applesaucemod: (Default)
The Big Applesauce Moderators ([personal profile] applesaucemod) wrote in [community profile] applesaucedream2015-01-25 03:45 pm

Sweeter than the First Time [Open to All]

 photo dream party visual_zpsua3sjlqf.jpg



Hello, dreamers of Manhattan. The Rift knows that things have been kind of rough, lately. The last dream didn't go as well as it had hoped. Consider this an apology of sorts, and a hearkening back to the good times you've shared.

It's a grand old (and potentially familiar) cabin house that the dreamers will find themselves wandering. The furniture is plentiful and comfortable, the floors are strewn with cushions and blankets, and there are cheerful fires burning in the grates. It seems a little odd that the house still manages to be on the chilly side despite looking so warm, yet it is.

Oh, well. You'll just have to find another dreamer or two and spoon up and fall asleep like little baby cats get cozy. It shouldn't be difficult; most of the dreamers (excepting those with strong telepathic defenses or deeply ingrained cuddle-averse personalities) will find themselves feeling friendlier than usual, along with an almost overwhelming desire to snuggle up to someone. How convenient that the house seems designed for that very purpose!

And if some of the cushions are Hello Kitty themed, well, that's just coincidence.


[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply. Characters will be affected by the dream-whammy to whatever degree makes the most sense for them, and will remember or forget the events of the dream at the player's discretion. Backtag into infinity.]
all_the_gifts: (displeased)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-27 12:52 am (UTC)(link)
Melanie's being followed. That's unusual. It ought to be alarming, but she can't quite manage to feel genuine fear in this place. So rather than try to elude the - woman? - who's trailing her, Melanie turns to face her, brow furrowed in faint perplexity. Why follow her?

When the blue-ish person says 'hunger,' the corners of Melanie's mouth turn down in a tight frown - almost a pout. Speaking of things she ought to find alarming… but as it is, she's mostly just indignant. "I'm not hungry," she insists. She's not. The box hasn't even rattled once since she got here.
noteasybeingblue: (ceilings are v interesting)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-27 01:41 am (UTC)(link)
"No." It is the oddest fusion of two living things, separate and poured into one vessel. "I hear the song of the green. It sings of hunger." Tiny voices, small voices, almost swallowed out by the body they share.
all_the_gifts: (baffled squint)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-28 04:30 pm (UTC)(link)
She isn't making sense. It's like she's speaking in riddles, which Melanie normally likes, except this one is about her. It's not even a very hard riddle - she knows perfectly well where the hunger is coming from - but this woman got the color wrong. It's not green.

"You can hear the cordyceps?" Melanie asks, wrinkling her nose.
noteasybeingblue: (the fuck is this.)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-28 08:20 pm (UTC)(link)
The strange human terms of differentiation matter little to a god. Illyria tilts to one side the dream construction of her shell's head. There's such a frightful discordance between the child's words and the voices of tiny whispering things within.

"I hear the calls of all the green," she murmurs. What a strange thing. "Even those that live in your shell."

Slowly, her shell drops into a crouch to make herself even with the child's eye level.

"What are you?"
all_the_gifts: (apprehensive)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-28 09:05 pm (UTC)(link)
There's 'green' again, which makes Melanie think of plants, but that's a completely different kingdom. "Grey," she corrects, watching the stranger with wary bewilderment. "It's grey, not green."

It's also a silly thing to focus on when this person is insisting she can hear it. Melanie being able to hear it is bad enough; she doesn't like the thought of other people listening in. Knowing she's dangerous is one thing - that's important. Knowing just how badly the cordyceps wants her to tear into them is something else entirely. No one should have to hear that. If Bee or Daniel could, they'd never speak to her again. Which would probably be better for them, but she still hates the thought of it.

"I'm a..." she's not going to say 'hungry child,' "... a symbiote." Is this an introduction? "What are you?" she echoes uncertainly.
noteasybeingblue: (analyzing bullshit)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-28 09:17 pm (UTC)(link)
"I am Illyria." But she has come to understand that name has so little meaning here, in a universe where she is not known and never was. Intolerable, yet the immutable fact she must accept. She is not the all-powerful being that once wielded the incalculable power of millions. She says it evenly, with the scant trace of regret for the loss of all that she was prior. "I am a god."

Perhaps the child sees variegation in the spectrum of its own tiny plant-things, but Illyria sees only the things that are beneath her and can voice their protest, and the things that are beneath her and cannot.

"A God-King from before your time, or anyone's, when the world was in its first form." Illyria watched that cosmic embryo come into being and claimed a section of its surface rock for her own. But despite her long and untold years, she has not met before now a - symbiote. "But I know not of your kind. They did not exist in the world I walked."
all_the_gifts: (cautious)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-29 03:53 am (UTC)(link)
"Oh." Well, when you're under the protection of an angel, it's easy enough to take a god in stride - or a 'God-King.' She would have expected a god to be bigger, though. Melanie studies Illyria with a bit less wariness and a bit more open curiosity. "Well, we're very new - symbiotes, I mean. In my universe, we're in our first generation. So that's why you couldn't have met one of us." Presuming they were ever in the same universe, which Melanie doubts. From what little she understands of gods, she doubts most of them would have allowed what happened back home to happen at all.

