applesaucedream | Far Side of the Aurora Borealis

Far Side of the Aurora Borealis

Congratulations, dreamers of Manhattan - you get to go to Oxford! It's probably not the Oxford with which any of the dreamers are familiar, though. This one is a bit… different.

The dreamers will find themselves in Jordan College, the oldest and grandest of all the colleges in this version of Oxford, a rambling structure that includes dining halls, libraries, classrooms, chapels, courtyards, a botanical garden, and an extensive network of cellars and tunnels beneath the ground. There are plenty of places to explore!

Sharp-eyed dreamers might notice some subtle architectural quirks. Doors look larger than they'd need to be for solely human use, and every staircase has a little ramp built in - not large enough for a wheelchair, but large enough for, say, a small, scampering animal.

And speaking of - the dreamers are a bit different here, too. Upon arrival, they will realize that they now possess dæmons: physical manifestations of their souls. Be gentle with them; they're undoubtedly confused by being suddenly made manifest. They come with all the side effects and complications inherent with dæmons. They can't travel more than a few yards from their person without it being painful for both parties… and it probably won't take the dreamers long to realize they shouldn't be touching one another's dæmons, what with the shared sensations and all. Still, it's a rare opportunity for the dreamers to chat with their own souls - and the souls of others.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Mod note: you know the drill. All players and characters are welcome, regardless of whether they're current members or not. Characters will remember or forget any and all dream events at players' discretion.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The TARDIS and her unicorn self are following a lavish hallway with high arched windows and a soft carpet that swallows their foot- and hoof steps, leading into the library just a few feet behind Johnny. As soon as they walk through the doorway into the expansive room, the TARDIS spots the boy on the floor, recognizes his mind, and freezes in her tracks. She's acutely aware of the effect she had on him when he came across her in the woods, the pain and horror she unwillingly inflicted, how she wasn't able to stop or help him at all. Now she is probably already much too close and she holds her breath, expecting him to curl up in agony any second.

But he doesn't, and after a long moment the Unicorn, apparently somewhat less inhibited by concern for others and a sense of consequences, walks forward with its head hung low and friendly, snorting gently to draw the boy's attention. The TARDIS remains by the doorway, still afraid that something will trigger his violent reaction to her.

Johnny's still getting used to Novatiana - not just her existence, but the way she feels, the way he needs her there, like to be without her would be akin to not having a limb. Or more than that.

"I know," she whispers again, so soft only he can hear it, her little ears quivering. "I know. I feel it too. I think I've..." She pauses as he strokes a finger under her chin experimentally - she makes a contented little sound, and Johnny finds that her contentment is reciprocal, a shared experience as much as the pain of separation was. "I think I've always been a part of you, Johnny."

"But why haven't I known you until now?" he murmurs, even though some part of him finds this assertion to be patently absurd.

The snort - a horselike sound, not anything he'd have expected to hear in this environment, startes them both, and he turns to find himself staring up at - well, a horse.

"WHOA," he says, and struggles to his feet, a clumsy process without the aid of his hands, as he's still clutching Novatiana to his chest. "Whoa, hello. Where the hell did..."

He trails off, because it's not a horse. It's a majestic fucking unicorn.

"You've gotta be shitting me," he says, then catches sight of the woman standing at the entryway. "Hey, lady! Is this your unicorn?"

For a moment when the boy stumbles to his feet, the TARDIS is sure he's going to cry out, but no, he's still fine. She, on the other hand, is starting to feel strangely uncomfortable with the Unicorn being several feet ahead of her, so she gives in to the urge to follow it and steps closer cautiously.

The Unicorn, meanwhile, flicks its ears in curiosity and helpfully answers, "I am," even such a short sentence requiring more than two units of speech in Gallifreyan. Then it amends, "in a manner of speaking," in English for the boy's benefit and bestows a gentle puff of air on the small creature in his arms.

"Are you not in pain?" the TARDIS asks, having arrived at the Unicorn's side. Perhaps even more surprising than that is the fact that he doesn't seem to be scared of her, and she frowns in concern.

