ACT NOW! [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

Has this ever happened to you?

All you're trying to do is have an uneventful night's sleep, but you find yourself in a sprawling labyrinth of interconnected rooms, each one a transplant from a bland, suburban home. You search and search for an exit, but just can't seem to find one! And even if you could - where did you park your car?

Oh, no! You're trapped in another dream event!

No matter what you do, everything just seems to turn out wrong. Open a cabinet - tupperware avalanche! Attempt to pour yourself a drink - disaster! No bowl of cheetos is safe from your sudden, embarrassing clumsiness! It's as if you can't do any simple task without it going horribly awry! What a mess!

That's right, dreamers: you're stuck in the desaturated Before Times of every terrible infomercial you've ever seen, and life is a sisyphean struggle.



[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply: all are welcome regardless of their membership in the game, and characters can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Backtag forever.]

Comments

[lottawork]

This is not, scientifically speaking, what Nicholas Rush would call his finest moment.

In this or any universe.

He can accept being consigned to wander aimlessly and seemingly endlessly throughout the directionless maze of homogenous rooms, and he can accept, grudgingly, that the horrible sameness of each tediously, annoyingly American home setting is far from the deep unpleasantness his dreams have a historic proclivity toward. It is simply that he finds them tiresome, and he came to this conclusion before his attempt to disentangle a number of cords snaking out of an otherwise innocuous laptop resulted, inexplicably, in Rush himself becoming seamlessly incorporated into the thick of the fucking endless snarl that he is rapidly deducing must be nontrivial by its very illogical nature, cables trailing around and looped over him without regard for personal space or finite segments.

He hisses, low and impatient, out of his teeth and makes yet another thoroughly unsuccessful struggle to extricate his arm from the coiled mess of wires and cables, uncomfortably reminiscent as they are of less agreeable circumstances.

For fuck's sake.

[interndana]

Honestly, the incongruity of the house is the last thing on Dana's mind, given the slew of other problems she seems to be having today.

"Would you just--" she sighs, bending over to retrieve her phone, which has fallen out of her hands and onto the floor, for the fifth time in as many minutes. And her shirt's come untucked as well, fanastic. Although why she's wearing some bland combination of khakis and polo shirt is anyone's guess, not even the station had a dress code this uninspired. Dana frowns. Her phone's screen is cracked from all the abuse, and when she taps the glass it does not respond. She taps again, harder, and in the instant before it clatters to the floor again it registers a little angry red battery sign in the top right corner.

Dana growls incoherently at this fresh hell, scoops up the scuffed and battered device, and shoves it into her pocket (there is a faint ripping sound which Dana refuses to acknowledge, because that would just be too much) before stomping into the next room in search of, hopefully, a phone charger.

Her plan is curtailed when she trips over the carpet and falls forward, onto a vaguely human-shaped pile of cords and wires.

"Damn it," she mutters, adding a hasty "sorry!" once it becomes apparent that the pile does contain a person. Dana tries to scoot back and give them some room, and accomplishes this at the same time as she hits her head on a desk.

[biscuit_powered]

The door swings open. Then the door swings shut again as the person who opened it is stepping through, and there's a loud gasp precipitating a louder still response.

"ZON-KUTHON'S FLAYED BALLS!" And that will be the sound of a tiefling with her tail shut in a door. "Aa-augh," Asmodia adds at a somewhat lower volume once she's extricated the limb. At her feet, a rodent the size of a cat shudders in empathy, both creatures' attention on the matter of Asmodia feeling her tail for broken bones.

[singthesong]

Okay, so the Balladeer isn't always as familiar as a man his apparent age maybe ought to be with typical household tasks to start off with. But he can cook! So upon finding himself in a kitchen much roomier than his own, with several cookbooks right there, he figured: hey. Why not try a recipe?

He's not exactly sure how the oven caught on fire.

