applesaucedream | ACT NOW! [Open to All]

The door swings open. Then the door swings shut again as the person who opened it is stepping through, and there's a loud gasp precipitating a louder still response.

"ZON-KUTHON'S FLAYED BALLS!" And that will be the sound of a tiefling with her tail shut in a door. "Aa-augh," Asmodia adds at a somewhat lower volume once she's extricated the limb. At her feet, a rodent the size of a cat shudders in empathy, both creatures' attention on the matter of Asmodia feeling her tail for broken bones.

The veritable explosion of what must be some approximation of coarse words immediately drowns out Rush's own perpetual string of growled expletives regarding what, exactly, he thinks of this situation and all elements that may have contributed to make said situation possible, and he startles with a furious jerk of wires and limbs that attempt to align in some sort of defensive coordination. The idea that this configuration may even be possible in Rush's present, heavily impeded state turns out to be an overly optimistic assumption on his part. His reactive jolt sends him pitching onto the ground in the midst of his winding nexus of orphaned cables. The sound he issues may not have sounded entirely dignified.

This, perhaps, should be the least of Rush's problems currently, as this intruder has not sounded particularly dignified either, and what's more is that it is quite assuredly not human.

There are a number of responses that this - thing's appearance calls to mind, some academic, some insightful, many annoyed, most utterly useless, and a very small minority appropriate for addressing this situation in a manner that is both direct and culturally sensitive, as per the SGC-approved criteria for encountering an unknown species.

"Oh fuck," says Rush, though whether out of preemptive embarrassment or trepidation he personally cannot say.

Edited (OKAY I'M DONE) 2015-03-03 05:05 (UTC)

Tail curled tight around her body so she can take the end of it in her hands and check for damage, Asmodia does not initially notice the person already in the room she just entered. She looks up from probing her new bruises at the sound of something falling over, her eyes widening and her tail whipping out of her hands to free them in readiness for...something. She lifts her hands in readiness to flow into one of the many spell-casting gestures in her arsenal, her breath coming more quickly as she takes a few little steps to look around the nearby furniture at the source of the sounds.

Someone has tied a person up and left him here! She stares for a few seconds too long, eyes wide, then jumps in response to a loud squeak from Biscuit. "Rakhd!" she replies, snapping out of it and hastily looking around for actual threats. Whoever bound this person is probably still here...or...should be still here? She doesn't see anyone. Attention snapping back to the man on the floor, she asks rapidly, "Who did this? Where are they?"

This is - an intriguing situation.

It is also growing more unsustainable with the passing of each unbearable second.

There are not many instances that Rush can name in his life in which he simply did not have anything to say.

The fluid reactionary stance the probable non-terrestrial assumes implies a practiced response, though what purpose it may serve is somewhat beyond him. Defense, possibly. He narrows his eyes, marginally interested, but he is rather more interested in removing himself from his current predicament than investigating this foreign element's motives.

"Fuck's sake," he says tiredly, finding he no longer has the energy to maintain a suitably incensed tone. He has just been imposed upon by some great horned thing that is apparently quite sentient, and all he is capable of is lying here, bound and helpless and unable to blame anything for this embarrassment but his own mechanical ineptitude. His head drops in defeat to the floor. "No one did this. I fucking -"

No.

He is one of Earth's most critical intellectual resources. He is Dr. Nicholas Rush, he of the unparalleled cryptographic specialties and fierce academic poise, and he is not having this conversation right now.

"I appear to be stuck," he confesses at last, and must grit his teeth at the overpowering humiliation of it.

While it should be a relief that there aren't any hostile creatures lying in wait for someone to come along and attempt to free the captive they've bound in such strange cords, the answer leaves Asmodia with the still-more baffling question of how he could possibly have managed to do this to himself.

A titter escapes her as she takes another step closer and really takes in the full situation, and it doesn't take long for it to erupt into full-blown laughter. She doesn't know where she is or how she got here, she doesn't know where her friends are or if they were similarly taken somewhere strange against their wills, but she does know that a man tying himself up is always, always funny.

