applesaucedream | Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

Current Music: Evening July 27th/Morning July 28th

Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

The woods are dark and deep, but not particularly lovely. If anything, they feel dangerous, as if something terrible might come lurching out from behind any given tree and tear into the nearest warm body. What that terrible thing might be is anyone's guess. A cat with hands? Slenderman? Stegosaurus? Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf? All of the above in a horrible mob? It's anyone's guess. But every dreamer will be absolutely convinced that there is something unspeakable out there, and that it's after them.

The dreamers have two things on their side. The first is that there is actually nothing dangerous lurking in these woods (with the possible exception of other dreamers). The pervasive terror the dreamers are feeling is just that: a rift-given feeling, nothing more and nothing less. That snapping twig or rustle in the undergrowth is almost certainly just a squirrel or something else equally harmless.

The second is that no dreamer is alone. They all will be reunited with - or introduced to - their dæmons, a source of comfort in this dark, intimidating wilderness. However frightened the dreamers might be, at least they have someone with them who definitely doesn't want them dead.

[OOC: as ever, any and all are welcome! You don't have to be in the game to join the fun. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. And the party only stops when you want it to; feel free to backtag forever.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That is a difference in opinion," Rush responds tightly. "I am perfectly fucking normal."

Fuck, he's better at lying than this. His breathing is erratic. His breathing is erratic. Rush isn't even sure if he has a 'normal', a baseline. He's lived so long without one.

He has to move. So he paces, tight and controlled, and gives his heartrate and breathing adequate reasons to be erratic. Perfectly normal. He is tired. He is fine.

"You're not," snaps Nathaira. "You're not even doing a slightly good job at hiding it."

"I did not ask." The headache he didn't realize he had is getting unbearable. Now both hands go to his temples, applying pressure, he must restore his breathing.

Johnny sighs heavily. So much for that. Not like he blames the guy, this kind of stubborn refusal to talk shit out is pretty familiar. He's gotten a lot better at it lately.

Rush is still flipping out, and Johnny's instinct is to move forward and pat him on the back or something, but he reacted so badly to that last time that instead he stays put and feels useless.

"You know," says Nova after a moment. "Having Nathaira outside you has... advantages. If you try petting her, maybe... maybe that would help?"

She looks at the panther, then up at Johnny. "It helps us," she says.

Johnny says nothing, feeling embarrassed.

Rush freezes and stares at the rabbit for a long, distasteful minute.

"In what way is a communicative hyperintelligent leporid qualified to dispense psychological medical advice?" he asks waspishly. "You realize this is the case? You understand what you've recommended? You made the suggestion that I go and pet a cat to make myself feel better?"

"Actually," rumbles Nathaira, sliding her head beneath his hand in a motion that's now becoming nauseatingly familiar, a sort of forced stroking, "plenty of therapists recommend petting cats to treat anxiety. It lowers blood pressure."

Rush does not know what to do with that and will therefore not respond to it. He will not admit to indirectly taking advice from a rabbit. That would be fucking absurd.

Nova sniffs, unimpressed, and hops back over to Johnny, with Nathaira focused on Rush.

"Come on, man, don't be a prick," mutters Johnny, bending down to pick Nova back up. "It's not just that she's a cat, it's that she's part of you. It's comforting because it is. There doesn't have to be a fuckin... psychological medical precedent for it."

Nova reaches out with a little front paw and gives him a tiny bap. Be nice.

He will not admit that the way Nathaira is now rubbing her chin against his leg, like some fucking domesticated house cat, is bizarrely reassuring. His brain latches onto strange things in times of high anxiety, this is statistically true given his history and this particular instance is no exception. His breathing, at least, is no longer erratic.

"It's comforting because it is," parrots Rush, almost imperceptibly rolling his eyes at the phrasing. "Eloquent. Truly. Someone give this man a PhD."

"Quiet," his panther orders, flicking at the back of one knee with her tail. He stiffens at the feather-light contact but recovers admirably enough to stare at her, deeply suspicious. Is he being admonished by a panther? He is being admonished by a panther.

Johnny flips Rush off casually, without any malice behind it. He's an obstinate jerk, but he's having a rough time, and from the sound of things he's not a rifty, at least not yet. Worrying after someone else make it easier to ignore the slow burn of his own dread.

"That's better though, isn't it?" he says, barely resisting the urge to smirk.

"Shut up," he fires back.

"What was that you said about eloquence?" purrs Nathaira.

"You can also stop talking." But he hasn't stopped petting her with one hand, awkwardly. Petting her serves his interests. This is the only reason. "You're not even supposed to be able to vocalize. You don't have the physiological capabilities. How are your vocal chords producing those noises?"

"Don't overthink it. You might break something."

Rush has no answer, so he merely huffs quietly to himself and resumes his disgruntled petting. If this panther really is an extension of his self, then she would know there's too much damage in that neurological area already, all of it horribly beyond repair. And none of it anyone's concern but his.

Johnny shrugs nonchalantly and sits down, holding Nova in his lap, making a little show of petting her as well. It is really comforting, even though she's just as nervous as he is - at least they have each other, this rare point of contact.