If nothing else, though, he's used to crises, so he kept his head and found a fire extinguisher. Which is now continually spraying him in the face, despite his fumbling efforts to get it actually directed at the flames. Why is this happening? He's good with his hands! This doesn't seem like it should be this hard!

[peacefulexplorer]

Never fear, Daniel Jackson is here!

It's a bit hard to miss the commotion and rather worrying amounts of smoke pouring in perplexing abundance from the kitchen, which Daniel thinks more than warrants investigation. He charges in and promptly grinds to a halt because he doesn't fully know where he should be directing his attention - to the oven spewing copious amounts of smoke and flames alike, to the squealing fire alarms, or to the man who looks to be attempting to extinguish his face rather than the fire.

Well, first things first: putting out the fire. Daniel makes an unerring line for the line of kitchen towels hanging beside the sink, aiming to grab them as a protective measure so he can slam the oven shut and hopefully smother the flames within, but this plan promptly dies a disastrous death when yanking at the towel rack sends the entire thing crashing noisily to the ground.

[postictal]

There's something really uneasy about being trapped in an inescapable set of identical houses. This, okay, is probably not all that unique a fear for someone to have, sure, but Tim's had problems with this kind of thing. Space being warped, reality not behaving properly, or whatever. It's a bit of relief to realize he's not being dogged by the usual host of imperceptible terrors that enjoy flitting through his nightmares, and an equal relief to conclude that this couldn't really be classed as a 'nightmare' at all. Sure, the rooms are kind of there no matter what he does and there's nothing particularly remarkable about any of them, but there aren't any unprecedented day-to-night shifts or subtle tampering with his perception or impossible, too-tall things gliding in and out of his peripheral vision. It's just rooms, houses, all sort of linking together.

All righty, then.

Tentative exploration isn't yielding anything, but pretty soon that doesn't matter. Tim can feel the build of uncomfortable pressure in his chest just before he erupts into a sequence of sputtering coughs - even here he's not safe, he's never safe - and he has to stumble to the nearest faucet in the plain suburban kitchen he's found himself in, groping for the nearest glass to fill it with water. He anxiously twists the handle only to freeze when he finds, to his dismay, that it's simply snapped off in his hand.

"Oh god," says Tim, staring in helpless alarm as the sink steadily fills with water - is it not draining? Why isn't it draining? God, no, he doesn't want to flood the place. In the peak of his desperation he tries to cram the thing back on, but to no avail. Tim's going to flood a house that isn't even his, and all he wanted was a fucking glass of water.

[andhiswife]

Like a moth to a flame, so comes Greta to trashbabies in need.

Her aimless wandering of this funny sort of house becomes a bit less aimless when Greta hears someone who sounds in desperate need of a thump on the back, or some tea, or something. She follows the sound into a kitchen that is far larger than hers (sparking a brief moment of irrational envy - irrational because a larger 'modern' kitchen will only be filled with more things she has no idea how to use), but her focus quickly shifts to the young man staring in alarm at the near-to-overflowing sink.

"Oh, dear," she says, coming up to stand beside him. "What happened?"

[fucking_ebay]

At first glance this place is just boring, but maybe Peter should have been tipped off by the way he tripped over that protruding weather stripping in the doorway (and why does an inside door have weather stripping, anyway?). At least he found a room with a hokey in-home bar nowhere near as good as the one he had back in the day, because if there's one thing he's good at in dreams (not that he's figured out this is a dream just yet), it's finding the imaginary booze.

Except then all the bottles are literally full to the brim and the moment he goes to pour a drink the midori goes everywhere, the force of the splashing liquid knocking his glass off the counter for good measure. That earns some muttered curses, but whatever -- not his house, not his problem (Peter is the best house guest). Avoiding the broken glass, he grabs another and tries again, but this time the now half-empty bottle slips right through his fingers the moment he picks it up, sloshing sugary liqueur all down his front before landing on his toe and making him howl in pain while jumping up and down on one foot. Naturally, he bumps into the counter and knocks over all the other bottles, and when he flails at them to try to stop them all from falling over all of his efforts only seem to direct the spilling liquid in his own direction. At some point his body simply gives up and he slips on nothing to land hard on his tailbone while bottles and booze rain down around him.

