applesaucedream | ACT NOW! [Open to All]

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.

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.

A particularly vicious tug of one of the thinner, paler wires yields nothing, and Rush releases a furious slew of incredibly and increasingly uncouth words that do absolutely nothing to make this predicament any less absurdly, increasingly, supremely infuriating, but are satisfyingly cathartic in their own way.

The only way this could get worse, in fact, would be with the inclusion of an unwanted second party, which is precisely what has just occurred if his assessment of recent events is any indication.

"Fuck!" he erupts in congruence with the other person's disgust, struggling pointlessly to put some fucking distance between himself and whoever just fell on top of him, and in the process becoming hopelessly ever more entangled in his personal Gordian hell.

Dana backs off, wincing at the bump on her head and the person's tone. Clearly this man is having as bad a time here as she is.

"Ugh, I'm sorry," she says again, taking in the predicament. "I swear I'm not usually this clumsy, I was just looking for a charger for my stupid phone--" She reaches into her pocket to illustrate, but comes up empty. Because her pocket has ripped. Of course.

For a moment she feels a little stab of panic, she can't lose her phone, not that, it's her little piece of Night Vale and the only thing she feels like she can control when everything else about this world feels foreign and overwhelming. Breathe, Dana. It probably fell out when she fell on the man with the wires, so it's around here somewhere, just a matter of finding it.

Dana frowns deeply, narrowing her eyes at the mire of cords. "Yeah okay, so my phone is probably in there somewhere now, I'm gonna help you...deal with this."

"Perfect," growls Rush, eying the innumerable amount of wires draped over him that have left him resembling some sort of absurd, disgruntled Yuletide lawn decoration. Every furious movement has simply resulted in further entanglement, and he would very much prefer freedom of movement. An experimental prodding of one of the denser knots of cords rewards Rush with a rectangular lump, which he extracts from the mess with considerably more success than he has had with any part of his own fucking body thus far.

"If you wanted a fuckin' charger, I believe that's statistically plausible." He gestures dryly at the snarled disarray that appears to be liberally festooning every inch of him. The phone he holds appears to be rather spectacularly cracked across its front but is still working if the flickering red bar is any indication, and he shifts carefully to hand it over.

"Thank you." Dana takes the phone and only gets the slightest static shock from it, which given the rest of the circumstances she'll take as a win. It's a wonder the screen still works, though the phone is emitting a pained discordant wailing; Dana hopes she doesn't have to get it repaired, because who knows how some technician would react to the phone's...peculiarities. She suspects if she asked anyone at Romac they'd take it away from her, and Dana's not about to let that happen.

She looks up, remembering that there is a man tangled in electrical cords in front of her, and that ignoring him in favor of reuniting with her phone might come off as rude. "So uh, how did you even end up like this?" she asks, beginning to pick carefully at the edges of the tangle. She's keeping her eyes peeled for anything white and Apple-producty.

That phone is assuredly not behaving in the typical order - Rush is quite certain that high-pitched shrieking falls rather beyond the average cellular device's technical normalities.

"Believe me, it was not my intention," he grunts, yanking forcefully at one of the heavier cables that has now wound its way determinedly around one arm and snaked across one hip. "I was merely attempting to locate any potentially useful technology. And then -" He waves an exasperated hand at the mess neatly interwoven around him, including a number of wires that appear to have successfully threaded down the back of his shirt to add a new level of insult to the fucking indignity. "I confess I am not entirely clear on the specifics of how, exactly, this level of seamless technological assimilation is possible."

The phone is just unhappy at being dropped so much, although if it would behave itself it wouldn't be in this situation. It ought to be on a leash, but, leashes for phones, that's preposterous.

Dana is becoming more and more perturbed by the minute. She can see how an attempt to untangle a large snarl might lead to getting tangled oneself, especially if one were using their arm as storage, but this is just...

"Oh, this is a dream, isn't it," she says, feeling a bit foolish for taking so long to realize. "This is all very improbable, and I did wonder about the house being so strange, but then I've been in stranger houses before the Rift, so...hmm." She walks around him, taking in the mass of cables, which cannot possibly all be originating from that one laptop. "This is probably some sort of challenge to solve, I mean unless the dream's intention is to turn us all into cyborgs. What if, when we figure out how to deal with this mess, the house stops being such a maze and we can leave?"

That sounds like the sort of intrusive lab-rat type shenanigans Rift dreams get up to, right?

