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

[etherthief]

Iman smiles, both at the name and at the remark, and then gives a little snort when the soap goes flying and Sunshine just sighs. They're both having lots of problems right now, which makes her progressively more relaxed about her own fuckups, until of course Sunshine asks that casual question.

"Oh, um - no one." Well THAT'S not true, and ridiculous besides. "I mean, not no one, she's a friend of mine. She has hair kind of like yours, she bakes - I thought maybe it was her for a second. But she's a lot taller." And perfecter. Not that Sunshine isn't totally hot, she wouldn't mind hittin' that, but that's an unusually secondary conclusion. What is happening to her.

"So what are you trying to make?" she says. "Because part of me wants to see if two pairs of hands are better than one, and part of me thinks we should stand still and not touch anything ever again."

Greta hasn't given her baking lessons yet, but maybe she could get some pre-practice in. If, you know, that doesn't end with them covering everything with flour and then setting in on fire.

[rae_of_sun]

Okay, so, not a face-twin. Small favors. Sunshine wrestles the hand soap back up onto the counter, getting soap all over the damn place in the process, but she's okay with that. At least soap will be easy to clean up. And it means she can actually wash her hands, which she does, without incident. Stop the presses.

"Bakes professionally?" Sunshine glances back at Iman, wondering if she should be worried about the competition. Probably not. The bake shop was doing just fine before she started attracting the rifty demographic - and before the dramatic angelic remodeling. Now, it's doing better.

She fumbles the faucet handle a few times before successfully turning off the tap, eyes the roll of paper towels with considerable trepidation, then opts to just use a hand towel to dry herself off. She's not messing with anything that unrolls right now. She turns back to Iman, back to the mess she's made of the counter and floor, and huffs out a dry laugh at her question.

"I was trying to make cookies, but it is not my day, apparently." Arching an eyebrow, she adds, "You really want in on this?" Because sure, the thought of having someone else helping is intriguing… but considering Iman's entrance, there's a decent chance this is just going to be twice the disaster it was when Sunshine was operating on her own. "You might be better off edging out of the room before my attempts to clean this up result in the--the frigging outbreak of the Second Voodoo Wars, or something."

[etherthief]

"Um, not exactly," she says. "She did where she came from, sort of. She's still pretty new."

Cookies sound fun, but, as they can clearly both agree, potentially disastrous. She grins, a little bit bewildered at the reference to 'Second Voodoo Wars'. "Wouldn't want that," she says, lifting an eyebrow. "I mean, that's not a thing in my universe, but it sounds like a shitshow." She puts her hands on her hips and frowns thoughtfully at the counter. "Well, I'm not one to give up, but I'm also subpar in the kitchen on a good day, so I'm not sure we want to roll those dice, yeah."

She looks around. "We could start less ambitious?" she suggests. "Try to clean up a bit? Maybe if we go real slow and work together."

[rae_of_sun]

Sunshine gives a noncommittal hum in response to the formerly professional new not-face-twin, distracted by the hand towel's complete refusal to just stay on the oven door handle where she's trying to put it. After its third fall to the floor, she gives up and tosses it onto the counter. Her shoulders slump when it ends up landing in the sink. Gods, this is ridiculous.

She turns back to Iman, letting out a brief, humorless laugh at her assessment of the Voodoo Wars. "It was." Though at the rate things are going, she can almost imagine their current, collective fail rate ballooning outwards until all of Manhattan is just a smoking crater. Bad, but not exactly a rehash of the Wars… which would probably involve Iman getting turned for having the audacity to be nice and likable. But let's not think about vampires behaving badly.

"I work in a bake shop," she says instead, eyeing the mess with deep disappointment. "If my boss could see this, he'd…" she almost says 'fire me,' but this goes so far beyond a mere lack of work ethic, "… stage an intervention, probably." To say nothing of what would happen if she pulled something like this at home. Her mother would have four new charms squirreled away in the bakery and a fifth tucked under the driver's seat of the Wreck before the lunch rush. Yeesh.

But cleaning sounds doable. Or at least safely attemptable. It won't involve heat sources or electric mixers, so at worst it should just be embarrassing and not dangerous. "Okay," she says. "So, cleaning supplies." Maybe there's something under the sink. She opens the cabinet, not in the least bit surprised when several plastic spray bottles tumble out onto the floor. "Spartan," she deadpans, dropping into a crouch and, in the process, accidentally kicking one of the bottles halfway across the room.

[etherthief]

"I'm sure you're fine on a regular day," says Iman. "I mean, this seems sort of astronomical, doesn't it? This amount of clumsiness over such a small timeline. Highly unlikely."

She smiles sympathetically when the cleaning supplies tumble out, then crouches down to help. "A bake shop, huh?" she says. "Do they, by chance, need an extra baker? I don't know if my friend even wants a job like that, but it couldn't hurt to ask. I've been checking out a few places for her."

She starts to stand up and hits her head on the edge of the counter. She grunts and shrinks back down, clutching at her head. "Ow," he remarks, equally deadpan. She stays on the floor instead and attempts to spray some of the flour-strewn floor, but instead narrowly avoids spraying herself in the face. "Shit!" She laughs, baffled, at the absurdity of it. "This is going great so far."

