applesaucedream | It's Saturday night and you're hallucinating in your sleep!

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It's Saturday night and you're hallucinating in your sleep!

It's that time again! The rift has caught the good little dreamers of New York (and beyond) in its currents and washed them ashore ~~on a desert island~~ in a dream wonderland. This time, however, quite a noticeable change has come over each of the attendees of this nocturnal party.

All the people who arrive in this shared mindspace will find that they have been transformed into some sort of animal they find familiar or that resembles them. They will find that they can still communicate with one another and that they still have all their mental faculties, but might be a little…well…influenced by the forms they have taken on.

They will also find that they have been deposited in the middle of the largest, most elaborate playground they have ever seen. Climbing equipment and slides of the sort meant for human children are in evidence, but so are cat trees, meadows, tunnels, pools and ponds, aerial obstacle courses, and anything else the mind can imagine, for as far as the eye can see.

[OOC: The usual dream party rules apply: players apply the party's theme (in this case, transformation) to their characters according to their own discretion, and both members and non-members are more than welcome to use this post to try out characters not yet in the game. Usual dreaming rules also apply, in that players can choose whether or not their characters will remember this in the morning. Have at!]

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"Well, the ones that stay in trees grab on with their feet and their thumbs at the same time," she explains patiently, "so it's a hard landing. The ones that roost in caves just use their back feet, so they don't hit the rock as hard."

Meanwhile, Peter's tiny enough that it's hard for her to judge where he might roost. He could fit anywhere. "What sounds nicer to you - a cave or a tree?" Maybe his bat-self has a preference.

"That's what I've been trying to do," ~~whines~~ explains Peter. "Grab on with my bloody thumbs -- you can't expect me to throw my feet at whatever and have it work." Mostly because he can't figure out how he's supposed to turn in midair to do that.

He stares at her for several long moments, fighting the urge to tell her what a stupid question that is. "A cave," he surprises himself by answering.

"I think that's the problem, actually - you're crashing because you're trying to land on things instead of on the underside, which is where a real bat would land."

She pauses after his response, considering. She doesn't doubt it's the right answer, but it does make things a bit more daunting. Either way, it'd be difficult - it wasn't even easy for her when she first took bat shape - but he's good enough with the twig that at least he might be open to the idea of landing upside-down.

"All right... this isn't going to be easy, but I'm sure you can do it with a bit of practice." She walks back over to one of the cat trees, having noticed that even the underside of the platforms are carpeted. If he can just get his feet up there, grabbing hold of the fuzz should be easy - easier than stone. "Instead of aiming for the top of this platform, you're going to aim for the underside, here. And when you get there..." she trails off, wondering how best to explain it. "Maybe it would be easier if I showed you." Except that would involve manhandling him a little, and she's not sure he'd allow that.

"Showed me how?" asks Peter, not grasping the reason she's hesitating. "You said you can't turn into a bat right now." Yep, rubbing it in. He's not even doing it especially on purpose; it just doesn't come into his head that he might not want to bring it up.

Fortunately for Peter (or maybe not-so-fortunately), Daine's too wrapped up in trying to figure out an inoffensive way to explain her idea to be particularly offended that he's pointing out her limitations. It's regrettably true that she can't take bat shape, but honestly, she's not sure how much help her demonstrations would even be. What she could do is carefully move him the way he'd need to move, but she doubts he'd like the idea of her manipulating his little limbs as if he's a toy.

"Well," she says delicately, "I could show you how you need to move by actually moving you. I'd be very careful not to hurt you," she hastens to add. Figuring they could start simply, she suggests, "If you were to lie on your back, say, I could slowly move my hand below the platform, and then you could try nabbing it with your feet as you pass beneath it. You'd only have to focus on grabbing hold instead of trying to do that and fly."

And once he got the hang of grabbing a perch with his feet in that manner, maybe he'd let her help show him the way he has to sort of cartwheel through the air to get his feet in that position while flying. Maybe.

