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

[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.

[lottawork]

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.

[interndana]

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."

[lottawork]

"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.

[interndana]

"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.

[lottawork]

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."

[interndana]

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?

[lottawork]

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."