applesaucedream | Universal Remote [Open to All]

Current Music: October 13th/14th, 2013

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Universal Remote [Open to All]

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Here's an interesting scene: the dreamers of Manhattan are on a pirate ship. Or perhaps they're standing in a busy ER, wearing scrubs and holding a scalpel they may or may not know how to use. Or perhaps they've found themselves in the middle of a world cup championship game, or an old-fashioned highway robbery, or an interstellar dogfight, or a dramatic, 'unscripted' showdown between arguably attractive people they've never seen before in their lives.

Whatever the situation, rest assured: it probably won't last long.

Maybe the Rift is bored. That might explain why the dream keeps changing, as if someone were idly flicking through the channels and switching up the genre. The poor dreamers are just along for the ride, the only constant amidst a shifting array of scenery, clothing, and overall mood. Perhaps, if things are sufficiently interesting, the dream might settle a little to see how things play out. But given the Rift's definition of 'interesting,' that might not be a good thing for whoever is providing the entertainment.

[OOC: the usual dream party rules apply. All are welcome, regardless of whether they're in the game or not. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Dreamers' clothes may change to reflect whatever scene they're in, but their memories and personalities will remain intact... though the overall mood of the setting might influence their mood, as well. Feel free to throw NPCs into whatever scene you find yourself in, with bonus points added if said characters treat the dreamers as if they're established parts of the 'canon.']

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The notion that this might not be real suddenly seems extremely, readily apparent, leaving her almost embarrassed she failed to catch on immediately. Of course - she was never in forensics. This isn't even her time period. This is the sort of thing she may have glimpsed on the television in America, documentations of crime methodology rendered obsolete with the progression of science and technology.

"Yes," she says, mirroring him and shooting a quick look at her 'co-workers' puzzling over her data behind them. "Though I shouldn't really be here. This isn't what I'm used to." She looks at him oddly. "Is this another dream?"

"Yeah, I think this is one of the group ones. Unless it's yours?" That kind of thing is rarer for him, and he suspects it's not the case. The Balladeer extends a hand, suddenly rather conscious of his police uniform. It feels a bit ridiculous, like he's wearing a costume. "I'm the Balladeer. Have you - "

Whatever he was about to say is interrupted by the arrival of the second detective, who ignores Mako in favor of glaring up at him. "Just where do you think you're going? We haven't even started processing the scene!"

She thrusts his gun and holster out at him, which he eyes disdainfully before turning back to Mako. "You want to get out of here?"

She shakes her head wryly. "No. It wouldn't be mine."

She knows her dreams. Her dreams come in stunted triplicate, in shades of kaiju blue. Raleigh listen to me and the shriek of a monster and the groaning of rending circuits as the Conn-Pod is torn apart, you can always find me in the Drift and clutching a glossy red shoe and the scrape of metal on metal. Her dreams all carry those particular flavors. This is not one of them.

When the other detective interrupts, Mako cuts across her evenly, her tone nothing short of endlessly polite.

"We just got a call. Two more bodies dropped, with suspect still fleeing the scene." She lifts her eyebrows meaningfully. "Unless you'd rather they got away."

The Balladeer's dreams often involve about this many bodies, but the settings aren't quite as varied.

"Yep!" He leaps right into Mako's story, tapping the radio still at his hip. "We're gonna go deal with that, you stay here and take care of this crime scene." By dream logic, the two cops here are obviously the only ones in the entire city capable of investigating things. It makes sense! Not that he's waiting for permission anyway - he immediately turns on his heel and starts away, without checking to see if Mako's following.

"We only have one car!" the other cop calls behind him.

The Balladeer shrugs. "I don't know how to drive anyway," he confides. "Not a lot of call for it - "

The world shifts, and suddenly they're no longer standing in front of a dead man's house. They're sitting at the controls of some kind of craft; out the glass in front of them, there's only the blackness of space and the occasional star. Startled, the Balladeer leans back, taking his hands from his portion of the controls. "Oh, that's - new."

