applesaucedream | Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

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Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

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Don't worry, dreamers of Manhattan. There will be no humiliating episodes of sudden-onset-clumsiness tonight - at least, nothing more severe than what you might experience naturally. Your physical and mental faculties will be left perfectly intact. What a treat! And what luck, because if you do lose your footing, it's a long way down to the forest floor.

But hey, who wants to be on the boring old ground when there are so many wonderful treehouses to explore? There are dozens of them spread throughout the surrounding forest, connected by a series of bridges and catwalks (some, admittedly, a bit more stable than others). It's easy to forget - or fail to notice - that there really is no easy or conventional way down to the ground when you're surrounded by such splendor.

The houses' styles range from charming and rustic to modern and sleek, with many falling somewhere in between. There are viewing platforms for bird-watching or simply taking in the scenery (trees, mostly, though if you venture high enough, you'll be treated the sight of the forest canopy stretched across a valley far below). But the insides of the treehouses are comfortably furnished to varying degrees as well, so there's no need to immerse yourself in nature if you'd really rather not. Some are complete houses in their own right, with all the amenities of a Manhattan apartment and then some.

Go for a climb, or kick back and relax. The only enemies you'll find here are other dreamers... and, potentially, gravity.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"A few days ago," she confirms glumly, stepping around to where his branch meets solid structure. "So you're saying this is another part of the package? Because that place just keeps getting better and better."

So, a brand new rifty, and one he's never met or even heard of before - Daniel's pretty sure he'd remember.

"Yep," he confirms apologetically, sounding equally put out by their shared misfortune. "Shared group dreams. Rift likes to toss us all together into one metaphysical space every once in a while."

It's a temporary diversion, but he seizes the opportunity to inch his way steadily forward while keeping his attention locked on the - apparently non-human? - rifty. Maybe if he isn't thinking too hard about the merciless, sheer drop beneath him -

"I'm Daniel," he supplies with a fleeting, encouraging tug to one side of his mouth. "Came through like you, just over a month ago."

At least he seems to be moving along on his own now, because if Asmodia has to rescue him she really can't say what she'll do about his predicament. Just a week ago it would have been dead simple to turn Biscuit into a bird and send him out to deliver a charge of flight magic, but both parts of that plan are inaccessible now, locked away as though she and Biscuit never knew how to do them in the first place. She grits her teeth as she watches Daniel inch closer, then casts about her for something to hang onto in case she needs to try lean out and to grab him without going over the side herself.

"Asmodia," she replies, wrapping her tail around a nearby branch in preparation. "Did you come from a place like this Manhattan? Because it's starting to seem like I'm the only one who didn't." That's unfair and an exaggeration; Daine's not from a copy of Manhattan, but her world hadn't sounded any more familiar. If she can just keep him talking, though, maybe she'll also keep him moving.

"I'm from a version of Earth," he says evenly, studiously ignoring the tallness of the trees and the vertiginous, virescent drop as he keeps edging onward. "In a manner of speaking. I was offworld at the time. Er." He halts, frowns, and considers the bizarre nature of that statement out of context. Then again, the person he's talking to, Asmodia, is presumably not human. Maybe the relative unfamiliarity of 'offworld' as a standard social concept is a gross assumption on his part.

Dimly, he registers that he's stopped and forces himself to keep going. Several flakes of bark crumble away beneath his fingers, break neatly away from the whole to drift downward in a dizzying, fluttering plummet of faintly air-resistant fragments susceptible to the fluid nature of wind and aerophysics.

Daniel doesn't need to be a physicist to know that his fall would be far less gentle or likely to be slowed by fluid drag. No. It would be something more of a straight plunge. A straight plunge to his leafy, imminent, bark-strewn death.

He is trying very hard to not think about that.

Asmodia. Asmodia is more important. She's right there and asking questions, and that's generally more his wheelhouse. Right. He wrenches himself out of that delightful morbid tangent and wraps his fingers a little more securely around his branch.

"I'm an archaeologist," he says by way of explanation. "I, um. Traveled. Quite a bit. Through space." He clears his throat weakly in substitution for the moment in the conversation where he would typically make a wavy, roughly circular hand gesture that he will now not be making for obvious reasons. "It's a thing."

