lottawork: (lost)
[personal profile] lottawork
The sharp sting of the sea-smelling air and the pale blaze of tall, stately buildings are all tied to an inextricable specter of aching, deadened grief. Compared to the remainder of him, however, that which is flooded in ice and splintering exhaustion and the twisting contracture of agonized muscle, it is utter relief. He has torn his mind away to skid into a set of memories apart - an attempt at some blissful temporary landscape of subconscious manufacture, shrouded in stifling heat and glittering, crisply defined white buildings and disorganized stacks of yet-to-be-graded exams and a worn desk surface dense with the academic disarray of messily-scrawled papers and too many textbooks.

The point at which rational paranoia approaches irrationality is too subjective, too skewed by recent experience, and intuiting the correct order has become a crushing, pressing torture of navigating the wreckage left to rot in his own head. He is aware and he is present, but -

But he knows what will happen when he wakes. What is waiting for him.

The same that has been waiting for him for days. Assuming it has been days.

Temporal sequencing was never, in the light of humor and cruelty and irony - his forte.

He looks out beyond the scope of his office, into the hall that should maintain the uniform white interior but instead cuts cleanly to a corridor, smooth and faintly oxidized gray lit in a haze of blues and yellows. He exits his office and steps almost directly into the vast, overarching space of Destiny’s gateroom, rippled light thrown from the shimmering pale blue of the open gate.

The old walkways of academia, threaded seamlessly and incomprehensibly throughout the Ancient ship that’s long since been lost.

An imperfect interface for an imperfect state of mind.

He is shivering from the abrupt temperature shift, stepping from the too-warm, too-heated offices of a college campus to the overwhelming coolness of a ship's interior.

He closes his eyes.

He prefers this. He does. It will be brief, it will be transient, it will be - unbearably disorganized, this fracturing, easily shattered hell of two contexts interleaved on a single plane. The plane that exists within his head, or whatever state of disrepair it has been left in. He won't be able to hold onto it once he wakes. Once they make him wake.

He'll lose it all again, because he won't be able to hold onto it. He won't be able to hold onto anything.

It's better that way.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
 photo treehouse banner 02_zpsauguouyv.jpg

Don't worry, dreamers of Manhattan. There will be no humiliating episodes of sudden-onset-clumsiness tonight - at least, nothing more severe than what you might experience naturally. Your physical and mental faculties will be left perfectly intact. What a treat! And what luck, because if you do lose your footing, it's a long way down to the forest floor.

But hey, who wants to be on the boring old ground when there are so many wonderful treehouses to explore? There are dozens of them spread throughout the surrounding forest, connected by a series of bridges and catwalks (some, admittedly, a bit more stable than others). It's easy to forget - or fail to notice - that there really is no easy or conventional way down to the ground when you're surrounded by such splendor.

The houses' styles range from charming and rustic to modern and sleek, with many falling somewhere in between. There are viewing platforms for bird-watching or simply taking in the scenery (trees, mostly, though if you venture high enough, you'll be treated the sight of the forest canopy stretched across a valley far below). But the insides of the treehouses are comfortably furnished to varying degrees as well, so there's no need to immerse yourself in nature if you'd really rather not. Some are complete houses in their own right, with all the amenities of a Manhattan apartment and then some.

Go for a climb, or kick back and relax. The only enemies you'll find here are other dreamers... and, potentially, gravity.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
Has this ever happened to you?

All you're trying to do is have an uneventful night's sleep, but you find yourself in a sprawling labyrinth of interconnected rooms, each one a transplant from a bland, suburban home. You search and search for an exit, but just can't seem to find one! And even if you could - where did you park your car?

Oh, no! You're trapped in another dream event!

No matter what you do, everything just seems to turn out wrong. Open a cabinet - tupperware avalanche! Attempt to pour yourself a drink - disaster! No bowl of cheetos is safe from your sudden, embarrassing clumsiness! It's as if you can't do any simple task without it going horribly awry! What a mess!