That's not unexpected news; Mako only learned to drive under Pentecost's insistence, but she knew plenty of people who simply never needed to. The sprawling metropolises in which the Shatterdomes were stationed were seldom ever cities with good traffic laws. She simply follows, as the other nameless detective does not seem overly predisposed to leave the scene of the crime.

The place they find themselves in next reminds her vaguely of the interior of a jaeger, but it is too spacious and sleek and outside there is no water, but space. She takes in a startled breath and mirrors the Balladeer in snatching her hands away from the array of buttons arranged delicately over the console.

"This dream is very fickle," murmurs Mako, subtly disquieted.

A pair of doors hush quietly open behind them.

"An unidentified object has been spotted in Sector 12," announces a woman who very much resembles the detective she thought they had left behind, now clad in some kind of crisp, simple uniform. If she recognizes them her face does not betray it. "We think it might be some kind of craft. Permission to investigate, Captain?"

Mako looks at the Balladeer dubiously. She's still not clear on which of them the woman might be addressing.

The Balladeer meets her eyes with equal bafflement. But someone has to say something.

"Yeah...yeah, that's fine. Permission granted!" he finishes, picking up in confidence. Hopefully he's the captain then. With any luck, she'll leave again and the two of them can actually talk without interruption for twenty seconds.

She bobs her head in a quick nod and departs. Mako hisses out a quiet breath she hadn't realized she was holding. The logic of this arrangement appears to be just as fluid as the setting is.

"Do we just play along?" She looks at the rows upon rows of multicolored buttons. At least in the last setting she'd been infused with some sort of basic forensics knowledge. She has no idea where to start here. These consoles are nothing like the intuitive controls of a jaeger.

"We can." The Balladeer shrugs. "Or we could just walk out. Either way we'll have to deal with them." On the whole it's probably easier not to upset the dream people too much.

If Mako can't find her way around these controls, the Balladeer certainly can't. He only barely understands how the Internet works. He's got more sense than to randomly push buttons in a spaceship, so instead of fiddling with them, he turns back to their long-since interrupted conversation. "So anyway! I don't think I got your name?"

"Mako Mori," she says, inclining her head slightly. He seems altogether unconcerned by the state of the dream, less bothered by its abnormalities and more comfortable with its transient nature. She tries to mirror his disposition as much as she can, leaning against the chair instead of sitting ramrod-straight as is her habit. "I haven't been in Manhattan for very long. And you," she continues, brow creasing in confusion. "People call you 'the Balladeer'? Is that short for anything?"

She is well used to the notion of nicknames being shorthand for another identity. The underground deals Pentecost had to cut to keep the program running for as long as it did had taught her that much, and Hannibal Chau had only been the last in a long list of black market dealers with which she'd become peripherally acquainted. 'The Balladeer' has the sound of a sort of official title or duty, though she isn't wholly sure what to make of that.

"No, just that," the Balladeer answers simply. What would it be short for? "ROMAC gave me a fake name when I showed up, for their legal things, but I don't like to use it."

Oh, but she's only been here a short while. The ship is indeed drawing closer to some unidentified thing floating in the distance, but the Balladeer's only keeping half an eye on it. "Do you know about them? They used to be an organization who dealt with the Rift. They'd help get new people set up, keep things secret from the public, all that kind of stuff." He sounds vaguely dismissive of the entire concept. The politics of it had never much concerned him, but he's certainly not nostalgic for them now that he knows exactly what they got up to.

"I've heard about them," she says dubiously. Johnny hadn't exactly spoken very well of them, his general tone and disposition hinting that it was a good thing, better, that they were gone by the time she arrived. It had sounded very much to her like the sort of backwards endeavor the American government might set out to do. "I've also heard that it's better that they're gone."

The Balladeer's tone would suggest he feels the same. Mako makes a mental note not to mention any of her extensive involvement with the PPDC, given the general climate aimed at government-sponsored or government-funded organizations. She has a feeling not many people would take kindly to the fact that she once devoted everything she had to one of them, honorable intentions or not.