It's not so much the talking that startles Johnny - his rabbit can talk, after all, why not THIS thing - it's the language, if it can be called that. It's not like anything he's ever heard. It stuns him for a moment, so he's caught staring up at the impressive beast even as it switches to English and then... breathes on Novatiana. Okay. She seems to like it, though, curling up in his arms, a rabbit version of a blush.

When the woman approaches, Johnny's still mostly focused on the multilingual mythical beast. Her question strikes him as incredibly weird, though, and he frowns at her.

"N... no?" He was in pain just moments ago, a lot of it, but somehow it doesn't seem like that's what she's referring to. "Why would I..."

He trails off, something about her becoming belatedly familiar - her expectation, perhaps, or her voice, although it sounded so different before, powerful and layered - the Unicorn's voice is familiar too, in the same way, he realizes - though he's having trouble reconciling this small, unassuming woman with the entity he now knows her to be.

He hesitates, staring at her, waiting for some sort of confirmation, but he knows he's right. "TARDIS?" he says softly, finally.

It takes Johnny's confusion and hesitation for the TARDIS to realize that he hadn't recognized her, that perhaps he never really saw her humanoid form through the tears and the pain. "Yes," she confirms just as softly, then recalls the bits and pieces she'd been able to glean from his mind. "John. I am sorry for what happened to you. I had no intention to hurt you."

She doesn't understand why he's fine now any more than she knows why he reacted so catastrophically to her two weeks ago, but she's rather glad for it nonetheless. "Do you have any guess as to what about me caused you such pain?"

John. Not even his mother called him John, at least not very often. But somehow he doesn't feel like correcting her. It feels right, or at least what she ought to call him.

"It's okay," he says hesitantly. "I... I know it wasn't what you wanted." He frowns, looking her over. She seems perfectly collected now, more like what she was when they first met - not at all like the second time. "I have a few guesses," he says, "but... they're just guesses." Really uninformed guesses at that. But he's distracted by the memory of his dream, which, given the nature of dreaming he's experienced Rift-side, was probably a lot more than just his dream.

"Look, are you okay?" He steps a little closer, and Novatiana peeks out at the TARDIS, looking very concerned for a rabbit. "Last time I saw you, you... you seemed like you were hurt. Or under attack." He feels a sad internal tug - Novatiana quivers in unison - at the memory. "I was there. With... with the butterflies."

Is she okay? What he's saying confuses her even more for a moment, except there is really only one thing he could be referring to, and wasn't there something... there was so much, too much to recall clearly, and she doesn't exactly want to anyway, but then her expression falls into dismay as she remembers that she'd felt his mind there for a short time.

"Oh," she says finally, feeling dread and guilt and something like shame, the Unicorn shying away a step with its ears pressed back in discomfort. "It seems I must apologize again... I was unable to keep other minds away, or safe, in my state." She knows it's not her fault that others got dragged into that horrible experience, but she does feel a degree of responsibility for the distress she put them through and for her failure to protect them. "I didn't even recognize you, or I would have tried to help... You reached the butterfly room?" She can't even remember his presence beyond the Architectural Reconfiguration System. "Did you wake up before the toxic leak?"

"Um..." Johnny shifts his weight awkwardly. He doesn't want to make her feel any worse for incidents outside her control, but he wants to lie even less. "Uh... not quite."

"But it's okay!" Novatiana squeaks somewhat impertinantly. "We're - he's fine! See?"

This was something he wanted to say, but he feels like he wouldn't have. Novatiana had to say it for him. She's a little more easily sincere than he is, maybe? Or is it the TARDIS who moves him toward sincerity?

"Yeah." Johnny strokes Nova's head absently. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm sorry I couldn't help."

She recalls what happened to the butterflies and it pains her to hear that he had to go through that as well, but the rabbit's insistent reassurance draws her attention and she glances down at it in surprise. These manifestations are probably more likely to be straightforward and truthful, she thinks, having found her own to lack her restraint and all those learned concepts like linear time. When Johnny agrees with his rabbit, she nods a little, trying to take solace in his sincerity.

