applesaucedream | Universal Remote [Open to All]

Current Music: October 13th/14th, 2013

Entry tags:

Universal Remote [Open to All]

photo cropped-broadcast-room-panel_zpsapyqar5j.jpg

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.']

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They cycle on with their overwrought narration, oblivious to the two horribly confused men standing directly in front of them.

"Peter," he says slowly, nervously, "I don't think they can see us."

He steps forward, reaching out tentatively, and immediately leaps back in alarm when one of the cameramen passes right through his arm.

"Yeah, okay!" He scrambles away, rubbing his own frantically as though testing its solidity. It feels solid. It feels there. "That's weird," he babbles with a frantic desperation verging on hysterical. "That's really weird!"

The cameraman he just tried to touch stiffens, his eyes going wide.

"You guys feel that?" he calls to the rest of the group.

"Oh, Jesus," breathes Peter, cold dread settling in the pit of his stomach. He doesn't want to be dead. He doesn't want to be a bloody ghost. If they'd come straight from the car crash maybe this would mean they died and are what, haunting the woods now? But then what the hell was America's Got Talent, some kind of hallucination while the oxygen left their brains?

"Fuck," he says, inching closer, willing it not to be true. He reaches out a shaking hand, hesitates, then goes to tap it against the man's arm. It swipes right through and Peter lets out a yelp and scrambles back to join Daniel.

The cameraman jolts and takes a step back of his own. "There it is again!"

Oh, great. So they're the ghosts? What does that mean? How is Daniel still breathing? If they're ghosts, why does he still have glasses?

The cameraman turns to his fellows, now sounding absurdly excited by the prospect of having had two brushes with the undead.

"▒▒▒▒ guys, you hear that?"

Daniel blinks and squints at him.

"Did he just, um," he says slowly, not daring to believe it. "Did he just beep?"

"...He did," confirms Peter, starting to feel just a little hysterical. "He fucking beeped. I'm not fucking beeping, why is he fucking beeping?"

You have to be a fucking idiot to get excited about an encounter with the supernatural, that much Peter has known for a long, long time. It's little comfort that he is the supernatural in this situation, and he hangs back by Daniel's side, no intention of going back up to the cameraman and giving him another brush with the undead.

"I can't be dead," he protests. "I don't even believe in goddamn ghosts."

"Well, clearly something's happening here," says Daniel, trying not to let Peter's panic tint his own mounting terror. It feels an awful lot like this is all part of some larger joke, maybe a concept he should be familiar with, but he's only just got a grasp on the finer point of the English language and hasn't really expanded his focus past that.

"We could be - I dunno, I don't know, phase-shifted or - or something?"

Phase-shifted. Where did that come from and what does it say about who he was before all this? Why was that his go-to phrase? That's not even a thing.

...Is it?

"We're getting EMF readings off the charts," enthuses one of the other crewmembers, staring a beeping device in the palm of his hand. "Something's definitely here."

"...The fuck does phase-shifted mean?" asks Peter, no more in the know than Daniel and rather assuming Daniel said it because it means something to him. If it means they're not dead he'll go with it, but it sounds like bullshit sci fi mumbo jumbo to him. ~~Next Daniel will suggest that they need to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.~~

"Someone is here," he corrects the idiot with the beepy thing, obviously to no avail.

"I don't know," says Daniel, one part miserable and two parts increasingly perplexed. "Did you even get the whole 'memory' thing? I'm still trying to figure out who I was, okay?"

The man carrying the - what is it, an EMF reader? whatever that means - advances on them steadily. The rate of the beeping only increases the closer he gets to the pair of them. Intrigued despite himself, Daniel cocks his head and watches, then reaches forward to swipe a hand through his chest.

Two things happen in rapid succession.

First, the beeping evens out to a single, incredibly loud, high-pitched tone.

Second, Daniel's arm does not pass through the man's chest as he predicted it would, and instead connects very solidly with him and sends him flying halfway across the clearing to a chorus of "holy ▒▒▒▒!" from his fellows, who seem torn between delighted and terrified. "Holy ▒▒▒▒!"

"You just said 'memory problems,' not that you'd forgot everything you knew!" protests Peter, though truth be told he's been harping on the questions mostly because he wants to make hysterical demands of someone and he didn't really care enough about what Daniel was saying earlier to put much thought into it.

And all the while, one of the idiots is getting closer and closer. Peter starts to edge away, but Daniel apparently has something else in mind. Something seriously different in mind, because he doesn't just step up to meet the guy, he launches him backwards. "Jesus!" yelps Peter. "What the fuck did you do that for?!"

"I didn't think it would do anything," he protests, concern rapidly morphing into panic as the cameramen scatter like pigeons. It didn't do anything before; he'd just wanted to see if there was any correlation between the electronic beeping and its physical proximity to Daniel, and then trying to test that theory had done the exact opposite.

He withdraws, intending to press himself flat against one of the trees, only to stumble when he glides seamlessly through it instead. "I've only got pieces of who I was - how am I supposed to sort out what means what?"

"Well don't do it again!" suggests Peter, but it seems Daniel's already had the same idea. Or maybe he's trying to become one with the tree, which seems to be working out for him better than most things one or the other of them has tried tonight. The crew is scattering all over the place now, and Peter tries dodge away from one of them running either toward or away from the disturbance that is Daniel only to shoulder-check the guy. It's all the more surprising because it actually connects, even though a second later the man's flailing hand goes right through Peter's chest.

Daniel keeps backing away frantically, only to go crashing into one of the crew who, by some ridiculous happenstance, managed to get behind him. Even worse, the camera goes slipping from his hands and lands amidst the leaves with a dull thump, and its operator soon follows.

