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

[applesaucemod]

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.]

Comments

[i_jones]

"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."

[jennifer_strange]

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.

[i_jones]

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."

[jennifer_strange]

"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.

[i_jones]

"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."

[jennifer_strange]

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.

[i_jones]

"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."

[jennifer_strange]

It takes Jennifer a moment to parse Ianto's theory (she thinks, at first, that any holes the Beast gnawed between a room and the hallway would only be as good as the door), and then she hums pensively. "Too much drywall might make him ill," she says. Granted, said illness would probably be characterized by the unpleasantness it brought to any and all bystanders and not any lasting harm it would bring to the Beast, but the point still stands. "It would be easier if I had…"

There's another crunch from down near the floor as the Quarkbeast steadily demolishes a chrome muffler. But it hasn't moved. It's as if the hallway itself is somehow producing snacks for it. And if it's capable of helpfully producing metals… "It would be easier," Jennifer says a bit more deliberately, "If I had Exhorbitus."

She turns on her heel and lets out a little "ha!" of triumph when she spies the legendary sword propped against the wall. The enormous ruby set into the hilt gleams in the light and casts little geometric patterns onto the wallpaper.

"Don't touch it," she warns Ianto. Then, "Actually, for safety's sake, we'd better just make you my apprentice." She gives his arm a bracing pat and announces, "You're hired." Then, she hoists the ostentatious weapon with a fond smile.

"This'll cut through walls much quicker than the Beast could."