All of this is accompanied by an increasingly strident chorus of "JESUS," and "GODDAMNIT NO," and "FUCKING FUCK -- FUCK YOU, GODDAMNIT!"

[postictal]

Pretty much the last thing Tim expected to run into here was a noisy, gangly British guy swearing up a storm while he lies prone in a puddle of alcohol, but maybe Tim's dreams got tired of nonstop adrenaline and terror and just this once had to settle for plain fucking weird.

Tim's about to offer the guy some help when his first step into the room nearly sends him skidding over some stray shards of glass to join him.

"Shit -" He snatches at the nearest barstool-like chair for support but only succeeds in toppling it on top of the guy on the floor. "Shit," Tim says again in desperation, whatever vague amusement he might have gotten from the initial ridiculous sight promptly dissolving.

[wildmage_daine]

Another dream involving an enormous house. Huzzah. This one isn't even interesting. Daine surveys the living room she's found herself in with flatly unimpressed feline eyes, her fluffy housecat tail curled neatly around her forepaws. At least there's a window - maybe there's something more exciting happening outside.

Daine leaps lightly up onto the couch - or tries, to, anyway. It starts light, but when she lands, she's in the much heavier shape of a Siberian tiger. The fabric of the couch would have withstood the claws of a regular cat, but it's no match for a tiger's, and it shreds with a truly horrendous noise. Odd's bobs - how is she a tiger? Daine recoils, claws snagging on the cushions, windmilling tail knocking a bowl of popcorn onto the floor. She needs to be smaller, she needs to be smaller, but her magic isn't cooperating. Popcorn crunches underpaw as she finally backs away from the couch, now in dratted bear shape, and she sits in a corner with a huff.

Beside her, a shelf of knick-knacks jars loose, and a few framed photographs and porcelain figurines tumble to the ground.

[deadeyedchild]

Jay trips over the hall rug for a third time as he fumbles with his camera, trying to get it to point the right way, dear christ is the lens-cap still on?? He picks at it with absurdly clumsy fingers and loses it somewhere on the floor, stumbling over the rug AGAIN and almost faceplanting outside the room he's trying to get to, where all the scary crashing noises are coming from. That's the kind of room Jay is usually prepared to run into, camera aloft. Whatever's going on in there, he should clearly document it.

It's a BEAR. Holy shit. He scrambles to find the record button, why can't he do this, jesus, he keeps zooming it in all awkwardly, okay there christ it's recording, and he starts to narrate stammeringly.

"U-uh, this is Jay, I don't know where I am and I can't remember how I got here, there's - there's a bear in this house I'm in - as you can clearly see-"

Wait, what is he doing. He should run. He staggers backwards, but instead he slams against the wall. Another shelf of breakable knick-knacks comes crashing down, spelling broken bits all across the floor, making him jump and swoop the camera onto that. Shit, now it's out of focus. Where's the autofocus? Where's the damn autofocus? And when did it stop recording?!

[stronglikebear]

"Whoa -- OKAY." And shouting is probably not the best way to react to a polar bear in the living room, but he just found a polar bear in the living room. Yuri attempts to backpedal, but somehow his efforts to grab for the door handle so he can slam it shut after him have resulted in him slamming the door shut with him still inside with the POLAR BEAR.

And then the knob comes off in his hand. Back pressed to the door, Yuri lets out a high-pitched, nervous laugh. "Uhhhh," he says, not sure if he should throw the doorknob at the bear or something. That would probably make it worse, right?

