applesaucedream | ACT NOW! [Open to All]

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?"

Brow furrowing, she tries just shucking the cords off -- they're just around her arms, surely they should slide right over her hands -- and when that fails, simply shaking her arms as if that's going to help. When she's done, she's managed somehow to bind one of her wrists almost directly against his body, and she takes in a sharp breath as the situation suddenly seems significantly more sinister to her.

"...I'm going to cut it," she decides, because the hell with preserving his spell components when they're obviously under some kind of curse. Trouble is, she can't reach her knife right now; she just ends up yanking on the man she was attempting to free when she tries. Grinding her teeth, she wracks her brain for other options...and lights up as it occurs to her to call on her familiar. "Biscuit?" she whistles, then grins when she sees where he's got to. "Biscuit!"

The rodent from earlier looks up from where he managed to overturn a bowl of cheetos on himself while his witch was busy. "Besa srruisr sraka kur ka," she says to the donkey rat, who obediently abandons his treasure trove of junk food to trundle in their direction, fur laden with orange cheese dust. "He'll get us out," Asmodia says confidently.

Edited 2015-03-05 07:02 (UTC)

The annoyed hiss between Rush's teeth rapidly devolves into a steadily ratcheting panic when she succeeds in pinning a hand against him. He twists in a futile effort to get away from the immediate, overpowering discomfort the contact instills, and succeeds only in entangling them both further.

"Get - the fuck - off," he rasps between clenched teeth, panic now approaching something more easily interpreted as horror. She will not stop touching him, and this is her fault and something easily fucking rectified if only she had fucking listened to him in the first fucking place. Anxiety intensifying unbearably with each passing fucking second, Rush lashes out with a thoroughly ensnared foot with frenetic desperation, and succeeds only in hooking it around some essential component of the wires still trapping his right arm, toppling him completely once more.

The inclusion of an animal he does not recognize is assuredly not helping.

"Don't you fuckin' dare," he snarls at it as it approaches, accent thickening at the bleeding edges of his own mounting, frenzied panic. "Donnae even think ah comin' fuckin' near me. An' don' - don' fuckin' cut it. D'you wannae fuckin' kill us?"

"Stop pulling!" protests Asmodia, realizing all too late that she is dealing with a crazy person. He keeps yanking on her hand, bending the wrist at a painful angle and cutting off the blood supply as each movement pulls the bonds tighter. "Stop, stop, just --!"

And down he goes, taking her to the floor with him. She manages not to land on him, but it's not like there's far she can go. The bonds on her arms have converged so that the one not pressed against her newest acquaintance is held tight against her own forearm.

Biscuit stops short and chitters at her, staring at the man with his ears perked forward, and Asmodia does not call him closer again. "What do you mean, kill us?" she asks, trying very hard not to catch his infectious panic. Did he know these cords were cursed? He could have warned her!

"They conduct electricity," he repeats in a tone meant to imply how much he finds his acquaintance to be a complete idiot, but merely sounds strangled and torn. "I don't know how many of these are on, that is to say live, that is to say working, that is to say conducting electricity as we fuckin' well speak."

The initial surge of feverish energy has faded to a harsh, heavy gasping as Rush shuts his eyes and devotes the remainder of his concentration into not panicking.

It is not going well.

"I do not like," he works out from his awkward, contorted, painful sprawl on the floor, "touching. Regardless of fuckin' species. Y'understan'?"

She's not liking it much at the moment, herself. Try to do a good deed, get lashed to a panicking xenophobe with a bunch of active magical artifacts. Break the conduit, unleash the energy -- that much she can grok despite his vague way of explaining things. "You could have said that to begin with," she growls, referring both to his failure to tell her that the conduits were active and to his failure to tell her he's just a panicky weirdo about people in general (if that's even true; it's not like he doesn't know she's really a tiefling under all this).

With him on the floor and her arms bound together and to his side, she doesn't have much choice but to sort of lounge next to him, painfully propped up on one elbow to maintain some semblance of not being entirely prone and helpless. Thus far the cords are only on her arms, but she knows better now than to move and make it worse.

