applesaucedream | Encampment Under the Sea [Open to All]

Encampment Under the Sea [Open to All]

photo encampmentunderthesea_zps98ceddce.jpg

Since the dreamers of Manhattan had such a lovely time at the last vaguely-nautical-themed party, the Rift has decided to step things up a notch. Tonight, the dreamers will find themselves in what appears to be a city very much like the one they inhabit in the waking world, full of towering skyscrapers, neon signs, and heavy traffic. But there is one rather crucial difference: this city is located deep underwater, and the aforementioned traffic is mostly whales and fish, with the occasional submersible thrown into the mix.

The walls and windows are heavily reinforced to withstand the pressure of the water outside, and the people who dwell in these buildings seem to be doing rather well for themselves, for the most part. Buildings are connected by enclosed walkways, so barring any horrible accidents, the dreamers should have no problem getting around without getting too wet.

Much like the city they inhabit in the waking world, some areas are more obviously affluent than others, and the dreamers are as likely to stumble upon an upscale club as an underwater pub. But while the chances of a full structural breakdown are slim, there are definitely some areas that are on the leaky side, and a general sense of claustrophobia pervades the city wherever you might find yourself.

Explore. Or, if you're feeling particularly ambitious, attempt to escape. Either way, take care - it's hard to say what might be lurking in the darkness just beyond the city lights.

[ooc: Y'all know the drill. All characters are welcome, whether they are in the game or not. Characters can remember or forget the events of the dreaming at the player's discretion. And the party never stops - backtag into infinity!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm gonna guess some kind of magical healing MacGuffin," says Johnny, still eyeing it dubiously. He is not about to command Daniel to jam this shit into his veins, and he doesn't think he'd want to try it either, but...

"I mean, okay," he says, trying to think reasonably; he desperately needs reason right now. "I only changed the room, I didn't... make the things in it. Those were given to us. By the dream, or whatever." The dream has so far proven to be not particularly friendly, but some of them can swing both ways. The most recent house dream sticks in his memory. "If I found it, it's probably because we needed it. I mean, it could be something bad, but... even if it is, what's the worst that can happen, at this point? If you die you just wake up."

As if dying is easy. He shouldn't say shit like that. Like he's getting used to it.

"It's up to you, man," he murmurs, setting the syringe back down in the case. "I think I've done enough." Meant to be a joke, comes out so bitter it burns his tongue.

"Right, because this environment has just been so accommodating, you know. Really molds itself to our needs." He's injured, he's in pain, he's cranky. And that was rude. He sighs. "Look, I'm sorry. And you're right, maybe it could help."

He shoots Johnny a rueful smile and awkwardly drags himself over to the kit, flipping it open and studying the equipment inside. Oh, how nice, it even looks clean. Clean and bright green and ever so faintly phosphorescent. Lovely.

And then he keeps talking, if only for his benefit, because if he's going to try this he's going to need a distraction. Daniel Jackson, always willing to try new things. The needle is big, and this will hurt. This is also nothing like standard medical procedure. And the worst that could happen? He's fairly sure that using the needle can't entail anything worse than what he's already been through - though of course now that he's thought that the dream will probably try to one-up him.

"So worst case scenario, I die." He says it point-blank, and pulls off his jacket. "Not so bad, way I see it. I have this habit, see." He rolls up his shirtsleeve, studying the arm he plans to medically violate. He settles for the deltoid. Lots of veins there. Good for intramuscular injection. "In the waking world, mind you. I kind of have this thing." He picks up the needle, weighs it, shit that thing is fucking enormous, removes the cap, and squeezes the pump a little to eliminate any air pockets. And he keeps talking, faster and faster, because he is Daniel Jackson, he is willing to try new things, and this is how he deals with it. "Call it a bad habit, really. I have this thing where I tend to die." He positions the needle, hovering it over the skin of his arm, really not wanting to carry the action out.

"Quite frequently," he finishes cheerfully, and jabs the needle in and squeezes the pump before he can change his mind and shuts his eyes and breathes through his nose and tries to breathe because something is happening, some interior chemical reaction, and he can't tell if it's good or bad.

Whoa, okay then! Johnny had not been prepared for his half-assed suggestions to be taken so readily, cringing back as Daniel just up and injects himself. Wow. Wow, okay.

"Jesus," he mutters, and glances back up at Daniel's face, catching up with all the stuff he's been saying somewhat after the fact. "Uh. I'm sorry to hear that."

What does one say to something like that, anyway? He could offer a lackadaisical 'me too,' but he's only experienced it in dreams, and that would feel beyond shitty. To be like 'I know how you feel' when no, he does not.

"At least... you still look pretty alive," he says, which, wow, good job, Johnny.

He trains his focus on Daniel's arm, then his ankle. "Feel anything?" he says awkwardly.

