applesaucedream | Here You Are, Stick Figure and a Busted Grin [Open to All]

Current Music: September 14th/15th, 2013

Here You Are, Stick Figure and a Busted Grin [Open to All]

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The first thing that the dreamers of Manhattan might notice is that the ground is a good deal closer than it normally is. The second thing they might notice is that their surroundings are larger than they might expect. The playground looks almost daunting. Of course, there are other ways for the dreamers to occupy themselves on this hot summer day: a charming fountain bubbles away a little distance from the playground. There's an ice cream stand with treats free for the taking. Beyond the paved area is a meadow, covered in wildflowers and dominated by a huge, sprawling tree, perfect for climbing.

It's all prime entertainment for children. So really, it's just as well that 'children' is what the dreamers will find themselves to be - once more, for those who had childhoods, or for the first time, for those who didn't.

Perhaps you'll remember everything: the Rift, Manhattan, the friends (and enemies) you've made since your arrival. Or perhaps you'll only remember who you were when you were young, and find this an opportunity to forge new friendships - or new (and probably pettier) animosities. Run around, get dirty, have a good time. ~~It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.~~

[ooc: usual dream party rules apply. All are welcome, whether they've been apped to the game or not. Characters will remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Mental and emotional regression is optional, but physical regression is mandatory: your character is in the body of a little kid - human, or human-ish - regardless of who or what they are in the waking world.]

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~~Asmodia should pay more skill points into Perception. Alas, she never will.~~ Utterly oblivious to the arrival of one of the children she's deliberately avoiding, Asmodia has made herself quite comfortable in the indent amidst the conjoined branches, one cloth-shod foot sticking out and tapping silently against the air. She tries out making the doll stand on a nearby branch, then makes it mock climbing up the bark.

That's less interesting than hoped, and after a moment's thought she scrunches up so she can carefully curl the end of her tail around the little figure. Leaning back again, she waves the doll back and forth through the air, making it fly. Flying would be the best, she thinks, or maybe second best after being able to go invisible. If she could turn invisible and fly she could go anywhere and no one could stop her.

He's fairly observant, not to mention the fact that he was keeping an eye out for birds or squirrels. The flash of motion catches his eye after he's scaled a few more branches, and he pauses to squint up at it. That's...yeah, it's totally a foot!

"Hello?" he calls, hoisting himself up onto another limb. He hadn't realized there was another kid up here, but that's okay! He doesn't mind sharing at all.

Asmodia gives a violent start, snapped out of her private world by the voice of another child. She fumbles the doll and it bounces off one of the branches to go plummeting to the earth below as she quickly withdraws her foot and belatedly listens.

"...Hello?" she calls back, then winces and bites her lip. Stupid. How is she going to get him to go away if he knows she's up here?

On instinct, he leans forward to try and catch the doll as it falls. Instead, he nearly falls out of the tree himself, letting out a faint cry of alarm and grabbing for a branch. That was close!

"What was THAT?" he calls, clinging to the bark as he peers down at the fallen thing. Some kind of little doll? The kid up there must have dropped it. "Nevermind, I'll get it!"

And then he's scrambling back down the tree again, without waiting for an answer.

She didn't mean anything to happen to him, and the cry and scrabbling sounds make her think maybe the doll hit him on the head. Asmodia heaves herself upright and comes within a moment of thrusting her head over the side to look down before she remembers that she really does not want to do that. He doesn't seem to be dead if he's still shouting at her, but if he's going to come back up with it....

"That's, uhm...it's alright!" she protests halfheartedly as she braces up on hands and knees and turns to look down the other side of the tree. Maybe she can climb down the other side? Maybe she can climb down the other side. She takes her first hesitant step down out of her nest, feeling blindly with one hesitant foot. "I didn't want it anyway!"

It's too late. He's already starting back up the tree again.

"It's okay!" he calls out. The doll is small enough to be tucked into a pocket, so he can climb just as well with it. That's what she's worried about, right - that he can't get that high? Because he totally CAN, doll or no doll. "I can get there!"

Nope nope nope nope. He can climb up to meet her all she wants, but she's going to sneak away before he gets up there and sees her. Somehow. Asmodia carefully starts to lower herself down the other side of the tree, because maybe if she stays on the other side he won't see her, maybe she can get all the way down and she can run away and no one can ever tell her parents she was here --

The problem with this plan is that she forgot she's really not good at climbing trees, and she's even worse at climbing down them. Every step makes noise, and then there's a lot more noise when she misses a toehold and goes sliding down the trunk with a shriek, hands scraping painfully over the bark until she catches herself on a lower branch and clings to the tree, panting.

The shriek startles a yell out of him in turn, though he clings fiercely to the tree, torn between dropping down and - oh THERE she is, she's falling! She catches herself, though, and it's only afterwards that he registers that...well, she's really weird-looking. There's a human boy gaping up at you right now, Asmodia.

After a moment, he blurts out "You're a troll!"

She can feel all the blood rushing through her head even if it doesn't show much under her dark skin. A moment of utter terror is quickly succeeded by furious, hurt indignation. "I am not!!" she squawks -- but then, he's a human boy. A citizen boy. She clamps her mouth shut, tears stinging her eyes at the injustice of it. He can call her whatever he wants, that's how it works. It's just that troll is a new one, that's all.

"Oh!"

He hauls himself up to sit on the next branch, getting a little closer so he can look at her better. She looks like a troll. Except they might have hooves, maybe? She should know what she is, though, and she says she isn't. "What are you, then?" he asks, plainly curious.

Asmodia just continues to cling, still shaken by the brief fall. She leans in close to the tree and scrunches up her shoulders like she's trying to hide her face even as she rolls her eyes downward to give him an incredulous stare. "I'm a tiefling," she says, halfway offended he doesn't just know and is making her say it.

