applesaucedream | The Shavings Off Your Mind are the Only Rent [Open to All]

The Shavings Off Your Mind are the Only Rent [Open to All]

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Picture a house. Actually, picture two houses. They're (almost) identical structures that share an uneasy coexistence, tangled together on a quantum level. One of the houses is Good: bright, cheerful, full of comfortable furniture and a pervasive feeling of safety. The other house is Evil: dingy, dilapidated, and haunted by the dreamers' greatest fears.

The good news - and bad news - is that travel from one house to the other is as simple as passing through a door. All a dreamer has to do is walk through a doorway, any doorway, and they'll find themselves in whichever house they weren't in before they crossed the threshold. Perhaps they'll step out of a beautiful library and find themselves in a threatening hallway - or perhaps they'll flee a menacing kitchen and find themselves in a perfectly safe dining room. That is the nature of the houses' entanglement: every door is a portal between the two.

There are, of course, complications. Dreamers in one house can't perceive the other; if you're in the Good house and looking through a doorway, the space beyond will look as nice and inviting as the space you're in now (until you step through that doorway, of course). Dreamers also can't really perceive one another if they're in the same room, but in different houses, though they might see a flash of movement out of the corner of their eye, or think they heard something.

Perhaps the greatest complications are the houses themselves. They have rather strong personalities, and they aren't very fond of one another. Each house will want to keep you if it can (keep you safe, in the case of the Good house, or keep you for itself, in the case of the Evil one). Dreamers may attempt to cross a hall and find the door that looked open and inviting a moment ago is now barred shut, leaving them trapped in the hall - or have doors suddenly close in their faces before they can end up anywhere unpleasant. Still, there's only so much either house can do, and even a locked door can be jimmied open or busted down.

Escape from the houses is possible, but the formal gardens beyond are similarly entangled, with neatly trimmed lawns and expertly plotted flower beds becoming overgrown tangles of nettles and algae-choked reflecting pools. An archway is as good as a door, as far as the gardens are concerned, and there are plenty of arbors and arches over the paths. Of course, dreamers may find that a sound arbor in the Good garden has collapsed in the Evil one… and heaven help anyone who dares to explore the hedge maze.

[ooc: y'all know the drill. ALL characters are welcome, regardless of whether they're in the game. Characters can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion.

Also, this dream party marks the aforementioned calendar freeze. For the next three weeks, the IG date will sit on July 3rd. Posts dated July 3rd or earlier are allowed and encouraged. The calendar will resume forward motion at a 4:1 ratio on Saturday, July 26th.]

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The sitting room was tastefully appointed, once. Now the wallpaper is dirty, peeling, and what isn't covered in a fine layer of dust is coated in grainy dirt as nature reclaims the rotting wood floor and wall paneling. The window is too cloudy to see out of, but a woman in a rocking chair sits next to it all the same, wrinkled, pale hands curved around the ends of the armrests like claws. Moths and rot have claimed the best of the spiderwebbed shawl across her shoulders.

Ianto approaches cautiously, the wood giving softly and damply under his shoes, but no matter how close he gets (not so close), no matter the angle, he cannot seem to see her face. With the cold crawling across his skin and into his cheeks, he's not sure he wants to. There's a high-backed chair in the corner against the far wall, next to a crumbling fireplace filled with piles of ash, and Ianto gamely brushes away the grime and brittle shells of long-dead insects before he sits, to wait. He's not sure what scares him more - that she will turn around, or that she won't.

Edited 2014-07-06 18:07 (UTC)

Okay. She's not sure how, but Jennifer has just taken a catastrophically wrong turn. Her first guess is that there's some sort of unpleasant magic going on - a bit ostentatious, even, with the whole overwhelming sense of doom and aggressively spooky aesthetic - and her gaze is drawn to the incongruously polite-looking man sitting in the corner. Is this his work?

Down by her feet, the Quarkbeast sneezes.

"Erm." Jennifer shivers in spite of herself. "Sorry. Wrong… room." She isn't sure what she's interrupting, here, but she's reasonably certain she doesn't want to be interrupting it anymore. She turns to leave, then lets out a little 'tsk' when she realizes the door has transformed into a boarded-over ruin. God, she's probably getting tetanus just by looking at the nails holding it all together. She throws a sheepish, uneasy look over her shoulder at the man in the chair. "D'you mind?" she asks, gesturing to the door.