"You did that --!" she guffaws, coming close to kneel beside him, both to take in the full glory of it and to see what must be done to fix it. "To yourself! How?" Reaching out, she plucks at one of the strange cords. "And what kind of rope is this, anyway?"

"It's electrical," Rush snaps, weary frustration sharpening immediately back into furious annoyance. He is not meant to be thrust into the middle of first contact situations. He has never been meant for it. Diplomacy is not his specialty, and there is a horned, scaled, varicolored, fanged biped with a tail that is clearly expressing a great deal of raucous amusement at his expense. "Intended for technological use and not, I can assure you, for binding of any sort. This should not have happened, obviously."

The sound is incredibly fucking grating and it is enough to, temporarily, incentivize Rush into attempting to once again maneuver himself out of the mess he has incomprehensibly and unceremoniously been wrapped up in, in a much more literal sense than with he is altogether comfortable. His right arm is uncomfortably pinned to his side as a result of his twisting collapse, a number of cables now doing a fine fucking job of cutting into his circulation, but his left is making some relative progress in freeing itself from the chaotic jumble of knots. He commences in the slow, painful effort of what amounts to clawing his way out of the mess, studiously ignoring his unexpected and extremely unwanted audience.

She jerks her hand back, heeding what she takes to be a warning on reflex. Then she feels dumb because he has to be lying to her. "It doesn't look electrical," she objects, eyeballing him and taking in how he is absolutely not writhing around in pain from electrical shocks. When she briefly touched the cords, too, she didn't feel any kind of jolt from them. Frowning, she sits back on her heels and watches him struggle for a minute, absently stroking Biscuit's fur when he insinuates himself under one of her hands.

"...Is it supposed to be a conduit?" she asks hesitantly. That was probably a stupid thing to say. She's probably wrong, he was probably just making fun of her with that electricity comment, and how could something that little and not-metal even be a conduit for electricity anyway, that doesn't make any sense, why did she even say it --

What she's utterly lost sight of in her increasingly self-recriminating train of thought is that she's sitting here watching him try to escape from his accidental bondage without lifting a hand to even attempt to help.

Oh, fucking excellent. So now it is not only amused but curious, and apparently hailing from some planet or plane or universe where fucking laptop cables are not accepted as the norm.

"Of a sort," he mutters, injecting as much concentrated hauteur as he can into each subsequent motion, first in steadily picking away the wires wrapped around the shoulder distal to his free hand, then in gradually working the second arm out from its winding, uncomfortably taut trap, as he has rapidly deduced that he cannot be expected to receive help from - whoever the fuck that is that's been deriving enjoyment from this.

"They carry electrical currents." And are also, apparently, fair fucking impossible to untangle once one has been hopelessly incorporated into the central knot. The pathways some of these wires appear to split off into seem quite implausible, and Rush makes no effort to suppress his low growl of exasperation. Has homotopy not been fucking invented yet?

"But not right now," observes Asmodia, encouraged by the confirmation but not so much by his brisk manner. She furrows her brow, watching him work. If these cords are just components for a spell or device not currently in use, there should be no danger in touching them-- except that he seems to be having a lot of trouble getting free of them. If it takes him this long to untangle himself, perhaps it's not such a great wonder that he managed somehow to get himself in there in the first place.

"Do you need help?" she asks as the idea finally occurs to her. "I could cut them, but if they're components I assume you want them whole." She reaches out to pull one of the cords that has looped itself around his neck off over his head, her fingers cool where they brush briefly against his face.

The belated offer is neither appreciated nor desired, and the unexpected contact elicits a startled jerk that nearly rolls him off his side and onto his back, which would be an even less workable position and not conducive to escaping this fucking intolerable mesh of wire and electronics.

"Fuck - !" Rush forces himself rigid again, fearful any abrupt movements may unravel or reravel any progress he may have made in extricating his upper body. "Don't - just fuckin' leave it, don't -" He makes a resigned, circular motion with the only hand he has available to him. "Don't cut anything."