"Yeah, they didn't turn out so well. It was about what you'd expect from a shadowy government organization studying a mysterious phenomenon. And the people associated with it," he adds with a tinge of bitterness. How could they justify kidnapping and locking up innocent people like that, who'd already been whisked away from everything familiar? He should have realized it was happening sooner.

Well, no sense bringing down the room. "Buuuuut they're gone now, and everything's more or less settled alright." He leans forward, peering out the windshield or viewscreen or whatever's in front of them. "Does that look like another ship to you?"

Shadowy government organization studying a mysterious phenomenon sounds glaringly similar to the PPDC's origins. Mako says nothing. If that life is really so far behind her, there is little point in mentioning it.

She devotes her attention instead to the arrangement of panels indicating the object they seem to be approaching.

"It does," she says. It's impossible to tell what their ship may look like from the outside, but the ship opposite them seems oddly warped, nothing like the sleek metallic exterior of a jaeger. Its colors are too whorled, its design too arachnidian and peculiarly curled.

"It doesn't look friendly," says Mako, dubiously.

The Balladeer is cheerfully oblivious to the fact that he might be hitting some hidden buttons! He's not even especially anti-government - just very anti-ROMAC.

"No..." he responds, peering at it doubtfully. "Maybe it's friendlier than it looks? I think that'd be against genre conventions, but who knows?"

Behind them, the door whisks open again. The woman from before doesn't sound quite as calm and cool as she did before. "Captain, it's a Zoran scout ship! They're armed, but they haven't raised their shields yet. What are your orders?"

"Ah..." The Balladeer glances sidelong at Mako. Giving orders doesn't come naturally to him. "Can we talk to them?"

The officer nods. "We'll open hailing frequencies."

Careful, murmurs Raleigh, but she nods. As uncertain as the curiously topological shape of the other ship makes her, the instinct to gravitate to nonviolence drums persistently in her skull. She meets the Balladeer's glance with trepidation, equally unused to being in a position of authority as opposed to submitting to one's orders.

She holds her breath as the officer moves deftly to one of the consoles and begins tapping at it studiously to twist knobs and dials whose purposes she can only guess.

The ship opposite them revolves slowly to face them directly, light beading along the tips of its hooked protrusions.

The officer blanches. "They're powering weapons," she says nervously. "Recommend course of action? Captain?"

Mako tenses.

The next moment, she is blinking in the sun, squinting against light filtering through treetops. The cold black of space has been replaced with an expansive woodland, the ship's sleek interface with plated armor not unlike a drivesuit and a long sword buckled to her hip.

Ohhhhh god, oh god, oh god. The Balladeer flinches back into his seat as the tension in the room suddenly skyrockets. Having weapons pointed at him isn't new. But he always talks his way out of these things. If he can't do that, he hasn't got anything else. How did he end up being the person in charge here?

"Um - " Before he can finished his slightly panicked sentence, the scene shifts again. Unbalanced, he stumbles and reaches out to catch himself on something that turns out to be very much alive.

It's a horse. A horse in plated armor.

The Balladeer chuckles a little breathlessly. "I guess I'm not cut out to be a spaceship captain. Good to know!" They were never in any true danger, but he's not eager to try exploding. He pats the horse's neck. The armor feels uncomfortably hot and heavy, and the sword is an unwelcome weight at his side, but at least they're outside. "Oh man, Greta'd get a kick out of this. You want to try riding?"

Mako wasn't very eager to engage in an interstellar dogfight either, but at least that environment appealed to her a little more accurately than their current one. She shades her eyes with a hand as she searches for some sort of landmark or clue as to where they might be. Nothing leaps out at her; their present location looks to be nothing more than some generic woodland.

The Balladeer sits astride a horse, and Mako's eyes widen fractionally as she breathes in the thick, earthy smell of the animal at the same moment she comes to the realization that she's showed up mounted on one of her own. A slender palomino paws at the ground with a hoof, tossing its head as it whickers quietly. She rests a hand on its neck in a movement that can only be called instinctual.

In her head, Raleigh is only slightly less surprised. Of the two of them, he is the one more familiar with animals, but the sheer size and power of the steed has them both taken aback.