Rush makes another quietly disgusted sound - a dream, fucking naturally, if he had only stopped to examine the discrepancies in his incoherent personal timeline he may well have sorted that out on his own - but the relief of knowing with a certain degree of surety that this experience is not by any means permanent is minimal. This dream has been appropriately aggravating, and choosing to ensnare him in a dense web of cabling was likely a cruel deliberate choice on its part, but it has not thus far proved to be as potent as any of his standard array of nightmares.

"'Strange' apart from the overly processed American suburbia setting?" he answers dryly. "I doubt that this would even be possible in reality, given that technology is something of a specialty of mine." Miraculously, he manages to free his left arm and immediately holds it aloft, far from the rest of the disordered jumble swarmed over and around him. "If it wanted a 'challenge' it could have picked something far less fucking grating."

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.

The veritable explosion of what must be some approximation of coarse words immediately drowns out Rush's own perpetual string of growled expletives regarding what, exactly, he thinks of this situation and all elements that may have contributed to make said situation possible, and he startles with a furious jerk of wires and limbs that attempt to align in some sort of defensive coordination. The idea that this configuration may even be possible in Rush's present, heavily impeded state turns out to be an overly optimistic assumption on his part. His reactive jolt sends him pitching onto the ground in the midst of his winding nexus of orphaned cables. The sound he issues may not have sounded entirely dignified.

This, perhaps, should be the least of Rush's problems currently, as this intruder has not sounded particularly dignified either, and what's more is that it is quite assuredly not human.

There are a number of responses that this - thing's appearance calls to mind, some academic, some insightful, many annoyed, most utterly useless, and a very small minority appropriate for addressing this situation in a manner that is both direct and culturally sensitive, as per the SGC-approved criteria for encountering an unknown species.

"Oh fuck," says Rush, though whether out of preemptive embarrassment or trepidation he personally cannot say.

Edited (OKAY I'M DONE) 2015-03-03 05:05 (UTC)

Tail curled tight around her body so she can take the end of it in her hands and check for damage, Asmodia does not initially notice the person already in the room she just entered. She looks up from probing her new bruises at the sound of something falling over, her eyes widening and her tail whipping out of her hands to free them in readiness for...something. She lifts her hands in readiness to flow into one of the many spell-casting gestures in her arsenal, her breath coming more quickly as she takes a few little steps to look around the nearby furniture at the source of the sounds.

Someone has tied a person up and left him here! She stares for a few seconds too long, eyes wide, then jumps in response to a loud squeak from Biscuit. "Rakhd!" she replies, snapping out of it and hastily looking around for actual threats. Whoever bound this person is probably still here...or...should be still here? She doesn't see anyone. Attention snapping back to the man on the floor, she asks rapidly, "Who did this? Where are they?"

This is - an intriguing situation.

It is also growing more unsustainable with the passing of each unbearable second.

There are not many instances that Rush can name in his life in which he simply did not have anything to say.

The fluid reactionary stance the probable non-terrestrial assumes implies a practiced response, though what purpose it may serve is somewhat beyond him. Defense, possibly. He narrows his eyes, marginally interested, but he is rather more interested in removing himself from his current predicament than investigating this foreign element's motives.

"Fuck's sake," he says tiredly, finding he no longer has the energy to maintain a suitably incensed tone. He has just been imposed upon by some great horned thing that is apparently quite sentient, and all he is capable of is lying here, bound and helpless and unable to blame anything for this embarrassment but his own mechanical ineptitude. His head drops in defeat to the floor. "No one did this. I fucking -"

No.

He is one of Earth's most critical intellectual resources. He is Dr. Nicholas Rush, he of the unparalleled cryptographic specialties and fierce academic poise, and he is not having this conversation right now.

"I appear to be stuck," he confesses at last, and must grit his teeth at the overpowering humiliation of it.

While it should be a relief that there aren't any hostile creatures lying in wait for someone to come along and attempt to free the captive they've bound in such strange cords, the answer leaves Asmodia with the still-more baffling question of how he could possibly have managed to do this to himself.

A titter escapes her as she takes another step closer and really takes in the full situation, and it doesn't take long for it to erupt into full-blown laughter. She doesn't know where she is or how she got here, she doesn't know where her friends are or if they were similarly taken somewhere strange against their wills, but she does know that a man tying himself up is always, always funny.