"...I have an idea," she says, watching him gasp for air. "I can get us out of this, but you have to let me do it -- you have to trust me. And you have to tell me if there are any other enchantments on these things that are going to stop me from opening the dimension door."

Rush finds himself capable of very little by the way of communicative effort at the moment, periodically fluctuating between straining to shift away from the unpleasant tactility and being unable to do so for the cord that has wound tightly over his chest and is now notably restricting his air flow considerably.

"They are not -" he grinds out, though the words emerge as halting wheezes, "bloody - enchanted. Mechan - mechanical."

His eyes clamp shut as he tries not to succumb to the vertiginous pull of steadily reducing respiration. Rush has next to no grasp of what method of escape she's brought up - something dimensional, whatever the fuck - and he can no longer afford to care if the unpleasant graying cast that has begun to saturate his vision is any indication. He is not going to die by fucking strangulation and certainly not by laptop cables being atypically inflexible little fucks.

That would be ridiculous.

"Yes - do it - before ah fuckin' - asphyxiate."

How are there more of them around his chest? How did they get around his chest in the first place? He may think these things are purely mechanical (mechanical how? They don't even have moving parts!), but it's pretty obvious there's magic afoot here.

No use dwelling on it, though. With her hands tied she can't check, and so she'll have to trust that he's right and they can disappear right out from under their bonds. "Okay," she says, shutting her own eyes and taking a deep breath. "Remember, don't try to resist. I can only do this once."

Thank the light she doesn't have to move her hands for this one. Focusing inward, she begins loudly reciting an incantation in a language Rush won't recognize -- and a few words later, they both abruptly disappear and reappear in the same positions on the other side of the room sans laptop cords.

He can respond with only a faint grunt, and trusts that will be an adequate enough response. The string of words she utters is completely unknown to him - it does not sound remotely terrestrial - and the undetectable shift is equally beyond his grasp. The steadily constricting pressure around his chest vanishes and he sucks in a desperate lungful of air in a palliating, wrenching gasp, struggling away from the unwanted contact and slamming his head into some unknown surface in the same graceless series of movements.

"Fuck!" he snaps with what little recovered breath he has, and scrambles back again. A wall. He crawled directly into a wall and even considering the disorienting kaleidoscopic pulses to his vision following his imminent strangulation, that makes him fair fucking pathetic.

"What is it," Rush rasps, wrapping one arm protectively around his aching chest, "that you did, just now?" He shoots her a look of suspicion mingled with curiosity. "That method of transportation - I'm completely unfamiliar with it."

She'd laugh, but in all honestly she's a bit shaken up by just how freaked out he is over this. Were the cords that tight? It was uncomfortable for her, sure, but she wasn't the one being strangled by the things. Asmodia quickly pulls away as well, sitting up with considerably more grace (perhaps because she knows where she put the both of them). Rubbing her wrists, she watches the human, her currently invisible tail curled around her folded legs, the end of it twitching back and forth nervously and denting the fabric of her trousers each time she hits it against her leg.

"...Dimension door?" she repeats. Not a magic user, then. "It's a spell, a really handy one. Uh...are you, uh...hurt?"

Edited 2015-03-07 07:21 (UTC)

Rush makes a rough, frustrated noise in the back of his throat and flaps a hand in a hopeless expenditure of energy he frankly cannot afford to be expending this soon after what nearly amounted to an anoxic blackout. The hand immediately creeps to the throbbing on his head to rub at the possible bruising with a distracted, unfocused air.

"I'm fine," he says, vocal cords feeling as frayed and torn as the rest of him. "I'm not overly familiar with magic, as a vehicle or a practice. I'm a scientist."

He fixes her with an unvarying, intense look, eyes narrowing.

"And you," he continues with a mildly accusatory curiosity, "are not human. Are you." The addition of the question-like phrase is a vaguely recognized social courtesy, but the question itself does not exist so much as it manifests as a quiet demand.

Asmodia nods, unsurprised by the admission (though claiming to be a scientist is pretty fancy). Most people have only passing knowledge of magic; they might buy a magic item or commission a spellcaster to make their lives easier in some way, but she's far from the norm in being able to harness it herself. At least he doesn't come from some backward place that doesn't use magic at all; then she never would have been able to explain well enough to stop him from resisting her attempt to relocate him.

