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.]

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"Tag!!"

A painted dog streaks by Andrew, thwapping his leg with her tail as she goes by. He laughs and makes a lunge for her, but she's much too quick for him. He'd obviously never catch her except for how she has to turn just a few yards on and dash back the other way. Both of them laugh raucously as she circles just out of his reach, then as she turns again he finally reaches his hand out in time to run his fingers down her back as she goes past. "You're it!" he informs her, and then he bolts, knowing she'll catch him again in just a moment.

Someone, it seems, is not bothered by the question of what his soul is doing outside his body.

Edited 2014-03-31 05:25 (UTC)

'Oof!'

Charley shrieks as she rounds a corner and a long streak of a man barrels into her, arms flailing to try and grab hold of him even as she's in the midst of falling.

Her daemon Horatio is, for a moment, an explosion of feathers and surprised shrieking, until he recognises the Doctor, and dives down with a glad shout. 'Doctor!'

Andrew lets out an 'oof!' of his own as he runs smack into a shorter body, arms automatically going to grab at her shoulders. Farranfore is right behind him and slams into the backs of his legs thanks to the sudden stop, letting out a yelp as his knees fold and he half falls, half sits on her. She shimmies free unharmed, though, and a second later Andrew can be found sitting on the floor in a slight daze while his daemon stares in surprise at the cause of the kerfluffle.

He looks up sharply at the cry, and his surprise at being dive-bombed by an overexcited bird has to take a back seat to his astonishment at the familiar face above him. He stares, mouth hanging open, and for the moment all he can think to say is, "Oh!"

Charley, of course, has no idea that Andrew is not the Doctor, and for a moment, she just grins breathlessly down at him from where she's sprawled half-atop him. She's about to say, 'Hello, you,' or repeat his oh back at him, when Horatio decides to land on him, and she loses her breath all at once, going shocked and tense.

It's as if she'd brushed up against him and instead had him go right through her. It's-- no, it's like the test tube world in the Divergent Universe, pressing her face into the Doctor's until she could feel him down in her marrow, more profound than any mere touch could be, wonderful and awful both at once. And, she knows in the instant it happens, as if it was knowledge she'd been born with, shockingly intimate, something that should never be the result of merely accidental touch.

She and Horatio process all of this in the space of about two seconds, and then Charley falls back with a little, 'Oh,' of her own, and Horatio flutters over to hook his talons into her shirt, nuzzling up under her chin.

'I'm sorry! I didn't know!'

'No,' Charley says, still a little short of breath, lifting a hand to curl over his small, warm shape. 'I didn't either, that was--' She shakes her head, looking back over at Andrew. 'I don't think our-- whatever these are, I don't think other people are supposed to touch them.'

Edited 2014-03-31 09:29 (UTC)

As far as Andrew is concerned, nothing more happens than a little bird landing on him, surprisingly sharp talons pricking his skin for the briefest of moments before both Charley and her friend go all tense and horrified and a frantic fluttering of wings marks the bird's equally abrupt departure. None of that nor the apology that follows does anything to clear up Andrew's surprise at literally running into a companion he believed he'd had several very solid reasons to believe he'd never seen again.

"Really?" he asks a bit stupidly, looking at the little animal nestled up under her chin. He's touched his own, after all, and nothing much happened. He's worked out that she's some kind of projection of his own, though how he's doing it he has no idea and it's a bit surprising that the same thing is happening to a non-psychic human. None of that is anywhere near as surprising (or as important), though, as the issue of Charley being here at all -- or as the fact that she actually seemed happy to see him.

Farranfore steps into the breach, as it's clear Andrew is not going to get his act together to speak for a few moments yet and she doesn't have the patience to wait for him. "Where did you come from?" she asks, ears back and tail wagging in the very image of pained hopefulness that Charley won't remember she never wanted to see the Doctor again. "When did you come from?"

((ooc: And when I say 'doesn't know about the metacrisis', what I apparently mean, as the conversation between Charley and Ten that's going on before this in game-time has progressed, is that she knows about him, but didn't realise that's who Andrew was. Whooooops too many things going on at once.))

'I'd show you,' she says with a weak little laugh, 'but frankly I think you'd probably rather not know.'

It was, she imagines, the kind of thing that might be enjoyable were it done intentionally; she's not sure exactly what Horatio is, but she's more or less come to the conclusion that he's some bit of herself that's usually quite at home inside her, incorporeal and voiceless. Something private that's hers. And, well, frankly she can think of a time when she'd gladly have let the Doctor touch that, reach down inside her and wrap his hand around her heart. But not anymore, not with this new Doctor, and it's certainly not something that should happen unexpectedly.