Daine might feel a few little pin-pricks on her hand as Peter tenses his toes and tries to dig in his claws at the mention of her moving him. Has she seen the size of her hands?! "I know how to grab on with my feet, remember?" he asks incredulously. "I've grabbed that stick what, fifteen times now?"

Though that's not his real objection to this plan.

"It's not the same as grabbing something while you're on the move," she points out, frowning a little as he tenses in her hand. Perhaps she should mention that she's handled more bats than she cares to count without them coming to any harm. If anything, animals tend to leave her happier than they were when they arrived, but Peter's not entirely an animal... thus the problem.

Has she handled bats his size, though? Clearly the answer is no, since she already admitted she's never seen one as small as him. "The fact that I can grab on to anything with my bloody toes tells me I've pretty much got it down," he argues back. More quietly, he adds, "That's not the part that's a problem."

Daine takes a slow breath, tamping down her frustration. Never mind that she just healed his wing not two minute ago; obviously she's out to hurt him.

"All right, then," she says, her tone deceptively mild as she takes a few steps away from the cat tree. "All you have to do is a little cartwheel in the air as soon as you're under the platform. If you'd rather I didn't help you, I suppose you'll just have to figure it out on your own." Raising her eyebrows, she prompts, "Off you go."

Everyone is out to hurt him.

...Shit. Peter stares at the platform, then turns to look up at Daine, nose twitching. Then he resolutely stares at the platform again. He can't do that. Does she know he can't do that? She has to know there's no way that's going to work.

"...Alright, fine." He's hardly going to go back on it and ask for help, though. She wants him to figure it out on his own, fine. Just watch him. With more than a few misgivings, Peter launches himself at the cat tree. He has no idea when to start flipping or how or what direction -- as he nears the cat tree, he throws himself backward, stalls out, and hits the edge of the platform before tumbling toward the ground.

Daine starts forward instinctively the moment he hits the platform (surprise, surprise), but she stops herself from trying to catch him. He's so lightweight that hitting the grass shouldn't hurt him, but if she doesn't catch him just so, she might.

Instead, she drops into a crouch and sighs down at him. There's no point in a snide, 'Not so easy, is it?' given that it was clearly never easy for him in the first place. Then again, all the more reason for him to be accepting of her help instead of acting as if she means to work against him, somehow.

"Are you all right?" she asks, brow furrowing as she tries to figure out if he's hurt himself again.

In a way, it seems better to hurt himself than to let someone else hurt him. At least then he has some control over it, twisted as that may be.

Peter half expects to be scooped out of the air again. Instead, he plummets right down to the earth and bounces off the grass, getting the wind knocked out of him. As Daine crouches over him, Peter stretches out a wing and awkwardly tries to right himself and got off his back. "Shit," he says. "Yeah, I'm fine, thanks."

Since he seems to be physically undamaged - and since he also seems grumpy - she doesn't try to pick him up. Instead, she rubs her forehead and tries to figure out a way to make this easier. Even after his crash landing, she doubts he'd be keen on letting her show him the way he needs to move through the air. She's not entirely sure it would be that effective, either, to be honest. What'd help most is if he'd been in a bat's mind like she had.

Frowning down at him, she wonders if there could be an indirect way of making that happen. She was able to calm him down before, so he can pick up on her feelings when she sends them his way on purpose. Could he do the same thing with more specific memories? She'd once helped soothe a bunch of frightened bats by thinking of caves, and the safety of huddling in the cool darkness with the rest of your colony. What if she thought of exactly how to land properly? Would Peter be bat enough to 'hear' her and understand?

"There is something else we could try." 'Try' being the operative word. "It'd involve mind-stuff, though. Not me going into your head so much as you being in mine. I could try to share a memory of what it feels like to land properly."

Peter finally turns himself over, which means he has to crane his little neck around to look up at her. On the plus side, though, he no longer feels like an overturned turtle.

Watch her he does, sort of wishing she'd pick him up and get him off the ground. "What, like some kind of Vulcan mind-meld?" he scoffs, to cover up his genuine concerns. Those come out anyway, though, when he asks cautiously, "You wouldn't be able to see my memories?"

