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

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy rolls her eyes in about equal amounts frustration. "Look, it's not like that," she answers. She knows he deserves at least an explanation, but finds it very hard to give him one. "I just.. I freaked out, okay?"

[fucking_ebay]

"You just freaked out." Also understandable. Also having a hard time just doing what he knows he probably should and giving her a pass. "For a month."

[essentiallyharmless]

"Just give it up, Peter..." She doesn't have the emotional energy to fight him over this, and she doesn't want to hurt him even more. There's so many conflicting emotions inside of her, and it would hurt her too much to let him see that.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter makes a disgusted sound in his throat and hops up to go back to the bar. "Is it even something I did?" he asks, not exactly ready to let it go. "And what the fuck am I supposed to do, Lucy, just pretend we never had anything together?"

[essentiallyharmless]

"If you'd like," she answers, in a voice that attempts to be casual but doesn't quite pull it off.

"What exactly did we have together?" she then counters. They had some fun, good sex, and occasionally some comfort, but were they even really going anywhere? Wouldn't it have gone the same way, anyway?

[fucking_ebay]

"Not much apparently," snaps Peter. It's not like he thought they'd get together and get over everything and get back together if they had this conversation. He kind of thought she might act like she gave a shit about what happened, though.

[essentiallyharmless]

The words sting a little, but it's far too obvious that Peter definitely thought they had something. She takes a deep breath and tries to pull herself together.

"I'm sorry you're hurting," she says, making an effort to keep her voice steady. "But I'd known for a while things weren't working out. I didn't mean for you find out the way you did. And after you scared me, I thought a clean break would be better for everyone."

Never mind that she didn't think to consult Peter in any of this. Never mind that it's all bullshit anyway.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter pours himself a hefty glass of that mead he found earlier, pauses to consider whether to offer Lucy any, then pours himself a bit more instead. "And that's it, you just decided for both of us," he says bitterly, not knowing that he's echoing forgotten objections he's made to being left out of certain other decisions. "After fucking Rabbit Man -- why him, anyway?"

[essentiallyharmless]

She's getting pretty sick of Peter thinking he's entitled to -- well, anything regarding her, really.

"His name is Johnny, and I fucked him because I wanted to," she answers, getting to her feet and starting to sound angry now. "And guess what? You don't get to decide anything when it comes to my life. If I don't want to date you, I'm not going to date you. That's that."

She steps over to him, getting just a little up in his face. "What I do with my body is my decision. If I want to screw around, or do drugs, or have an abortion, or jump off a fucking building, that's my call."

[fucking_ebay]

"Whoa!" Peter's really not prepared for this to turn into an argument over women's lib. If he had his memories of the first time they had this argument he likely would have expected it...and would have had something more he could have been brooding over this entire time. As it is, what he's got in his head is that he just worded one little objection maybe a little bit wrong and now she's acting like he's trying to run her entire life. "Who said anything about that shit?" he snaps. "And do you think maybe you could have found some way to tell me that didn't involve Rabbit Man," he uses the nickname deliberately now, an epithet, "and fucking disappearing into thin air? Really fucking mature, Lucy."