"Thank you, and I am glad to hear it. I have been... recovering." At least from the physical damage; the painful ruination of her hope to leave this universe as well as her future fate still weigh heavily on her.

The Unicorn, finding linear time far less serviceable than the TARDIS does, is beginning to get distracted from this conversation and brings its head to eye-level with Johnny, regarding him with timelessly old dark eyes. "You are quite broken, aren't you?" it declares in its melodious voice that is neither discernibly male nor female. "Set her down. I will be looking at her," it adds, motioning demandingly at the rabbit with its flexible lips.

Johnny blinks at the Unicorn, not entirely certain just how affronted he is. "Excuse me?" he says, but Nova is already squirming in his arms.

"Put me down!" she whispers, and Johnny does so, though he doesn't keep from giving the Unicorn a serious side-eye.

"So," he says, looking back to the TARDIS. "Nice to, uh, meet you. Properly." He gestures vaguely at their new attachments. "How about this, huh?"

The TARDIS isn't even aware that the Unicorn has said anything particularly rude, though it was perhaps a little off topic. At Johnny's gesturing, she watches the animals for a moment. "They are reflections of the basic structures of our minds, though I am not certain how they came to manifest here," she tells him helpfully, in case he hadn't figured that out yet. All in all, she can offer regrettably little information on the matter, but there is something she is more interested in anyway, and she raises her eyes to his again. "You mentioned having a few guesses as to your reaction to me. Would you share them?"

Meanwhile, the Unicorn lowers its head close to Novatiana, but it can't even get down far enough to get a proper look. With a loud snort it heaves its heavy body onto the floor, folding its legs until the feathering around its ankles pools together like a bed of spun gold. Then it moves its snout towards the rabbit again, waiting for her to come closer. "How small you are," it says in something like wonder.

"Sounds about right," murmurs Johnny, and jumps as the Unicorn drops down heavily. Nova jerks back a bit, but she inches forward again, sniffing at the Unicorn's snout.

"I am quite small," she agrees. "You're very... big." She gazes up. "And beautiful." She gives the feathering hair around his hooves a little nudge with her nose.

"Um," says Johnny, watching this ordeal with bemusement. "Well..." He looks levelly at the TARDIS, wondering how much he should say. "It's only a theory... and a pretty uneducated one... but..." He hesitates, not wanting to say something too forward, not knowing what the threshold of "forward" is with this woman/ship/entity.

"I sort of have a bad history," he says, not knowing how else to begin, "with... I guess you'd call it architectural inconsistency." He casts a glance around as though suddenly afraid some such anomoly is about to make itself known. "You... I mean, the ship part of you... I think there's a lot more than just what I saw outside. Right? Like when I was dreaming... I was inside you, right? The tree, the library, the butterflies... that was all in you. In the box."

A lot of this was just an intrinsic sense that he managed to file out of a mess of reactionary feelings after the fact - and some of it was gleaned from the dream. He has no idea why he should know any of this about her, but her entire structural existence, if he's right about what it is, is pure anathema to him. Why that's causing him a physical reaction in the real world is another matter entirely, but it seems like a logical place to start.

"I'm a size you can't imagine," the Unicorn replies, sounding rather satisfied with itself, and then gently brushes its lips over Nova's ears. "And you are beautiful too, in your very small way. The universe needs all you small things, you know."

Contrary to what Johnny might believe, this all sounds fairly reasonable to the TARDIS. She has, after all, had the bad fortune of becoming familiar with malicious structures herself, and she nods. "I am infinite and restructure myself as I please, and yes, you saw my interior, though in... disastrous shape." She hesitates, recalling his shocking words choked out at the edge of unconsciousness, how he'd called her wrong. "But, you already knew this when we first met, didn't you? Have you reacted like that to other dimensionally transcendental structures, then?"

"Oh," says Nova stammeringly and huddles down under the Unicorn. "Well. Thank you." She peeks over at Johnny, as if to say did you hear what the Unicorn said??

Johnny's distracted. He throws her a half-smile, and looks quickly back at the TARDIS. "I sort of... intuited it, I guess," he says. "I don't know how. It's like... I could feel there was something, and I wanted to know what, but as soon as I got close I realized you were... uh. Dimensionally transcendental." Sure. That's as good a way to put it as any. Certainly better than how he'd put it before.