It's a little hard to pay attention to the conversation when he seems a split second away from falling to his death. Biscuit makes a questioning sound, but Asmodia just waves a hand at him vaguely, shushing him. She shuffles forward, holding fast with her tail as she tests how far out she can reach -- no, not far enough. Her breath catches when he moves again and sends bark falling, and she finds herself wishing she had even something mundane like a rope to toss out to him.

"Oh? I, um, traveled with a group that -- wait, space?" Her reminiscences about Pathfinder-style 'archaeology' (of which Daniel will no doubt disapprove very strongly whenever she does get around to telling him about it) are interrupted by her befuddlement over what he even means by the word 'space.' "...What kind of space?" she asks, baffled. Isn't everything 'space'?

"As in, you know, galaxies. Wormholes. Planets and, and such." He keeps his voice light, conversational. No big deal, just casually discussing his former line of work. His former, unbelievable, occasionally destructive line of work.

This is just fine.

"I don't think I'm familiar with the one you're from," he continues, scooting along his branch with a desperate, rapid energy. He's getting closer, he just needs to - not look down. Keep going, and not look down, and soon he'll be close enough to pull himself to solid ground. Relatively solid ground. Does it count as solid when it's still suspended in the trees? He makes the command decision to leave that question where it is, thanks.

"Assuming you're not from, uh, from Earth." His brows knit together as he reconsiders. "Which might be an entirely untrue assumption. I don't, ah, I don't actually know. You're not, are you?" He squints at her, abruptly transitioning from uncertain to blazingly incisive.

Oh, no big deal. No big deal at all. He didn't just tell her that he's been out doing what only the most powerful archmages can do, going places people literally cannot survive even if they are powerful enough to get there in the first place. Nope. Just an ordinary conversation about an ordinary person leading an ordinary life.

"No," she says, making a face. She really does stick out like a sore thumb, and it's not fair when almost any of her friends could have walked among the humans of Earth without immediately being assumed foreign. "It's called Golarion. Are you really -- are you really saying you've traveled in the dark tapestry? You're not making fun of me, are you? Because I'm not stupid, whatever I look like. If you've been out there, how are you not dead?" Equally important: "Or insane? You're not a cultist, are you?"

He can have a penetrating look right back even as she stretches out an arm, fingers coming up a few inches too short to grab at his shirt.

"Err." He looks at her blankly for a minute, mouth slightly open before he reclaims the presence of mind to snap it shut. "No, I'm. I'm pretty serious. And I'm not, I'm not a cultist?" The statement comes out sounding much more unsure than intended. He hastily plows onward.

"If by 'dark tapestry' you mean like - the night sky? Intergalactic travel? In which case, yes, yes I have." His expression settles for something between perplexity and faint amusement. "Though I wouldn't say I haven't died. You could, uh - in fact, you could call it a habit. I just happen to not be dead - now."

He closes the remaining distance between them and closes one hand gingerly around hers.

"Ah." Immediately the added stability gives him the leverage to swing his other hand up to grip the corner of the platform she's perched on. "Much better."

"It's the space between the stars -- oh." And his earlier terminology makes sense now. "Space. Funny way of saying it."

Reassuring that he says he's not a cultist (from what she's heard they tend to be proud of it). Not as reassuring that he's died before, nor that he didn't answer how he could possibly have traveled out there. Her grip on his hand is firm, but she really hopes he doesn't actually fall because she's not completely sure she'd be able to haul him up. She tightens her grip with her tail, suddenly afraid he is going to fall and take her with him.

"You shouldn't make a habit of it," she says, looking at him like he's grown a second head. "Come back too many times and the wrong kinds of gods are going to start paying attention."

"Ahh, gods," he says with mock dismissiveness. "They're a mixed bag. More or less challenge them for a living. Or, you know, kill them," and his rate of speech rockets up to an impressive velocity as he hastens to elaborate, "but only the intergalactic conquering ones. Those're - those're usually false gods, and not, um. And not very nice," he finishes less-than-eloquently. The rest of anything else he might have to say is lost in the low grunt as he levers himself upward, putting a frankly agonizing amount of strain on the arm grasping the platform for fear of putting too much weight on the arm of his impromptu rescuer.

He's got to thank eight years of spending entirely too much time with the military, because after a minute of struggling against the terrifying pull of gravity, he heaves himself upward and fully onto the platform. Immediately he rolls onto his back, panting slightly, and decides that he is really quite comfortable, sprawled like this on this odd wooden construct, potential for splinters be damned.