"Keep your voice down," Ianto warns in a hushed whisper, and that, of all the noises, is what causes the old woman to shift in her chair. It rocks a little, creaking as it does - and the wispy ends of her shawl flow with it, then settle. Ianto tenses, ramrod straight in his chair, relaxing slightly when she moves no further.

"I've tried to open it," he admits quietly. "Sorry."

Jennifer watches apprehensively as the creepy woman in the chair moves. Is she part of the overall spell happening here, or what? Is he even the one in control of things?

She presses her lips together, considering. Then, being careful to keep her voice low, she ventures, "Would you like to leave?" She's assuming the answer is 'yes,' but sitting in a corner isn't exactly conducive to an escape.

You know what, she's really good company, okay. She doesn't ask questions, and at best she's just psychological horror, which is arguably the least traumatic thing in the house. A half-smile tugs the corner of Ianto's mouth into a rictus grin that quickly disappears. "Not so bad in here, is it? Quiet. Haven't been eaten by monsters. As dreams go, I mean. There've been worse."

How long does someone have to sit in a place like this before they go native? Jennifer wrinkles her nose. "There's been better, too. The hall is nice."

She weighs the pros and cons of trying to talk this guy into wanting to leave versus just getting the door open and giving him the option whether he wants it or not. She'd certainly like the option, and there's her decision made for her. Jennifer looks down at the Beast, then gently raps a knuckle against the door. "Who'd like some nice, rusty nails?" she asks the creature in an undertone. "Would you?" The Beast's tail wags in a broad arc, and Jennifer steps back to give him room to work before softly urging, "Get 'em!"

The Quarkbeast darts forward, fangs flashing in the dim light and clawed forepaws gouging at the rotted wood. Jennifer lifts a hand to shield her eyes from wayward splinters as a sizable hole starts to appear in the door. It should be big enough to crawl through, at the very least, before very much longer.

Ianto watches in alarm as the strange - lizard dog? what even - attacks the door. Each ragged, grating noise sends another spike of terror like lightning through his nerves and he grips the arms of the chair, face turning white.

"Stop," he hisses urgently, "stop," and this, again, is what finally stirs the old woman. She folds her arms, wrapping the shawl tighter around her shoulders. It gives in the back, fibers tearing under the slightest movement. It tangles in the ends of her hair, a mousy brown flecked with grey and with silver roots. The chair rocks again, knocking against the uneven floorboards.

"Hello?" she calls, voice thin but young, young for her age. She doesn't turn around. "Yes, who is it?"

Yeah, no, she's definitely not asking the Quarkbeast to stop. She crouches down by the widening hole the creature's creating and gives Ianto a look that pretty plainly says, 'you're barking.'

She's not expecting a reaction from the woman in the chair, and she furrows her brow in the old (is she, though?) woman's general direction before returning her focus to the door. The hole is large enough for her to fit if she wriggles a bit, and while she doesn't like the idea of wriggling her way through the ragged gap, it's more appealing than staying where she is.

"No one important," she says, dropping to her elbows and knees. "We're just leaving." And by 'we' she means the Quarkbeast and herself; she's not speaking for whats-his-name in the corner. And with that, she shoos the Beast aside so she can cram her head and shoulders through the hole.

Ianto looks between the woman and Jennifer's - well - eyebrows knitted, unsure if he should follow now that there's such an obvious and expected exit. Would he fit? He probably wouldn't fit. That's fine. He's rooted to the chair anyway.

"Is that you, love?" the woman asks, lilting, wavering, and she does turns her head now to look in Jennifer's direction, eyes staring endlessly into the middle distance; not blind, just not seeing. She reaches out a trembling hand. Her nails have recently been done, a conservative but warm mauve, the most (only) kempt part of her. "It's just that no one comes to visit me anymore," she says hesitantly, and the greatest escape Ianto can manage is covering his face.

With her head in the hall and her shoulders mostly filling the hole in the door, Jennifer's barely in a position to hear the old woman and in no position to answer her. Grunting to herself, she continues her determined wriggle out of the room, knees scuffing the dust and dirt on the floor.

The Quarkbeast, on the other hand, turns to the woman and cants its head to one side uncertainly. "Quark," it offers, club-like tail thwacking against the wall and dislodging a portion of rotting plaster.