"But I don't know why I got the migraine," he adds. "To be honest, the whole, um... concept kind of scares me. A lot. But it's never been physical like that before." He fidgets uneasily, wanting to steer away from this. "I've never had... up close and personal experience before that. It's all been sort of..." He hesitates. He doesn't want to get too far into this. It's not that he doesn't trust her - he does, in fact, much more than he has ever been able to trust anyone upon meeting them, and he's grateful that they are able to talk like this, but at the same time he's not too eager to get into all the fucked-up details of his recent past.

"...Theoretical," he says eventually.

The Unicorn lets out a pleased puff of air, happy to be providing comfort and shelter for the little thing. It doesn't have anything else to say at the moment, so it just nuzzles Nova's soft fur leisurely.

The TARDIS spares the two a glance, rather sad that her and Johnny's interactions can't be as simple. His explanation isn't exactly clear, but she gets the feeling he couldn't make himself understood any better if she asked him to elaborate, so she just nods. His memories could probably provide more details, but she's too worried that it might cause him discomfort after all to look into his mind.

"The rift has affected the physiology of some people as they came through," she muses, "it might have radically increased a pre-existing psychic sensitivity to my physical properties. You clearly aren't affected by my mental presence." That's something, at least, and she tries very hard to think of a way to mitigate the effect in the waking world as well.

"Perhaps if you learned not to be scared of it... of me." She can't help sounding slightly dejected at that; providing for people's needs is a fundamental part of her nature, and being a paradox to someone's senses is kind of horrifying.

"It's not you I'm afraid of," says Johnny, frustrated at his own inability to explain better. Her hypothesis is probably right, though it upsets him to think about his physiology being altered like that. "It's just... the structural... part."

Well, that is her, Johnny.

"Semantics," he mutters. "Look, this is gonna get philosophical if I'm not too careful, but it's not you." He hesitates. Is he really about to say this? He just walked right into a cliche that doesn't even belong here. "It's me."

Nova bursts into an embarrassed laugh.

"I don't..." Johnny scrambles to come up with something not dumb to say. "I don't know if I can learn something like that, I mean, it's intrinsic. It's... it's hard to explain. But... I can try." He looks at her, feeling a strange sense of remorse. "I'm sorry I called you wrong, before," he says. "I think it's amazing. I mean. You."

Johnny's sincere attempt to make her feel better and his apology bring a small smile to her face, though it turns wistful quickly. "I'm rather more amazing in my own universe," she objects softly, thinking he already got a distressing taste of how badly off she really is here.

But it's kind of him to say, and she strives to give him a reassuring smile. "You don't need to apologize; I understand exactly what it feels like. Certain cosmic anomalies have much the same severe effect on me. It is best simply to avoid them as much as possible." Not that she always has as much choice in the matter as Johnny does here.

"Uh, yeah." Johnny's not very fluent in cosmic anomalies, or at least, so he thinks. "Something would have to be pretty damn crazy to get to you like that, I bet. I'd hate to see what that was like."

Nova tucks her head under her paws, snuggling shyly against the Unicorn's mighty hoof. Johnny feels an inherent nervousness at her overt affection. He's not like this - why is she?

"Don't WANT to have to avoid you," she mumbles, a little sullen sounding. That's more like it.

The Unicorn agrees with Nova's objection and nuzzles her affectionately. "Visit me here," it suggests, "We can show you all sorts of things. All times and places."

The TARDIS feels strangely touched by the display, knowing that the rabbit is voicing Johnny's more or less subconscious thoughts. She's done nothing but hurt and terrify the boy until now, and yet he can see past that and is fond of her in some way. It's quite charming, especially for someone who, as the Unicorn pointed out, has been through a lot of pain besides.

"I hope you will never have to see," she says, concern quickly replaced by grim seriousness at the next thought. "One of them is here in New York. You should not attract his attention under any circumstances. He calls himself Zagreus." She doesn't care to understand what Zagreus is interested in, but Johnny's damaged mind seems a likely target, now that she thinks about it.