It's a good thing he elaborates quickly, because she's already starting to recoil when he suddenly claims to be a god-slayer and she's not sure if that means he is mad after all or if he means it and she ought to be terribly afraid right now. Still, she doesn't let go, because this god-slayer sure as hells can't fly, and she's relieved when he finally levers himself onto the platform and she can let go and scoot away from the edge.

"Are there many false gods where you come from, then?" she asks too airily. "You don't look like a god-slayer."

"Oh, yeah," he says breezily, blinking hard to clear away the bright spots of fading vertigo from his vision. "A whole galaxy of 'em. Mostly gone now, though." He rolls his head back to look at her in what's meant to be a reassuring look. "Kind of dismantled their entire economic structure. Granted, it was slavery-based, and genocide-based, and also technologically oppressive? Just so we're clear."

He gets himself propped up on one elbow, belatedly coming to realization that this is probably one of his less stellar introductions between the amount of information and the severe, severe likelihood of misinterpretation. Whoops.

"Tougher than I look," he assures her with a hopeful lift to his eyebrows, just before they knit sharply down again. "Er. Well. No, actually, I'm probably exactly as tough as I look. I just seem to have a lot of trouble staying dead."

If she didn't have an inkling of just what kinds of gods are out in the darkness between the stars, Asmodia might think she'd met some kind of anti-cultist out to rid the dark tapestry of its mad denizens. Whatever the outer gods are, though, they're not false gods that can be toppled by a mortal man, however immune he is to the strictures of death.

She's still not really clear on what he means in general, either. At least she can grab after familiar terms like slavery-based economic structure; dismantling one of those is pretty promising. She sits primly nearby him, knees up and her body generally tucked in on itself as she eyes him with a mixture of unease and bemusement. "And this was...on other planets," she seeks to clarify, unsure about the general scale and setting of what he's claiming to have accomplished.

He's feeling like he's got a solid enough coordination of his physical extremities to shift into a sitting position himself, which he does with a relative minimum of tangling limbs and generally undignified struggling. Arranging himself into a breathless cross-legged configuration, he responds with a tiny nod and regards her with reinvigorated interest. "Yes. Yes, exactly."

His smile adopts a self-deprecating twist as his expression relaxes. "I realize that - that probably wasn't the best introduction to my universe. Guess it's pretty different from yours, hm?"

"You could say that," she agrees as Biscuit cuddles up to her on the side opposite Daniel, his whiskered nose poking out as he leans around her to peek at the man. "I know...Earth must be a different planet, it's not that I come from a world where we called it Golarion instead. The continents are all wrong otherwise. And there are -- other reasons." But do they really want to get into literal ancient history?

"Is the one we're in much like yours?" she asks, wondering if this 'space' travel is something she just hasn't learned about yet.

Edited 2015-04-03 18:15 (UTC)

Well, she's taking this pretty well in stride. Granted, there isn't much choice at this point when one has this kind of discussion in a treehouse in a dream in another universe. But when someone prefaces their introduction with 'by the way, I used to kill alien gods for a living,' that significantly ramps up the tendency for things to go awry.

"A bit," he admits. "Hard to tell when you can't leave the city. But we had a Manhattan and our continents more or less lined up. Just with more programs devoted to galactic exploration, and fewer Rifts screwing up the general progression of space, time, and spacetime."

He cants his head to one side, sympathy clouding over his look of interest. "It can be kind of a big shift, I know."

She's been to a demiplane inhabited by literal devils. Going to another planet isn't exactly easy, but no one has made an active attempt to kill her and/or bind her soul in an infernal contract, so all things told it's not as worrying as some past developments in her life.

"For a lot of reasons," she agrees, not volunteering any of those reasons. "But I'm going to find a way back. It's...it's important that I get home."

He holds her gaze for a minute, incisive and fiercely sympathetic, before he nods slowly.

"I know." His stare falls away, breaking off to examine the array of woodland with apparent fascination. "If we ever figure out how to get home, well. Let's just say it's everyone's priority."

There's an almost imperceptible shift, something registering in his demeanor, when he glances back at her again, frowning. "Your name wouldn't happen to derive from 'Asmodeus,' would it?"

