The Tomato in the Mirror

[applesaucemod]

Spring is in the air, and monsters are in your head. It will be hard to run from your fears tonight, though -- for you see, you are the thing lurking in your nightmares. Whether it's something that goes bump in the night, a ferocious animal, or even a person you find intimidating, you have become that which frightens you. Anyone who encounters you in this dreamscape will see the shape of you nightmares, and should you look into a mirror, well....

Dreamers will find themselves in an oversized funhouse whose twists, turns, and intersections turn it into a maze. There is no entrance and there is no exit, only branching hallways, tunnels, and ladders that divide and rejoin in baffling combinations. By the look of it, the funhouse has been here for years, slowly falling into decay as its lights burn out one by one and the bright paint chips and fades. The machinery, however, is still working, still ready to surprise these new guests. Hallways end suddenly in long, steep slides back down into the depths, floors lurch under dreamers' feet, and entire corridors spin horizontally. Elsewhere, dreamers might become lost in the mirror maze or get dropped into a vast ball pit.


[Mod note: Usual dream party rules are a go: apply the dream's transformation to your character(s) as you see fit, and decide for yourself whether they will remember these experiences in the morning. Both members and non-members are welcome to play all characters on this post, including those which are not currently part of the game's cast. Have at!]

Comments

[bluesuit_handy]

Not knowing what she's doing, Andrew anxiously swivels his eyestalk to watch her. Does he have side thrusters? It seems like he should have side thrusters. No amount of mental prodding at the different circuits governing his shell result in anything like that going off, though, and when he experimentally fires his main thrusters again, it just makes him skid sideways a bit and melts a few more balls into slag.

"I thought they would have fixed this issue by now," he muses to himself. He perks up at Daine's exclamation, waving his rod-like 'arms' and firing the thrusters again despite knowing that neither will do him any good. "How do you know?" he asks, hopeful but wary.

[wildmage_daine]

"Molly says I'm still in my human shape," she says, relief evident in her tone. "The reason they feel so close is because they are - to me, anyway. We're all in bed. I told them to wake me up if I start to shift." Not that shifting in her sleep is something she does, but considering the present circumstances, she doesn't want to take any chances. Waking up from this nightmare to find that she had actually turned herself to a spidren somehow would be... ugh. Well, it's not happening.

With that issue out of the way, she can focus on getting Andrew out of the awkward position he's currently in. She can imagine a few ways of righting him, but hurriedly dismisses any that involve producing web. She isn't entirely sure how, and more to the point, she has absolutely no desire to try. Instead, she resolutely plunges into the ball pit and flounders over to where Andrew is lying. Positioning herself opposite the thrusters, she uses her forelegs to grip the casing near his armored head. The rest of her numerous limbs are planted against the slightly springy floor at the bottom of the pit, and she commences pushing.

[bluesuit_handy]

Andrew watches her, his view upside-down as he points his eye stalk what would be straight upward were he not on his side at the moment. Perhaps Daleks do have a way of righting themselves, but what it is he has no idea at the moment.

He flails a little inside the casing, then belatedly engages his thrusters when her pushing makes him slide. The initial burst is too much, jolting him and threatening to send him flying into her, but after a moment of cutting power entirely he comes back with just enough to steady himself while she pushes. "This can't be how they have to do it," he grumbles. "Mind you, next time I run into any, I'm shoving them over."

This time when he nears upright, he'll levitate carefully into the open air above the balls, wobbling only very slightly as he gets the hang of it.

[wildmage_daine]

"It won't be easy," Daine points out, grunting a little as she helps him to right himself. Once he's vertical, she hurriedly scrambles clear of the thrusters. She hasn't missed what they've done to the balls closest to them. Snagging the netting with one leg, she hauls herself up out of the pit to where she can move with a bit more ease.

After considering their options as far as escape routes go, she says, "I'm guessing you'd do better with the trap door than the slide. I might be able to open it."

[bluesuit_handy]

Andrew realizes he's put her in danger of burns when he sees her scuttle away at top speed (or as close to top speed as she can apparently manage at the moment). With Daine at a safe distance by the time he puts it together, though, he concentrates on keeping himself upright so they don't have to do it over again.

"Yeeeeeeah," he agrees, drawing the word out with more than a hint of sarcasm. He's not sure he could even fit in the slide unless he came out of the casing, and that is really, really not happening. "Or one of us could learn to control our dreams and we could stop doing this," he sighs. "Yeah, try the trap door."

[wildmage_daine]

Whatever, Andrew. Daine officially isn't a spidren, so your sarcasm cannot touch her!

It's surprisingly easy for her to crawl up to the ceiling and examine the trap door. So long as she doesn't really think about what she's doing, it doesn't feel much different from crawling along the floor. In fact, the most telling clue that she's upside-down at all is that her hair isn't in her face.