[omnomnom_feels]

This dream is not immediately menacing, and so Rashad does not concern himself yet with attempting to escape or to find anyone else caught in it. He might as well be here as in the waking world, and he might as well spend his time organizing this messy kitchen as do anything else.

This is the twenty-fifth time he has attempted to neatly arrange this cabinet full of tupperware only for one of the inevitably precarious stacks to come tumbling down on his head, often bringing others with it. No two pieces match and none of them will stack the slightest bit neatly, but still Rashad patiently stoops to pick up the fallen containers and try again. And again. And again.

[noteasybeingblue]

This is not dignified.

Illyria did not recognize the signature when she first tasted it, the peculiar blend of elements that do not make sense, and thus she set off to dutifully investigate. True, there are a great deal of unidentifiable creatures in this accursed city, even more so in dreams, but if any are to pose a threat, Illyria would like to know the manner and make of those she may face.

Or she would, had her attempt to enter the room from where this particular being's energy sparks within had not resulted so poorly for no reason Illyria can immediately detect. She does not contain a great wealth of rage toward doors, inconsequential as they are, and yet her shell's fist has somehow, infuriatingly, become entrapped within the door she intended to simply open. She wishes to enter the room, not destroy it, though the will and rage to do precisely that have begun to gather the longer Illyria struggles with the uncooperative object. She is a god and she will not be prevented from her goal by a simple door of vermin make.

Perhaps it is best, then, that her next attempt to remove her shell's arm from the door tears the entire thing from its hinges so that she may enter and evaluate the room's occupant, though the shattered wooden remains that dangle uselessly from the arm are not, the God-King thinks again coldly, remotely dignified.

[all_the_gifts]

This had seemed like it might be a nice dream - or at least not a bad one. It hadn't felt scary, as they sometimes do, and there's nothing obviously worrisome or threatening about her surroundings. It seemed safe.

That impression had lasted right up to the point where Melanie had tripped - tripped - over a stray power cord and almost fallen right into someone, teeth-first.

She'd managed to save the person by shoving them away (far more roughly than she'd intended, but a shove is still far better than a bite). Then, she'd crawled into the first closet she could find. It's poorly organized, the floor an untidy stack of shoes and clothes practically falling off the hangers, but that suits her purposes. It's easier to hide in the mess. The downside is that she can't pull the door shut all the way - it's blocked by a converse she displaced in her scramble to hide - but at least it's shut most of the way. Hopefully no one will think to look in here.

[johnny_truant]

Okay well that was weird. Wandering uneasily around, turning a corner, and holy shit there's a little kid almost faceplanting on him. He'd reached out instinctively to catch her, with surprisingly good reflexes, he'd thought, but instead she'd shoved him back with alarming force and skittered away into the nearest room. What the hell.

Johnny lands heavily on the floor and it takes him a few moments of stumbling around to get up again before he goes after her. "Uh, kid?" he ventures. "Are you okay in there?"

He sticks his head in the room. An ordinary looking room - some kind of study, maybe, with a desk and some cabinets and closets. All right then. He steps in, looking around. No sign of her.

He's just about had it with dreams about houses, but the prospect of a frightened child is at least somewhat diverting.

"You don't have to hide," he says, feeling somewhat awkward. "I promise, I'm just as lost as you. We're dreaming, you know."

Maybe that's comforting.

He reaches toward a cabinet - maybe she could fit in there - and opens it up.

Out comes a fucking avalanche of tupperware.

"Jesus!" He jerks back, staring in great confusion at the seemingly impossible amount of plastic coming out of the finite space. For fuck's sake. Why is there tupperware in a study.

He stares at the mess at his feet, then pushes the cabinet door to shut it. It bounces back off the hinge and smacks him in the face.

"Fuck!" He staggers back, tripping over the pile of containers and landing on the floor. "Hhhgh," he groans. This is probably not helping coax the kid out. "Uh. Sorry, uh, kid, if you're in here. Kinda having some problems. It's okay." He climbs up to a kneeling position, deciding not to attempt any further movement for now. "My name's Johnny."