She startles in turn, flinching back and tucking her hands in close to her chest. Of course he doesn't want her touching him. Of course. "Sorry," she says bitterly, not moving to help him again. If he wants to struggle with his stupid spell component cords by himself, it can be one hundred percent his problem. She can absolutely do that for him. "I was just trying to help," she mutters before clenching her jaw. She's not hurt. She refuses to be hurt. If anything, she's angry, because he's being a stupid prejudiced human and that's his problem, right?

Rocking back again and turning her attention away from him in a ~~forced~~ business-like fashion, she shucks off her backpack and reaches into it, grabbing a garment that apparently just happens to be the first thing her hand touches and swinging it around over her shoulders. As she ties the short cloak in place everything that is inhuman about her fades from sight or changes to a more 'natural' color, leaving her a pale young human woman.

"There," she says sharply, glaring at him. Just let him flinch away from her now. "Better? May I help now?"

Thank fuck his shoulders are narrow and the rest of him equally so, which makes the entire process of easing the taut loops trapping his right arm to his hip a marginally less aggravating trial than it would, Rush suspects, normally. He has placed a higher priority in unthreading the coils that have wound their way around his neck as he has no great desire to die gasping, but his arm has begun to go unpleasantly numb and has become, unsurprisingly, his secondary target.

"Sorry," he mutters without exhibiting the slightest effort to convey any sense of apology whatsoever, narrowed focus entirely devoted to extracting his neck from any imminent danger of strangulation, "but I've found things tend to progress much quicker without external -"

That particular line of thought unexpectedly shatters in contact with the apparent knowledge that this organism is capable of shifting its appearance.

" - interference, what the fuck," Rush finishes flatly, taking great care to enunciate each consonant with crisp, arid disbelief. "Did you just alter species?"

"Yeah, and I did it just for you," she lies impatiently. She could have turned into an honest to goodness human, but using an illusion is a lot easier as long as no one trips over her invisible tail. "I get it, okay? So I'm human now, and you can calm down and let me get you out of that mess."

Again, she reaches toward him to help with the cords. It's so simple and she can have it off him in just a minute if he'll just hold still instead of acting like a big, racist baby. Or so she thinks -- should Rush hold still long enough for her to start pulling loops of cord off him, she'll quickly get one of her own wrists ensnared.

Edited 2015-03-04 08:29 (UTC)

Rush takes a moment to ask himself what intergalactic menace he must have pissed off to allow this to happen. Why is he engaging in first contact. Why has he been put in this situation. This is not his fucking area.

"Would you fucking - no," he snaps, almost entirely devoid of his intended rancor. He suspects any efforts to get this non-terrestrial to fuck off would be infinitely less difficult if his tone would stop bizarrely and ineffectively landing in the area of mildly horrified bafflement. "Fucking leave it. I am solving a problem."

This is no fucking less difficult than one's typical quantum-based geometrically-locked cypher, except perhaps instead of a flawlessly arranged locking grid there are simply rows and rows of endless fucking knots. But his right arm is finally loosening, thank fuck, and no longer in imminent danger of mass tissue death by blood loss.

"You're not solving it very well!" retorts Asmodia, who is very unlikely to be impressed by his intellect at this point. He's the one who tied himself up and hasn't provided a good excuse (or any excuse) for how that happened, and he's the one who still hasn't figured out how to untie himself the entire time they've been talking.

He's got part of it at least loose, and it seems obvious from an outside perspective what needs to be done next. "Hold still," she demands, refusing to take no for an answer as she goes to work on the wires. If she just takes that part and shifts it -- and there, all those loops can slide right down off the end of his arm, which will free up that other one running out from the snarled mess around his hip, which in turn can --

Wait, when did she slip this much of the cables up over her own forearms? She can remember putting her hands through a couple loops just for a place to put the cable so it wouldn't re-tangle, but when she looks down she finds that it's crept up to her elbows, and when she tries to slide her arms out --

"Uh," she says. "Don't freak out, but I think there might be a problem."