"Oh, Rhi!" the woman exclaims musically, a small smile cracking her lips, reaching out for the Quarkbeast with curiosity. "Have you got a dog? Na fachgen da," she coos, and her fingers twitch invitingly. "Bless."

"It's not a dog," Ianto says weakly from the corner. Then, to the Quarkbeast, "Shoo. Go on, go with her."

Jennifer's legs are disappearing through the hole, now, but the Quarkbeast hesitates in following her. It's not so sure about the old woman - there's something not right about her - but it's inclined to like Ianto in the same way it's inclined to like anyone who doesn't respond to it with full-voiced screaming. It trots over to Ianto's corner with a low, concerned whine, then glances pointedly between him and the door.

"No, that's - no," Ianto insists, raising his voice. He hesitates, then pushes himself from the chair, trying gently by pointedly to wave the Quarkbeast in the direction of the door and Jennifer's shoes. "See? Look. Over - not at me, over there."

"Is that you, dear?" the woman asks again, and she cannot turn all the way around to look at Ianto, though she tries. She continues, sadly, "It's just that no one comes to see me anymore."

The Beast gives Ianto a puzzled look, then - very carefully - hooks his fangs into a loose fold of his pants and gives him a gentle, persistent tug toward the door.

Jennifer, meanwhile, pokes her head back through the hole in the door, wondering what's keeping the Beast. When she sees that it's trying to convince whats-his-face to accompany them, she sighs. Sentimental creature. After casting an uneasy glance the old woman's way, she hisses, "Are you coming, or what?"

"Not my trousers," Ianto chides, momentarily distracted from the situation by the peril his clothing is in. He looks up a bit guiltily when Jennifer sticks her head back in. He could probably fit through that hole, maybe. The door isn't that structurally sound, anyway, it could easily be made bigger. "Yeah," he says after an internal debate, gently shaking the animal from his trouser leg. "Yeah, just... hold on."

He takes a bracing breath and exhales slowly, shakily, crossing to the chair and putting his hands on the back of it so he can lean down next to the woman. Startled by the movement, she turns her head to look at him. "I'm... I'm gonna go now, Mum," Ianto says haltingly, with a tight smile. "I might come back later, yeah?"

He waits for a moment, heart sinking visibly when she stares at him with the same empty expression she had for the window. "That's nice," she says, reaching up to pat his hand once. "Tell me when I have a visitor, won't you? No one visits me these days."

"Okay," Ianto answers, barely an exhalation of sound, and pulls away from the chair, turning back to the Beast. He nods to the hole in the door. "Alright, then, dig me out."

The Beast releases him once he finally seems inclined to follow them out, and trots back over to Jennifer. From her awkward position on the floor, she watches the exchange. When she hears 'mum,' she lets out a little huff of air that might have been a curse if she'd bothered to add any consonants to it. That's his mother? She glances between the two of them, looking for a resemblance, wondering if she should feel envious. Maybe she should.

She doesn't. She drops her chin and hopes that wherever her mother is - if she's anywhere at all - it isn't a room like this one.

She doesn't miss the inherent irony in the fact that now that the man actually wants to come out, leaving the two of them alone seems like the better thing to do. But she doesn't have the energy to argue the point, so she squirms back into the hall to give the Beast room to work.

It's odd - from this vantage point, there's nothing to see but an innocuous, open doorway leading to a pleasant looking guest room. But she can almost hear the sound of numerous fangs making quick work of the door, and it isn't too long before the Beast appears, tail wagging cheerfully. Jennifer sits back against the opposite wall and strokes the leathery scales along its side. "Good boy," she murmurs absently. "Good boy."

The resemblance is easy to miss. Ianto always took after his father in looks and his mother in everything else. Which is sort of worrying, for obvious reasons.

If it's possible to crawl through a ragged hole gracefully, Ianto does it, sitting back once he's through and brushing dust from his knees. A quick glance behind him shows a clean, quiet room. Right. He starts to get up, and when none of his limbs cooperate he sags against the wall of the hallway instead, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Sorry," he says, and then, "thanks," and if his eyes are red after he takes his hands away, well, that's because he was just pressing on them.

