applesaucedream | Falling [Open to Multiple]

Current Music: January 28th - 29th, 2013

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Falling [Open to Multiple]

The last time Daine so thoroughly exhausted herself was during the siege at Pirate's Swoop, so it's no great surprise that in her dream, that's where she wakes. She sits up on the cot they've set up for her in the stables, where the ponies could keep an eye on her. Her head swims, and she grips the edge of the cot until the sensation passes.

A familiar gray nose enters her field of vision, and Daine smiles as Cloud, her pony, sniffs her over. "I'm fine," she reassures the mare, reaching up to give her neck a pat.

You're no such thing, Cloud replies tartly. You've drained yourself again. I won't always be there to lend you strength when you need it.

"Good thing you're here now, then." Daine steadies herself against the pony as she rises to her feet, ignoring Cloud's irritated snort. "Where's Numair?"

It's trouble enough to keep an eye on you, let alone the stork-man.

Daine sighs. "Fine. I'll find him myself."

She makes it to the stable doors before the scene begins to disintegrate around her. Daine whirls about to look for Cloud, but the stable is gone, replaced by nothingness. Within moments, nothing remains but the planks below her feet - and then they, too, crumble away. Daine drops into the Dreaming with a cry of dismay, not knowing where she'll land.

[OOC: Daine's taking a two-day nap after the events in this thread, giving her enough time to drop into the minds of a good number of people. Go nuts!]

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"Daine!" Andrew can hear her, but it's like she's...muffled. A long ways off, perhaps. He spins on the spot, listening, trying to figure out what direction her voice is coming from. "Daine, keep talking! I can't see you!"

Okay, she heard that, though he sounds a good deal quieter than he ought to, considering how close behind her he was a moment ago. She scowls at the wall in front of her, wondering how thick it is. "The maze is changing itself," she calls as she draws an arrow from her quiver and sets it to the string. Best to take precautions if the labyrinth is up to mischief. Or is the Master doing this, somehow? "There's a wall here that wasn't here a moment ago!"

And since there's no chance of Andrew getting through said wall, she edges down the corridor. Maybe there's a parallel corridor leading back the way she came. "I'm going to try and double back," she shouts.

Andrew trots a few steps down one pathway, changes his mind, doubles back, and goes down another. "No -- stay where you are!" he demands, hurrying along to where he thinks he might reach her. If anyone's going to be doing the exploring and the finding, it ought to be him.

"No, thank you," Daine breathes to herself as she creeps down the corridor. There are several good reasons not to plunk herself down in a dead end: if the Master (or something else nasty) shows up, she'd have nowhere to run, and it'll be harder for Andrew to find her if he has to track down the one specific corridor she's at the end of.

And, given the way Andrew's just treated her, the last thing she feels like doing is staying put and waiting for rescue like a child who got lost at the market. She's perfectly capable of getting herself out of trouble, thanks ever so.

"I'm not sitting in a dead end," she calls, unable to keep from sounding indignant. There - an opening in the wall leads to another corridor running alongside the one she was just in. She steps through and turns right. "I'm heading back your way!"

Andrew snorts irritably to himself. Honestly, she's being childish. How is he supposed to find her if she keeps moving around? No doubt she's gone off in the wrong direction, like when she turned left even though he'd told her they were only doing right turns.

"I'm coming to you," he insists, hurrying along and taking the first turn that seems to be in the direction from which her voice last came. "Daine, will you just -- listen?"

"Thought you wanted me to keep talking," she quips, aware that she's being a bit obnoxious, but too annoyed with Andrew to care. Anyway, there has to be a better way to do this. If the maze is shifting itself, they might never be allowed to find each other... unless they cheat.

Taking bird shape might work, but that would mean giving up her bow and almost certainly not getting it back. As she looks at the shelves to her left, it occurs to her that she might not need to take a shape just to see over the walls. "I'm going to try something," she announces as she replaces the arrow and slings her bow over her shoulder. Then, she sets a foot on one of the shelves nearest the floor and cautiously puts her weight on it. The shelf squeaks, but holds, and Daine smiles. Within moments, she's scaling the shelf about as easily as climbing a ladder.

Andrew scowls to himself and mimics Daine in an unflattering sotto voce, pulling a dumb face: "Thought you wanted me to keep talking."

He stops where he is and tries to figure out what that squeaking noise is. "Daine?" he calls. "Daine, really, keep talking to me."

"Bit - busy," Daine grunts as she hauls herself to the top of the shelf. Hanging onto the top shelf with one hand, she uses her other arm to shove the books aside and make some room for herself. A few books tumble off the shelf to thwack against the floor below, and the whole shelf wobbles a little from her efforts. Carefully, she pulls herself up until she's kneeling atop the shelf and steadies herself with one hand.

She can see a good deal more of the maze from here than she could from the ground, and she cranes her neck to see if she can spot Andrew's head. "Andrew?" Suddenly inspired, she grabs one of the books beside her - a smaller paperback - and calls, "Look up and tell me if you can see this," before hurling the little volume up into the air. It makes a tidy arc, pages flapping, then drops into the maze.

Edited 2013-04-26 02:21 (UTC)

Heeding her instructions, Andrew cranes his neck to look upwards, watching the open air. Say -- if he knocked a few books out, maybe he could get handholds and footholds on those shelves so he could climb up and get a bird's eye v --

It turns out Andrew is looking in the wrong direction. He doesn't see the book coming, just hears a flapping of pages before it clocks him on the back of his noggin. "Ack!" he cries, flinching much too late and bringing a hand up to touch his head and assess the damage.