"So," says Johnny, not sure what else to do. "Doctor of what?"

"I'm a cryptographer," he says shortly. "Mathematician. Why in the everliving fuck would you care?"

Nathaira nips at his hand, some absurdly scolding action, and he jolts away.

"What the fuck."

"He asked," she explains impatiently.

Johnny can't generate enough self-respect to give much of a shit about Rush's continued jackassery. Really, he's just enjoying watching Nathaira's attempts to get him to chill. He reflects briefly that he's glad - and maybe a little surprised - that he gets along so well with Nova. Their initial meeting had been a little shaky, perhaps, but it certainly didn't go on this long.

"Cool," says Johnny calmly. "Not the life-saving kind, though. That could be useful, even in a dream. Which would make me care more."

Nova nuzzles against him and gives him a little nip as well, maybe taking a pointer from the bigger, older soul-creature. Johnny smirks down at her. Come on now.

"Should you ever come up against a hyperspace gateway address cyphered in an algebraically decimal alien locking grid, you can let me know," Rush counters in a marginally less caustic tone than usual.

Never mind that it took him two years to crack the last cyphered address he encountered and he'd more or less had to mentally torture himself to do it and the solution they'd implemented hadn't even been his because he was not good enough, would never be good enough, would fail at that endeavor like he had and would so many others.

He stops petting the panther because it feels too fucking bizarre to continue doing it, instead hooks both hands around the back of his neck and occupies himself examining the asymmetrical arrangement of the trees, the quantum subdivisions of dream particles that comprise the air, the leaves, the dirt, and wonders if it would be possible to observe their structure on a molecular scale, then almost immediately dismisses the idea. What would that accomplish?

His mind is locked in distant stasis, trapped in cryogenic stagnation, billions upon billions of light years away from any feasible solution to this problem, and his consciousness has been displaced to here, an entirely unrelated anonymous forest with an equally anonymous man and his rabbit that have no empirical grasp of the space in which they occupy and, apparently, no intellectual drive to examine it. Rush finds that grating. Immensely so.

"Who're you?" he snaps with perhaps more rough diction than is strictly necessary, an attempt to maintain conversational norms that he has a purely basic grasp of. He only recalls the fundaments of interpersonal dialogue, one of which is that when the opposite party directs a question in relation to the subject's person, the subject must respond with a question of equal association and magnitude.

The stream of science-fiction sounding nonsense makes him want to laugh, but he manages to keep it contained. There's no reason why it can't all be true, it's not like he hasn't met weirder, more science-fictional things. To say nothing of an angel.

And then that unfriendly demand, out of left field. Johnny blinks at him. Jeez.

"Johnny Truant," he says slowly. "I'm nobody." He shifts his arms a little closer around Nova, tucking his knees up. "I worked in a tattoo parlor in Los Angeles. Then I fucked up my life and almost lost it. Now I'm here." He focuses on his shoe as he scrapes it gently over dried leaves. "Manhattan. When I'm awake. It's hard to explain if you haven't already come through."

There, is that satisfying? It's more than he'd ordinarily be willing to share, but not so much that he feels exposed yet.

Rush has nothing to say about any of that, merely put the question forward as it seemed the socially acceptable thing to do, but evidently that was a computational error on his part as Johnny does not seem to want to actively discuss it so he decides that's enough discussion relating to their own personal selves for now. He's still working on reordering the chaotic neurological sludge in his own internal thought processors, a dismissal of the high vibrations of toxic anxiety and whatever the fuck else is there that shouldn't be.

"Come through," he repeats, narrowing his eyes. "As in a wormhole?"

"Sort of," says Johnny, relieved Rush is picking up on that rather than any of the rest of it. "I mean, I don't know one way or the other. We call it the Rift. I don't know that anyone knows... what it really is, or how it works."

He rubs distractedly at the back of his neck. "Sound like something in your doctoral wheelhouse?"

Now that is infinitely more intriguing than whatever stories this person might have about souls or personal history.

"Why didn't you mention that earlier?" Rush asks mildly, dropping his hands and staring at him. "An anomaly of that scientific consequence that exists in Manhattan? What is it? Who discovered it? What does it do?"

And how does he get to it he almost adds, but bites that one off. He is in stasis in a ship in a different part of the universe, he reminds himself, and whatever possible access he might have to a...Rift of any nature is simply out of the question at the present time.

Johnny gives him a put-upon sigh and a stare to match. "I don't fuckin know, man, I'm new here. It pulls people out of their universes and into a new one. Into Manhattan. And it puts us all in these dreams, and that's all I know."

He shrugs and pushes a hand through his hair. "Nobody's figured out how to go back through yet, or anything. But I guess you haven't come through yet. Sometimes that happens." He's not sure whether he wants to say 'lucky you' or not, with someone this fucked up, coming through might be a blessing. He oughta know.

That's fascinating, in a frustrating, distant sort of way. Rush wishes he could analyze it. The ramifications of that sort of thing existing, how it apparently diverges into multiple parts of different universal, possibly pandimensional constructs, is singularly incredible. Completely unheard of, even in his own work that frequently involved subspace wormholes. Such things pale in comparison to this.

