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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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

so laaaaate my apologies

backtags foreverrrrr

p. much my modus operandi

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