"Sorry!" Daniel fires off in the cameraman's direction, for the moment forgetting that he and Peter seem to mostly be landing outside of the average human's perception.

What follows is a flurry of angry beeping, both from a host of devices apparently going haywire and from the crew's furious storm of expletives. Beyond desperate, Daniel does the only thing he can think to do.

"Run," he yelps as he turns blindly in the opposite direction and does exactly that.

Could they have possibly chosen a more obnoxious tone for beeping themselves out? And how the hell are they beeping, because that vital question was never fucking answered. Peter stumbles back from the wildly beeping man he bumped into and offers precisely zero argument to Daniel's plan of action. He turns on the spot and nearly overturns himself in his haste to follow suit.

Unfortunately, there's a crew member in his way. "Goddamnit, let me out of here!" snaps Peter from the ground after bouncing off the man. The crewman doesn't answer, of course, except with more beeping and scrambling to get his gear back up off the ground where he dropped it when he fell as well. Peter scrambles to his feet and darts after Daniel with all the grace of a drunken gazelle, heart thudding in his chest.

The storm of high-pitched bleeping starts to fade the further away they get, much to the relief of both Daniel's eardrums and his patience. He blows out a long breath and braces a hand on one of the spindly tree trunks as he doubles over, panting.

It's only after he's caught his breath that he comes to realization that the almost comical alarm of the camera crew has all but dissolved, and the surrounding woodland has settled into an uncomfortable, eerie silence. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

The bark under his hand is oddly smooth and pale.

Then it twitches.

Daniel's hand jumps away as he startles back, shaking his head.

"Oh god," he says, babbling, "oh god, oh god oh god - "

The tree unravels, a grotesque parody of a flower in bloom, and casts its gaze to the both of them with a bulbous pair of horrible milky eyes. A glistening strand of spittle slides down its mottled chin.

That is not a tree.

For a time there's nothing but the thudding of his own heart and the rasping of his own breath in his ears. If the camera crew can track them they're at least not chasing him and Daniel, because the sounds of chaos they leave behind never resolve themselves into the sounds of pursuit. Peter follows the shape of Daniel, afraid the other man is going to disappear into the trees and leave him alone.

He stops in a little clearing short of where Daniel does, panting himself and looking back. They left the crew behind a while ago and as far as he can tell they're proverbially out of the woods, if not literally out of the woods. Maybe now they can catch their breath and figure out what the fuck is happening to them, before they get plunged into some other version of television hell.

There's a little rustle from Daniel's direction, and Peter freezes, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end at the litany that comes spilling out from the man behind him. He doesn't want to turn around. He really, really does not want to turn around and know what's scared Daniel.

He turns around, and lets out a blood-curdling scream.

The thing utters a high-pitched shriek to rival Peter's, jaws gaping wide, and Daniel can only stumble back and stare in abject horror. He bumps into Peter, gropes for the other man's shoulder, and abandons the the action as he watches the thing's eyes fix greedily onto the movement.

"Run, run run run run run," are about the only words he can successfully form but his muscles have locked and gone rigid. He's gone deer-in-headlights frozen in the face of whatever the hell this thing is, paralyzed but for the chattering of his teeth and the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

The thing creeps nearer on spidery limbs.

The thing is all the more terrifying for the fact that Peter doesn't know what the hell it is. His mind whirls frantically, absurdly, through the list of possibilities as though being up against something big and wrong unarmed in the woods would be made better by matching it up to its proper name.

He grabs at Daniel, not so frozen as the other man, and yanks him along as Peter breaks into a stumbling sprint back the other way. "Fuck!" he squawks. "Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck --"

Maybe they can sic it on the camera crew. The thought would be funny if only he wasn't sure that he'll be feeling its hands on his back at any second.

Peter has to practically haul him into the first few steps, but the rough action is enough to jar his legs into remembering how to stagger into a run. The trees have gone darker, black-barked and spindly, their immediate surroundings dense with mist. He can only hope Peter has some idea of where they might be going, because he has no idea where they are or where the cameramen might be in relation to here.

The thing screams again. Daniel glances over his shoulder, but the patch of forest is horribly empty, devoid of any bony, clawed shape.

"Where did it - "

Then he glimpses the pale streak in the trees, leaping from branch to branch with evident ease.

"Up!" Daniel yelps, but without any means of verbalizing the context he has no idea if the pronouncement is remotely helpful. It snaps from one trunk to the next, little more than a blur, keeping in perfect line with the two panicked men charging through the woods.

For a second Peter has the ludicrous thought that Daniel is telling him up, as in climb up that tree, but as he looks up the twisted shape of a likely candidate he sees --

"Fuck!" he exclaims, and veers away, though the forest is thick enough that it has no trouble adjusting its own course to follow. They're going to die. They're going to die in these horrible fucking woods and he doesn't even know what the hell it is that's going to kill them.

If he'd had the presence of mind to demand what the hell the thing is between panicked gasps, he would have - but the only instruction locked in his brain is the single-minded fixation in getting as far as humanly possible from that thing.

Unfortunately, the thing in question has other plans. Skeletal fingers lock tight around his ankle and unbalance him with a fierce jerk. Daniel skids into the leaf mulch with a muffled grunt that quickly turns into a horrified yelp as the sharp tugging movement to his legs just keeps going, dragging him back and away and into the pitch-dark woods with an inhuman speed. He grapples uselessly at the ground, fingers shredding through leaves and twigs and catching on roots, but there's no purchase, nothing for him to latch onto. The trees blur into brown-gray linear streaks. His glasses are gone. The last thing of which he's fully cognizant is the sickening crack of his head smashing into one of the passing trunks, and then silence.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Universal Remote [Open to All]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

suddenly body horror

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject