Better to Receive than to Give [open to all]

[applesaucemod]

Somewhere in the cosmos, there is something bright, and young, and playful. Somewhere, this being watches over their little flock and does their best to make those people safe and happy. Somewhere, that godling and their flock celebrate the winter holidays in the happiest of dreams.

And somewhere closer at hand, a sleeping giant stirs.

The bright tapestry of dream threads gathered by Zephyr is suddenly yanked hard enough to pull it from its temporary mooring. Something entirely unlike the little godling reels in the dreamers so neatly gathered and packaged up for it, bringing its own toys back to their proper place and taking all the others it can with them. Unsatisfied, it reaches out again and again, dragging in dreamers from all across the multiverse. It will snare them, all of them, and then it will possess them completely.

Perhaps it's fitting that when the stolen dreamers arrive in this new shared mindscape, they'll find they've been designated the Rift's Christmas gifts to itself. Each might awaken inside a dark box, or cocooned in…is that tissue paper? When they claw their way out they'll be greeted by the sight of an enormous evergreen tree laden with twinkling lights and kitschy knickknacks looming overhead. Beyond the shadow of the tree the rest of the world -- that is, the living room -- is just as large. Or is it that the dreamers have just become very small? Giant packages wrapped in bright paper form an obstacle course, but the wooden floor of the room is wide open between the tree and the hearth where an enormous plate of cookies and glass of milk await a cataclysmic Santa Claus.

All in all, things are fairly normal as far as the rift's dream gatherings go…at least on the surface. The more telepathically sensitive among the dreamers may notice an undercurrent of something darker, more urgent, and more possessive than normal. The rift isn't just sampling the wares of other worlds tonight; this time it means to play for keeps.


[OOC: This is the second part of our crossover with wethelost! Part one can be found here. Usual dream party rules apply: all players and characters are welcome regardless of whether they are currently in the game, and characters may remember or forget the events of the dream party at the discretion of their players.

For reference, characters of average human height are roughly four inches tall according to the scale of their current surroundings. There is an entire giant house beyond the living room; characters will find a kitchen and dining room on the same floor, a staircase outside the door of the living room that leads up to a second floor with two bedrooms and a bathroom, and another staircase off the kitchen that goes to an unfinished basement. Feel free to add details as needed!

This event takes place on evening of August 8th/morning of August 9th in Applesauce time, and December 31 in WtL time.]

Comments

Nicholas Rush | Stargate Universe | Big Applesauce

[lottawork]

[tw: claustrophobia and panic]

Oh fuck. Fuck. No. It's too small. His arms can't even stretch their full length in front of him, he can tell the plane parallel to him is a mere inches away from his nose as he breathes, tight and rapid and terrified.

He can't move. Fuck. Fuck. No.

Rush thrashes against the tiny space with exponentially increasing desperation, wiry and small and unable to find purchase in the smooth walls of his confinement. He can assign this, this space a designation of nonreality, because he may not have the clearest idea of where he was prior to this but he is reasonably certain that he was not boxed away and sealed into a coffin in recent history for fuck's sake.

He struggles momentarily to cry out, create the adiabatic transverse wave (his mental faculties are still in place and functioning but not altogether optimally) but the sound dies unformed in the rasp of a panicked set of unresponsive vocal cords. There's a whisper and crackle of paper beneath him, what, did no one have the fucking courtesy to embalm him before they buried him alive fuck fuck fuck he's had consciousness in this unreality for hardly a few minutes, he is going to die already, contained, muzzled, trapped, buried and alone and strangled and bolted into this private achromatic hell of vasoconstriction and dyspnea.

Finally, victoriously, the lid of his premature coffin gives beneath the pressure of a battering, writhing, panicking scientist slash cryptographer who launches himself immediately from his prison of cardboard and tissue paper with no fanfare whatsoever. Rush's momentum carries him as far as the base of a tremendous tree, and immediately as his back strikes it he sinks to the ground, trembling, making repeated and failed attempts to mitigate the crushing, vaguely postictal neural strain of trying to alleviate clenching, relentless panic, eyes snapped shut.

[etherthief]

Well, this is ridiculous. She recognizes all the decorative bullshit as 'Christmas', though someone - she suspects the Rift - has taken it predictably too far. Having already punched her way out of her confinement, she takes a minute to look around, when a muffled crash and subsequent heavy breathing draw her attention over to the base of the monster tree.

Fuck, how many people are wrapped up in these boxes? This seems seriously messed up, even by the usual standard. She picks her way over to the source of the noise, peering down the precarious slope of a red-wrapped box, and sees-

"Rush?" Oh shit, he doesn't look good. She grabs a handful of ribbon tied around the box she's standing on and scales her way down like a goddamn rock climber. Which is pretty badass, she thinks, but it's not like Rush is in any state to notice.

"Hey, hey." She crouches over him. Claustrophobic panic response, looks like, if he just fell out of his box. Pretty understandable. "Hey, it's Iman. You're okay." She rests a hand carefully on his arm.

[lottawork]

He is not dying. He is not - fuck. He can breathe. He can breathe again, he simply needs to stop shaking. Fuck. Breathe.

The words reach through to him distantly, still clawing his way through the tachycardic, derealized mental ooze following the surge of physical panic. Rush shakes his head, a firm, restablizing motion that dims the high-pitch humming in his ears, if only faintly. He will simply need to reorder. He will simply need to -

"Fuck!"

Rush tears away from the unexpected contact, slides sideways with every intent of scrambling to his feet and stretching distance between himself and the second party but his legs do not entirely support his weight and he half-collapses instead, drags himself backwards a full foot away - relative to him, of course, and not the fucking enormous fucking tree, fuck this, fuck this in all conceptual, ideological, metaphorical ways there are to be fucked.

"Fuck," says Rush again, with slightly more grasp of his diction and also his linear focus, as his vision snaps onto - oh, pure dead fucking brilliant. "I - Ms. Asadi." The question creeps into the panted words as Rush lays partway on his back, propped up by elbows of questionable and tremoring support, pushing back the sensation of hand on skin.

[etherthief]

"Whoa, shit." She backs up, raising her hands to show it's just her, no harm intended - and then realizing belatedly it doesn't matter who she is or what her intent was at all. It's that she made contact at all.

"Shit." She lowers her hands again, chewing her lip. "Sorry. I, uh." There's not much to say, really, so instead she waits for him to give some kind of sign that he's conversation-ready.

[lottawork]

The unbearable aural shrilling of his own rebounding, vibrating dread fades gradually with each contracture of lungs. Rush's heart continues to hammer, frenetic, inconsolable, but he is - he can - he will have this under control. He can manage it. He can.

"Fuck." One trembling hand sweeps the hair from his eyes, a movement meant to inject a form of normalcy into a situation where none exists. "What the - fuck."

Breathe and - compartmentalize. Rush understands a number of things. He has a number. Of things. Of groups. Categories. He can order them. He can. He can structure them. Item one - the container in which he had formerly been kept was not a coffin but in actuality an absurdly large fucking box wrapped in discordantly bright paper, like an oversized fucking Christmas present. Item two - the other surroundings, from tree to all other gifts, are equally inflated. Item three - Rush and Asadi and presumably every-slash-anyone else is not grotesquely massive. Item four - it is possible the house is of the average size and build of most houses and it is simply that their own relative size has been reduced. Item five - this is, assuredly, an unreality and therefore discreditable as a dream.

Thank fuck.

"Dream?" Rush guesses, the internal ticking of various points having at least lowered the rate of breathing and somewhat the jarring shivering of limbs.

[etherthief]

"I'd put money on it," says Iman lightly, relieved he seems to be coming back down. "Pretty dark humor, this one. The other ones I've been too were a lot more... casual." She looks around at the wall of gifts they're now behind, standing small at the base of the tree. "It sort of feels like there might be another shoe to drop. Like a huge fucking... child or something."

Yeah, fuck this. She's not having it. She starts wandering with uneasy urgency around the tree, searching for an exit. "I think if we can get away from all - this - that would be best," she says, inspecting the narrow passage between several stacked boxes. "We can probably get through here, but... I don't know if you're ready for that." She glances over at him, trying to suss out just how functional he actually is right now.

[lottawork]

"I'm perfectly fuckin' fine," snaps Rush with a fraction of his characteristic choler. He is fine. He is standing, primarily without support, his breathing is a constant variable with his heart is now moving in relative synchrony. He is fine. He will be fine. "I dinnae enjoy small spaces. 'S a common fuckin' problem."

Despite his efforts the thickness of his accent slips through, though Rush opts to ignore it. Inconsequential. With comparatively less grace than Asadi, he follows her to the small passageway and peers at it, shaking his head one final time in an inane attempt to regain an equilibrium. The increase of pain to his temples successfully warns him away from performing that small cranial maneuver again in the near future.

[etherthief]

Iman has a certain threshold for being snapped at, and Rush is presently stretching it to the absolute limit, though he definitely gets leeway for most of it being panic-induced. Maybe he's just an insufferable douche so people won't be inclined to offer support, which he clearly hates. But whatever, he's brilliant, Iman has looked past other character flaws to associate herself with brilliant people before, and she's doing it again now with the Scottish asshole brigade.

"All right," she says. "Then we'll just get through it as fast as possible."

She shifts into the little passage and starts easing her way out.

[lottawork]

Oh fuck. Clearly, clearly, Rush did not evaluate this new course of action appropriately. Clearly. More tight spaces. More small, cramped - fuck. No. No, he will execute this plan of action accordingly and he will execute it fucking excellently even if this is not in his historic proclivity. He is not exceptionally talented in the art of maintaining composure, not now, not in this context and certainly not while surrounded by obscenely large fucking Christmas paraphernalia.

This is fine. It is not implausible. He will execute without limbic damage. Wordless, he follows Asadi and compresses himself into the tiny space. The press of the walls is no object. He is breathing, he is employing forward momentum, he is shuffling along and his rate of breathing is increasing incrementally and that is fine, it is still relatively workable in this solution set, he will maintain this solution set, Asadi is right in front of him and she is still moving so it is not inconceivable that he can continue moving, but for fuck's sake he's stopped why has he stopped.

His breath catches and stutters and halts. He can execute. He can continue executing.

Rush forces himself to continue moving, neglecting the pressure of adrenaline and the squeezing, inching compression of freshly surging panic. The walls are not coffins, nor are they glass containment fields. There is no water. He trembles.

[etherthief]

Iman is acutely aware that she's now trapped herself in a very long narrow passage with a very unstable, highly claustrophobic person, way, way too soon after he just came down from the last attack. On top of that, asking him if he's okay, reaching out to him, will only incur more violence. She can only grit her teeth and keep moving, praying he doesn't completely freak out on her before they make it.

When he stops, she stops as well and looks back. She's not really enjoying the tight, oppressive space either, and stopping is pretty much the last thing she wants to do, but she's not gonna keep moving when he's stuck.

He seems to be forcing himself onward, and she keeps going as well, awkward and uncomfortable. Should she say something? She should probably say something. Try to get his mind off it.

"Is there like a technique you have," she says. "Like. Math problems in your head or some shit. Something rhythmic. Like how we're moving, steadily and continuously, yeah?"

Whether or not this is helpful, she suspects she'll get sworn at again in due order, so she braces herself regardless.

[lottawork]

"Zero," says Rush.

No. Wait. Wrong. That's not the typical algorithm. He clenches his eyes shut and tries again.

"Fine."

And that is an inconclusive answer, he realizes, to the question Asadi did not actually ask in fully comprehensive terms. A third time, he narrows his attention on the scattering and breaking and rapid reforming of his own turbid thought texture, carefully formulates his statement.

"I am fine." The words are too well perfectly spaced, a dead indication of how thoroughly they contradict themselves in veracity. He will be fine. He simply - needs to get out. There is no water. He needs to get out and there is no water. He needs to get out.

[etherthief]

Wow, and the Oscar goes to. Iman rolls her eyes but doesn't press the issue, focusing instead on moving forward. "We're about halfway there," she guesses. Is it just that they're so small, or is this really such a wide expanse of gifts? How many presents does a giant need?

She hesitates, reaching a particularly tight spot between boxes too heavy for her to manipulate. She really doesn't want the two of them to get stuck here. Can she maybe...

She lifts her hands and presses them against the box, frowning tightly. This isn't really what she does, but she has to do something. Can she make it smaller? Just a little smaller?

[lottawork]

Asadi stops and Rush grinds to a halt behind her. This will not be practicable in theory why has she stopped?

He attempts to form her name but the word rasps on his tongue. Oh fuck, no, he can't breathe. Fuck. He stares at the wrapping paper spread beneath the hands that are splayed against it for support, at the dissonant, disturbingly bright-faced teddy bears printed on it. They stare back in baleful, innocent mockery.

Again, he exerts every effort to say Asadi's name. The noise exits his throat in the form of a high-pitched, dragging sound, not even vaguely word-shaped, pathetically akin to a sob.

[etherthief]

"I know," she says with soft urgency, not needing to hear a clearly pronounced word to know how much he need to keep moving, but she can't do this fast, it's too big for her to be fast. Still she pushes with everything she has, not with her body, but internally, metaphysically. She just has to adjust things a little, matter and molecular structure. She just needs it to give a little, so they can get through. She's sweating now, breathing shallow, not just from the strain, but because his panic is starting to catch.

"I'm sorry," she says, knowing that probably means fuck-all to him. "I'm fixing it, I just need- just hang on, okay? We're gonna get out. We're gonna be okay."

[lottawork]

His hands fist into the paper in front of him, tearing pale sickles into the wavering teddy bear faces. He pulls away with crinkling handfuls in either hand, braces his back against the opposite wall of their horrific, cramped, packaged alleyway.

They're never fucking getting out of here. They're trapped. They're trapped.

Rush's tenuous, paroxysmal terror contracts into the prolonged blink, the hush of tense breath, and

detonates.

He hurls himself at the wall with its splotches of torn paper, hammers at it with both fists, slams his fragile, shaking body into it. It doesn't matter if it's fucking solid, it feels like glass, it holds and will not give beneath his hands just like fucking glass, he can practically feel the slimy sensation of water traveling in runnels down his neck and in his clenched hands even if it's sweat it feels like water he cannot bear the water he cannot operate like this. The air is hot and tight, the wall won't fucking budge even as Rush pummels at it with his condensed, frenetic energy. Get them out. Get them the fuck out. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. No. No, they're trapped. Fuck. Help.

[etherthief]

Oh fuck. Iman's breath stutters as her concentration breaks and she turns to look at him, eyes wide with rare and visible distress. He's breaking down completely and he is just not going to let her help him. There's nothing she can do to fix this. Fuck.

"Rush," she says desperately, wanting to grab him and resisting, that would only make things so much worse. "Rush, stop, please, it-" Shit, what does she do?! Frustrated, she slams her hands back against the box that he's currently ramming himself against, and forces her will on it, it's bad practice, it's messy, it's dangerous, but it doesn't fucking matter. She can feel the crackle of energy shooting back up through her arm, shocking her system, and it hurts like a motherfucker but she can't worry about that now. The box is going to collapse, or melt, or something, and Rush can't keep throwing himself against it. She reaches out and seizes a handful of his shirt, no other choice, maybe if it's not skin contact it'll be okay.

"Come on," she says sharply, and gives him a fierce tug.

The box is bending inward, imploding as if suddenly no longer able to sustain its weight. She hopes to god there wasn't a person in there, though at the very least it seems too big for that. She drags Rush through the widening gap, knowing at any moment it'll snap back to the way it was, but he definitely does not need that information.

She's almost moving at a dead run now, which is exhausting, horrible, her arm feels like it's burning, but she can see the end of it and they're so close--

She hears it snap back behind them, they've cleared it by now, she just hopes Rush doesn't look back.

They burst out into the open again, and she releases her hold, not caring where he ends up, because she's hitting the floor now, coming down hard on her knees, curling over and clutching her arm, hissing formless curses through her teeth.