She rests her elbows on her legs and resists the urge to grab her own tail; it's a childish habit and she won't have it. "No," she says, trying to lock eyes with him to show that she's not intimidated by his tone and is only going to tell him what she feels like sharing and on her own terms. Her gaze slides away to land on his ear after a whopping four seconds, the extended eye contact all but excruciating. Still, she tries to at least sound firm. "I'm not."

"Ah." He considers her honesty for a moment, expression locked in open, incisive observation. "Interesting."

He is not a diplomat. He is not a fucking linguist. He is a scientist, and he is not equipped to make goddamned first contact.

He is also the only one present to carry out that directive.

Unfortunately.

"I'm unfamiliar with your species," Rush says at last, breaking his analytical sweep to drop his hand and shift back, pressing against the wall. His other arm comes up to wrap again around the burning lines of lingering tension across his chest. "Though non-terrestrial interference was, in my universe - frequent."

Asmodia stares. "...You what?" she asks after a moment of awkward silence. The first part kind of made sense; tieflings can pop up anywhere but they're not exactly common in a lot of places (but if he didn't know what she was, she's kind of surprised he didn't assume she was a fiend). Then something something non-terrestrial? Interference from the stars?

"I'm a tiefling," she says, speaking slowly for his benefit. Surely he's at least heard of them. "And what do you mean, your universe? And what do you mean, non-terrestrial interference?"

'Tiefling' has little to no linguistic significance to him, and the sharpening of the frown he shoots at her should inform her as much.

"Universe," he repeats with slow, deliberate stress distributed evenly over all consonants. "Brane. Separate reality." The intensity of his pointed stare abruptly disperses as he looks away, shaking hair from his eyes in a brusque, involuntary motion. His tone becomes wry, quietly self-derisive. "Spacetime is terribly malleable these days, haven't you heard?"

"No," she says, any playfulness gone in the face of this weird revelation -- or rather, this weird claim. "I hadn't. You're not making much sense right now -- but you're human, aren't you?"

She sort of assumed -- well, but there's still no good reason not to assume, is there? "Where are you from?" she asks, trying to lay some kind of groundwork before addressing this universe business.

Rush snorts, one side of his mouth twisting upward bitterly as he continues to address the empty space of wall.

"Human. Yes." His eyes drop, briefly raking the air surrounding him before snapping unerringly back to her, rigid and questioning. "Earth. Planet, if you haven't heard of it. Though likely a different iteration than the one you might be familiar with."

He regards her with something approaching his usual level of terse, vague irritation. "We're operating from different areas of reference. You understand that reality isn't a singular concept, and that theoretically there's an infinite amount of divergent pathways to be extrapolated from each one?"

He's even worse at eye contact than she is. It makes her feel a little better, and also a little awkward. Her frown deepens and she leans farther forward as if getting a few inches closer and squinting at him will make all the weirdness resolve into something comprehensible. "Earth," she repeats, giving an almost imperceptible shiver at the familiar name. "That's the name of your planet? Because that's...alarming, not going to lie."

She gives her head a little shake. "I know there are other planes of being, but they're all part of the same..." she gestures vaguely, "thing. But you're talking about two different versions of the same plane, aren't you? Or more than two."

"Countless," he confirms tiredly. "Potentially part of a cohesive whole, though at that point we'd be making scientifically unsound assumptions regarding the nature of the multiverse."

Rush flexes the fingers of his right arm abruptly, reestablishing sensation in absence of numbness, a rapid clenching and unclenching of his fist with arrhythmic intensity before he drags the hand through his hair, brushing the disordered fringe again from his face.

"Essentially, what we know is this." His hand falls away to flick up one finger, wavering yet absolute. "One, that the multiverse is endless. Endless." He pauses to favor her with a searching look with more magnitude than is strictly conversationally appropriate, though given that Rush is ostensibly encountering a non-terrestrial - 'Earth' is a familiar title, though 'alarming' raises its own set of theories - it may be entirely warranted. "Two, the differences between universes are equally infinite. And three, there exists a Rift capable of circumventing the boundaries that would normally exist between separate branes, a spatial-temporal fracture in the chiral matter itself."

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