Rush has been making significant progress in his mind. He has righted himself to the point where he is, roughly, sitting up and is semi-successfully maneuvering his right arm out of its snare and into something resembling complete freedom of motion, and from there he may progress to releasing his lower body as well.

That is, assuming, that external forces somewhat beyond his control do not insist on fucking everything up on a consistent basis.

"What did I just say," he growls, performing a flawless job of imbuing each word with as much withering disdain as can be contained in a pentasyllabic phrase. He is beginning to suspect there may be several unknown properties at work here, several of which involve the physical entanglement of any unfortunate who happens to initiate the briefest contact with the nest of tangles, regardless of spatial logic.

And now she's gone and gotten herself fucking caught. With him.

"Fair fucking brilliant." He shakes the hair from his eyes with a brisk jerk of a chin and glowers levelly at her, muscle in his jaw twitching subtly. "You realize you've effectively trapped us both?"

Brow furrowing, she tries just shucking the cords off -- they're just around her arms, surely they should slide right over her hands -- and when that fails, simply shaking her arms as if that's going to help. When she's done, she's managed somehow to bind one of her wrists almost directly against his body, and she takes in a sharp breath as the situation suddenly seems significantly more sinister to her.

"...I'm going to cut it," she decides, because the hell with preserving his spell components when they're obviously under some kind of curse. Trouble is, she can't reach her knife right now; she just ends up yanking on the man she was attempting to free when she tries. Grinding her teeth, she wracks her brain for other options...and lights up as it occurs to her to call on her familiar. "Biscuit?" she whistles, then grins when she sees where he's got to. "Biscuit!"

The rodent from earlier looks up from where he managed to overturn a bowl of cheetos on himself while his witch was busy. "Besa srruisr sraka kur ka," she says to the donkey rat, who obediently abandons his treasure trove of junk food to trundle in their direction, fur laden with orange cheese dust. "He'll get us out," Asmodia says confidently.

Edited 2015-03-05 07:02 (UTC)

The annoyed hiss between Rush's teeth rapidly devolves into a steadily ratcheting panic when she succeeds in pinning a hand against him. He twists in a futile effort to get away from the immediate, overpowering discomfort the contact instills, and succeeds only in entangling them both further.

"Get - the fuck - off," he rasps between clenched teeth, panic now approaching something more easily interpreted as horror. She will not stop touching him, and this is her fault and something easily fucking rectified if only she had fucking listened to him in the first fucking place. Anxiety intensifying unbearably with each passing fucking second, Rush lashes out with a thoroughly ensnared foot with frenetic desperation, and succeeds only in hooking it around some essential component of the wires still trapping his right arm, toppling him completely once more.

The inclusion of an animal he does not recognize is assuredly not helping.

"Don't you fuckin' dare," he snarls at it as it approaches, accent thickening at the bleeding edges of his own mounting, frenzied panic. "Donnae even think ah comin' fuckin' near me. An' don' - don' fuckin' cut it. D'you wannae fuckin' kill us?"

"Stop pulling!" protests Asmodia, realizing all too late that she is dealing with a crazy person. He keeps yanking on her hand, bending the wrist at a painful angle and cutting off the blood supply as each movement pulls the bonds tighter. "Stop, stop, just --!"

And down he goes, taking her to the floor with him. She manages not to land on him, but it's not like there's far she can go. The bonds on her arms have converged so that the one not pressed against her newest acquaintance is held tight against her own forearm.

Biscuit stops short and chitters at her, staring at the man with his ears perked forward, and Asmodia does not call him closer again. "What do you mean, kill us?" she asks, trying very hard not to catch his infectious panic. Did he know these cords were cursed? He could have warned her!

"They conduct electricity," he repeats in a tone meant to imply how much he finds his acquaintance to be a complete idiot, but merely sounds strangled and torn. "I don't know how many of these are on, that is to say live, that is to say working, that is to say conducting electricity as we fuckin' well speak."

The initial surge of feverish energy has faded to a harsh, heavy gasping as Rush shuts his eyes and devotes the remainder of his concentration into not panicking.