"I don't know what a Vulcan is," she says, placing her hand on the ground so he can crawl into it if he likes. "But since you're not really an animal, I don't think I could see into your mind, even if I tried - which I wouldn't," she's quick to add. "I'd just be trying to send some memories your way. I'm not certain it'll even work."

Moving around on the ground is still awkward with his arm-skin tugging on his legs and his limbs just not wanting to move the way he expects them to. Peter crawls up without comment, saving face by simply taking it as his due that he should be carried around.

He sucks in a deep breath. Once again, he's made uneasy by being reminded what Daine is capable of -- what she could have done to him already many times over if she'd wanted. But she hasn't hurt him, at least not deliberately. "Alright," he consents at last, not sure if this is really any better than having her manhandle him would have been.

"All right," she echoes. "I'll start with something simple. Just let me go if you're getting anything on your end."

Shutting her eyes, she takes a few deep breaths and remembers what it was like to be a bat. It's the way she'd change shape, if the rift hadn't taken that aspect of her magic away. She narrows her focus, calling up a memory of clinging to a cool, stone wall, the cave filled with a faint whisper of wind and hollow drip of water. Holding on to the memory, she opens her mind and tries to send it out - not to Peter, specifically, but to anyone who might be within a short distance of where she's sitting.

If he could furrow his brow, he would. There's a niggling feeling of something -- some unremembered feeling nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Peter strains to listen, trying to understand what she's sending him, expecting it to be flight instructions. The harder he concentrates, the more it seems to slip away from it. Letting go of it with his mind for a moment, he sucks in a deep breath -- and it's then that it comes to him, vague, ghostly, but comprehensible. It's the feeling of being there that comes through clearly, the details of the scene murky in translation.

"You forgot the smell of batshit," he murmurs, not realizing how much tension has gone out of him in the last few seconds.

Daine blinks as his words startle her back to herself, then bites back a grin. "Don't be pert," she says, "be glad it worked. How much did you get?" He must have gotten enough to at least know what she was going for, but that doesn't mean it was detailed enough to be of use if she tried to share something more complicated.

"I was in a cave," he replies, going for the broad strokes. "You were in a cave. Cold, kind of wet." He chuckles at the next part, amused by the fact that it's not sarcasm that prompts him to say it. "Very homey."

"It was," she agrees, pleasantly surprised that it worked so well. "Well, it was for bats. Want to try some flying memories?"

Edited 2013-06-22 23:54 (UTC)

Peter hesitates, trying to decide whether to confess that the memory wasn't so crystal clear he's confident he could have taken instructions off it. He decides no.

"If you insist," he says with a cheerful little wave of his thumb.

For whatever it's worth, he wasn't really meant to get much from it other than the sense of being there. The fact that it seems to have relaxed him a bit is a not-entirely-unforseen bonus.

"Okay." She'll have to be extra specific for this one, elsewise he might not get anything useful from it. Deciding just to focus on steady flight instead of the more complicated task of landing, she shuts her eyes again.

What she calls up is a mix of memory and imagination. She's a tiny pipistrelle, not much larger than Peter's bat shape, and she's on the wing above a glassy-smooth lake. Her wings scoop at the air, and she focuses on the sensation, on the exact way her muscles must flex to flap her wings and move her where she needs to go.

Peter lets out his breath in a sigh and shuts his eyes as the new feeling comes to him. It's difficult for him to just let it come; he wants to focus on it and pinpoint what she's showing him, but it's only when he relaxes and lets his mind drift that he's caught up in it. The muscles in his arms flex in minute imitation of the feelings she's showing him. "Got that part," he mutters, not even realizing he's moving his wings at all.

Good, Daine replies, forgetting for the moment that she's been talking to Peter aloud until now. Instead, she shifts her mind to landing, the pond giving way to a cave. She approaches the roof of the cave, sharpening her focus as she reaches her landing site. At the last moment, she flips in the air, her feet finding purchase against the rock. Once she's settled, she lets go and flaps a few feet before repeating the process, giving him another chance to experience it secondhand.

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