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

[applesaucemod]

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.]

Comments

[peacefulexplorer]

Wow, this is - this is nice. It's sunny, and bright, and he's got to shade his eyes to peer upward but he smiles, a little relieved grin. He's not sure why he's relieved, actually. Everything's still a little fuzzy.

Hang on, how did he get here?

He turns in a small circle on the spot, frown dimpling his forehead. Hmm. That's a little odd, a little worrying, but he can soldier on, can't he? It's like a great labyrinth of greenery. That's not so bad. It's actually rather pleasant.

He can't seem to remember how he got here, though, no matter how he strains to. There's the horrible nagging feeling that he's lost something important and there's something he's got to remember - if only it would occur to him.

But on the other hand, there's a fountain, like, right there. He wanders over to it, leaning close over the water -

Too close.

He's pretty sure he actually goes head over heels in a clamorous splash that leaves him undignified, gasping, and wholly drenched as he tries to unsuccessfully right his mistake in scrambling out of the fountain. He tripped. He must've! Who does that?

His first attempt to rise simply sends his hands skidding across the slick, wet surface of the rock pathway around him, and he plunges unceremoniously in again.

[ooc: so Daniel is still a little scrambled post-Ascension, as seen here. To whatever extent is really up in the air at this point since it IS dreamland, so he's probably got some basic grasps of English again and also more of his memories are starting to trickle back.]

[postictal]

Trees are usually kind of a no-go. This is weird, though, all these carefully trimmed squat bushes all lined up, nice and neat and colorful. The air is thick with sweet-smelling pollen, almost cloyingly so. Tim has to try not to gag.

After a few minutes of terse inspection of the environment, cautiously prodding the dense, springy brush and leaping back warily at the first hint of anything that could be a danger sign, Tim has to reluctantly, bemusedly concede that this is exactly what it impossibly appears to be: a nice dream.

Maybe that's not weird, though. His first dream was pretty okay, after all. Aside from how he'd managed to convince himself that the Jay he was talking to was purely hallucinatory. Yeah, that kind of put a damper on the whole thing.

Tim's hands chase up and down his arms as he half-hugs himself, darting nervous looks at the artfully arranged flowers and trimmed foliage. He feels like it might be some kind of fancy rich person garden, maybe, but he's never known what those really looked like. He's never been to one.

Regardless, he's not really sure he likes the look of it, or even the feel of it. Too many thick-packed leaves surrounding him. No sign of an exit.

Guess it's gonna be his job to find one.

He sets off for the nearest gap in the bushes, ducking beneath the overarching limbs. Maybe if there's a weak spot or a dying bit of greenery somewhere - if he could just get through -

[driftseeker]

Mako tilts her head back to catch as much sun as she can, eyes shut in complete, tranquil bliss. She misses the coast with its continuous backdrop of crashing waves, the smell of steel and salt, the cold gray-blue spectrum and the hammering of wind and rain on rock. But she has missed green too.

She flexes her toes delightedly in the cool green water of garden pool beside which she found herself, reveling in the texture of water against skin. Her shoes she has perched beside her in in a neat line by her hip, her weight on her arms as she supports herself with the pressure of palms to smooth stone walkway.

Mako laughs once, a low, clear sound, and the memory is tinged with melancholy when it skates the fringes of her conscious mind, but for a moment she is lost in the sheer joy of remembering the ease of her life in Tanegashima. For now, it is not so bad. She will take it.

[andhiswife]

Oh, dear. Is she trespassing? She feels as if she must be. These are the sort of gardens you might find around a palace or something, which means she has no business here.

It's lovely, though, isn't it? Greta spares herself a wistful little sigh - she wouldn't mind having grounds like this to wander - but... no. This isn't for her. The longer she lingers here, the more likely she is to be interrupted by a sounding of trumpets and a clatter of hoofbeats, and goodness knows how she'll excuse her presence here if one of the Princes finds her. Did she just... wander in, accidentally? She must have. What was she thinking?

Greta turns about, heels scraping over the gravel path. For the moment, at least, she is alone. With a little luck, she might be able to find her way out before whoever owns this place discovers her.

"Right," she whispers to herself before setting off at a brisk walk.

All goes well until she reaches an arched doorway covered in ivy, and there she stills uncertainly. What if there's someone on the other side? She presses herself close to the ivy, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. Then, with as much caution as she can muster, she starts to edge through the doorway, awkwardly caught between trying to hide in the ivy and trying to peer past it to what might lie beyond.

[lottawork]

The air is thick and humid, laden with antigens and irritants and dust motes that ride the occasional breeze that dips lower than the needlessly elaborately-pruned brier forming the walls of this atypically lush prison. It is certainly a prison by all formal definition; he has paced the length of every new if uncomplicated maze in the greenery, and each archway simply exposes a different variant of floral and arboreal arrangements.

He unequivocally loathes it.

He locates a particularly thorny limb protruding from the surrounding vegetation and snaps it loose with a brusque crack and the sharp smell of split branch. He does not anticipate it being highly useful or readily applicable, but he refuses to wander this sort of environment or any environment undefended and he has this as an ongoing policy and with the pointed lack of military individuals with a propensity for shooting anything that so much as twitches oddly, he will have to take the responsibility upon himself.

Ideally no species of flora here will be fucking sentient or parasitic.

Resolute, he targets one of the compact walls of shrubbery and begins hacking at its exterior.

[rae_of_sun]

They're only a little ways into October, and the weather hasn't been that bad, but this still feels like a hell of a treat. Sunshine has found herself a broad, unshaded patch of lawn framed by a strip of flowers that have been pruned with more aggression than she'd deem necessary. But the upshot is that they're too low to cast much shade at all, let alone enough to reach her here. She sprawls, cat-like, in the grass, her eyes shut against the glare.

And everything is pretty frigging perfect until a shadow falls across her. Sunshine doesn't even bother opening her eyes to see who it is. "Whyyyyy?" she whines asks, expression crumpling into a pout. She is hard at work, here.

[johnny_truant]

He feels like it's been an unbearably long time since he dreamed of being outside.

He's aware - distantly, avoidantly - that the house has been keeping him more and more often. But he doesn't want to think about that now. It's distant, easy to brush away. He does. Please, he thinks in a quiet little prayer to the rift, let him just enjoy this one.

He wanders until he comes upon a little waterway in soft, smooth limestone, soothing and quiet. He stands on the steps for a moment, just looking at the water, before settling down and dipping a hand into it. It's cool, comforting. This is nice. He feels himself crack a smile, letting his guard lower for the first time in ages.

[centralcore]

"Whoa, wHOA, WH-OH-oh," she blurts in awkwardly modulated sing-song, staggering with alarm as she abruptly becomes aware of herself. What was she doing? Where is she? How did she GET here? WHAT IS HAPPENING.

All right. Calm down. There are explanations for everything.

She wobbles slightly on her terrible human legs and looks around in moderate alarm. This is - she is reasonably certain - not Manhattan. She can't see any buildings in the distance. She was given to understand leaving the island was not possible.

Even more distressing, she remains incapable of recalling how she came to be here.

"Whah-at," she snaps at nothing. Her voice seems a little more like its old self here. Something is very strange. Something is very wrong.

well I wouldn't say Iman is going to "lie" beyond ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[etherthief]

Iman feels - calm. It's a nice feeling. She doesn't bother to consider or analyze its cause. There is some internal assurance that she should simply enjoy it for what it is. So she does; she looks around, looking, not studying, and endeavors to enjoy her surroundings.

Is this a dream? It might be a dream. Who cares?

Why is she so-

Oh.

She looks down at her left hand. A hand again, not the metal claw she's had in so many recent dreams. She wiggles her fingers. Flexes them. She smiles.

Rush fixed it. She remembers now.

