Better to Receive than to Give [open to all]

[applesaucemod]

Somewhere in the cosmos, there is something bright, and young, and playful. Somewhere, this being watches over their little flock and does their best to make those people safe and happy. Somewhere, that godling and their flock celebrate the winter holidays in the happiest of dreams.

And somewhere closer at hand, a sleeping giant stirs.

The bright tapestry of dream threads gathered by Zephyr is suddenly yanked hard enough to pull it from its temporary mooring. Something entirely unlike the little godling reels in the dreamers so neatly gathered and packaged up for it, bringing its own toys back to their proper place and taking all the others it can with them. Unsatisfied, it reaches out again and again, dragging in dreamers from all across the multiverse. It will snare them, all of them, and then it will possess them completely.

Perhaps it's fitting that when the stolen dreamers arrive in this new shared mindscape, they'll find they've been designated the Rift's Christmas gifts to itself. Each might awaken inside a dark box, or cocooned in…is that tissue paper? When they claw their way out they'll be greeted by the sight of an enormous evergreen tree laden with twinkling lights and kitschy knickknacks looming overhead. Beyond the shadow of the tree the rest of the world -- that is, the living room -- is just as large. Or is it that the dreamers have just become very small? Giant packages wrapped in bright paper form an obstacle course, but the wooden floor of the room is wide open between the tree and the hearth where an enormous plate of cookies and glass of milk await a cataclysmic Santa Claus.

All in all, things are fairly normal as far as the rift's dream gatherings go…at least on the surface. The more telepathically sensitive among the dreamers may notice an undercurrent of something darker, more urgent, and more possessive than normal. The rift isn't just sampling the wares of other worlds tonight; this time it means to play for keeps.


[OOC: This is the second part of our crossover with wethelost! Part one can be found here. Usual dream party rules apply: all players and characters are welcome regardless of whether they are currently in the game, and characters may remember or forget the events of the dream party at the discretion of their players.

For reference, characters of average human height are roughly four inches tall according to the scale of their current surroundings. There is an entire giant house beyond the living room; characters will find a kitchen and dining room on the same floor, a staircase outside the door of the living room that leads up to a second floor with two bedrooms and a bathroom, and another staircase off the kitchen that goes to an unfinished basement. Feel free to add details as needed!

This event takes place on evening of August 8th/morning of August 9th in Applesauce time, and December 31 in WtL time.]

Comments

[omnomnom_feels]

Rashad is shaking visibly now, and it takes him much too long to understand that he has succeeded, that the man is already climbing out. His hands continue to tear uselessly at the package as Rush tumbles to the floor, and his whole body gives a jolt at the sound of the impact.

The object of his fear -- Rush's impending death -- is gone. The fear, however, is not. It will dissipate on its own, but not quickly -- not so quickly. He lets out a sound halfway between a moan and a whine -- and, suddenly fearing an attack from above (it is something to fear, and his mind craves stimuli to which it can attach his emotion) he turns and crams himself head-first through the hole Rush just vacated.

[lottawork]

The environment, his rescuer, everything in the vicinity ranks lower on the scale of personal priority compared to the rampant shivering, the constriction of blood vessels and the frailty of extremities. It's - fuck, he has to process this. He has to -

Rush lifts his head in search of his unexpected savior, only to find -

"What the fuck are you doing?"

The words explode in a strained amalgamation of disbelief, horror, panicked fury. What the fuck is he doing?

[omnomnom_feels]

Rashad already has his torso through the hole; Rush's demand for information reaches his ears as he claws his way inside, pulling himself as far as he can into the tight cocoon of paper and cardboard. He very quickly reaches a point where he's more tearing paper than getting further inside, his arms pressed too close in to get leverage. The fallen angel comes to a stop with a little over half the length of his legs sticking out through the torn lid, hyperventilating audibly. "Hide!!" he squawks, feet kicking uselessly.

[lottawork]

"What the fuck from?"

His shoulders and neck spasm in an involuntary anxious tic as he scans his surroundings in a broken, terrified sweep for the unseen danger, but finds nothing. Nothing. Nothing physical. Nothing corporeal. Fuck. Fuck. What the fuck is he hiding from?