"I feel pretty alive," he says, a little breathless because woah that stuff, whatever it is, is doing something strange and maybe scientifically impossible to the biology in his leg region, "which is an improvement."

It's like the bones are knitting together on an interior level and he doesn't know how he feels about that. On one hand, his ankle is feeling less like it was crushed and more like its normal, healthy, un-crushed self, but on the other, he did just inject himself with a foreign substance of unknown and dubious origin, purely because it seemed like the thing to do.

This is a dream, Daniel is exerting dream logic, and that is going to continue to be his excuse for doing something so unbearably stupid.

After a few minutes, the ankle feels safe to stand on. Which Daniel does, promptly, unfolding himself from the wall to get to his feet, a little hesitant and wobbly but otherwise pain-free.

He relaxes and allows himself a surprised smile.

"Guess you were right. And, uh, aside from feeling better, nothing else seems different." He frowns a little, puzzled. "That...that almost never works."

Johnny grins, relieved, and stands up. "Every once in a while the dreams do something nice for us," he says. "But, you know... just. Once in a while."

As if to say, we just used up our token.

"So," he says, feeling antsy. Now that they can move again, the question becomes what now. There's no sitting around in these dreams. That's asking something to find them.

"Maybe we can find a way out of here," he suggests after a moment.

"That'd be good, I think," Daniel agrees, casting about for a door. "Not sure how I feel about wandering around without a plan, but what can you do?"

He turns to Johnny, then peers up at the water, visible through the glass ceiling. And shudders imperceptibly. Not fun to think about. "You know where we are?"

"No fuckin idea. I just changed the room, I don't have a map in my head." Unfortunately enough. He shrugs, looking around for anything useful. "I mean, there's gotta be a way out, right? Within the dream logic, I mean. Sometimes it's like... we can't leave the space we wind up in, but this time, I mean, there's a world out there. That can't just be for show. There's gotta be like... a submarine, or some shit."

He stops, hearing himself. "Not that I'd know what the fuck to do with a submarine if I found one," he says, a little embarrassed.

"Well, hey, me neither. Might be able to tell you what century it's from, but that's about it."

He moves in slow revolution, sweeping his gaze around the room - props to Johnny, this is much nicer than where either of them started - until he finds what he's looking for.

"Gotta door, here." He cocks his head. "Two doors, actually."

Neither of them look like they belong in the room they're in. The rest of it is rather pleasant, carpeting and plant life and the whole nine yards, but these doors are heavy, firmly set steel, looking more like airtight hatches on a submarine.

"Well, it looks like we're underwater, so they might just lead...out." He swings a hand vaguely upward, feeling a little sick at the idea. "But unless you can find any other way out of this place..."

He doesn't complete the thought.

"Jesus," murmurs Johnny. "No. No, we're not... even gonna try that." Christ, it gives him the willies just thinking about it. "There has to be a... like a passage, or something? I don't fuckin know."

He scans the room and finally spots a window up the rear wall, through which he can glimpse a little enclosure. A control booth?

"Up there." He moves over toward it, energized by the task at hand, ridiculous and improvised though it might be - he needs something. "I'm gonna... see if I can get up there."

Shouldn't be too hard. Right? Actually, should be pretty fucking easy. He just makes himself a staircase, and...

He's not really feeling that though. He doesn't want to do it anymore than he has to.

There's a pillar running up the side of the enclosure, with an winding pattern running up around it, which might work for handholds. Maybe he can climb.

"I've decided," he says, "I'm gonna do something really stupid."

He moves to the pillar, grips onto two ledges, and hoists himself up.

He swivels around immediately at the mention of something else; those doors don't look safe or like the sort of doors he wants to be going through anytime soon. He can't quite tell what it is, though it seems important.

"Uh." He watches nervously as Johnny prepares to do something that, yes, Daniel agrees, is probably really stupid. "Johnny, what are you doing?"

Yeah, that doesn't look safe. He starts forward, alternating between shooting Johnny a worried look and pausing to look at his probable destination. He stops just beside the pillar, staring up.

"You sure that's a good idea?" He probably isn't and it probably isn't but it feels polite to ask.

"No," says Johnny, sounding distinctly detached and unconcerned. Probably not a good sign. He clambers up a little higher, starting to feel like this is definitely not a good idea. "But if I fall I just wake up, so, you know, what the fuck ever. Sorry if I abandon you here. It won't be on purpose."

God, listen to yourself, Truant. He bites his lip and continues up, refusing to examine any of the cavalier bullshit he just said.

"Johnny, maybe..." He doesn't finish the sentence. Johnny's actually making good progress, but the way he sounds as he tosses those last words to him - yeah, no, not good. "Really, I, I think the mantra of 'it's just a dream' only goes so far."

