applesaucedream | What's Stopping Us From Breathing Easy [Open to All]

Current Music: October 6th/October 7th, 2013

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What's Stopping Us From Breathing Easy [Open to All]

Dreamers of Manhattan, you've lucked out. Rather than finding yourselves in some kind of dystopian nightmare, you'll end up in a series of formal gardens on a lovely day, the air filled with birdsong and a cloud-scattered sky arching overhead. Some of the gardens look a bit wilder than others, in an artful sort of way, but it's clear that all of the gardens are well kept and frequently tended. Aside from each other, dreamers aren't likely to run into any creature larger than a rabbit. True, there are no actual exits - every doorway or arbor leads to another garden - but that's hardly a problem. It's beautiful, it's safe... what could go wrong?

Well, that depends on the dreamer's honesty. No uncomfortable truths will drop unbidden from anyone's mouths like last time, but the dreamers will find that any time they attempt to lie or prevaricate, they'll be beset by a sneezing fit. A tiny lie by omission might only prompt that uncomfortable feeling of an impending sneeze; a larger, more significant (or more stubborn) fib will lead to a sneeze attack so crippling that the dreamer might just need to sit down for a minute.

You could try to pass it off as allergies, if you could get the words out without making everything worse. But while telling the truth is not compulsory, lying is punishable - and pretty well obscured - by sneezes.

[OOC: Usual dream party rules apply. All are welcome to participate regardless of whether they've been apped in the game or not. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion.]

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"It's a, um, a thing." He flaps a hand vaguely without much coordination to put behind it, now desperately crawling away from the crumbled remains on bony elbows. "Important, ummm, science, ahhh, technology. Right. Just, you know, the standard sort of maintenance type of A.I., the sort that gets to spend his days tacked up to a management rail and follows orders, yes sir no sir I'll watch the subjects sir, ten thousand bloody test subjects, and did they give me any instruction for the inevitable fall of civilization? Noooo, just gave me full control of all the test subjects, good luck Wheatley, I'm sure you'll manage just fine!"

He tries for a complicated propping-upright maneuver and ends up on his back.

"Right," he says to the sky, clear and cloud-scuttered and almost as brilliantly blue as his old optic, he thinks mournfully. "Okay, then. Hmm. Didn't think this plan through, time for the old Plan B."

Plan B, he's sure, will be brilliant. And again, he sneezes.

"You're a computer," the Balladeer summarizes. A computer that apparently got stuck up on a rail and left to monitor some kind of experiments mid-apocalypse, but all he really needed to know out of that was computer and most certainly cannot use limbs. The apocalypse thing seems like it should be alarming, but Wheatley doesn't seem to have been bothered by it at all, so the Balladeer's just not going to worry about it right now!

He steps closer, hesitating before reaching a hand down. The state of Wheatley's hands does not bear thinking about, but what's he going to do? Watch him writhe around in the grass? At least he can't catch anything in a dream... "Here. Can you stand up?"

"Can I stand up?" he asks incredulously. "Of course I - "

When the sneezing fit has subsided, he looks at the Balladeer sheepishly and accepts the proffered hand with the unquestionable air of defeat.

"Just a bit new to it, is all," he says. "Not used to putting all these different pieces together." He succeeds in getting his knees beneath him and just has to lever himself upright, that's the plan, then. "Just look at all these - how do you keep track of them all?"

The Balladeer tugs him upright, reaching out to steady him with his free hand. "Steady, there. I guess you just get used to it after a while." He can't recall ever being younger or less physically capable than he is now, but that sounds about right. Maybe he'll bring up the subject to Greta. If there's some trick to teaching people to walk, he's sure she'd know.

He's taller than a lot of people he meets, but Wheatley's just about got him matched in the beanpole department. Not too heavy to help keep upright, then; just a lot of arm and leg to look out for. "Got it?" he asks, smiling reassuringly.

"Absolute - kchoo!"

That sneeze gets dangerously close to unbalancing him entirely and he wobbles, arms windmilling frantically. There are just so many parts of him, all made up of corners and angles and jutting elbows and he is so far off the ground. He realizes that a bit on the late side and looks down and yelps.