A sudden rustling draws her attention and she turns to look behind her, finding an ivy-laden archway she hadn't noticed, and sort of tucked into it, like a child trying to play hide-and-seek, is-

"Greta!" she grins broadly. The only thing that could have made this nicer. She reaches out with both hands to draw her into the open. "I'm so happy you're here!"

[ecks]

This is not where she was.

The absence of distant screaming is a positive development. The absence of a charging dinosaur more so, though perhaps only in the short term. The absence of her companions -- very bad.

The absence of the quiet, insistent voice in the back of her mind, while a relief, is likely the worst development of all.

Ecks gazes about herself at the neatly manicured lawn and sculpted bushes, one hand clutching what appears to be a cane with the air of someone who expects to do something quite violent with it in the near future. They didn't have a plan for anything like this, and without knowing what this is she is momentarily stymied as to the correct course of action. She silently runs through likely scenarios, recalling the last several times she appeared somewhere unexpected without warning, and weighs the probability of this being some sort of vision against the improbability of none of her compatriots being included.

"Bottle-God?" she ventures after spending a few moments literally frozen in indecision. That is not his name, but she will not speak his name in case this was not his doing and there are others listening. He will know she means him if he is listening. "Did you do this? Are you here?"


[OOC: Please note that Ecks is pretty alarming in appearance. She's Frankenstein's monster flesh golem stitched together out of parts of a lot of different people (even different species), and she's wearing battle-worn leather armor. She doesn't really do facial expressions, and her voice remains near a monotone when she's not making a particular effort to emulate emotive speech.]

[deadeyedchild]

Jay's midway through inelegantly clambering over a hedge when he hears the unfamiliar nearby voice and freezes. The voice is addressing someone else, someone who doesn't seem to answer.

So after a moment, Jay lets himself down awkwardly and takes a few steps around a cluster of little trees, trying to get a peek at the speaker.

He couples his approach, thoughtlessly as usual, with a ventured, "Hello?"

Then he sees her, and he immediately regrets this decision.

She's tall - several inches on him, and that's not the most imposing thing about her, not even close. She looks - well, hellish, visibly sewn together like some kind of monster.

He staggers back unsteadily, breath catching hard in his throat.

[omnomnom_feels]

Soothing. This place is soothing, and the feeling is so unusual, so pleasant, that Rashad is immediately drunk on it. He sits at one end of a perfectly symmetrical garden, his own hindquarters carefully placed in the exact center of a bench that is itself centered exactly, and he stares quietly at the neatly trimmed plant life, the tidy pavement forming a perfectly straight pathway that splits only to admit a perfectly round island of green in which stands a small tree formed into a perfect sphere. Each stone has its place. Each bush has its disciplined shape. Everything fits neatly into everything else, the world is quiet and calm, and he finds his breathing slowing to a steady in-out, in-out as he simply...accepts. This is a good place. He will remain here a while.

[ecks]

It's not Olidammara who answers the call, but the call is answered. Ecks blinks at the young man (human, male, unarmed, physically slight, strange clothing), puzzled and a little hurt by his response to her appearance. Has it happened again? She glances down at her own hands and sees that yes, it has happened again. "Oh," she says. "I meant to be disguised."

She feels the top of her own head and receives more bad news: the hat is not nonfunctional, but actually gone. She adds this to the growing list of puzzling, troubling things to be resolved. "What is this place?" she asks, attention back on the human.

[andhiswife]

There's a squawk and a rustle from the ivy in response to hearing her name - that's it, she's caught, oh no - before Greta registers whose voice it was. Iman. Iman's here? Her approaching friend gets a bewildered look as her brain sluggishly switches gears. If Iman is here, then she's not home, not really trespassing in some royal garden. They're dreaming.

That's a relief. Well, the garden's presumed lack of ownership is, anyway.

"Iman!" She belatedly returns the grin, taking Iman's hands - she has both of them again! - and letting her friend draw her out into the sunlight. Her gaze drops, both in response to the glare and in general embarrassment. (There would be more of the latter if she knew just how much greenery was currently caught in her hair.) "I was so certain I was trespassing," she admits, smiling down at the new-old symmetry of Iman's hands, giving the left one a fond brush with her thumb. "Thought you might be a royal guardsman for half a moment, there."

[antitimelord]

Someone looks like they are having an incongruously bad time in these pleasant gardens. Well, Zagreus can relate to that. Though he is much less alarmed and much more just vaguely annoyed. The Rift seems to be on a tear lately, but his dreams had mostly been left alone. This, however...is not acceptable. And feels very patronising. At least the feeling of being vaguely patronised by something larger and more powerful than himself is, by now, just a familiar undercurrent of his life. Or perhaps it only feels that way to him, perhaps the Rift thinks of him no more than he thinks of the dirt on his shoes, or the random Manhattanites he damages in passing. At least this garden seems free of giant, acid producing snails. And tiny dogs. Fish-men as yet undetermined.

"Not a fan of dream-gardens, then? Or is it just one or the other?"

[grabme]

"Okay. Rrrright. That - that is going to be - actually, it's not a problem. Not a problem at all! Kscshoo!"

Wheatley rubs his nose sullenly with the back of one hand, gazing morosely at what was formerly a proper marble statue, carved in the shape of a tiny little human with wings. He's not sure what sort of nightmarish hybrid was meant to be represented there in sculpture, but the fact of the matter is that, in an event that could have happened to anyone, he'd crashed slap-bang into the thing and sent it toppling.

"Probably did everyone a favor," he says to absolutely no one, now trying for affronted. "Ghastly thing. Lookit that - humans don't come so small, now, do they? What sort of genetic experimentation was at work here? Terrible. An insult to nature, I say, didn't like the old thing anyway. All for the best. Gshchh!"

What sort of biological nightmare is this? His whole respiratory system keeps seizing and shivering him with an awful judder, sound the alarms this is a crisis, and he doesn't know why! He hovers, wiping his nose on his sleeve, wanting nothing more than to leave the disaster in pieces and let it be someone else's problem, as he became well-accustomed to doing in the derelict Enrichment Center, but along comes the nagging feeling that she wouldn't have done that. She would've fixed the problem with her usual locked-down, silent efficiency. She would've -

Wheatley sighs, folding his long legs in a disorderly sprawl as he hunches over the mess and starts nudging hopefully at the pieces in the vague hope that some of them will simply snap back together again - what sort of shoddy technology is this, honestly - shooting nervous looks over his shoulder on the off-chance that someone might see and have the sheer gall to blame him for this, as if he could have any control of over this whatsoever.

[centralcore]

Someone is LAUGHING. Not the maniac cackle of that horrible rat man who hid from her, nor her own deep satisfying chortle, nor the ugly false-sounding Caroline noises she is trying so hard not to remember. It is a... a "nice" sound.

Glados hates it.

She approaches the noise until she locates the noisemaker, at which point she arches a steely eyebrow - a motion she's now accustomed to enacting on purpose, and which she tolerates for its subtlety.

"What is so funny," she demands.

[wildmage_daine]

Hey, Daine knows that face. It's nice to see Daniel looking solid again, and she figured from the Balladeer's texts that he'd stopped being a ghost, too. Seems the rift tired of that particular bit of nastiness. So much the better.

She's swooping down to say hello, in a cheery parrot shape, when he takes a spill. It's quite the tumble, actually; she might have suspected him of doing it on purpose if he didn't look so bewildered when he came back up for air. When she sees how much trouble he's having righting himself, she lands with a clatter of wingbeats on the pathway alongside the fountain.

Daniel? Oh, dear. Down he goes again. Daine quickly shifts into polar bear shape, plunging her forepaws into the water - at least it's not deep - and thrusting her head beneath Daniel's chest until she can lever him upright. Up you get, she says cheerfully, waiting for him to get his feet back under him.

[centralcore]

Glados whips around to face the intruder (people can SNEAK UP ON HER now, she HATES THIS) and fixes him with a scowl that could rot fruit.

Dream gardens. What an absurd phrase. Colloquially meant, she assumes. This is not HER dream garden. Hers would involve fewer plants and more lasers.