"There's a multi-branal penetrative force existing in the very accessible confines of Manhattan and you never thought to mention that earlier?" The sheer scope of a discovery like that is staggering. Rush can't possibly conceive of why anyone would simply forget to mention it.

"Usually the people I meet here already know about it," says Johnny, raising an eyebrow at him. "It's kind of the reason these things happen, you know? Also we were sort of busy."

Something cracks in the woods, muffled and distant, and Nova stiffens, stretching her ears out to listen. Johnny manages not to lose his composure. He doesn't feel up to running again just yet.

"You being here might mean you're gonna come through soon, I guess," he continues, "or it might not. You might forget the whole thing, I guess. I don't know."

"Like fuck," he answers incredulously. "I'm not going to be forgetting an interdimensional force that can breach diverging D-branes, I don't care how long I've been in stasis."

Three years, hopefully. If they reach their planned endpoint. Or possibly forever if they don't.

While Johnny may be well at ease with the disturbing noises in the woods, the snap of an indescribable something provokes a shuddering jump from Rush and a low, menacing growl from Nathaira. Rush is really fucking tired of the perpetual rate of increased adrenaline, but - and he makes sure of it this time - his breathing is not erratic. Yet.

"If you say so, buddy," says Johnny, running his hand soothingly over his rabbit.

"I don't like it here," she murmurs after a moment.

"I know." He scoops her up closer. "It'll be okay."

He holds her for a minute, looking around, then glances back at Rush. At this point he's not sure if running will make a difference - if there's a way out of these woods (trying to escape dream settings has never proved especially possible, except of course for that one time). But sitting still might lead to something equally unpleasant. Nova's nervousness is starting to flow back into him, making him twitchy and nervous. "What do you want to do?" he asks.

Get back to work. Wake up from fucking stasis. Get rid of the panther. Find a way to Manhattan, or this man's spaciotemporal-shifted equivalent.

"Find a way out," he says pointedly, jerking a hand in a quick, angular gesture that's meant to encompass the entire forest but could just as easily be misinterpreted as that tree over there in particular. He is tired of his breathing being erratic. Which it is not now and has not ever been.

The lie does nothing to help. Any moment he's expecting something of his usual nightmares to be shoved along into this mix of trees and adrenaline and terror, perhaps a wave of water or a small tight space (like a coffin, his brain provides unhelpfully), or even the fucking - no, he's not thinking about fucking them. It would be just the sort of thing to enter the simulation at this point, when he gets fucking relaxed enough or at ease enough or used enough to the constant heart-pounding and it just has to throw him a new wrench to fuck things up further.

"All right," says Johnny wearily, and gets to his feet. "That sounds like a great plan, if the rift'll let us pull it off." He's partly saying this because he has an inkling it'll annoy Rush, which the miserable little shit part of him is starting to see as the only option for a leisure activity in this fucking dream.

He shifts Nova to one hand and offers the other to Rush.

"I don't see any other options here, do you?" he fires back, sounding mildly offended despite his best efforts to not sound mildly offended. "What, you rather fancy running in circles in the fucking woods?"

Very obviously ignoring the proffered hand, Rush turns on his heel and starts forging blindly ahead with absolutely no regard for the concept of stealth.

"Yep," says Nathaira as he shoves a particularly obstinate branch out of the way with an earsplitting crack, "that's definitely the best way to go about doing this. Hey, break those twigs a little louder, why don't you? I think there's someone on the other side of the planet who didn't hear you coming."

He whirls on the panther, teeth gritted, fuming.

"Shut. Up."

"I'm just saying that might be what ends up happening," says Johnny, withdrawing his hand and breaking into a brisk walk to follow. "But sure, I'd rather get out."

And okay, he likes the panther, but even he thinks that's being a little harsh. "Hey, all right," he says, stopping with them and raising a hand. "Bagheera, Dr. Happy. Nobody wants to be here, okay? Let's just chill out for a second."

But man, being the sensible one is a lot easier when his own terror, irrational or not, is spiking back out of control. He turns to look behind him, for a moment certain there's something there, looming. There isn't, but that does not make him feel better.

"Let's just - let's keep going," he says. "And let's keep the loving banter to a fucking minimum."

Nathaira has the audacity to shoot Rush a significant look at the words "fucking minimum," which earns her a glare of equal or greater proportion. Then she mouths "Bagheera?" at him, incredulous. Rush simply shrugs, as if to say don't look at me. He doesn't have answers to anyone's fucking questions, much less hers.

He echoes Johnny's first movement, glancing back over his shoulder, then starts doing it more periodically. He doesn't like the prickle on the back of his neck. He doesn't like it. But his breathing is not erratic, so Rush is going to assume he is doing just fine, thank you.

The assessment significantly increases his resolve.

"Do you think," he begins in a tight whisper, jerking around to stare behind them yet again, "that there is actually anything fucking in these woods? You're the first other person I've even seen." Not that he's been too tremendously helpful, mind. The mention of the multi-dimensional breach remains by far the most interesting and useful thing to come out of this little encounter, and Johnny didn't even know much about it.

Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

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