"I've never ridden one before," she admits, running a hand down the horse's neck in an effort to calm it. It seems just as startled by their sudden appearance as she is. "Who's Greta?"

"A friend of mine." Watching her, the Balladeer mimics her movements and pats his own horse's neck. Its mane is dark against its tan coat; if there's a word for that sort of horse, he doesn't know it. The smell isn't so alien though, and he smiles in fascination as he works his fingers through a section of mane. "She's from a world more like this. Sort of medieval." Though still, he supposes, quite distant from the experience of knighthood.

Are they knights? They must be. Who else rides around dressed like this? Even the horse, poor thing! His mount seems calmer, merely flicking an ear and tossing its head a little at his touch, but it has to be hot under all this.

"I've never ridden either," he admits. "But this is nice."

So, it seems when it comes to the varying points in time the Rift doesn't discriminate. Mako from the future in relation to Manhattan, Greta from the past, and the Balladeer - she can't entirely discern what time period from which he might have been displaced. There's a lot about him she can't seem to read, including his relative ease in acclimatizing with each new environment, though that could simply mean he's been here for a lot longer, long enough to grow accustomed to such changes.

She looks back down at the horse, who snorts and tosses its head in a manner that might indicate discomfort, or impatience, or any number of things she doesn't know how to interpret.

"I don't know what it is we're supposed to be doing," she confesses. "All the other places had an objective, but this place - "

A shrieking roar cuts her off, and a dark, sprawling shadow passes over the both of them, blotting out the sun. She looks up and catches a glimpse of leathery wings, curved claws, the gray shimmer of a scaly hide, and her stomach plummets.

The Balladeer watches the dragon pass overhead with wide eyes. Beneath him, his horse whickers and shifts uneasily. Luckily, it doesn't bolt; he really doesn't have the skill to control a panicked steed.

After a moment of silence, he speaks.

"I bet that's normal."

In contrast, Mako's horse bucks, nearly succeeding in unseating her. She clings to its reins in blind terror, unable or unwilling to confront the reality - or lack thereof - of the thing circling them overhead. She can muster little more than a short intake of breath, her mind a panicked whirl of fragmentary images, the shriek of Otachi's claws sinking into metal, the awful thunderous snap of its wings unfurling, the sickly bright blue of its blood gushing from the place where they cleaved it in two.

Otachi's dead, says Raleigh, but he doesn't sound as certain as he means to, as he hypothetically means to. Otachi's dead, remember? We gutted it like a fish.

The timbre of the echoing roar is deeper, throatier, nothing like the birdlike screeches of a kaiju, but the rational reminder is not enough to hold her heart still or her breath even.

The shadow swoops low and this time she sees it, face-to-face, smoldering eyes and jaws gapped wide and startlingly bright red tongue. With the hiss of igniting gas, its maw gapes open to belch loose a gushing sheet of flame. The trees spring alight.

Mako's mouth goes dry.

Her horse rears abruptly and it is all she can do to cling desperately to its back as it makes a sharp turn to bolt as far away from the inferno as it possibly can.

Oh. It's coming back.

Stoic though the dark-maned horse may be, it's certainly not proof against a charging dragon. The Balladeer only has time for a half-startled shout as it wheels, nearly throwing him. One hand wrapped in the reins, he ends up clanking hard and clinging to the horse's side as it runs.

It is much bouncier like this!

"What should we do?" is what he means to yell. What comes out is more along the lines of "Whaaaaaauauauagh!"

Mako can only hope the horse has some idea of where it's going, because no amount of desperately yanking on the reins has any hope in redirecting it. Panicked as the animal is, it's more likely than not that it has no greater plan than simply getting away. For the moment, that plan, one-note as it might be, suits her.

Oily smoke streams thickly from the predator's open gullet as it dips low and takes to the sky again with an almighty clap of its wings. The Balladeer seems to be keeping pace, though the poor man is practically bouncing against his steed's back.

She opens her mouth to suggest something, anything, but she never gets the words out. Her horse jars to a halt and bucks again, throwing her bodily from its back and sending her arcing to the ground.

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Universal Remote [Open to All]

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