[rae_of_sun]

This has to be a nightmare. It has to be. In no other situation would Sunshine be having this much difficulty with the ostensibly simple task of cracking a goddamn egg into a goddamn bowl. She just wants to make some carthaginian cookies - is that so much to ask?

Apparently so. She's gone through the better part of a dozen eggs so far, and the counter and floor are liberally decorated with her failed attempts. Her next effort results in the shell crumbling to improbable pieces in her hand, egg white dripping viscously down her wrist, and she shakes it off with a disgusted groan.

What is wrong with her?

[etherthief]

She's very... clumsy, isn't she? Is there something wrong with her? She keeps wandering past room after room, each more dull and American suburbia than the last, annoyed and searching for anything useful, relevant, or familiar. She starts short when she passes a kitchen and sees a brunette cracking some eggs, or trying to - getting ready to bake, is she? Is that...?

"Greta?" She steps into the room, already smiling, and promptly walks right into the kitchen table, banging her hip painfully, somehow knocking over two of the chairs and almost managing to upend the entire table in the process. Holy shit wow. Can she just melt into a puddle, please?

[biscuit_powered]

"Weird house," Asmodia comments to the donkey rat on her shoulder, though the words would sound like gibberish to anyone else listening. The animal in question, something like an unholy cross among a rat, a gerbil, and a capybara the size of a cat, squeaks back and she rolls her eyes as though he's said something unhelpful, then jerks her head and hisses as he inadvertently pulls her hair while adjusting his position. They've wandered through a few rooms now, the forms of the furniture just familiar enough not to evoke alarm but just strange enough to evoke confusion.

But there -- a window! She hurries over to look out and try to get some idea of where they are, but in her haste she doesn't notice the blinds hanging halfway down the window until she hits her head on them. Muttering to herself, she recoils...only to bring the blinds with her. What follows is a lot of clattering and flailing as she realizes the blinds are stuck on her horns and tries to extricate herself only to yank the blinds off the window frame and get hit in the face by them instead, Biscuit squealing and falling off her shoulder in the commotion. Draped in plastic slats and string now, she stumbles back and promptly trips over the fallen rodent to land on the end of a coffee table. Bowls of unfamiliar snack foods go flying into the air, launched as if by catapult.

[apidae]

"Hello?" Bee steps cautiously into the room, following the sounds of commotion - quite a lot of that to go around, it seems. She's been quite clumsy and awkward herself so far, moreso than seems natural. What an unusual dreaming scenario! It must be a dream, for her ability to sense patterns is quite dulled, but so far the conceit doesn't seem to be anything other than mass uncoordination.

The girl she sees in this room is having quite a bit of trouble herself, but Bee stops for a moment to take in her appearance - beautiful red hair but strange dark gray skin, and horns like a ram's! She looks so fascinating and beautiful. She steps over, cautiously, not wanting to alarm. She doesn't yet notice the furry little creature on the floor.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" she says, approaching through a mess of snacks and overturned bowls. Honestly, things just seem set up to get knocked over in this place.

[deadeyedchild]

He wakes up by falling out of bed, struggling in a web of sheets. The fuck is going on? Where is he? This is not his bedroom, any bedroom he's seen before, it's way too - midwestern suburban, or something. Four-poster bed and fully furnished and shit. Not that he can see much of it because he's still tangled in his goddamn sheets. Why. Why is this happening. What the christ.

[nastyhabits]

Now what in the great grand beautiful fuck is this? He can't help but be a smidge annoyed that some fucker out there decided to hijack his whole 'houses within houses' shtick, but 'till he can find whoever the fuck's in charge there's not a damn thing he can do about it, is there?

No siree. There's always a damn thing HABIT can do about it. He is Mankind's Bad HABIT, and there's not a thing he can't do. He's a fuckin' inspiration, ain't he? Absolutely. Truly.

