bit of memory when encountering a stressful situation concerning her programming.
 * Extended Awareness ·: Now, she is as vigilant about her surroundings as she is about her target.
 * Steady on Target ·: The Dreamer is a tool meant for targeted violence, not the chaos of an actual engagement.
 * Between the Lines ·: The Dreamer has become more receptive to her hidden memories.
 * New Parameters ·: At the pinnacle of casual psychosurgery, the Dreamer learned to trigger the most essential component of her programming, the “on” button.
 * A Word from Our Sponsor · or ·: The dreamer’s programming is pernicious, and long before she realized that she was beholden to someone’s will, had already created both local and international business accounts. At two dots a dreamer may use some of her memory to recall a password or security question she had set up to access an account or a seller allowing her to purchase any amount of suspicious material without drawing attention to herself and still pass background checks. At three dots, the dreamer’s alter-ego has been far more thorough and created entire business connections not just with legitimate businesses, but also a variety of criminal elements such as arms dealers and drug lords.
 * Realpolitik · to ·: Some dreamers find their missions require them to belong to a certain political affiliations or certain social groups no matter how contrarian it may be to their day-to-day identities. This dreamer able to pass himself off as belonging to a political group when confronted on his beliefs by both group members and outsiders.
 * Memory Palace · to ·: The dreamer has practiced a variety of memory visualization and retaining techniques to preserve her memories longer.
 * The Treatment · to ·: The dreamer recalls strange surgeries of writhing, living things buried in her flesh and the consumption of mineral supplements.
 * Not A Bug But A Feature · or ·: There is something inside the dreamer — something that wasn’t there before. Sometimes the programming isn’t just in the dreamer’s mind. It may look like a chitinous worm that can move in and out of the human esophagus with blinding speed, or it may be some sort of ghastly techno-organic pistol that is extruded from her hand, but it is a weapon and it’s hers. When not manifested, the object will otherwise be unable to be detected even by investigative surgery or X-rays.
 * Mephistopheles ·: The dreamer has kept her programming controlled by making strides towards completing the mission. As long as she continues to take steps to ensure endgame, she is rewarded with positive reinforcement.
 * Déjà vu ·, ·, or ·: Dreamers are powerful if unreliable. While they have been given impressive abilities they are locked behind powerful psychological barriers that require extreme transgressions on the part of the dreamer to access. Those dreamers trying to make use of their training often seek alternative means of achieving a similar state that takes a lesser psychological toll on them.
 * Field Handler ·, ·, or ·: The dreamer's patrons feel the mission she is on is serious enough that they have personally attached a field handler to make sure that the mission is accomplished. Some report their handlers were simply mortal pawns like themselves, while others claim theirs were otherworldly entities in the flesh.
 * Pencil Pusher ·: The handler is either disinterested in the mission at hand or has limited ability to influence the world.
 * Clock Watcher ·: The handler might find the Dreamer amusing or at least tolerates her presence.
 * Company Man ·: A handler of this level is invested in the completion of the objective either ideologically or materially.
 * Bought Out ·: The dreamer, through intensive research or just pure coincidence, stumbles onto information about the handler’s life or nature that can be used to force the handler to provide additional backup.
 * Friend Inside ·: The rarest handlers of all are the ones that are able to view their assets as valuable. They may not see what they’re doing as wrong, but at least they acknowledge there is some value in retaining the dreamer’s services.