"You did that --!" she guffaws, coming close to kneel beside him, both to take in the full glory of it and to see what must be done to fix it. "To yourself! How?" Reaching out, she plucks at one of the strange cords. "And what kind of rope is this, anyway?"

"It's electrical," Rush snaps, weary frustration sharpening immediately back into furious annoyance. He is not meant to be thrust into the middle of first contact situations. He has never been meant for it. Diplomacy is not his specialty, and there is a horned, scaled, varicolored, fanged biped with a tail that is clearly expressing a great deal of raucous amusement at his expense. "Intended for technological use and not, I can assure you, for binding of any sort. This should not have happened, obviously."

The sound is incredibly fucking grating and it is enough to, temporarily, incentivize Rush into attempting to once again maneuver himself out of the mess he has incomprehensibly and unceremoniously been wrapped up in, in a much more literal sense than with he is altogether comfortable. His right arm is uncomfortably pinned to his side as a result of his twisting collapse, a number of cables now doing a fine fucking job of cutting into his circulation, but his left is making some relative progress in freeing itself from the chaotic jumble of knots. He commences in the slow, painful effort of what amounts to clawing his way out of the mess, studiously ignoring his unexpected and extremely unwanted audience.

She jerks her hand back, heeding what she takes to be a warning on reflex. Then she feels dumb because he has to be lying to her. "It doesn't look electrical," she objects, eyeballing him and taking in how he is absolutely not writhing around in pain from electrical shocks. When she briefly touched the cords, too, she didn't feel any kind of jolt from them. Frowning, she sits back on her heels and watches him struggle for a minute, absently stroking Biscuit's fur when he insinuates himself under one of her hands.

"...Is it supposed to be a conduit?" she asks hesitantly. That was probably a stupid thing to say. She's probably wrong, he was probably just making fun of her with that electricity comment, and how could something that little and not-metal even be a conduit for electricity anyway, that doesn't make any sense, why did she even say it --

What she's utterly lost sight of in her increasingly self-recriminating train of thought is that she's sitting here watching him try to escape from his accidental bondage without lifting a hand to even attempt to help.

Oh, fucking excellent. So now it is not only amused but curious, and apparently hailing from some planet or plane or universe where fucking laptop cables are not accepted as the norm.

"Of a sort," he mutters, injecting as much concentrated hauteur as he can into each subsequent motion, first in steadily picking away the wires wrapped around the shoulder distal to his free hand, then in gradually working the second arm out from its winding, uncomfortably taut trap, as he has rapidly deduced that he cannot be expected to receive help from - whoever the fuck that is that's been deriving enjoyment from this.

"They carry electrical currents." And are also, apparently, fair fucking impossible to untangle once one has been hopelessly incorporated into the central knot. The pathways some of these wires appear to split off into seem quite implausible, and Rush makes no effort to suppress his low growl of exasperation. Has homotopy not been fucking invented yet?

"But not right now," observes Asmodia, encouraged by the confirmation but not so much by his brisk manner. She furrows her brow, watching him work. If these cords are just components for a spell or device not currently in use, there should be no danger in touching them-- except that he seems to be having a lot of trouble getting free of them. If it takes him this long to untangle himself, perhaps it's not such a great wonder that he managed somehow to get himself in there in the first place.

"Do you need help?" she asks as the idea finally occurs to her. "I could cut them, but if they're components I assume you want them whole." She reaches out to pull one of the cords that has looped itself around his neck off over his head, her fingers cool where they brush briefly against his face.

The belated offer is neither appreciated nor desired, and the unexpected contact elicits a startled jerk that nearly rolls him off his side and onto his back, which would be an even less workable position and not conducive to escaping this fucking intolerable mesh of wire and electronics.

"Fuck - !" Rush forces himself rigid again, fearful any abrupt movements may unravel or reravel any progress he may have made in extricating his upper body. "Don't - just fuckin' leave it, don't -" He makes a resigned, circular motion with the only hand he has available to him. "Don't cut anything."

She startles in turn, flinching back and tucking her hands in close to her chest. Of course he doesn't want her touching him. Of course. "Sorry," she says bitterly, not moving to help him again. If he wants to struggle with his stupid spell component cords by himself, it can be one hundred percent his problem. She can absolutely do that for him. "I was just trying to help," she mutters before clenching her jaw. She's not hurt. She refuses to be hurt. If anything, she's angry, because he's being a stupid prejudiced human and that's his problem, right?

