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

[apidae]

Bee hums thoughtfully. She can understand that. There are certainly a lot of bad people out there, enough for borrowers to worry over.

"I'm sure she knew what she was talking about," she says with a sage nod. "And that it was to protect you. But you're on your own now, aren't you? You might have to start trusting a few of us beans." She grins, tickled by his adorable slang. "We're not all so bad. And those of us who've come through the Rift, well, we've got to look after each other, haven't we?"

Bee's never met any harmful rifty-beans either, as it happens.

[watchesthebeans]

"Jennifer's alright," acknowledges Aglet. "And you seem alright, too. I guess I just never expected beans to take it very well, not even beans who've been through the rift."

He looks thoughtful, and it finally occurs to him to try to learn a little more about her beyond the fact that she's a bean and she's nice. "What kind of place are you from?" he asks.

[apidae]

Bee smiles, pleased to see him relaxing a little bit. "A place a lot like this one," she says. "Well. The waking world, I mean. No rifts or rifties that I know of, but otherwise, I haven't noticed any strong differences."

She scoots back a bit, moving carefully, not wanting to cause undue vibrations or startle him at all. She slips down onto her stomach, resting her chin in her hands, her legs kicking slightly behind her. She can be very like a child, when she feels complacent and calm enough.

"To be honest I rather like it here," she says. "Having come through. It's an adventure."

[watchesthebeans]

Aglet nods. As far as he can tell his own world is a lot more like this one than like Jennifer's, but hers is the only one he's heard about for comparison. "I never really wanted adventure," he admits readily, taking the opportunity to also make himself comfortable by sitting cross-legged on the floor. "I mean, other than borrowing, that was enough. We'd gone to live with some of my cousins, or else I don't think I ever would have left the house where I was born."

[apidae]

"Sounds a bit like me, when I was younger," says Bee. "I never left my mama's house, except to explore the woods in back with my granddaddy. He taught me about the outdoors. Mama taught me everything else." She smiles faintly, a little sad to remember her two most dearly beloved - but, she supposes, it might be worse to have been taken while they were both still alive, missing them, them worrying over where she's got to - she's lucky, in an odd sort of way.

"And haven't you developed even a little taste for adventure?" she asks him. "There's so much out there to explore, and to be borrowed." She grins. "I could help you, if you like."

[watchesthebeans]

Aglet shrugs one shoulder, looking away. Considering Jennifer's barely been able to coax him to come out on walks in her pocket, it's probably safe to say he still doesn't have a taste for it. "It's too big," he admits, though it's almost like he's reminding himself instead of only explaining to her. "Anyway, exploring's not what borrowers do. There are few enough of us without us all going out and getting eaten by cats and things."

[apidae]

"You could be the first," she says brightly. "It might be time for a change, after all. Being in this new place, with new things to see... the rift brought you here, and you might as well make the most of it, hadn't you?" She smiles sweetly. "And as for the bigness, well, that's where I'd come in. I can take you somewhere, keep an eye out for cats and things." She lowers one of her arms down and extends a finger, a friendly little gesture, like offering a hand to shake. "I'll bet there's more to you than just borrowing."

[watchesthebeans]

"I don't see what else there'd be," chuckles Aglet. "Aren't all places kind of the same? Jennifer's apartment isn't that different from the old house."

Heaven help him, he thinks that's all the variation there is in the world.

[apidae]

She laughs outright at that, keeping it muffled to just a delighted giggle. "Oh Aglet, there's so much more out there," she says. "Things you've never imagined! Things you'd see differently than I could, than - that anyone here could! It would be so marvelous. How would you even know if you never go out to see?"

Granddaddy used to say this to her, when she was smaller and more easily frightened by the unknown. It was through him that she learned to cherish and even desire it. She hopes that she inherited a bit of his profound powers of persuasion.

[watchesthebeans]

"I wouldn't," he admits, thinking that one of the things he could see that she never could might be the inside of a cat. He's already voiced that objection, though, and he knows from talking to Jennifer that beans don't like talking about sensible things like whether certain animals are a menace. He tries to sound unbothered by the idea of never knowing; he is a borrower. On the other hand, he is also a teenaged boy. "But you don't even know where I live when I'm awake," he points out. In his world growing up, such a problem would have been insurmountable.