Daine hastily claps her hand over her mouth, but she isn't quick enough to mask her snort of amusement. "So that's where you are!" she triumphantly says once she's sure she can speak without giggling. "I'm over this way!" She tosses another book into the air, aiming a bit more carefully this time so it only drops into the corridor beside her. "Just climb up and you'll spot me soon enough."

Andrew hisses and rubs his head. Aaand she's laughing at him, he can tell. He's at least looking the right way to see the next book, and at least it doesn't come flying into his corridor and hit him. Realizing she's already had his idea ahead of him, he resigns himself to duplicating her efforts and starts climbing.

"That wasn't funny," he informs her as he nears the top, getting his eyes above the lip of the shelf.

"Yes, it was," Daine cheerily informs him, giving him a wave when he finally pokes his head above a shelf not too far away.

While she waits for him to finish climbing, she carefully gets to her feet, arms out for balance as the shelf wobbles a little beneath her. From this vantage point, she can see enough of the labyrinth between them to spot a place where their respective corridors intersect. "I think we should be able to meet there, if the labyrinth doesn't switch things up again," she says, pointing.

Andrew gives her a disapproving frown, but drops it. If she's going to behave that way, he's not going to dignify it by protesting. He perches partway atop the shelf, clinging to it in a way rather contrapuntal to Daine's hands-free approach.

"I see it," he confirms, not sulking hard enough to stop him from seeking the solution to their current problem. "You've got a shorter path if you come down this near side."

What? It was a little paperback; it can't have hurt him that badly.

"Got it." Daine considers climbing down the other side, then decides it'd be quicker to jump. Shifting her arms into wings, she makes the leap, flapping to slow her descent just enough to keep from landing too hard. Shifting her arms back, she heads for their designated meeting spot, feeling distinctly smug. This is a far sight quicker than twiddling her thumbs and waiting to be found.

"Don't --!" Andrew looks for a moment like he's going to launch himself up and over the shelf to come to her rescue. He's almost too busy saving himself from a bad fall to even see that she uses a transformation to slow her descent. Staring as she disappears among the shelves, he heaves a sigh and wishes he could do the same. Instead, he has to survey the pathways, memorize a way to get there, and laboriously climb back down the way he came.

Soon, though, he's on his way. He's just quite a bit less smug about it than Daine.

The maze, as far as Daine can tell, is behaving itself. The route she takes to the meeting spot unfolds exactly as she expects it to. No walls pop up out of nowhere to block her way. She's still ready to grab an arrow if she needs to, but she's beginning to think it unlikely that she will.

Since her route was a bit shorter than Andrew's, she reaches the place before him and settles in to wait, idly polishing the bow with the cuff of her sleeve. "I'm here," she adds for good measure, so he'll know she made it.

"Wait there!" Andrew calls back, feeling that by doing so he might be able to make it sound like it was his idea. She's quite nearby, but it takes him a minute or two more of twisting and weaving through inhospitable passageways before he finally turns a corner and sees Daine.

"There you are!" he exclaims.

Daine huffs and rolls her eyes at the order. What does he think she's going to do, go skipping off? She's not an idiot, despite his best efforts to treat her like one.

With those thoughts to entertain her while she waits, she's not exactly overjoyed to see Andrew when he finally shows up. "Yes, hello," she deadpans, straightening away from the bookshelf she was leaning against.

"I told you we needed to stick together," grouses Andrew, not exactly thrilled with Daine at the moment, either. At least she didn't go skipping off while he was getting here. "Come on; we need to find the book drop."

Oh, of course - because it's her fault Andrew belittled her and then refused to keep up. "If you'd been nicer, this wouldn't have happened," Daine points out, scowling at him. "Or has no one ever told you it's wrong to scorn folk for not having had the same opportunities as you?"

Andrew stops up short and gives her a deliberately uncomprehending look. "This wouldn't have happened if you'd stuck to the plan," he argues, though he can feel his ears heating up. "I didn't scorn you."

"Yes, you did," Daine replies flatly, stopping as well. "And I'll thank you not to look at me as if you've no idea what I'm talking about." She can feel her temper starting to rise, so she takes a deep, deliberate breath before allowing herself to continue. "I don't expect to be the cleverest person in the room, but that doesn't mean I deserve to be treated like an idiot - especially about things I couldn't possibly have known, anyway. It'd be like me looking down my nose at you because you can't tell what animals are saying."

"It wasn't personal," mutters Andrew, stuffing his hands in his pockets and looking away. One moment -- he allows himself one moment of superiority, and he gets this. No one else used to kick up this kind of fuss, he's sure. "I joke," he says defensively. "With friends. It's a thing I do."

Except he does know better. He just doesn't want to know better.

"Felt personal," Daine replies, her righteous indignation slipping just enough for some of her hurt to show through. "Didn't feel very friendly, either." It certainly isn't something any of her friends from home would have done. "Where I'm from, pressing your obvious advantage just to make someone else feel foolish is something you do to your rivals, not your friends."

And that's if it's done at all. She could mention it's the sort of behavior folk would expect from children or cowards, not the decent or honorable, but she's not out to insult Andrew. She just wants to make sure he quits lording things over her.

"...Sorry," Andrew finally says reluctantly, wishing he were more confused about why he has to apologize. "Most people just...hit me on the arm or whatever."

Because a lack of emotional reaction (except expressed by minor acts of violence) totally means it's okay.

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