Rush's sensory input returns in agonizing shudders; he becomes aware that he is partially sitting, largely curled over himself, hands sinking fingertips into the sides of his head in an effort to escape the plummeting, anoxic nature of his own panic. He seizes breath after desperate breath, forces his physiology into a state of relative compliance, and - looks up, surveys his environment, once again distinguishing nothing immediately threatening.

"There's nothing fucking there," he hisses, but the doubt is palpable in his clipped consonants, the tremor in his words.

[omnomnom_feels]

Rashad, for his part, lays in his self-imposed paper tomb and shudders. The feeling is already beginning to subside, but not before he comes to grips with the fact that he's hiding from nothing at all...and transfers the emotion back to the sensation of claustrophobia that generated it in its original owner.

"I can't breathe!" he gasps, giving a full-body twitch with the realization. "Oh, Host, I can't breathe!"

[lottawork]

Rush stares in paralyzed irresolution, attempting to claw together enough wherewithal to discern at what point their roles reversed. He can't see his savior who has fucking wedged himself into the box for no fucking reason Rush can immediately delineate. The other man expounds an unknown epithet as he apparently captures the full scope of his situation, and the fractured panic in the words are what finally reestablish Rush's flagging grasp of his own physicality in a high, shearing press of nerves.

"What the fuck did you expect?" he snaps, irritation surging anew at the fucking useless cyclical nature of their joint predicament. Joint - fuck, there's no fucking point, is there? "There's a fucking way out, fucking use it if you're so fucking inclined."

[omnomnom_feels]

Rashad's heartbeat slows as things begin to right themselves, and he takes stock of the situation as he finds it now that he is becoming more and more able to think clearly. "I'm stuck!" he lies, able to muster only a shadow of the previous real emotion.

It was irrational of him to get into the box -- it is fortunate he does not normally possess such feelings, he thinks, or he would always behave just as irrationally as a mortal. Rashad wriggles a little, testing the limits of his confinement, then slowly starts to work his way back up and out. It is slower than going in, the angles awkward and the leverage against him. When he is at last able to pull himself all the way out he takes a deep breath, feeling the imaginary sweat on his face cooled by the imaginary air of the dream.

[lottawork]

He is sitting, partially on his knees, and breathing is taking its sweet fucking time reasserting itself to fucking baseline. He can take note, dully, of the shape and color of the box and the discarded ribbon it was ostensibly tied in.

Is that a Christmas present?

This vein of thought abruptly freezes and shatters when his rescuer gets a painfully slow return of his senses, enough to drag himself out of the situation of his own making and for Rush to finally see his face.

Rush's eyes flick shut in a glowering exhalation of solidifying annoyance.

"Fuck," he says, reflexive and disgruntled and completely without consideration. "Not you."

[omnomnom_feels]

"It is me," replies Rashad contradictorily, because a statement that illogical cannot stand. He's still breathing hard, still holding on to the lingering feeling of unease into which the terror has faded as his hands shake from the recent overdose of adrenaline. He should seek out Rush in the waking world sometime soon, he decides. Or perhaps he should call that young man, Johnny. He was right in thinking that feelings shared in the Dreaming would only whet his appetite. "Doctor Rush," he nods as though nothing out of the ordinary just happened.

[lottawork]

His nerves are no longer building to a vicious point of anxious discharge, as made transparent when the remnants of his dread crystallize into peripheral irritation. Rush hisses between his teeth, slow and deliberate. Standing will not be feasible at this point, however much physically getting away from Durant would be preferable. Asadi's note of his social irregularities, formerly only mildly interesting, has become suspiciously accurate in relation to Durant's abrupt slide from irrational terror to dispassionate rigidity.

"And what the fuck," hisses Rush, "are you doing. Exactly."

It is, he understands, an entirely useless question with multiple connotations, varied and vastly divergent, but now the weariness and emptiness of his fading panic has compounded with his frustration upon having needed to be rescued at all and Durant is the only available, if impassive, outlet.