She doesn't want to face the fact that a lot of other people -- possibly powerful people, possibly all kinds of other people -- might have equally important reasons for wanting to get home and equally good skills at finding their way out of weird, seemingly life-ending situations. If she admits to herself that she's not the only one trying to get home and probably not the best person to even make the attempt, she's going to have to admit to herself that if it was going to happen someone with more skills than her would have already figured it out.

His question breaks her out of dark thoughts edging toward the truth, and she lets out a surprised, rueful little chuckle. "You know, you're the first person in this world to ask me that," she says, almost feeling oddly pleased if only because people not knowing who the gods (and devils) are is one more enormously alien aspect to this world. "Yes. It is." She levels an expectant look at him in return, some measure of suppressed amusement coming to her expression as she waits to see what he's going to make of it.

"...huh," he says, head going to one side. "I mean, that - granted, that has - quite a few associations in older literature, but, um, naturally those associations will vary between, between universes." He debates telling her that nearly all of those associations relate to the Devil, and sin, and then debates whether she would actually know what those references entail. The last rifty who hadn't originated from Earth hadn't had any idea who 'Satan' even was, let alone what he could do.

"Here it's not - necessarily a good association," he says delicately. "Which is fine, by the way, there's no way you could have known but - 'Asmodeus' usually pertains to a, a very powerful demon. In Earth literature." He winces. This is certainly a spectacular introduction he's making.

The twitching of Asmodia's jaw as she listens to him stumble his way through telling her as delicately as possible that she's named after a demon might be mistaken for a tremor of distress at the point he's slowly circling. When he reassures her there's no way she could have known she can't quite contain a little choking sound.

And then, as he finishes, she finally gives in, unclenches her teeth, and bursts into laughter. "Your face!" she cackles. She indulges in her laughter for a few moments, having enjoyed briefly leaving him to twist in the wind, but eventually calms herself enough to explain. "It's not a good association where I come from, either. And he's a devil, not a demon -- he's an infernal prince, not an abyssal whatever."

"I. You." He blinks rapidly, processing that very much not expected response. "Oh."

She's not taking the news the way he'd assume one would take the news that they are named after a (literal? are demons a thing here? you know, they just might be?) demon, but at least, well. It's a better reaction than the one he'd been imagining.

"I mean," he starts again, though the clouded frown over his face hasn't quite faded. "Just - as a word of warning? We have those here, too. Actual devils. Well, just the one, really. Satan, Lucifer, the Morningstar, etcetera and so forth." Hey, anything he can say that will keep anyone from making his mistake upon meeting the literal Devil - and not taunting him or outright challenging him - is a warning well worth divulging.

It's not exactly news, is the thing, and if he was going to make assumptions and try to kill her he likely would have done something about it already. Her smile slowly dies as he speaks, though; his warning is getting through to her.

"I don't...I have not heard of that one," she says delicately, not immediately dismissing the earnest attempt to tell her about something dangerous. "Is he a major devil?"

"In one type of mythology, he's the Devil," Daniel answers grimly. "As in singular. Not that there aren't dozens of other sorts in different branches and interpretations and religions, but." He clips off with a vague wave of a hand. "Point is, he's powerful and dangerous and ruthless, and also very real as opposed to, say, fiction or mythology, which is the general common assumption."

He doesn't want to scare her, but the warning is, he feels, pretty much necessary, if only to keep people on the alert.

"And he's in Manhattan. Physically he looks human but he's - he's not. He's really not." He grimaces, recalling the prickle of horrible darkened wrongness he'd seen shrouded about the man before he'd even gleaned what sort of terrible thing he might be. "Just as a word of warning. I didn't realize what he was when I met him, and that nearly cost me." He rubs one arm, rueful and self-conscious, not quite managing a smile to even out the sincerity of his warning.

The tip of Asmodia's tail beats a tense tattoo on the wooden deck as Daniel speaks. The rest of her body is still but tense; she doesn't know of this Lucifer but she does know that she's not keen to introduce herself to any devil, let alone one supposedly at the top of some cosmology's command chain.

Hopefully he's enough like the major devils of home not to take any special interest in a fiend-tainted mortal who doesn't make it her business to be his business, or she'll have yet another reason to regret how badly she stands out in this world. She starts as Biscuit diplomatically puts his front paws on her tail and gently holds it down to stop her thumping. "He's manifested, then?" she asks, all humor gone from her voice. "You're certain his attention is on this region?"

Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

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