Daniel's still going to move underneath him, maybe in preparation of catching him for all the good that might do, though the likelihood of Johnny staying awake after falling is -

He is not going to finish that thought.

Johnny stops, partly because of what Daniel's saying and partly because he's stuck. The next handhold is a little out of reach of his stupid little skinny arms.

"What does it even matter," he says irritably. "What's one more time dead in these fucking dreams? I'm used to it."

Liar.

He hangs there for a moment, awkwardly sprawled like a monkey, and rests his forehead against the cold stone of the pillar.

He makes himself a little ledge to grab onto, something closer. Just a tiny adjustment. Barely costs him anything.

Daniel, Gabriel, none of them understand. Any minute, just as easily as he could lose his grip and fall, he could lose his hold on the power, something will jut out of the wall and slice through Daniel, or the floor will open and swallow them up, or the ceiling will disappear and the water will crush them.

Any of this could happen. He's seen it. He saw it happen to Seth. It could happen to him. Just because it hasn't doesn't mean it won't.

He exhales long and slow and builds himself a walkway, a little bridge between him at the booth he's trying to reach.

"There," he mutters, not sure if he's talking to Daniel or himself. "Happy?"

Daniel's eyebrows shoot up; woah, okay then.

"Wow." Then he remembers Johnny's first point and winces, pushing hands into his pockets and dropping his gaze to the floor.

"Look," he says, well aware that this is probably not the best time for a heart-to-heart. "Just because you're used to something doesn't make it right. I've died...god, so many times, I can't even keep track anymore. Doesn't make it easier and doesn't mean you should get used to it." Never mind that Daniel has by now. Sort of. He's accepted his role of cosmic punching bag and all the baggage that entails. So, yes, he's a bit of a hypocrite. A bit of a large hypocrite. It's a work in progress.

"Yeah," says Johnny, not really ready for this conversation. Especially not with someone he's just met. Someone who saw him kill something.

"I'm gonna. I'm gonna see what this is." He steps gingerly onto his bridge and crosses over to the little enclosed room. Inside he can see some kind of control panel - a big lever, and a lot of buttons.

"I don't know what any of this shit is," he calls, "but I think it might be a way out." Call it a feeling. Or just that he has to do something. Starting with break the glass? He doesn't see a way in.

"I might have to bust my way in," he announces, feeling monumentally stupid. Just gonna declare everything he does before he does it. As if looking for validation.

"Should I...I dunno, come up there?" he calls back. He studies Johnny's route up a little skeptically. Johnny might not have trusted himself to make it all the way up but clearly he's nimbler than he thought. Daniel wouldn't class himself as clumsy but he's definitely not of the same build, and he's not sure if he would trust the pillars and Johnny's self-made bridge to support their combined weight.

"What do you see?" he asks. He's decided against that line of thought unless it becomes a liability.

"Uh..." Johnny glances back down. For that, he'd definitely need to make a staircase or something. "I think it'll be okay. Just... hang on."

He strips off his shirt, because fuck it, and it's covered in monster blood anyway, bearing all his scars and ink to Daniel, the ocean, and God. Whatever.

He tears it up with some difficulty - it's a lot harder than they make it look in movies - and wraps a piece of it around his fist. Then he punches right through the window.

"Ow, FUCK!" He jerks back, clutching his bleeding fist. "I - I'm fine, I'm fine. Just stupid."

At least the glass actually broke. He would have shattered every bone in his hand if it had been as thick as what's keeping the water from them.

"Johnny!" He grabs at the pillar as soon as he hears the explosive swear, reflexive and useless because he knows he won't be able to climb up there to help, not without possibly dislodging them both, and he hears the tinkling of broken glass and he can see, barely, Johnny with his scars and his bleeding hand and his torn-up shirt and the smashed window, and Daniel has enough context to figure out what just happened and seriously, what an ill-advised course of action, but there's nothing he can do about it now.

"Johnny, maybe that's - not such a good idea," he starts again, halting, because it's not like he could do much to stop him regardless. He's already punched out the window.

"OH REALLY," Johnny snaps back, and uses his mangled fist to punch out the rest of the glass. Ahhhh shit that really stings. Fuck.

"Okay I'm going in. You just hang tight, Flash Gordon." He hoists himself up with a great amount of effort, hauls himself through, and lands heavily on the floor inside the booth. "Aagh," he grunts, and just lies there for a while. What is he doing. What is he doing.

Welp.

He picks himself up and gives Daniel a wave. He's got cuts all over his arms and torso from the glass, stupid idiot, but whatever, right? Maybe they'll find more of that magic neon shit.

He takes a closer look at the control panel, which is all to do with something called a 'Bathysphere,' whatever the fuck that is. It looks sort of promising, though, like summoning something. Operating cleanly on his ongoing inertia of 'what the fuck ever,' Johnny cranks the lever.

