applesaucedream | 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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Instinctively, Peeta half-turns away when he recognizes that Daine is shifting, but even as he does so he can see from the corner of his eye that she's already in (fully clothed) human shape. He turns back in time to catch her smile. His own smile in return is skewed by the sudden - though faint - urge to sneeze. He sniffles, once, and the sensation fades.

"Are any of them talking to you?" he asks her. "Sometimes the dream animals seem normal, but..." he trails off with a lift of his shoulder, implication clear.

"Not exactly." Daine's gaze goes a bit distant as her focus shifts. "I can feel them, and if I reached out to any of them I think they'd answer normally enough, but..." she trails off, then shrugs. She's beginning to suspect that the animals in dreams seem most normal when she's there to make them most normal, as if the her mind is effecting the dream - or the Rift is upping its game to match her.

In a more thoughtful tone, she continues, "I think they're as normal as folk expect them to be. Like the closer you look at them, the more they come into focus." Does that make sense? She shrugs again, a bit embarrassed. "I just look at them closer'n most, is all, so it's like they become more normal for me."

It does make sense, and Peeta relaxes almost imperceptibly. If the animals here in this particular dream are as normal as Daine expects, they should be fine. Probably. He nods, mostly to himself, before smiling at her again.

"Want to explore? If the rift is giving us a pleasant dream for once, we might as well enjoy it."

"If," Daine echoes, her tone mostly playful, but with a wry edge to it. It's not that she wants things to take a turn for the awful, she just knows better than to assume that things'll stay nice just because they started out that way.

But there's no sense in refusing to enjoy the pleasant dream for as long as the rift lets them have it. If they spent every unmolested moment looking over their shoulders and waiting for the next bit of nastiness, they'd never get anything done. Daine's smile evens out into something simpler and more genuine.

"It is fair impressive," she says, making an all-encompassing gesture. At the moment, all it really encompasses is the arched tunnel they're walking through, but Peeta's doubtless realized there's a lot more beyond this. "Their majesties don't have anything like it, and I expect they're the only ones back home who might."

"They had gardens sort of like this in the Capitol," Peeta says, a faint sneer of disdain on his face. "Those were more unnatural, though, more - 'gaudy' would be the right word, I guess. It felt very fake. This is a lot nicer."

The colors in the Capitol had been too bright and garish, the shapes too fanciful and ornate. Even the scents had seemed manufactured, an overpowering onslaught that would never have occurred in the wild. Even in a dream, the garden he and Daine are standing in feels more real and natural than the ones he walked through in reality back in Panem.

Daine's brows furrow for a moment. She doesn't much like to think about the Capitol, from what Peeta's told her of it already. He doubtless likes to think of it even less. It's a pity that such an outwardly nice dream would remind him of it.

Then again, it reminds her a little of Carthak, too. Maybe it doesn't matter what realm you're from; folk in power like to show it off by twisting wild things into neat shapes and orderly rows. Or by putting them in cages.

But there are no cages here. She's fair certain of that; she'd have felt their occupants, elsewise. It's just a garden, not a menagerie.

Still. "I think I'd like things a bit wilder," she admits. As if in response, the end of the tunnel deposits them into a high-walled garden. The stonework on all sides is overgrown with ivy, and the path winds through beds of high-growing wildflowers and the occasional fruit tree. It still looks unmistakably kept, but it's a fair sight less organized than the other gardens she's passed through or flown above. "Like this," she says with a grin, letting her palm drift over the tops of some grassy stems.

Peeta agrees; wilder reminds him of home - of the District instead of the Capitol. It reminds him of -- but he doesn't go there. An itchy twinge rises in his nose and he rubs it once, absentmindedly. When they emerge in an area that is more overgrown, if only deliberately so, he feels a tension he hadn't realized he'd been carrying fade away.

The garden they've found themselves is encapsulated in green, as if they're in a green-walled room. A soft smile on his face, he steps over to one of the flowerbeds. "Much better." He bends to sniff at a flower he doesn't recognize, but that clearly has not the results of any tampering. It's scent is very faint and clean, and his smile widens.

"That's called betony," Daine says, dropping into a crouch beside him and gently touching her fingertip to its stem. "At least, that's what we call it in my realm. We used to grow this--" she hesitates, not wanting to say on our farm, and a faint tickle in her throat holds her up for another beat before she concludes, more vaguely, "back home." She sniffs once, absently, as if to goad that near-sneeze into happening. The urge has passed, though.

"Good for headaches," she adds with a little smile. "And nerves."

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

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