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

[biscuit_powered]

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.

[lottawork]

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?"

[biscuit_powered]

"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!

[lottawork]

"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'?"

[biscuit_powered]

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."

[lottawork]

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."

[biscuit_powered]

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.

[lottawork]

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."

[biscuit_powered]

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?"

[lottawork]

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.

[biscuit_powered]

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."

[lottawork]

"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."

[biscuit_powered]

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?"

[lottawork]

'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?"

[biscuit_powered]

"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.

[lottawork]

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?"

[biscuit_powered]

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."

[lottawork]

"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."

[biscuit_powered]

Biscuit creeps over from where they left him on the other side of the room, bumping into the leg of a coffee table quite hard on the way and sending a bowl of cheetos falling to the floor. Asmodia flinches both in surprise at the noise and in sympathy for his surprise, and she sits upright and lifts an arm to let him clamber into her lap before lowering her hand again to rest against the rodent's spine.

"...You're...messing with me," she says experimentally, not the least bit sure he actually is. It's so unlikely, though: a perfectly normal-looking human saying he's from another planet, and one in a different universe on top of that. She keeps on frowning thoughtfully, though, chewing over the concept rather than laughing at it as a joke. "So you came through this Rift? But if people are coming through it, I think I would have heard."

[lottawork]

In the space of time in which he nearly strangled himself, the rodent-like creature had slipped out of Rush's sphere of relevance. He doesn't recognize it, nor does he choose to acknowledge it short of a perfunctory narrowing of eyes. His attention flickers between presumed pet and presumed owner in vague indecision before coming to a pointed rest on the skeptical latter.

"It operates on a premise askew," he answers in swelling annoyance. "Not in the typical sense. I studied spatiotemporal aberrations for a living and I had no idea the bloody thing existed until I was confronted with it directly." Her clear doubt, however, has communicated her inexperience with the Rift itself; it's an overwhelmingly likely conclusion that she is not one of its manifold victims. "I take it, then, that you've never encountered it. That is to say - you're not in Manhattan."

[biscuit_powered]

Biscuit settles down and makes himself comfortable, face turned toward the stranger. He watches Rush intently, ears perked forward -- several of those words don't register as familiar in his mind, but he's paying just as close attention to what's being said as his witch is.

"No," says Asmodia. "I'm not. But if it's a rift between worlds, why shouldn't you be in Absalom?"

[lottawork]

Oh, excellent. She's retaining nothing of what he's been saying. The Rift's mechanics may not be entirely understood - not by him, not by the TARDIS - but the premise, surely, is a simple enough concept to digest.

"Whatever or wherever Absalom is, my universe clearly doesn't have one," he snaps, opening a hand in a weary gesture of irritation. "Obviously our separate branes have a vast number of differentials. I was taken from a ship several billion light years from Earth. That might give you some context for the level of diversity we're dealing with." The selection of worlds available for sampling also includes, apparently, ones populated by 'tiefling' creatures capable of dimensional manipulation and possibly illusory shape alteration and fuck knows what else.

Rush punctuates his brief, scathing diatribe with a decisive flex of his right hand before he braces it against the floor, deliberately testing its weight. It's unlikely it will support him for long. He tenses and relaxes disgustedly in the space of the same instant, curling his right arm back around himself. Escape from this conversation, however uselessly circuitous it's proving to be, won't be a workable solution for some time. And communicating a poorly understood concept to an even more poorly understood species is not within his purview, and never has this been more painfully transparent.

[biscuit_powered]

Asmodia's grip tightens incrementally on Biscuit, who tolerates it for now with long-suffering patience. The corners of her mouth draw down -- why is she putting up with this, again? She just rescued him; the least he could do is not talk to her like she's some kind of idiot. It really doesn't help that she feels like an idiot for not knowing what he means by some of the words he's using (what the hell is a light-year?) and for sitting here trying to puzzle out what he means by saying he was 'on a ship' somewhere other than his planet.

"I meant that if there's a rift people are just falling through, maybe you shouldn't assume I'm the one who just came through it," she snaps in return.

[lottawork]

"Obviously you haven't," he counters, tone retreating to its brusque, unattached crack of consonants. His hand flexes again, clenching and restive. This is growing intolerable. "You'd be halfway useful in this discussion otherwise."

In an abrupt twitch of motion he whips his hand back down to splay fingers against the floor, digging nails ruthlessly into the wood surface, an insufficient redirection of lingering tension and exasperation.

"The Rift," says Rush tiredly, weariness flooding over his rigidity, "is to blame for this, specifically. This encounter. Our consciousnesses are active within a constructed dreamspace, allowing interaction across universal barriers that would ordinarily be uncrossable."

[biscuit_powered]

Who does this asshole even think he is? "I'd be plenty useful if you didn't keep --" what is it he's done, he's been trying to explain but obviously he's doing a shitty job, here -- "-- keep saying cryptic bullshit! First it's a rift and now it's a dream and you don't have to be such a dick about it!"

The rodent in her lap lets out a pained squeak, and Asmodia abruptly realizes her grip has been tightening as she speaks. She lets go, muttering, "sorry" into her lap.