This might be the strangest conversation she's had since she arrived here. How do you talk to a God-King? Melanie hesitates, then offers a hand. "I'm Melanie."
noteasybeingblue: (the shell)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-29 03:59 am (UTC)(link)
The newness should not have surprised her - this is but a child, a significantly smaller sort of human, but the tiny whispering things in its blood have changed it so, and it is not fully human. For a moment Illyria looks at the hand, uncomprehending, until her shell's expression crumbles into one of faint disgust as she distantly recognizes the inane human ritual.

She takes it delicately and holds it for a moment - small, seemingly fragile, teeming with foreign life, stronger than those of any ordinary vermin - before simply releasing it. That is near enough to the socially accepted custom.

"You are not afraid," Illyria observes with equal parts puzzlement and disappointment. There are only wisps of guarded interest radiating from this symbiote-creature.
all_the_gifts: (uncertain)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-29 04:18 am (UTC)(link)
Melanie pulls her hand back, resisting the sudden urge to grin. It was her mistake, really, to assume a god would behave in the same sort of way humans do. Especially a very old god, from well before when humans were coming up with things like handshakes.

But it was also sort of funny.

"We're dreaming," Melanie says with a little shrug. The worst thing that's happened to her after a dream was waking up hungry. Granted, bad things can also happen in dreams… but if Illyria wanted to hurt her, she could have done so already. Melanie just gave her a good enough opportunity, holding her hand out like she did. "Should I be afraid?" she asks. "Were you planning on hurting me?" She sounds more perplexed by the idea than nervous about it. Even if Illyria was curious in the way that Dr. Caldwell was (which Melanie could believe), cutting people open to see how they work seems a bit low for a god.
noteasybeingblue: (humans ugh GROSS)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-29 04:24 am (UTC)(link)
"Yes," says Illyria when the child offers the explanation of dreaming, sounding utterly disgusted at the fact. God-Kings do not require sleep. The Rift and its intrusive machinations do not intrigue her. She is not meant to sleep and being pulled into this odd little space is simply against her nature.

She looks at the symbiote-child-thing again with dismissive curiosity.

"I am sworn against harming your kind, or those like you." Her tone, once iron with contempt, sinks into something more glum. The child may not be definitively human but it is near enough, she thinks, that her oath still stands. And she does so miss crushing tiny squirming squealing things, but this is no longer her purpose.
all_the_gifts: (welp)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-29 04:40 am (UTC)(link)
"That's good," Melanie says with a little nod. "I've done something like that, too." She wouldn't put it so dramatically, like something out of an epic poem or novel, because killing people seems like the sort of thing everyone should try not to do without making a big fuss over how hard it is to restrain themselves.

But she does know how hard it can be to restrain yourself.

"There aren't really humans left in my universe," she explains, "so I'm not dangerous there. I have to be careful now that I'm in this one."
noteasybeingblue: (?????????)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-29 04:47 am (UTC)(link)
"You are dangerous?" She cocks her shell's head sharply. The notion is almost absurd, except that Illyria herself does not appear so outwardly threatening in this shape, all of her self and her being packed into this tiny, fragile little container. "Are you not the dominant entity in your shell?"

It is how Illyria is. There are - remnants, scattered, of Winifred Burkle, but all of them are swallowed out by the far superior presence of the God-King within. But this symbiote-child's hunger is made of so many small things, and the child itself is without question the one who speaks and decides.
all_the_gifts: (perturbed)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-01-29 04:57 am (UTC)(link)
It takes Melanie an extra moment to parse Illyria's language. Shell must mean her body. Entity means herself - the normal part - but it means the cordyceps, too. Melanie frowns.

"I'm… almost always the dominant entity," she says carefully. "If I wasn't, that's when I'd be dangerous."
noteasybeingblue: (ceilings are v interesting)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-01-29 05:16 am (UTC)(link)
She does not understand the aversion to dangerous. Illyria is dangerous, feared, and she would not be perceived any other way. Even the principality, that which can match her strength, treats her with a certain wariness and an awareness of her power.

"If you are dangerous," she counsels gravely, "then you are feared. When you are feared, you have power. You have such potential, yet you eschew it. Why."

It is a quiet demand. When one has strength, one must embrace it to become all they are. This is how the Primordial beings warred during the world's conception. Why would one deny this pivotal part of themselves?
all_the_gifts: (not safe)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-02 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
Melanie shakes her head slowly in bewildered disagreement. "When you're feared, people keep you locked up. That's what they used to do back home. They kept us all strapped into wheelchairs whenever we weren't locked in our rooms."

"Besides," she continues, standing up a bit straighter, "I don't want to hurt anyone."
noteasybeingblue: (?????????)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-02-02 01:04 am (UTC)(link)
"It is your duty," says Illyria, "to use that fear. Even here. Now." The child radiates power, nothing near the grandeur of a Primordial God-King, perhaps, but power nonetheless. That it would not think to use this power is unfathomable.