"Don't look down!" he begs the other man, grasping for support, his eyes wild. "It's high, it's really high, too high, don't look down because it is terrifying down there, really, it is, take my word for it." He shuts his eyes again. Not doing that again. No. No sir.

The Balladeer grasps hurriedly at the other man's elbows, trying to hold his arms still and stop the flailing. "It's fine! It's okay, just calm down. Thrashing around won't help."

He's speaking in soothing tones, hoping that'll help. Wheatley's panicked yelping gets him to glance reflexively at the ground, but it's no farther away than it's ever been. He smiles, squeezing his arms reassuringly. "You're pretty tall, but you're probably not going to hurt yourself if you fall down. We're on grass. Just don't look, okay? Try and get your balance."

"Don't look," says Wheatley. "Right."

He does.

"How do you stand it?" he gasps, once he's remembered to stop wailing. "It's all so far down and - what's, um, what's the term, that designation you lot use - green. Obviously I understand the concept, green, obviously, one a scale of one to ten on the obvious scale that would be at least a nine, maybe a nine-point-five if you really push it along, but it's just - we didn't have that, down in the Relaxation Center! Not even a little! Not unless you count the neurotoxin but, well, no one counted the neurotoxin. 'Cept the humans. But everyone else said it was all gone!"

He's found that he's rather forgotten what he was so terrified of in the first place, less preoccupied about broken statues or losing his balance and more about the exceptional green-ness of every particle of his surroundings.

"This is amazing," he says. "Grass! Leaves. Look at that!"

The Balladeer cringes at the wailing.

He's not cringing quite so hard that he missed the mention of neurotoxin, but then it's gone and Wheatley is off and rambling about the grass. Well. Well then. He's not going to pursue that right now, but he's not going to forget about it either.

For now, he smiles and resolves to push through. "I know! It's really pretty out here!" It makes sense. A computer in a lab somewhere wouldn't see a lot of plants. "You don't get as much of this back in Manhattan, outside of the Park. Wow, you probably haven't seen much at all, have you?" Wait, was that rude? "Don't worry, I didn't get out much either before I got here."

"Nothing but the boring old maintenance rail," says Wheatley, still utterly enamored with the bright points of color dotting the bushes all about. What's the word for those, hmm? He swears he knew it once. Probably got lost in the old transfer out of the mainframe. Lots of odd bits got jostled about when he was sucked into space. He is not envisioning that now, not at all (he ignores the horrible itch in his nose and behind his eyes at the thought), just thinking the whole thing over and remembering why it is he can't remember the little tidbits, like what those colorful leafy things are called.

"Big, crumbling facility," he says absently, now turning slowly in the spot in continuous revolution, awed. "Left me in charge of the whole thing, can't expect one little personality core's able to do much about the miles and miles of technology just wasting away? All those test subjects. Worst job imaginable, let me tell you, none of those humans could hold a conversation, cryosleep'll more or less do that to you, suppose they can't really be blamed for it, but still. No one to chat with but that pushy nanobot work crew, and they're not much for conversation either. Nasty pieces of work. Size discrimination, s'what it is. Big round metal ball, oooh, he's just much too big to acknowledge properly, let's just steer ourselves right on by! Watch out for big, clumsy Wheatley! Better not even make eye contact, mates!"

He lifts his hand until it's even with his large, round glasses and wiggles his fingers in a disparaging gesture that just seems appropriate. "Horrible. Awful. I said to everyone else, I told them, I said, we ought to form a bloody union. But, ah, they were all asleep. So that idea didn't really, um, didn't really take off. Sorry, where was I?"

...he does have a point. This is possibly not the first person the Balladeer would choose to leave solely in charge of much of anything.

"Plants," he prompts helpfully at the question, having listened patiently (if somewhat baffled) through the entire ramble. "I think it was plants. Are you having fun being out of your facility?" Being trapped in one place with a bunch of unfriendly people who won't talk much with you - oh, he definitely feels that one. Seems like he might have woken the humans up, but they must've gone into crysosleep for some kind of reason. It sounds like a sci-fi movie sort of way to survive the apocalypse.

