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]

"Oh!" Bee brightens visibly. "That's wonderful! I mean that there's still... you know, community out there. A network for the in-betweens. I'm glad to know that." It's so immediately comforting to know she has another option if things don't work out with the Rebels.

"What was your home universe like?" she asks. "A lot like this one? Mine is almost identical, I think. Apart from the Rift. Did you know there's aliens here? Do you come from one with aliens?"

[heysoulsister]

"Yeah," Jodie says, pointedly thinking, See? Now, if Bee decides the rebels aren't for her - or if they actually turn out to be a problem - she knows there are other possibilities.

She blinks a little at the irrepressible flood of questions, but they're all normal enough. There's a typical list of questions rifties ask one another, and Bee hasn't really strayed from it. "Uh, it's pretty similar to this one, yeah." And the ways in which it differs are not anything Jodie wants to discuss. Even if she did, Bee practically radiates good-natured innocence. Jodie's not about to ruin her day with stories about monsters. "No aliens back home. Not that I knew of, anyway." Presuming entities don't count. "But I have met a few since I got here."

[apidae]

"Me too," says Bee excitedly. "I met one who's a time traveller. He's at least hundreds of years old - probably more, even! He was just lovely. He looks completely like a human, too." She tilts her head. "Isn't that odd? Maybe it's not odd, but it seems a little odd."

She looks Jodie over for a moment. Not for the first time, she wishes she could read her patterns - Jodie seems maybe a little shy, and she's not sure asking more questions is the thing to do.

"Do you like it here?" she asks eventually.

[heysoulsister]

Jodie's smile widens - at Bee's enthusiasm as much as at the idea of ancient time-traveling aliens. "It does sound weird," she agrees, privately thinking that Andrew and James look plenty human, too, despite the term not quite applying to either of them.

She considers the woman's question for a minute, then nods cautiously. "Yeah. It's not that different from where I come from, but it's…" she hesitates, wondering how much to divulge, then settles on, "better. A little." Better by virtue of the fact that she doesn't officially exist, that there's no DPA, no infraworld (or no bleed-through from there to here). Safer.

[apidae]

"Oh, that's good." Bee's curious what exactly is better about it, but that seems like something she maybe shouldn't ask. She's not sure what else to say, really. Sometimes talking to people is so difficult.

She leans back, letting her legs stretch out before her. "Want to read a book?" she asks, gesturing around them.