So in and out and through he goes, prowling through house after house in his poor ol' sack of meat. Don't take long before HABIT gets to be the thing he hates to be most of all.

HABIT gets bored.

He gets real fuckin' bored real fuckin' fast, and that's just a damn shame. And then, hello there, what's this? Some scraggly poor sap all wrapped up in his room?

Perfect. Spider's got himself a fly, and didn't even need to work for it.

"Heyyyyy buddy." In HABIT sidles, all smiles and broad grins and packing quite a bit of menace for something that happens to be wearing a short sad fuck for a meatsuit.

[eliotwaugh]

Eliot is 110% done with this plebian middle-American bullshit. Trapped in a beige vortex of drywall and knickknacks, it would drive anyone to drink. Not that Eliot needs that much of an excuse, but as excuses go this has to be like, way up there.

It's a small miracle, then, that he finds a kitchen that appears to be decently stocked, and he quickly gets to work setting up for a glorious alcoholic concoction. He doesn't stop to think why he's making something complicated and frozen and fruity when he could just open a bottle of wine, but by the time Eliot's done struggling with stiff unruly ice cube trays and the unnecessarily tricky blender attachments, it's too late.

The second he turns the demonic machine on, syrup and ice and rum go flying. Eliot panics, fumbling with the lid to contain its spewing horror. How is this happening. This should not be happening, there is no power on earth that can stop him from successfully making a drink.

"Why the fuck is this so hard?" he wails to the sky, or the disgusting stucco ceiling, as an ice cube richochets off his head and skitters under a cabinet.

Eliot is in hell, and it bears a striking resemblance to margaritaville.

[andhiswife]

LIKE A MOTH TO A FLAME…

Kitchens, Greta has discovered, are risky areas to frequent. It's ridiculous - she never thought there could be so many opportunities for disaster lurking somewhere so comfortably domestic - but as far as this place is concerned, it's true. So she's not particularly surprised to hear sounds of distress coming from a kitchen, and she allows herself a little groan of resignation - this is probably going to be awful - before charging in to help.

Her charge lasts all of three paces before she treads on an ice cube and lurches forward, arms outstretched in a desperate bid to catch herself on something. She ends up seizing the distressed young man's arm, and gasps out an, "I'm sor--" before a generous dollop of syrup hits her squarely in the face. Oh, for goodness' sake. She hauls herself upright and flails half-blindly in the general direction of the blender. Her fingers end up snagging the power cord and pulling it loose, silencing the device, and she takes an unsteady step back and attempts to wipe some of the… whatever this is… off of herself. Ugh. She's a mess.

And she only just got here. "Are you all right?" she asks the young man, squinting at him blearily. "Sorry about the, er…" she gestures vaguely towards the arm she grabbed.

[has_a_horn]

Awesome. This week has been an avalanche of worry and shitty things happening, but the moment he steps into the dream, he knows exactly what it is. In his trickster days, Gabriel had trapped a person or two in an environment just like this one. It's guaranteed hilarity, and exactly what he needs right now.

Gabriel sets himself up in a comfy chair, grabs a bowl of popcorn (that doesn't even think of falling over) and watches the show.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Gabe?"

The relief is palpable in Daniel's voice as he rounds the corner and recognizes none other than the Archangel himself parked on a chair. He wants to cross the room but he's scared of touching anything. Oh god, Gabe, stop this. Stop this, please. It's just terrible.

Few steps forward. Just enough to talk to Gabe face-to-face. He's been meaning to for a couple days now. That should be safe, right?

Wrong!

A few steps forward sees Daniel predictably slipping, hand shooting out for the nearest means for support: a doorknob that practically snaps off to the touch, sending Daniel sprawling and the knob soaring in a perfect parabolic arc to land with a comical clunk in Gabe's snackbowl.

"Oh," says Daniel, wincing. "Er. Sorry."