[rae_of_sun]

Sunshine considers the question for a moment. The short answer is 'probably not,' the long one is 'maybe if Arlo undergoes some kind of dramatic lifestyle shift and Peeta refuses to be coaxed out into the light of day' (because how can she not give her apprentice dibs?). But Iman is being nice and helpful, and Sunshine would feel like a troll if she offered absolutely nothing. "Probably not at my place, but I can keep my ears open," she says as she sorts through the spray bottles with a complete lack of grace. She can't even tell what's in most of these; they all just look like Generic Cleaning Supplies.

She's attempting to get most of the bottles back under the sink when Iman's brand of clumsiness starts to take a turn for the self-endangerment. Whatever's in that bottle, Sunshine's pretty sure it shouldn't be applied directly to the eyes. "You okay?" she asks, giving the mess of bottles beneath the sink a distracted shove. There's an ominous clunk from the pipes, and a moment later, water starts gushing out of the cabinet as if from a firehose.

"Shit!" Sunshine yelps, attempting to push herself out of the line of fire and succeeding only in falling onto her back in the growing puddle, plastic bottles drifting around her like an absurd flotilla (which would make her, what, an exceptionally clumsy Godzilla?). Shiva wept.

[etherthief]

"Yeah, I'm - Fuck!" Iman lurches forward, reaching for the violent spray of water with her left hand, aiming to create some kind of temporary solve for it, when her hand abruptly opens up without her say-so, fingers untwining to reveal all the sharp little tools, just out of nowhere in front of a damn stranger.

"Fuckshit!" she elaborates, yanking her hand back, trying to get it under control. What the fuck is wrong with it? What's wrong with everything?!

[rae_of_sun]

Iman reaches out towards the water jet with enough purpose that Sunshine thinks: oh, nice, a magic handler. Maybe even one with an affinity for water; that would be nice. But then her hand frigging unravels into an unnerving array of sharp, shiny instruments, and Sunshine propels herself away in a panic. Her head strikes the bottom of the oven door, which promptly falls open, the handle banging painfully against her hip.

Oh, gods. This is bad enough without having her view suddenly obscured. "What in the triple carthaginian hell was that?!" Sunshine says as she attempts to shove herself out from beneath the oven door.

[etherthief]

"Hoooly shit I am sorry," says Iman, frantically trying to pull her arm back together. "It is not supposed to just HAPPEN like that, jesus. Yeah, um." She finally gets her fingers to close up and waggles her hand at Sunshine with a weak, sheepish grin. "It's a prosthetic. Built it myself. Usually I, you know, warn people before doing that. Sorry."

Now that that's somewhat under control she has a minute to process Sunshine's reaction. Triple carthiginian hell is one impressive turn of phrase, damn, she's gotta up her swear game.

[rae_of_sun]

With a maximum amount of ungainly struggling, Sunshine manages to push herself up into a sit, the oven door shutting behind her as she leans back against it. She scrapes her hair out of her face, and notes with considerable relief that Iman's hand is looking a hell of a lot less mecha-spider than it was a few seconds ago.

Okay. She is okay. Soaked and embarrassed, sure, and her heart is still pounding, but it's just a prosthetic - a kali weird prosthetic, gods, SOF would go nuts over that kind of tech - and she is okay.

"… Right," she says with an unsteady nod. "Gods. Okay." She is just gonna… get to her feet. It's a far more difficult task than it should be, in part because she stupidly tries to use the oven door for support and just ends up yanking it open again. But eventually she makes it, her jeans and the back of her shirt thoroughly soaked. So hey, between that and the flour on the front of her shirt, she is 100% wreck. Fantastic.

Once she's braced herself against the counter, which seems mercifully disinclined to fall apart beneath her hands, she nods towards Iman's now-totally-normal-looking hand. "So, can that do plumbing?" she asks. Or almost asks. Halfway through 'plumbing,' a familiar but entirely uncalled-for jolt of power runs down her arms, and the countertop goes from sturdy formica to far less sturdy… what the hell is this? It crumbles off in her hands, and she falls back, her elbows going right through it and banging painfully against the still-wooden facade of the cabinets. She lurches to her feet unsteadily, then lifts a handful of the stuff for closer examination. Marzipan?

"So, uh… speaking of shit that shouldn't just happen," she says, scowling and dropping it on the floor. It splats.

[etherthief]

"Might be able to wing something, if I were at my best. The way things have been going-" which is when the counter melts right into a completely different matter, "-WHAT."

Now it is Iman's turn to jerk back wildly, slamming into the table and knocking something off of it right onto her head. Fucking OW. She hisses and gives the salt shaker a seriously evil stare before realigning her attention to Sunshine.

"Did you do that?" she blurts. "I mean, not on purpose, but - was it you? Was that alchemy?" It sure looked like alchemy, but weird and overly powerful, and serving no concrete purpose. Much like everything that has happened in this room.

[rae_of_sun]

'Alchemy' is a hell of a term for it, and Sunshine arches an eyebrow as she swats marzipan off of her elbows. "Transmutation," she says. Then, because the more disparaging term seems more appropriate in this case, "Stuff-changing. It's, uh… normally more small-scale than this." She's graduated beyond 'whatever fits between her hands,' sure, but warding a door - or even a bunch of doors and windows - is small-scale compared to transmuting an entire countertop to something not the least bit counter-toppy.

She gives said mess - complete with Sunshine-shaped hole - a deeply unimpressed look, then starts edging towards the door. This whole room is a lost cause.