[omnomnom_feels]

"...Rescuing you," replies Rashad after a moment of hesitation, choosing to skip over the most recent thing he did in favor of something from a little earlier. Now that he is past the moment, he is beginning to see that his behavior likely appeared quite unusual. Rush certainly seems irritated by it. He must be more careful in future; fear seems to be an emotion that arouses quite a lot of suspicion these days.

[lottawork]

"Yes," says Rush in savage acidity, drawing the word out with exaggerated care, less willing to overlook what is cleanly fucking obvious. "In addition to, apparently, being completely incompetent at it. What are you in charge of at ROMAC, exactly? Is your job difficult? I can't imagine it is. I can't imagine they place you in charge of anything that requires a great deal of critical thinking or common sense or basic fucking interpersonal expertise."

Following that aggressively dismissive philippic, Rush claws himself to his feet in a motion lacking any sort of muscular coordination, breathless and shaking, irritated at his biology for acting thus, and unwilling to follow his verbal attack on Durant's abilities with anything more than a thoroughly unimpressed glare.

[omnomnom_feels]

"I manage data," replies Rashad, mentally cataloging the insult to his abilities. A mortal would be annoyed, and so he scowls -- it is not difficult to remember the response when he sees it played out so clearly in front of him. "Which is not made easy by certain people failing to understand how to fill out a simple form." Hint. Hint. Rashad may be missing the central point here, because he sees no connection between his difficulty in rescuing Rush from a box without making a spectacle of himself and his capabilities as a servant of (somewhat petty) Order. "I successfully removed you from the box," he points out, injecting what he thinks is a convincing amount of testiness into his voice. "I was merely startled afterward."

[lottawork]

Rush snorts. "You were startled. Well. Of course." Somewhat maddeningly, his brain seems to be having difficulties supplying him with anything else appropriately biting, too preoccupied reordering his motor faculties back to their proper places. He settles instead for turning his back on the other man completely.

He doesn't care for this dream and he doesn't care for Durant. His failure, so-called, to fill out a simple form is inconsequential, and Durant is the only one who even remotely cared about the hallowed forms. Did ROMAC introduce them solely to give Durant something to do? This is entirely possible. Probably, even. The man values structure. Cherishes it.

Rush is wasting his time. He's making it his central priority to determine a way out of here, preferably one that pulls him out of the dream completely.

[omnomnom_feels]

Rashad stands and brushes himself off. "There are others in the remaining packages. You might assist me in freeing them as well." He might. Rashad doubts very much that he will. Rashad has already marked Rush's record to indicate that he is uncooperative and Not A Team Player, though his assessment seems to have gone unnoticed among their shared superiors.

[lottawork]

Durant is still talking despite the implicit dismissal. Rush had assumed it had been implicit enough. Hadn't it? It had. It most certainly had.

His eyes snap shut in a prolonged blink of pure vexation.

"Yes," he says, pleased to find his vocal chords are now saturating the words with exactly the appropriate amount of disdain. "Because you're just so good at it. Tell me, do you plan on insinuating yourself into their packages too? Or did mine appeal to you personally? Something about the color, was it?"

Rush could, potentially, remain here and continue his unopposed verbal assault, but Durant has evidently reverted to his former, unflappable state. Most certainly odd, as Asadi said, though Rush currently can't be incensed enough to give a fuck either way. Instead he makes a low, dismissive noise in the back of his throat, one palm pressing to the side of his head. The other hand braces itself on the nearest crinkling wall of paper and cardboard as he starts edging steadily away.

"Have a good fucking time of it, then."

[omnomnom_feels]

"I told you I was startled," says Rashad, who thinks that lie ought to have worked. Lies normally work. What's wrong with Rush that he won't believe a perfectly good lie?

He watches the human go, considering whether to go after him. He does not think there is particular danger in this place, at least not now that Rush is out of his suffocating package, so there is little need to be concerned that the mortal will get himself killed in Rashad's absence. There is little benefit to be gleaned from staying with the man, either; Rashad has had his fill of Rush's feelings for now and he does not need help when it comes to liberating others.

He gives a little shake of his head as though he can't quite reconcile the other man's behavior, then turns to go another way. "Enjoy wandering aimlessly," he replies.