He's never been the most tactful person in the world, but she seems pretty upset. The boy frowns, bracing himself against his branch and kicking his legs in the air. "Okay," he says, a little uncertainly. What on earth is a tiefling? She sounds like she thinks it should be obvious; could it just be something he's never heard of? It's not his fault he doesn't know. Maybe they live secretly, out in the woods like...well, most magic things, probably.

"I got your doll?" he offers, holding it up. That's what started this whole thing - oh, and NOW he sees why it's got a tail.

Is this a trap? She stares at him in silence for a moment, shifting her grip so she can wipe her nose on her sleeve and force down the urge to sniffle. He hasn't done anything, and even if he had, crying never helps.

Maybe he's going to throw it when she gets close. She wipes her nose again and sets her jaw in determination -- whatever he's going to do, she's going to be brave and face it. She can't get down and get away without going past him anyway, and she's not going to show him how scared she is by running before he's done anything. Slowly she picks her way down through the branches, carefully covering the relatively short distance between them.

"Give it?" she requests when she's close enough to hold out a hand, though she doesn't look him in the eye as she makes the request. "Please," she belatedly remembers to tack on.

He leans forward to place the doll in her hand, keeping grip on the branch with one hand. It seems good that she came down, maybe, but he saw her wipe her nose and she won't really look at him. What's that all about? She couldn't be afraid of him - she's got horns and a tail and probably magic, and he's just a normal kid. Maybe tieflings are just nervous, and that's why they live in secret and play by themselves.

"So what's your name? Do you live here? I won't tell anyone," he volunteers conspiratorially. It sounds like an awesome adventure, keeping hidden tieflings secret, even if he goes away and she never talks to him again. It's like a book or something!

She takes the doll and pulls it in tight to her chest like it's something precious, even though she knows she won't be able to keep it long once she gets home, not unless she hides it very well. It's not worth that, not really, not a silly doll she made out of parts of a tree, but it's hers and he's made such a fuss over giving it back to her that she's not going to let it go again now.

And what's that he's asking? Does she live in the park? No, he must be asking if she lives in the city, which of course she does, like any civilized person. She's not a vagabond. But it's the last part he said that makes her look at him again. "You won't?" she asks, not at all sure what to make of that promise, but really liking the sound of it. She screws up her face as she thinks about it, but finally nods.

"I'm Asmodia," she says, getting a little braver. "I don't live far from here. What about you?"

"Sure! Promise!" he assures her with a smile. It's a casual enough thing to him. Who's he gonna tell, the other kids in the park? He doesn't even know them really. Definitely not enough to run off and tell them about tieflings - they wouldn't believe him anyway.

Now that they're having a normal conversation, he swings his legs back and forth in the air again, testing the branch he's sitting on. He hasn't plucked up the courage yet to try and go up towards her again, but he's kinda thinking about it. "I dunno, I just live around here." He does, right? It kinda just seems like he's been in this park forever.

"You don't act like the people who live here," she points out dubiously, still clinging to the tree in what is, all told, a fairly uncomfortable position. She looks around for some better way to perch, the one hand she still has on the tree already getting sore. "You're not from..." her voice falls to a hush as she glances around for some adult who might be listening, "the opera house, are you?"

The boy raises his eyebrows and glances over his shoulder, towards where he can still kinda see the other children playing through the leaves. What does that mean? He thinks he acts about the same as the rest of them, except for maybe coming over here in the first place. Maybe she met some of the not-so-nice kids earlier.

He knows for sure that he's not from an opera house, though, so he shakes his head at that. "I've never been to an opera! That's where they have singing Viking ladies, right?" That isn't the kind of music he likes best, but maybe it could be fun.

"Ye-es? Yes." That sounds like what opera probably is. She knows there's singing, at least...and it looks like he hardly knows anything about it at all. "I go all the time, and it's full of Viking ladies." Whatever Viking ladies are. She hesitates a moment, then sticks her doll in her mouth so she'll have all five limbs free to pick her way downward and sideways to perch on a thick branch, waiting until she's got her butt on the branch and her tail wrapped around it before she passes the doll back to a hand. "I know all the best places in the city."

"Yeah?" The boy seems to have bought her story about the opera, at least; he's looking at her with wide-eyed interest. It seems like he ought to know a lot of places in the city himself, but he kinda doesn't. "Like where?"

"Like --" Like where? She hardly goes anywhere, and never alone, never unsupervised or allowed to really explore. She's seen a few places, though; she's proved she can make herself useful on errands (and only sometimes a nuisance, no matter what Lusana says) and mother and father say someday she'll have to be able to work on her own. Still, she doesn't know any really exciting places, so she'll have to start with the ones she's really been to and make it up from there.

"Like the docks, and the market square," she says, because those are the more exciting of the true ones. "And the...the fancy neighborhoods where all the rich people live, and the warehouse district, and the foreign quarters, all of them, and the hospital where people go when they're dying--"

She trails off, sensing that her list is starting to go off the rails, and fidgets with her doll. "I know all the best places," she says again, like it'll be more convincing if she keeps saying it even if she sounds less convinced this time. "I go anywhere I want."

If nothing else, the boy doesn't seem skeptical as he listens to the list. That last part isn't entirely convincing, but...

"I don't go so many places," he says, "I think." This is weird, isn't it? But she's weird too, so maybe that's alright. "Mostly just around here. But I bet I'll go to all those places sometime!" Except the hospital. That doesn't sound so fun.

"You could go all those places," admits Asmodia with far more jealousy than is warranted from someone who just said that she goes to those places all the time herself. "How come you don't know? Did your family just move to Kintargo?"

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Here You Are, Stick Figure and a Busted Grin [Open to All]

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