Nova and Johnny's joint curiosity about the possibility of exploring the TARDIS is quickly replaced by instant, galling horror at the mention of Zagreus. Nova tenses and looks up, as though fearing the predator may be approaching now; Johnny is almost limp by contrast, his muscles slack with a crawling sense of despair. He feels sick.

"It's too late for that," he says quietly.

Oh, no. Wrath and protectiveness instantly surge through the TARDIS and the Unicorn flicks its ears back in anger and instinctual alarm. It shakes its head harshly in response to Nova's fear, though taking care not to move its massive hooves. If any predator was near, they would get impaled on the long horn before they could even get a look at the rabbit.

"What has he done," the TARDIS asks, voice sharp and cold. This poor boy never deserved what she has accidentally put him through, much less being one of Zagreus' victims. Whatever he's been doing to Johnny, she resolves to put a stop to it.

Johnny is startled, almost frightened, by her sudden vehemence. He is acutely aware that he has stumbled into the midst of a dispute far older than he, between two entities he cannot even begin to understand, and it sickens him all the more, knowing something so powerful is out there, wanting to fuck with him.

"He," Johnny begins, though his throat is dry. He swallows and tries again. "I met him here, in... well, a different dream, but in a dream. He took me..." He breaks eye contact, looking at the floor. Nova scoots over to him, and he bends down to pick her up. "Uh, I don't know where he took me, really. Into his own dream, I guess. And he, uh." Tortured. He licks his lips absently, trying to force himself to say the words, to tell her. Nova nuzzles close against him.

He picks up from a different tack. "I don't know why, he just... decided he wanted to pick on me, I guess, like why not." And then he tortured me. Why can't he say it? "He went in my head and just... tried to mess it up, I guess. More than it already is."

He swallows again. There it is, hard in his throat, the urge to break down, but he won't let that happen, in front of Jodie was bad enough, the first time he saw the TARDIS, he cried then too, and before this it had been years, like twenty fucking years, since he cried, he's not doing it again, not again.

Nova peeks out at the TARDIS. "We saw him again in the real world," she volunteers. She frowns, inasmuch as her rabbit face will allow it. "He's an asshole," she declares.

Without Nova to snuggle, the Unicorn doesn't have any reason to remain on the floor, so it launches itself back on its legs with a great jolt and a full-bodied shake. It's still visibly tense as it stands at the TARDIS' side, ears and tail twitching restlessly.

Johnny's story sounds all too familiar, and she nods grimly. "He has done this to many others before. There is very little reason to his actions," she says in disgust and anger. "You are remarkably intact for having been attacked by him." She can't help thinking of Ianto and the way his mind had been, all disconnected shreds held together by the inevitability of pain and violation, and how long it had taken to mend him. Of course that had been Zagreus' vengeance, but even the ones who were likely mere playthings ended up far more warped and corrupted than Johnny.

"Am I?" Johnny manages a weak smile. "Well maybe I got lucky. Or..."

He hesitates, holding Nova against his face, like a kid with a stuffed animal. She whispers into his ear, "It's okay. She already knows."

He swallows. "Or... maybe it's just that I'm already falling apart, and that I'm used to being broken, and there's just no fucking difference."

He didn't mean for this to come out so bitter, but, oh well.

"There is a difference," she replies perhaps a little too harshly, though her ire isn't directed at him. "But you would not have enough mind left to realize it." Johnny may be unstable and abused, but she saw nothing that would indicate he isn't fundamentally himself anymore. His kindness and his soul's innocuousness are proof of that.

Speaking of which, the sight of him burying his face in the little rabbit finally reminds her that he's radiating distress, and anger isn't what he needs from her right now. Her bearing becomes a little softer, and she rests a hand on his shoulder in a gesture she hopes is somewhat comforting. "I will do what I can to keep you safe, especially here in the telepathic current." With a small, sympathetic smile she adds, "And you are not falling apart. Human minds are very resilient, to a degree that is incredible even to me."

Far Side of the Aurora Borealis

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cw post traumatic stress disorder???

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