[lottawork]

The breathless, wordless siege of fists on his confinement flies back when something hauls him bodily away by the back of his shirt and he strains reflexively, writhes against his captor, but the tension of their grip brings the collar of his own fucking shirt up until it's almost cutting into his neck, they're going to fucking strangle him, and the thought that immediately pursues this revelation is that this is the most superfluous fucking manner to go about executing him as there was already a significant likelihood that he was about to die by asphyxiation fucking regardless.

They heave him backwards and he stumbles after in a jumble of pain and panicked instinct, there's the distant crackling, hissing fold of reality rebelling against its unanticipated warping, and then he strikes ground and rolls without warning. The unbearable pressure of his shirt squeezing itself around his neck loosens in a palliating blaze of force and area and weight and volume and the liberation of kinetic energy and he can fucking respire again. Rush breathes in a sequence of unstable shuddering wheezes, gasping, choking, gripping fistfuls of crumpled paper as some form of fucking stabilizing force. Fuck, fuck, they're on the ground. Fuck. And Asadi -

Asadi, he constructs hazily, is the one who propelled them out of their imprisonment. And she is - currently hunched on the ground, obviously in some extreme amount of pain.

Four successive attempts allow Rush to make himself relatively upright and kneeling with one hand to the side of his head and the other ground against the floor in a taut, bracing fist. Shit - fuck.

"Asadi," he wrenches out, ragged and reaching his unsteady free hand forward in an effort to snap his focus beyond the mental atonal smear following that surge of phobic release.

[etherthief]

"Yeah," she bites back, not really meaning to snap but having a hard time concentrating on anything other than the pain. He fucking arm is probably fried. She's not sure she can move it. Do things like this stick around after you wake up? Can she even fix it? She tries to flex her hand and can't.

"Fucking shit," she mutters angrily, and lowers herself the rest of the way down, unconsciously entering a prayer pose, resting her forehead against the hardwood floor. The grains of it look huge this close. The pain is spreading up past her shoulder, a dull ache that resonates throughout her chest. Fuck, it's like being in school all over again.

"Hhrhghhhgh," she groans on a long single breath. "Are you gonna fucking be okay or what?"

[lottawork]

Swallowing is a laborious, dry-sticking effort but Rush manages it with closed eyes. His axons feel fucking flayed, his nervous system a knotted, adrenalized disarray. The hand that stretches out, wavering, soon drops back to support his body which is, ridiculously, aching and refusing to cease its intermittent oscillations of vibrating nerves and muscle.

Another rattling, wresting breath, then another. Scrub and re-fucking-set. He will approach this rationally, a compensatory intellectual embarkation to rectify his former lack thereof.

"We've outlined a solution set," says Rush. The words, caught between steadying pants, are a dim haze in ears that are muffled in the thick, sluggish ebb of his own lingering dread. "The output is optimistic." He will narrow the solution set. Asadi has performed admirably under poor circumstance, and now she may be suffering in a more tangible sense. Fuck. Rush breathes, his eyes remain shut, he breathes. She is suffering in a tangible sense. "What about your solution set?"

[etherthief]

God, what is he talking about. What are these words. Solution sets? Is this a fucking math problem? Her arm is broken and possibly beyond repair, and he's asking her about her solution set? She grits her teeth.

"I am fucked," she says harshly. "That was - you don't force it like that, it all ricochets back up and now the whole fucking arm is-" She breaks off with a wince as she tries to pry open a hatch to get a look at the innards. "I don't have a fucking solution set, you incomprehensible fucking prick." She lets out a breathless cry as she forces her arm open and takes a moment to breath unevenly before lifting herself up a bit and staring dismally at the smoking circuitry. "Goddammit," she murmurs. "Ugh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean - just." She puts a hand to her face, trying to calm down. She doesn't like losing her cool in front of anyone, much less a colleague.

[lottawork]

Asadi is upset. Rush makes note of this. She is upset and this is within reasonable parameters; her arm and whatever technology it is comprised of appear to be unresponsive. This is a problematic solution set.