Rocking back again and turning her attention away from him in a ~~forced~~ business-like fashion, she shucks off her backpack and reaches into it, grabbing a garment that apparently just happens to be the first thing her hand touches and swinging it around over her shoulders. As she ties the short cloak in place everything that is inhuman about her fades from sight or changes to a more 'natural' color, leaving her a pale young human woman.

"There," she says sharply, glaring at him. Just let him flinch away from her now. "Better? May I help now?"

Thank fuck his shoulders are narrow and the rest of him equally so, which makes the entire process of easing the taut loops trapping his right arm to his hip a marginally less aggravating trial than it would, Rush suspects, normally. He has placed a higher priority in unthreading the coils that have wound their way around his neck as he has no great desire to die gasping, but his arm has begun to go unpleasantly numb and has become, unsurprisingly, his secondary target.

"Sorry," he mutters without exhibiting the slightest effort to convey any sense of apology whatsoever, narrowed focus entirely devoted to extracting his neck from any imminent danger of strangulation, "but I've found things tend to progress much quicker without external -"

That particular line of thought unexpectedly shatters in contact with the apparent knowledge that this organism is capable of shifting its appearance.

" - interference, what the fuck," Rush finishes flatly, taking great care to enunciate each consonant with crisp, arid disbelief. "Did you just alter species?"

"Yeah, and I did it just for you," she lies impatiently. She could have turned into an honest to goodness human, but using an illusion is a lot easier as long as no one trips over her invisible tail. "I get it, okay? So I'm human now, and you can calm down and let me get you out of that mess."

Again, she reaches toward him to help with the cords. It's so simple and she can have it off him in just a minute if he'll just hold still instead of acting like a big, racist baby. Or so she thinks -- should Rush hold still long enough for her to start pulling loops of cord off him, she'll quickly get one of her own wrists ensnared.

Edited 2015-03-04 08:29 (UTC)

Rush takes a moment to ask himself what intergalactic menace he must have pissed off to allow this to happen. Why is he engaging in first contact. Why has he been put in this situation. This is not his fucking area.

"Would you fucking - no," he snaps, almost entirely devoid of his intended rancor. He suspects any efforts to get this non-terrestrial to fuck off would be infinitely less difficult if his tone would stop bizarrely and ineffectively landing in the area of mildly horrified bafflement. "Fucking leave it. I am solving a problem."

This is no fucking less difficult than one's typical quantum-based geometrically-locked cypher, except perhaps instead of a flawlessly arranged locking grid there are simply rows and rows of endless fucking knots. But his right arm is finally loosening, thank fuck, and no longer in imminent danger of mass tissue death by blood loss.

"You're not solving it very well!" retorts Asmodia, who is very unlikely to be impressed by his intellect at this point. He's the one who tied himself up and hasn't provided a good excuse (or any excuse) for how that happened, and he's the one who still hasn't figured out how to untie himself the entire time they've been talking.

He's got part of it at least loose, and it seems obvious from an outside perspective what needs to be done next. "Hold still," she demands, refusing to take no for an answer as she goes to work on the wires. If she just takes that part and shifts it -- and there, all those loops can slide right down off the end of his arm, which will free up that other one running out from the snarled mess around his hip, which in turn can --

Wait, when did she slip this much of the cables up over her own forearms? She can remember putting her hands through a couple loops just for a place to put the cable so it wouldn't re-tangle, but when she looks down she finds that it's crept up to her elbows, and when she tries to slide her arms out --

"Uh," she says. "Don't freak out, but I think there might be a problem."

Rush has been making significant progress in his mind. He has righted himself to the point where he is, roughly, sitting up and is semi-successfully maneuvering his right arm out of its snare and into something resembling complete freedom of motion, and from there he may progress to releasing his lower body as well.

That is, assuming, that external forces somewhat beyond his control do not insist on fucking everything up on a consistent basis.

"What did I just say," he growls, performing a flawless job of imbuing each word with as much withering disdain as can be contained in a pentasyllabic phrase. He is beginning to suspect there may be several unknown properties at work here, several of which involve the physical entanglement of any unfortunate who happens to initiate the briefest contact with the nest of tangles, regardless of spatial logic.

And now she's gone and gotten herself fucking caught. With him.

"Fair fucking brilliant." He shakes the hair from his eyes with a brisk jerk of a chin and glowers levelly at her, muscle in his jaw twitching subtly. "You realize you've effectively trapped us both?"

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