When the Doctor's dog speaks up, her face creases up with confusion for a moment, and then crumples into awkward understanding. Horatio takes the beat in which she's stuck for words to hop over to Farranfore and nuzzle the crown of his head against her forelegs. They might not be the Doctor exactly, but as far as he's concerned, they're still glad to see them-- or meet them, as the case may be.

'Oh,' Charley says eventually, rather embarrassed. 'You're not the Doctor, are you? Or--' she lets out a long breath that ends on a little huff. 'I've only just arrived, you see, and he saw me in the park, and-- well, I suppose none of that really matters, but he told me-- You're the-- the copy, aren't you? If you remember me, I mean.'

Edited 2014-04-02 03:33 (UTC)

[ooc: haha, maybe it's a good thing I took so very long to tag back!]

Farranfore gives Charlie's bird a surprised look at the display of affection, but dips her head to sniff at him -- and, forgetting herself, gives him a tentative lick that makes her tongue come away tasting of down. Giving another sheepish wag of her tail, she folds her legs neatly under herself after a moment's hesitation to fall back and lay down with her head on the ground between her paws. "Hello," she says, not sure if she's feeling apologetic or just plain happy about what's going on right now.

Charley's question is one that would have caused Andrew a great deal of pain in the first year or so of his existence. It's been long enough now, though, for his identity as the Doctor to have passed into something like a memory of a very long, very stressful childhood -- it was him, or he was it, but there's a disconnect between the Time Lord of yesteryear and the meta-crisis of today. "I'm not," he admits, still confused -- and now jealous that the Doctor ran into her first and yet again didn't tell him someone he'd want to talk to was in New York. On the other hand, not having to make the explanation himself might be worth whatever misconceptions she got from hearing it from someone to whom it hasn't happened yet. "And of course I remember you -- I'd never forget you, Charley. Well, I'd never forget you again. I've been better about that sort of thing, honest."

He gives her a troubled look. "You talked to him, though? You didn't...I mean, you're not still...?"

Not still so angry with him as to never want to see him again, he wants to ask -- and doesn't. Maybe Charley is from before then, but he's not sure whether that idea is comforting or not.

The lick gets a series of contented little throat-clicks from Horatio, and a brief flicker of the filmy third lid over his eyes, before he hops up to perch on her head, an echo of Charley's position still half-sitting on Andrew's legs.

Charley, for her part, feels more than a little awkward about her misapprehension-- she imagines, at least, that this not-quite-Doctor must get that enough as it is, and she knows well enough how magnetic the Doctor is. The Doctor didn't really tell her anything about how this man came into existence, but the way he'd referred to him was not the way she'd heard the Doctor talk about other versions of himself in the past. Like this man might have started out a copy of the Doctor, but had since become something else entirely.

And, honestly, she can't keep referring to him as 'this man' in her head, it's absurd. She's about to ask him what she should call him when he speaks up, and she recedes, mouth pressing down a little at the corners. Twice in one day to have this discussion, just the question is enough to make her feel a little wobbly, but she's damned if she's going to start crying again.

'Of course not,' she says firmly. 'I was angry, that was all. And C'rizz-- I was hurting, and you were-- he was?' she sidetracks, unsure of the proper pronouns to use to refer to the past Doctor, and then shakes her head. 'Well, it was all a long time ago, anyway.' Because of course it isn't that simple, but now is hardly the time to delve into old wounds.

Scooting back so that she's no longer sitting on Andrew's thighs, she proffers him a hand. 'Now for goodness' sake, sit up so I can give you a hug without squashing you.'

Edited 2014-04-02 04:56 (UTC)

It's probably a good thing that Charley doesn't dwell too long on the you/he distinction, because even Andrew doesn't really know how to phrase that sort of thing without making everyone in the room feel awkward. He almost doesn't want to let her climb off him, as he can hardly believe she's real and being squished is relatively convincing. He clasps her hand and lets her help him hoist himself up into a more hug-friendly position. Not waiting for her to initiate the embrace, he abruptly leans forward and wraps his arms around her.

"Oh, Charley," he sighs. "I've missed you. I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

Charley sighs happily into the hug, squeezing the Doctor back and nuzzling a little into his neck-- just for a brief moment. If it's odd to be having this conversation twice in one day, she's glad enough to see him that it doesn't really matter. She can't help but notice how warm he feels under his layers-- human warmth, or at least certainly not the faint chill of the Doctor she's grown accustomed to. It's peculiar, but perhaps not as much as it might be from one of the Doctors she knows better.

'I know,' she says a little ruefully. 'Neither did I. And--' She didn't say as much to the other Doctor, who'd seemed keen to talk about anything other than the more troublesome aspects of their shared past, and she's not entirely sure it quite counts with this not-quite-Doctor, but she feels she ought to say something. 'I am sorry. About leaving the way I did. It was-- well.'