His breathing is still irregular. This is not rational as he is out of that space and he will be fine, he will be fucking fine, he is going to proceed logically and intelligently. He will have to compose an adequate hash function to counterbalance their respective lowered rates of output. He is free from it, the crushing, compacting, breathless tightness of space meaning he can torque the circumstantial layout into something more workable if he prioritizes. He can prioritize, he will prioritize: (a) mangle his fucking lungs into fucking optimum, (b) evaluate Asadi's arm, (c) evaluate Asadi, (d) verify location, and this is as far as that chain of events can progress in the foreseeable future.

Uncooperative lungs reach a fragile stability and the arm does not look fixable given their current lack of tools or equipment so Rush will proceed to the item three.

"We should go." Fuck. That is item four. He's operating out of order. Unacceptable. "Are you - you are - all right?"

[etherthief]

"No, I'm not!" she explodes, more or less. "Fuck you, I got us out of there, didn't I? I'm not going anywhere, I don't even know if I can get up again. This thing is tied into my brain, do you understand? That stunt I just pulled could have caused brain damage, still could." She's struggling to get a rational fix on the situation. They're dreaming, that's been established as far as she's concerned, and there's every reason to assume she'll be fine again when she wakes up, but what if she isn't.

Okay. Okay. Worst case scenario: she wakes up, still damaged. She'd have to amputate the arm. And probably wouldn't get it back. Maybe the Doctor could come up with something, maybe - no, fuck Satan, she wants no favors from Satan. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. She spent a fair amount of time with one arm, she can do it again.

Right now is just the pain and the stress, and Rush not knowing what to do. She closes her eyes and takes a few long, steadying breaths. If she were home, she'd just call David, or Ana, but she's not home, they can't help her. She never would have done anything so stupid in the first place.

"I..." She finally sinks a little, exhausted and afraid. Her entire body is flooded with electricity and static, she can't move without excruciating pain, and she can't just sit here swearing about it. "I need help."

[lottawork]

So. Not simply manipulated neurologically but nervously ingrained into her system, which is fascinating in its own right and -

Not relevant, sadly.

"All right," says Rush. "Fine." Help. They can achieve that, surely. His hands are shaking, but he has a solid enough understanding of advanced technology. He has helped repair Ancient craft of unintelligible design, certainly he can - possibly - manage this. Possibly. Fuck. Uncertainties. He fucking detests uncertainties.

"I am," he begins in frowning, disordered indecision, "I have - limited experience with - do you want me to - should I - ?" Vocal expression, apparently, is not in his current capacity. Now that his physiology is asserting itself in a manner that is more or less a state of equipoise Rush has a fair amount of control over his motor coordination, hands trembling less fiercely when he lifts himself off their weight and shifts back to his knees.

[etherthief]

She lifts her good hand in an attempt to wave off the stuttered questions. That hurts too, though not as much. Everything hurts. Fuuuuck.

"Not that. We can't do anything about that here. If I wake up with it, then... then I'll have to deal with that. Right now, I just..." She chews her lip in consternation and looks up at him. "Look, I'm sorry, I know you don't like being touched, but I... if we're going to get anywhere, I'm gonna need you to help me walk. My entire body is basically short-circuiting right now, it'll wear off, but... I don't know when. And I don't know what'll happen when it does."

Steady voice. Maintain eye contact. Slow breathing. You're fine.

[lottawork]

Surely this space cannot affect externalized physical change? It shouldn't. That should not be acceptable in theory. Fuck. Lasting physical should not be workable in thesis, not applicable to the purest of subjective realities. He keeps his eyes closed and breathes in a faint, erratic pulsing of mechanical intent, in his private axis of depersonalized cogitation.

"Yes." The word is clipped out sharply before Rush can track the reasoning behind its conception. Rising proves complicated in that he must exert more than the typically requisite effort to bring all his motor coordinates into planar organization, but he braces himself on two feet with only minimal failing in balance. Next. Would be. Assist. Assistance. Yes.

He reaches down, fisting one hand into the material at Asadi's good shoulder, and pulls her upright, drags her good arm over the unstable slope of his own shoulders. It is possible he is implementing an excess of speed and force in this maneuver. He endeavors to slow accordingly with limited success. Motor control is - proving difficult.