"You would be amazed at how many things of which I am not a fan," she says crisply. "What is this place precisely and why am I in it?"

[centralcore]

Well at least someone's having a good time. Glados has been wandering around in increasing cognitive distress. There are multiple spans of time occurring here, she is relatively certain. She has little clips of memories popping up, things that did not happen, have not happened yet. She can't focus on any of them. Perhaps she is damaged. No one can know this.

She comes upon another lifeform, which is, fortuitously, Durant. All right, yes. She can work with this. He does not like disorder as much as she.

Why isn't he losing his mind about this?

"If I didn't know any better I'd think you were having a good time," she snaps, coming up behind him.

[driftseeker]

Mako jumps. She had not heard anyone approaching, thoroughly absorbed in her enjoyment of the water, of the cool breeze on skin. She looks at the other woman with a subtle widening of eyes. She certainly seems to resemble some sort of authority, her entire disposition somehow reminiscent of hard-cut, unalloyed steel.

"I - " she begins, not sure how to address that. She tilts her head, a small crease appearing on her brow. "I just like the water. That's all."

[peacefulexplorer]

At first he's relieved when someone apparently delves in to help him, gratefully accepting the incredibly solid support when it vaults him back to the surface and onto solid ground. Then he shakes the water from his eyes and looks at said help - and yelps.

He doesn't remember the word for what he's looking at. His hands flutter ineffectually for a minute as he tries to grasp the appropriate term - it talked to him, though, and in a language he's starting to vaguely understand, vaguely. It helps that it's in his mind rather than aloud, but how and why is it talking.

"You," he begins rather uselessly, "you're a - "

[wildmage_daine]

Daine steps back a pace or two. She hadn't meant to frighten him - hadn't thought she could, as her shape-changing isn't a secret - but it's clear that she has. Well, bear's a big shape. It's a fair enough response.

Sorry, she says, shrinking down into a less alarming dog shape. I didn't mean to startle you. I just had to get big enough to haul you out of there. She cants her head towards the fountain and gives her tail a hopeful wag. Are you all right?

[biscuit_powered]

Everything is so...tidy. And orderly. Moments like these are hard, because as much as Asmodia has always tried to convince herself she's a normal human being under the scaly skin, the perfect order of this garden makes that scaly skin crawl. It's just wrong on such a fundamental level that it makes her want to break. everything.

Normal person. Normal person Asmodia. Normal people don't break stuff just because it was too neatly organized.

She takes a deep breath, steels her nerves, and hurries past the neatly trimmed bushes, down the perfectly straight pavement. There has to be somewhere less...just less. She breathes a sigh of relief when she comes to an area where the trees have been allowed to grow into a scraggly archway over a curving, worn brick path. This is fine. It's still very deliberately laid out, but it's not so harshly symmetrical, so unforgivingly structured. She reaches up, knocks a few flowers and leaves loose to flutter to the ground...and at the sound of someone coming from the other direction, attempts to dive into the foliage to the side of the path, not wanting to encounter whoever's responsible for this place. She can't remember how she got here (botched teleport?), but it's occured to her that this is almost certainly a garden in one of the upperscale neighborhoods over on the mainland. They have a few friends here, to be sure, but most of those people have never been quite at ease with the gunworks off the coast or its motley residents.

Unfortunately, the key word is "attempt." The plants in question turn out to be backed by a hidden trellis, and while she does succeed in breaking said trellis, she doesn't quite succeed in breaking through it and finds herself stuck in greenery and splintered wood.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Uhhhh," he says, scrambling for all the relevant scraps of information he's supposed to be keeping held tight to him at all times. His name, his name. That's meant to be in there somewhere. Unfortunately adrenaline seems to be cutting off all access to it.

"It's, um, it's - okay," he says, slowly, carefully, parsing the words as he goes. They sound wrong coming from him, the stress on all the wrong syllables, the enunciation too cautious and deliberate. "I, uh. It's. Okay."

What else does he say to this? Great. This is great.