It was many more things than well, but it's a hard thing to know how to put succinctly.

Horatio (and for once she's grateful for his apparent tendency to brazenly come out with things she's too polite to simply say) butts in before her truncated apology has the chance to get awkward. 'Where did you come from?' He seems to be addressing the question to Farranfore more than Andrew, little head cocked. 'The other Doctor was quite tight-lipped about the whole affair. And for that matter, what should we call you?'

"I'm Farranfore," replies the painted dog, rolling her eyes upward in an unsuccessful bid to view the little raptor perched on her head, "and the klutz is Andrew Noble. We went sort of native."

She sounds apologetic about it, like she's worried Horatio will be disappointed that they're not called something with eight syllables and/or an 'x' in it -- or, perhaps, an ambiguous, self-assigned title. 'Farranfore' is a little better, but so's 'Horatio.' Andrew clears his throat like he's going to take over the explanation, but Farranfore goes on. "We're a biological meta-crisis off a botched regeneration. We got the face, but we're really only about sixty percent Doctor; the rest came from a human woman."

"Yes, thank you," says Andrew quickly, reaching out and stroking a hand down Farranfore's back. If Horatio is too brazen, Farranfore is too eager to share. "It hasn't happened to him yet," he explains to Charley. "He doesn't know most of the details."

And he and Andrew didn't get along, but no need to drag Charley into that mess.

She might sound apologetic, but she needn't. Farranfore's a nice name-- indeed, Charley's fairly sure it's somewhere in Ireland, but that's neither here nor there. Andrew is a different matter, and she regards him curiously for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she thinks the name fits.

When he explains that the metacrisis-- whatever the hell a metacrisis is-- hasn't happened to the other Doctor yet, she grimaces in understanding. 'Aha, yes. Tricky, that.'

'We should imagine,' Horatio chimes in, because really, until Charley decides whether or not she's going to tell the relevant Doctors-and-not-quite-Doctors, she should at least learn to be more circumspect about the issue. She always was a dreadful liar.

Luckily for Charley, though, she has other questions, and she ploughs ahead with those. 'I can't pretend I've the faintest idea what a metacrisis is, but that's about par for the course, eh? This woman, have you got her memories as well?'

If she knew where he got it, she'd probably laugh. Few people catch it, though; if the Doctor ever did he hasn't commented, and the partial rhyme is mild enough it could probably pass as coincidence even if she finds out he came from a hand.

"Wibbly wobbly timey wimey," Farranfore agrees, figuring she's referring to the general issue of paradoxes, temporal recursion, and other snags in the web of time.

Andrew waves a hand -- the Doctor's hand, actually, not telling her that -- and dismisses any need to explain the process itself with, "It's all very technical -- but yeah, I've got two sets, more or less. And can I just say I don't miss the monthly visitor? Do miss the breasts a bit." He winks broadly to show he's kidding. Probably. Girl talk!

...He probably shouldn't mention that he's pregnant.

Charley's far from prudish, but such casual talk of menstruation and breasts is so unexpected that for a moment, her eyes go quite wide, and then she bursts into slightly shocked laughter.

She recalls a deeply embarrassing conversation (at least it had been so at the time; she had been only eighteen) soon after she'd started travelling with the Doctor in which, the TARDIS not being forthcoming, she'd had to ask after something to deal with her 'monthly visitor', as Andrew put it. She'd awkwardly trodden around the subject, and when the Doctor finally understood what she was talking about, he'd started gabbling about hormones and pills, if she didn't want to bother with the hassle of dealing with her period, quite oblivious to her mortification. Eventually she'd snapped at him that if he wasn't going to be helpful, she'd start tearing up the clothes in the wardrobe room for rags. He had, after that, been helpful.

Now, still giggling a little, she casts a glance down at Andrew's skinny chest, trying to imagine him with breasts. The mental image that results is more than a little ridiculous.

'How very peculiar,' she says. 'Remembering being both a man and a woman, I mean. I should think it could get quite unsettling.'

Horatio flutters down from his perch on Farranfore's head, and Charley can tell what he's thinking without him needing to say it, but that's not the same thing. He's male, but he's not a man; he's just some part of her nature that's been expressed, for whatever reason, as a male bird. He cocks his head at Andrew.

'Do you ever-- do the wrong things? If there's bits of you that remember being a woman, I mean. When we disguised ourself as a boy, there was all sorts we had to remember, just about the way men act in public that's different from women.'

By ridiculous surely she means glorious. They weren't just any breasts; he remembers having a really good pair. "I only do the wrong things," he informs her sagely, only for Farranfore to give him a pointed (literally pointed) prod with her cold, wet nose.