"With your strength you could do much." She pauses. This symbiote is a strange and curious creature simply by its own nature, but its complete lack of a desire to conquer as it so could makes it even more so. "But you choose not to."
all_the_gifts: (displeased)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-02 01:11 am (UTC)(link)
"No," Melanie says, appalled. She takes a step back, eyeing Illyria with a disapproving frown. "I can't do that here. Everyone would die." It was one thing to finish the cordyceps' takeover back home. It was inevitable; all she did was hurry things along a little. But she can't be responsible for starting something like that.
noteasybeingblue: (the fuck is this.)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-02-02 01:22 am (UTC)(link)
"You would live." This is apparent, though the differences between conquest and massacre maybe be few and varied, and a god can so rarely have one without the other. Yet a kingdom without subjects is not a kingdom at all, but a wasteland, and therefore without meaning. Perhaps even a small and new symbiote-thing can understand this.

"You would prefer - not to rule?" This, too, is an alien concept. Some would prefer to follow, this is true, but there is doubt in Illyria's mind (doubt, laughable, something removed from what a god should be, what she no longer is) that this child-thing would acquiesce to even that.
all_the_gifts: (explaining)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-02 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
What a weird god. Melanie's familiar with the Greek pantheon and other assorted deities, but none of the gods in the stories were like this, obsessed with ruling and conquering. Well, all right, some were, but they fought with each other or used humans as pawns. She can't imagine Zeus telling her to destroy the whole human race.

"That's right," she says firmly. "I don't want to rule. I... I want to learn." Even a hungry child is still a child, and learning is what they're supposed to do. "That's what I'm best at, and what I like the most: being a student."
noteasybeingblue: (the shell)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-02-02 11:36 pm (UTC)(link)
This is truly a curious symbiote. It prefers not to follow, not to lead, but to learn.

"I came into being upon my world's conception," Illyria tells it solemnly. "In the time of the Primordials, there was no learning except in the ways in which we dismembered our foes. In living so long and knowing so much, my knowledge is infinite, but the space it occupies," she looks at her shell in utter disgust, "finite."
all_the_gifts: (cautious)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-03 12:38 am (UTC)(link)
Melanie can't help but be intrigued by the phrase 'infinite knowledge,' and she gives Illyria a reassessing look. "I don't need to learn how to dismember my foes," she replies, almost an even match for the god's solemnity. The hungry part of her already knows how to do that. "But I like learning other things, like maths and science and the arts. And I like stories."

She loves stories.

"Maybe there are things you could teach me," she hazards. Illyria might not like the idea. Aziraphale might not like the idea. But if he doesn't already know about Illyria, he probably should meet her, right? "About plants--the green?"
noteasybeingblue: (?????????)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-02-03 12:45 am (UTC)(link)
She looks at the symbiote in complete bemusement. It is a strange blend, human but not purely. Mortal, likely. Illyria had not considered that vermin would come in such varied sizes. It has no interest in harnessing its powers to its own advantage, but would prefer to dismiss them entirely simply to better understand the world it occupies? Illyria has seen this world, its physics and its place, and she finds it utterly beneath her interest.

"I hear them," she tells the child-thing. "I hear their song. There was a time when I could not, and there was a time when no Rift would stop me from visiting whichever world I pleased." She looks at the thing in its eyes with a direct, penetrating blue stare. "Do you wish to know what your voices say?"
all_the_gifts: (neutral - listening)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-03 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
"I already know what my voices say," Melanie replies, meeting Illyria's gaze steadily. "That's why I keep them in a box." She touches her fingertips to her chest, just below her sternum. The box isn't real, but that's where she feels it would be, if it was. "But I can't hear any of the others, like the grass or the trees."
noteasybeingblue: (humans ugh GROSS)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue 2015-02-03 01:03 am (UTC)(link)
She cocks her shell's head.

"Box."

She sees no box. The symbiote has given no indication of a box. Human biology is fairly incompatible with containing boxes within, as boxes are typically meant to encase things in an external.

Illyria was once kept in a box. Her essence was intended to remain contained until the end of time. A simple box could not hold a god, however, and she circumvented that pitiful boundary to be reborn.

"They are in your blood," she says evenly, displaying a minimum of confusion. Gods do not experience confusion, particularly not over small symbiote-children who speak of nonexistent boxes. "Within you. Not within any box."
all_the_gifts: (humoring you)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts 2015-02-03 01:24 am (UTC)(link)
"Not a literal box," Melanie explains, a little surprised by Illyria's confusion. Doesn't infinite knowledge cover metaphors? "An imaginary one, where I put the hunger so it can't hurt people." She shrugs once, gently. "When I don't listen to the voices, it's like I'm putting them in a box."

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-03 01:36 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-03 01:44 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-03 01:56 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-03 02:34 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-03 02:44 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-04 15:19 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-04 16:15 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-04 16:26 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-04 16:31 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-04 16:50 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-04 16:56 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] all_the_gifts - 2015-02-04 17:08 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

[personal profile] noteasybeingblue - 2015-02-04 17:14 (UTC) - Expand