"Yes. Yes, thank you, right, you know, you are really helpful for a human. Just - wow, that's incredible, that."

He looks at the Balladeer, half-awed. No one's been so accommodating about this before! Not even her. She'd listen to him, half the time, whenever she had a mind to, but she never answered back, just went and did her own human thing if that suited her without so much as a cough or an 'apple' to let him know what it was she was doing. No one's been so polite enough to actually sit and listen to him! This is nice! This is really - it's nice, is what it is, it's good, he could get used to this, because he doesn't really mean to talk all the time, honestly, it just sort of happens and it seems like such a brilliant, wonderful idea at the time but it's only after the fact that he realizes that maybe, at that particular moment, it's not.

The Balladeer pats Wheatley on the shoulder, giving him a lopsided grin. "Hey, no problem. I know what it's like, spending all your time stuck in one place with a ton of jerks!"

He seems to be balancing alright now. The Balladeer'd bet anything that it's just because he's gone off on a tangent and forgotten to worry about it. Panicking never does any good. The sneezing seems to have subsided too - maybe it was psychosomatic or something? "How long have you been here? In the city, I mean, not here?"

"Wh - it, umm. Sorry, what?" He peers at the Balladeer through his overlarge glasses, blinking at him owlishly. "City - right. Just arrived, I believe. That, um. Hang on, where are we now?"

It's only just occurred to him that the two settings are more than a hair incongruous, and he starts, looking from the Balladeer to the vibrant green of the shrubbery with increasing worry and perplexity.

"How'd we get here? We were in the city, weren't we, or - you might not've been, didn't see you around, though I suppose there'd be a great deal more humans than in the Relaxation Center if you're all awake and scurrying about but - but there were buildings. Great big tall - on the surface!" He gestures wildly, a sweeping vertical hand motion perhaps meant to convey the skyscrapers and their whopping great height.

Ah, right. There is that.

"We're in - " the Balladeer starts, and then reconsiders. He can't quite draw on the same well of common experiences here that he might with another actual human. Let's start at the very beginning then. "Do you normally dream?"

"No!" he says indignantly, then, "achoo!" Then, "not, ah, not sleep-dreaming, there's Sleep Mode but that's not quite the same as you humans, is it? It's an energy conservation setting and there wasn't any kind of dreaming involved, not typically, just a sort of - drifting. Shut off until you shut on again."

He flaps a hand vaguely. He'd always had a mind that that's how sleeping just more or less worked for humans, but he's never really known it.

"Is this dreaming?" He looks at the other man, eyes owlish and alarmed. "Not how I pictured it - at all. Not that I ever, um, pictured - chooo!"

The Balladeer leans back from the sneezing, as well as he can while still keeping Wheatley more-or-less upright. He doesn't quite have faith that the former personality core won't take a spill, left to his own devices.

"It's not always like this," he explains, "but the Rift does strange things to dreams. Lets us see each other in them. Every month or so, it puts us all in a big one - I think this is one of those." His own dreams don't tend in this direction. It's quite nice! He's not sure he's grasped this round's theme, unless it's just flowers, but he's just glad it isn't apocalyptic again.

"Hmmmm," hums Wheatley. Interesting, alarming, the whole nine yards now that he gives it a think. Dreams are a terribly human sort of thing but he's human now, so the Rift seems to have decided, and that is - well, he's still not sure how he stands in relation to that, honestly. So this person is a city-type person, which makes sense, since Wheatley cannot remember the last time he saw a human who was not her. He's pretty sure he'd remember something like that. Leaves something of a big impression.

"Right," he says, "okay. So do I just pop back awake, is that how it works, then? Switch off the old Sleep Mode?" He sounds a bit too hopeful and it all does seem a bit too good to be true, but he's certainly allowed to speculate, isn't he? Nothing wrong with some good healthy speculation!

The Balladeer shrugs. "I know dying does it, but you don't want to try that." It'd be an overreaction to such a benign dream. Even in the worst ones, he'd prefer to stick around in them as long as possible if the other option is death.

"You're better off just waiting to wake up on your own. It'll happen eventually." He hates to crush Wheatley's hopes, but that's just the way it is. He'll have to get used to it, being here.