It is not going well.

"I do not like," he works out from his awkward, contorted, painful sprawl on the floor, "touching. Regardless of fuckin' species. Y'understan'?"

She's not liking it much at the moment, herself. Try to do a good deed, get lashed to a panicking xenophobe with a bunch of active magical artifacts. Break the conduit, unleash the energy -- that much she can grok despite his vague way of explaining things. "You could have said that to begin with," she growls, referring both to his failure to tell her that the conduits were active and to his failure to tell her he's just a panicky weirdo about people in general (if that's even true; it's not like he doesn't know she's really a tiefling under all this).

With him on the floor and her arms bound together and to his side, she doesn't have much choice but to sort of lounge next to him, painfully propped up on one elbow to maintain some semblance of not being entirely prone and helpless. Thus far the cords are only on her arms, but she knows better now than to move and make it worse.

"...I have an idea," she says, watching him gasp for air. "I can get us out of this, but you have to let me do it -- you have to trust me. And you have to tell me if there are any other enchantments on these things that are going to stop me from opening the dimension door."

Rush finds himself capable of very little by the way of communicative effort at the moment, periodically fluctuating between straining to shift away from the unpleasant tactility and being unable to do so for the cord that has wound tightly over his chest and is now notably restricting his air flow considerably.

"They are not -" he grinds out, though the words emerge as halting wheezes, "bloody - enchanted. Mechan - mechanical."

His eyes clamp shut as he tries not to succumb to the vertiginous pull of steadily reducing respiration. Rush has next to no grasp of what method of escape she's brought up - something dimensional, whatever the fuck - and he can no longer afford to care if the unpleasant graying cast that has begun to saturate his vision is any indication. He is not going to die by fucking strangulation and certainly not by laptop cables being atypically inflexible little fucks.

That would be ridiculous.

"Yes - do it - before ah fuckin' - asphyxiate."

How are there more of them around his chest? How did they get around his chest in the first place? He may think these things are purely mechanical (mechanical how? They don't even have moving parts!), but it's pretty obvious there's magic afoot here.

No use dwelling on it, though. With her hands tied she can't check, and so she'll have to trust that he's right and they can disappear right out from under their bonds. "Okay," she says, shutting her own eyes and taking a deep breath. "Remember, don't try to resist. I can only do this once."

Thank the light she doesn't have to move her hands for this one. Focusing inward, she begins loudly reciting an incantation in a language Rush won't recognize -- and a few words later, they both abruptly disappear and reappear in the same positions on the other side of the room sans laptop cords.

He can respond with only a faint grunt, and trusts that will be an adequate enough response. The string of words she utters is completely unknown to him - it does not sound remotely terrestrial - and the undetectable shift is equally beyond his grasp. The steadily constricting pressure around his chest vanishes and he sucks in a desperate lungful of air in a palliating, wrenching gasp, struggling away from the unwanted contact and slamming his head into some unknown surface in the same graceless series of movements.

"Fuck!" he snaps with what little recovered breath he has, and scrambles back again. A wall. He crawled directly into a wall and even considering the disorienting kaleidoscopic pulses to his vision following his imminent strangulation, that makes him fair fucking pathetic.

"What is it," Rush rasps, wrapping one arm protectively around his aching chest, "that you did, just now?" He shoots her a look of suspicion mingled with curiosity. "That method of transportation - I'm completely unfamiliar with it."

She'd laugh, but in all honestly she's a bit shaken up by just how freaked out he is over this. Were the cords that tight? It was uncomfortable for her, sure, but she wasn't the one being strangled by the things. Asmodia quickly pulls away as well, sitting up with considerably more grace (perhaps because she knows where she put the both of them). Rubbing her wrists, she watches the human, her currently invisible tail curled around her folded legs, the end of it twitching back and forth nervously and denting the fabric of her trousers each time she hits it against her leg.

"...Dimension door?" she repeats. Not a magic user, then. "It's a spell, a really handy one. Uh...are you, uh...hurt?"

Edited 2015-03-07 07:21 (UTC)

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