Rather than puzzle over the actual trapdoor mechanism, Daine opts for wedging her clawed feet into the crack and muscling the door open. At least, that's what she intends. What actually happens is the door snapping off at the hinges, the springs that held it shut flying off at random angles. One tears through the net and clatters off the wall; the other buries itself in the ball pit.

"... Whoops." Eyes wide, Daine checks to make sure neither spring went through her anywhere before craning her neck to look at Andrew. "Nothing hit you, did it?"

[bluesuit_handy]

Yeah, that CLANK a second ago? That was one of the hinges bouncing off his dome. Andrew wobbles in the air, turning slowly, but it's honestly barely enough to rattle him through all that armor. "That depends on what you mean by me," he replies, chuckling. "I will say one thing for the Daleks, they know how to build armor. Come on, before I fall over again."

And up he goes..and bonks into the edge of the opening on the way up. With a long, metallic scraping sound, though, he manages to get through and land in the corridor above.

[wildmage_daine]

"Sorry." She ducks her head sheepishly. "These legs are stronger than they look."

Daine scoots backwards as he heads for the door, giving him plenty of time to get through before following him. One dubious perk of having so many limbs is that she's managed to keep hold of the door itself, and once she's made it up into the corridor, she sets it over the hole. She has to put it down sideways to stop it from just dropping right back into the pit, so the hole isn't covered completely, but she figures that's a better solution than just leaving the hole wide open.

She glances up and down the hallway, then looks to Andrew. "I don't suppose it matters which way we go next."

[bluesuit_handy]

"As long as it's not down, it's likely an improvement," replies Andrew, the shrug evident in his voice if not his body language. "Come on, I didn't get to see anything before I fell in."

Time to explore! He trundles off down the hall, the lights on his armor making the shadows shift as he passes.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine, meanwhile, wasn't aware that there was so much to see besides the ball pit. She's still not convinced, actually; this hallway isn't too impressive so far. Mindful of other trapdoors, she moves up onto the wall, then crosses the ceiling and down the wall opposite in a slow spiral. It's still a surprise when she doesn't find herself feeling dizzy from the spinning. Odd's bobs, spidren shape is strange.

"Well, I'm not sure where we are, but it hasn't been cleaned in a while," she comments as she follows Andrew along. If she was in her human shape, she'd probably be trying to avoid touching the walls - or anything, really. As it is, she can't help touching everything with her superfluous limbs. Ugh.

[bluesuit_handy]

"And here I am in a hermetically sealed micro-environment," says Handrew with a breathy, wistful little sigh like he wishes he could be out in the dirt with her. "It's a dream, remember? Dream dirt don't hurt."

And then a burst of compressed air blasts against his armor and about fifteen alarms go off inside his casing. Flailing on the inside, Andrew drifts sideways and bangs into the wall.

[wildmage_daine]

"A what?" Why can't he talk like a normal person? Anyway, just because it's a dream doesn't mean she has to enjoy herself, especially if she's stuck in spidren shape in a nasty old building.

Daine's reaction to the compressed air is a good deal more outwardly dramatic than Andrew's, but that's only to be expected. She tries to leap away instinctively, which just results in her slamming into the opposite wall. In the same moment, also instinctively (because you couldn't have paid her to do it on purpose), she shoots a blast of sticky web material at the source of the air. It lands on the wall with a splat, and the part of Daine that isn't completely horrified notes that it must be the stinging web she shot instead of the sort spidrens use to actually spin webs. Her suspicions are confirmed when another shot of compressed air attempts to make it through the web: there's a muffled hiss, and a bulge appears before slowly deflating.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. Daine turns away with a shudder and focuses on Andrew, instead. "Are you okay?"

[bluesuit_handy]

Andrew quickly swivels his eye stalk to peer at the source of the air, so he's treated to the sight of something gooey and generally unpleasant-looking splatting on the wall.

"What was that?" This calls for spinning his dome in alarm to try to see where the projectile came from, and he's mildly embarrassed when all he sees is a spidren Daine. "...Ah. Right. Well. I'm -- oh!"

Light has finally dawned! "It's a funhouse! Why didn't I see it before? But that's brilliant!"

[wildmage_daine]

Yeah, Daine is definitely not going to want to talk about the mess on the wall. She's not sure if spidrens blush, but she seems to have retained that ability. Huzzah.

"This is meant to be fun?" she asks, brow furrowed dubiously.

[bluesuit_handy]

"Well, it's probably not meant to be quite like this. Not if it was a real funhouse. Humans make them; you run about inside and it blows air at you or the floor moves. That sort of thing. There's usually less, ah...grime. Unless you go to one of the carnival ones, maybe."