Immediately the floor rumbles, and just near where Daniel's standing, a little hatch opens, and up slides something small, spherical, and distinctly submersible-looking.

"YEAH!" yells Johnny in a manic burst of excitement, and then upward, as though addressing the dreaming itself, "Suck it!"

He can see Johnny through the window, waving, remarkably triumphant for someone who's just spent the last few minutes getting cut up in broken glass. Daniel raises a hesitant hand to wave back, torn between relief and concern.

Johnny sets to work on...whatever it is he found up there and Daniel just stands there, feeling thoroughly useless and with no idea what to do with his hands. He opens his mouth, intending to call to ask if there's anything interesting, except that at roughly the same time, the floor decides to begin shaking.

"What -" is all he manages before the floor just opens, an apparent hatch folding out, and something metal and globular just rises out of the floor.

"What did you do?" Daniel yells, staggering backwards in full preparation for the thing to start beeping out an ominous bomb-like countdown, because that would be exactly in line with the kind of luck they've had so far and to be honest he just expects that sort of thing to happen regularly at this point, except that now the floors have stopped rumbling and the sphere device-thing hasn't made any indications that it may have a hidden bomb-related nature, and Johnny is making victorious noises from within the booth and, upon closer inspection, the sphere actually more vaguely resembles a submarine than a bomb.

"What's it look like?" retorts Johnny, heaving himself awkwardly back out of the window and shifting his makeshift bridge so it becomes a gentle slope back down to the floor. He slides down, wrapping his hand more carefully, bandage-like, in the remains of his shirt.

He pats the 'bathysphere', if that's what the kids are calling it. "Way out," he says.

"That's assuming we can figure out how to use it." It looks more like a submarine - albeit a small and oddly shaped one - the longer he stares at it and it's not like there are any other ways out of the place, but Daniel's doubtful of how well the thing might work in terms of functionality.

He glances over at Johnny, frowning when he sees the latticework of glass cuts over scar tissue, then quickly pulls off his jacket and holds it out to him.

"Here."

Johnny ignores Daniel looking at him; he doesn't need this shit right now, he swears to god - but he takes the jacket with a mumbled "Thanks."

It's way too big for him, but whatever.

"We'll figure it out," he says. "I mean, what's the alternative?" He inspects it briefly, then pushes on an important-looking switch, causing the hatch to swing open. He peers inside. It looks cramped, but safe enough.

"Cozy," he says dryly, and steps inside. There's not much of a console - just a joystick and an ignition, really. "I think I can probably drive this thing. Wanna find out?"

Daniel would be crazy to just go along with this. Johnny is distantly aware of how reckless and stupid he's being, like there's no tomorrow, or maybe like he just desperately wants to wake up, and he doesn't want to wait for it. But he levels a challenging stare anyway.

"I mean, the dream gave it to us, so I guess that means we should use it." He looks back at Johnny, shrugging. It's not foolproof reasoning, but Daniel did just stab himself with a needle full of neon green goo under an equally flimsy premise, so he's decided that standard reasoning doesn't really have a place in this dreamscape. Besides, when has Daniel not participated nonlinear intuitive leapfrogging? It's practically his specialty. Other than, well, dying.

He enters the submarine - he is going to call it that because that is the best word to describe its function, vocabulary-wise - a little uncomfortably. This thing was almost certainly not built to hold two people, especially if one of them is a six-foot man who's spent the past eight years working out of a military base.

"Ready when you are," he says once he's settled. Johnny is either very practiced at navigating these sorts of dreams or very at the end of his rope and just wants to move forward, away from this place. Daniel doesn't blame him in any case; he wouldn't mind terribly getting out of here either.

"Yeah, okay." Johnny sighs heavily, feeling a little tired and less excited now that he's faced with actually going somewhere, exploring the Dreaming. This seems like something he shouldn't be doing. Right?? This is probably a really terrible idea.

Too late now. He steps in after Daniel and all but curls up in the corner of it. He takes up a lot less space than his companion but he still feels cramped as hell, and that's not a good feeling for him. Better move fast.

The door clangs shut, seals itself with a hiss of air, and there's a drop in his gut as the sphere plunges down a short shaft and into the water, and then just sits there, kept up by some mechanism they can feel vibrating beneath their feet. Johnny reaches out, on autopilot himself, and grabs the joystick-looking lever.

"Let's see how this works," he says, not sure if he's grim or manic, and gives the lever a little jerk. Instantly the whole mechanism follows that direction, puttering along in the water. Johnny stares out the grimy little excuse for a windshield and navigates nervously through the depths.

Encampment Under the Sea [Open to All]

no subject

tw: injections/needles

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)