[apidae]

She smiles at the apparent step toward success. "I'm sure I can find you," she says gently. "Jennifer, you say? Are the two of you with a faction?"

That would certainly be a place to start, after all.

[watchesthebeans]

"We live in the ROMAC apartment building," replies Aglet promptly, cheerfully. He hears a little about what goes on elsewhere in the bean world from Jennifer, but by and large he feels that the politics of beans have nothing to do with him. The rebel troublemakers are a far-off threat to be dealt with by someone else. "Maybe you live there, too?"

[apidae]

"Oh," says Bee, careful not to betray any change in her demeanor. That doesn't matter, right? Surely ROMAC has bystanders and tagalongs just as she is to the Rebels. And, as she's consistently reminded herself, she doesn't even know they're that bad! Or at the very least, she likes to prove things for herself. Making friends from ROMAC might be a good thing.

Still, though. It might not be the best idea to out herself as a rebel right away. Better first to gauge the situation as a presumably non-affiliated party, then reveal herself when it's safe.

"I don't live there," she says, smiling. "But I'm not too far either, at least not for someone my size. If you remember me when you wake up, maybe you could tell Jennifer to expect me."

[watchesthebeans]

"I'll do that," agrees Aglet, not seeing any problem with inviting a strange bean to his their home. "Oh!" he exclaims, remembering. "I have a phone! Um. But I don't really...use it."

And he doesn't know his own number, so why did he bring it up?

[apidae]

"Oh, good!" Bee resists a laugh at the idea of a borrower-sized phone. "Too big for you?" she guesses. "Do you know the number? Or Jennifer's, for that matter? If not, I could just give you mine."

[watchesthebeans]

"It's as tall as me," replies Aglet ruefully. It just sort of lives on one end of his shelf, perpetually plugged in. He's played a few games on it now that he's grown a bit less afraid of the bean gadget, but he's never placed a call. "And I um...don't. Know it."

[apidae]

"That's okay," says Bee kindly. "Do you have anything to write on? Or with?"

[watchesthebeans]

For a moment Aglet starts to shake his head, but then he remembers it's a dream and he can have anything he likes in his shoulder bag. Digging around for a moment, he comes up with a stub of pencil lead and a scrap of paper. "You just hit the numbers on the display, right?" he asks.

[apidae]

"That's right," confirms Bee, and she gives him the number, watching with fascination as he writes it down on his tiny little note. "There we are. We're going to have fun, I promise."

[watchesthebeans]

It doesn't occur to him that the scrap of paper is, after all, only part of the dream and won't be there in the morning. Hopefully they'll be lucky enough that the act of writing it down will make him remember it when he wakes. "You'll get to meet Jennifer, too," he says, thinking that his own bean will appreciate him making a friend who likes exploring.

[apidae]

This doesn't occur to Bee until after he's written it down, but she decides not to say anything - after all, writing things down does often help it stick in the memory.

"Yes!" she says. "I'm looking forward to meeting her. What's she like?"

[watchesthebeans]

"Bossy," says Aglet immediately. "And she's got this Quarkbeast that eats metal."

[apidae]

Bee smirks slightly at bossy, then takes a turn for the confused at Quarkbeast.

"Oh," she says thoughtfully. "Well that sounds unusual. I don't think we have Quarkbeasts where I'm from."

[watchesthebeans]

"I don't think anyone but Jennifer has Quarkbeasts where they come from," confesses Aglet. "At least, I hope not."

Though truth be told, the Quarkbeast really has lived up to Jennifer's promises that it won't eat him. That doesn't mean he wants to dangle himself in front of its nose, though.

[apidae]

"Well," says Bee with a little smile, "then it must be very special."

She's excited to meet Jennifer and this Quarkbeast, as well as to see Aglet in the real world. She ruffles a hand through her hair and stretches a little. "We're going to have fun," she promises. "You'll see."