Dying? Oh no. No no no, that's no good. Despite all the new and overwhelming stimuli that's come with having this sort of body, Wheatley's somehow failed to note that, yes, he'd be human now and therefore he'd be capable of all sorts of human things, including but not limited to dying.

"Dying!" he squawks. "No. No, wait. Don't panic! Not panicking! No, absolutely not!"

He seems to be having trouble maintaining his own advice. He's now vibrating on the spot, shifting weight from foot to foot as he tries to come to grips with the new and terrifying concept of his own morality, even dream-morality. Especially dream-morality.

"You're," says Wheatley, slowly, "telling me," still slowly, with all the deliberate enunciation of a creeping realization, "that I can - I can die? Is that right? Of course I can. Of course I - they told me, back in the Enrichment Center, that if I did anything at all other than stick to the management rail, I would DIE. They kept telling me that, and I believed them, but then I - I didn't die, not even once though I came rather close a number of times but this is - I can! I could actually -"

He gulps.

"Woah! It's okay!"

The Balladeer rushes to reassure Wheatley, only to realize that there isn't much reassurance to be had in the face of impending mortality. Not for sane people, anyway. Don't computers die too eventually? "You don't need to die right now," he says instead. "I mean, you can. I guess. I know another riftie who just died and turned into a ghost, so maybe there's something going on with that too. But no one's going to test it!"

That all depends on how long they're going to be here for. "Everything dies sooner or later, but nothing's going to happen right now. Don't let it worry you."

"Don't let it worry me?" His voice becomes alarmingly high-pitched as he stares at the other man in dawning fear. "It was - you're - I'm human. Don't you know what that means? It means in something like forty, fifty years it's just ffft!"

One hand flails, palm out in a hopeless gesture of impending existential terror.

"Gone, away, so long and thanks for bloody nothing, I just go and, and what? Pop off into Android Hell?" Android Hell. It's a real place, just like She said! And that's where bossy, monstrous sorts go, isn't it? He doesn't want to go to Android Hell.

"Android - what? No!" The Balladeer has no particular idea what a non-assassin's afterlife might be like, but that's just silly.

He raises his hands in a placating gesture, speaking calmly. "Look, worrying about it won't change anything. You're better off enjoying your life while you've still got it!" If anything, stress will likely kill you sooner, but that might be an unkind thing to bring up right this second. "This is still better than being stuck on some rail somewhere, right?" he hazards.

Is it? Is it really? He's trying to be calm here, it's just that panicking is such a massively appealing prospect in comparison, it feels like maybe that way things will get excised or get better in some inconceivable way, so maybe he should expend as much panic and fear and anxiety as possible, and by the time he wakes up he'll be all worn out of it. He doesn't want to think about dying or Android Hell.

"Right," says Wheatley. "Gotta keep some perspective, here. Got some benefits. Like - flowers! That's the word for them, those little color-y blips, right there? Definitely didn't have any of that down in the, uh, the Enrichment Center. Definitely not. That's gotta be a plus, hasn't it? Right?"

"Right!" The Balladeer snaps his fingers, pointing at the nearest bush. "Right! Flowers! These are roses - I don't really know what kind, but they're pretty, aren't they?"

He takes a step towards them, reaching out to touch Wheatley's elbow as he moves away. Hopefully he won't just go toppling over again - he's still close enough that he should be able to grab him if he does. "Hey, you're getting the balancing thing pretty good. Want to try walking?"

"Flowers, yes!" Yes, he's sure that one was in the mainframe database! It's all coming back to him now! Or, well, it's coming back in fragments and scraps and pieces but good enough, right? Absolutely, right.

"Am I?" he says, genuinely alarmed. He looks down and grins, wide and slightly manic. "I am! Look at that! Not dead, all standing upright and - and - "

He seems to deflate somewhat.

"Well, tell you what," he says delicately, now wobbling uncertainly, "er, I'm actually feeling rather, erm, rather tired, you know. So why don't you just - go on ahead and I'll just, ah, wait here in case the, um, the, the flowers, you know...decide to, uh, to come over here."

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