"He meant do we act like a girl," she says, rolling her eyes.

"Yes, yes." Andrew flaps his hand at her, 'accidentally' bopping Farranfore on the nose in the process. "Really, humans have got such a lot of nonsense built up around what gender means, don't you think? It's so hard to keep track of what's womanly this century and manly the next."

It shouldn't be that hard given that he's been living in the same time period for several years now, but it's difficult enough for Andrew to follow the rules of how he's supposed to act human without worrying over whether he's acting enough like a man. Probably he mostly is anyhow.

"Where did you go after you left?" he asks, turning the conversation to a topic of more interest to him with all the grace and subtlety of a thrown turnip. "How long has it been for you?"

Charley's actually quite keen to pursue the subject-- it's not something she's thought a great deal about in the past, barring her childhood frustrations with everything that being a lady entailed, but now that she is, it seems an immensely interesting one. But Andrew, it would seem, is not keen at all on any amount of pursuing. The subject-change is immensely obvious.

Unfortunately, the change is to something Charley would really rather not talk about, and Horatio does an awkward little shuffle, lifting all his feathers in a way that makes him look briefly like a little puffball.

Charley offers a crooked little half-smile. 'I got stranded. In the year 500,002. I'd sort of changed my mind about wanting to leave, you see, but then, well. I've been... travelling, since then. I'm not sure how long it's been exactly. A few years.'

Hi, Horatio, Farranfore can fix that fluff for you. She starts licking him again in earnest, and Andrew doesn't catch what she's doing and give her a thwap on the butt with an open palm until she's already got a couple licks in. She pauses, gives him the stink-eye, and turns to start again, though now Horatio will have had the chance to escape. She, at least, seems to get that Charley and Horatio need comforting while on this subject, though her version of comfort is more than a bit awkward and messy.

"You said not to look for you," says Andrew sadly. "If I'd known -- if I'd ever thought for a minute you'd want to come back --"

She's probably heard this from the Doctor already, he thinks.

'Oh, don't let's get hung up on that, please,' she interjects hastily, and not a little regretfully. She does seem to have a talent for unintentionally causing the Doctor distress. 'I know you-- he'd-- have come for me if you'd known.'

As it was, she'd thought he was dead and he'd thought she never wanted to see him again; misunderstandings on that level might have been made a Shakespearean comedy out of if they hadn't been so tragic. Under Farranfore's attentions, Horatio fluffs himself a little once more in a show of fussiness at the attention, but he doesn't move. That probably says more than Charley would like about her state of mind at the moment.

It isn't even just that she needs closure about the Doctor, it's fond contact of any sort. Charley's always tended towards the affectionate, but, short of her recent reunion with the Doctor, the past... however long of her life has been woefully lacking in that respect. And directed at Horatio, it somehow feels... deeper, more immediate. Charley can't exactly define it, but then, she can't exactly define what the little falcon even is.

'Look, what about you? I can't go on treating you like you're the Doctor minus a few bits; what do you, I don't know, do with yourself?'

Andrew sighs and leans back, though Farranfore keeps on with ministrations minus a few pauses to spit up feathers. It's almost motherly, really, and Andrew finds himself staring a bit too intently at their animal-projections. Tearing his gaze away, he sniffs to himself and rubs his eyes.

"It's been a few years," he replies after a short but decidedly awkward silence. "Since I -- you know. Split off. I lived on Earth a while. Alternate Earth, not your Earth. I ran into an android duplicate of my old self, ages before the me that first met you, and we took up together. One thing led to another, his programming got altered and he developed his own personality, and now we're, ah. Together."

He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. "His name is James. You should come meet him, now that you're here."

Charley blinks, torn between several reactions to this bit of news. Blessedly, jealousy is not among them-- that would have been awkward, not to mention presumptive, with this man who isn't really the Doctor at all. The predominant ones are amusement, confusion, and surprise, and after a moment of further blinking, she errs on the side of amusement, bubbling into a laugh.

'Oh, goodness me,' she presses a hand to her mouth, trying to stifle the laughter lest she offend. 'If I ever catch myself thinking my life is complicated...'

Sometimes perspective can be a welcome thing. Charley smiles over at him, hoping to paper over the awkwardness. 'I'm sure I'd love to meet him.' Though, and her brow furrows for a moment before smoothing out into what she hopes is suitably bland inquisitiveness. 'Er, which old self? Just out of curiosity.'

She'll still gladly meet him, whatever the answer, but she'd like to know if she needs to prepare herself not to have a reaction.

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Far Side of the Aurora Borealis

warning: very slow tags until April 2

whoooops charley doesn't know about the metacrisis

oh noooes

Re: oh noooes

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so laaaaate my apologies

backtags foreverrrrr

p. much my modus operandi

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