"I didn't know," she replies quietly, still resting a hand on the Beast. She still doesn't know how to handle this, really. The only relationship Jennifer has with her parents is one of one-sided, fundamentally insatiable curiosity, just like every other foundling's with their unknown progenitors. Mother Zenobia and Mr. Zambini are the closest things to parents she had. Zenobia had been - and probably still is - completely mad, but in an amiable, harmless sort of way, not like the little tragedy she just witnessed. And Zambini… well, his whereabouts are a mystery (she still sometimes hopes he might show up in Manhattan; his disappearance probably looked rather like hers), but he'd been fine when she last saw him.

Foundlings don't often think of themselves as lucky. It's not a comfortable notion.

Jennifer pushes herself to her feet. She doesn't want to linger by this doorway anymore. After a moment, she offers a hand up to the man. "I'm Jennifer Strange." It still sounds a bit hollow without the old 'acting manager of Kazam Mystical Arts Management' to follow it, but at least she's no longer at the point of having to belatedly cut herself off.

"She's dead now," Ianto offers with a lopsided shrug, like that makes it better. It did, at the time. Even Rhi was relieved, although she hated him for a little while for suggesting it. It's not something he'd prefer to dream about, but he does often, and the guilt keeps him there until he wakes up. Or it used to - now it just keeps him there until he's too exhausted to properly dream, or until someone shows up. The intervention was good. He needed it.

"Ianto Jones." He accepts her hand, using that and an arm braced against the wall to pull himself up. He was kind of hoping she would introduce herself as Hermione and maybe the animal was an Animagus or something? Weirder things have happened. "Let's... not go through any more door. Or not that door. This is nice. For a corridor."

She considers offering a 'so is mine, probably,' then decides against it. No point in pretending she can relate.

"Works for me," she agrees, relieved that they're on the same page, there. She hasn't explored many of the rooms here, but if the others are like that one - deceptively nice from the outside and unpleasant on the inside - she'll pass.

She starts to introduce the Quarkbeast ('explain the Quarkbeast' might be more accurate), but then wonders if she even needs to. Ianto's taken the Beast in stride to a greater degree even than Mr. Fring, who always seemed to be remaining calm through sheer force of will and not due to any inherent familiarity with nonevolutionary animals.

"Are you from the Ununited Kingdoms as well?" she hazards instead, picking a direction and starting to walk. Wouldn't that be a novelty.

Ianto kept a pteranodon - just try to find a pet too weird for him to accept. He follows at Jennifer's shoulder, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets. The Ununited Kingdoms? How Hunger Games. He laughs a little. "The United Kingdom, actually. Wales. Haven't lived there in a while, but I don't think it's fractured quite so badly in my absence."

"Hereford," she says, lips quirking into a smile. They're neighbors - or they would be if they were from the same universe. And said universe was his. "In my universe, a good chunk of Wales is the dragonlands."

There's a loud crunch from below, and Jennifer frowns down at the Beast. It appears to be making short work of a discarded aluminum can, but she can't imagine where he found it. The hallway doesn't seem like the sort to accumulate litter. "Where did you get that?" she asks the creature. He quarks at her unhelpfully, tail wagging.

"Sounds about right." Of all the things to happen to Wales, it being full of dragons is probably the coolest, so he's okay with that.

He crouches down to the animal's level, giving it a stern 'I am disappointed in you' look. "Oi. Drop it." He holds out his hand expectantly. "That cannot be good for your mouth. Pantry, do you think?" he muses. "That must smell great, if it's anything like the other rooms."

Well, full to a point. There are only two, after all, but that's twice as many as there used to be.

The Beast looks startled by the request, ears tucked back and gaze shifting uneasily from Jennifer to Ianto and back. It doesn't drop the can, though, and there's a brief squeal of fangs on metal as it shifts its grip.

"Oh, he eats metal," Jennifer says reassuringly, "among other things. It just seems an odd thing to pick up in a hallway." The Beast, taking that as implicit permission to carry on, gives Ianto an apologetic wag of the tail before crunching down the can. Jennifer casts a glance back the way they came, but there's no trace of other stuff lying around on the carpet.

"Charming." Ianto raises an eyebrow at the animal and stands, hands on his hips. "Have you been exploring? We discussed this. We really shouldn't explore," he adds to Jennifer. Then, "Unless you hold open the door and I scout ahead. If your pet could dig through a wall in a room that's already connected to the hallway, we could come back to the other hallway and then go into these rooms." That makes sense, right? Absolutely. Wow, there's so many possibilities here. Then, again, "If there's nothing in the other hallway."

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jennifer_strange - 2014-07-07 16:32 (UTC) - Expand

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