That's right, dreamers: you're stuck in the desaturated Before Times of every terrible infomercial you've ever seen, and life is a sisyphean struggle.

 photo anigif_enhanced-buzz-31658-1352416027-1_zps41t0zihg.gif


[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply: all are welcome regardless of their membership in the game, and characters can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Backtag forever.]
bluesuit_handy: (.misc | sneaky)
[personal profile] bluesuit_handy
Andrew is terribly, terribly alone.

He's also terribly, terribly naked. An enormous horizontal scar lines the bottom of his belly, bigger than it can possibly be in his real, waking life, but it doesn't occur to him to wonder why he's up and about or why it's not hurting him at the moment. Also unexplained is why he finds himself outside the ROMAC base, away from James and the rooms that have become their home, away from the medical wing from which he's only recently been discharged and where his tiny, premature children remain.

He's trying to find his way back there now, dreading being sucked back into that microcosm of white hallways and too-vigilant officials and dreading the possibility that he may not be able to get back in and get back to his family. He's in entirely the wrong place, wandering labyrinthine pathways darkened by overhanging trees that never seem to lead him out of the dusk-darkening park and back to the skyscrapers he can occasionally glimpse above the treeline. He moves furtively from one scrap of cover to another, pale skin standing out in the dim light.

A sound sends Andrew scurrying off the path and diving behind a handy boulder just a moment too late not to be seen. A moment later the top of his head pokes back up from the impromptu hiding spot, and Andrew stares at the newcomer with an air of mixed embarrassment at being seen this way and affront at the intrusion. "Ah," he says, knowing he's been spotted. "Hello."
lottawork: (nightmare)
[personal profile] lottawork
[warning: this dream deals with claustrophobia, hydrophobia/drowning, suicide ideation, mental invasion, alien abduction, and related medical squicks.]

where is the ship

Immediately Rush knows where he is, and the thought fills him with indescribable horror.

He would struggle but he can only drift without purchase, resist without means for resistance. He has no cognitive self-defense. His mind is flayed and open - they have stripped his neurological architecture bare and reassembled it with fascinated laziness, they have analyzed everything he is biologically, fundamentally, psychologically, they know his blood type and the sensation of a hammer slamming over his fingers in the steel mills of Glasgow and the disordered burst of sympathetic nervous overload that generates panic. They've shredded into his head, they've come shrieking into his silence; nothing can be kept in isolation as they eviscerate his subconscious, invade each molecule, unmake his construction, unbury his core, shear into what he cannot hide from them, intimately, with sleek, strategic tendrils of thought that are alien, malformed, wrong.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water in a spectrum of blue-silver-grays. He's kept nothing from them, save what they want to know most.

where is the ship

There is the weight of water pressing down and all around him, the dull tingle of cold against the bare skin of his neck, head, arms. The thing keeping him alive is wrapped around his face and rammed partially down his throat, a silver breathing apparatus clamped over his mouth, silencing him, muzzling him. He is floating in a tank of ionized water and wishing he could breathe the water, fill his lungs with blissful icy fluid and end the endless sequence of prolonged neural attacks. That language, their language, is high-pitched and chittering and utterly unintelligible, an irradiating aural torment that sluices into the layers of his brain tissue and strangles his dread into utter numbness, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water, freezing and alone and psychically paralyzed. One hand slams against the vitreous walls of the tank in frenzied, fruitless desperation, the distressingly impenetrable surface spread beneath his fingers. He hammers at his prison and wishes he could drown.

where is the ship

The water is ionized. The water is conductive. The water is transparent, and so is the glass. A silvered flare of bubbles flutters upward, darting between the tubes trailing out from the subcutaneous entry points beneath his clavicle. Every movement is hopelessly inhibited by the thickness of water resistance, pulling at his clothes and his hair as they fan out in slow drifts. He remembers breaking out. He remembers his prison shattering under application of blunt force and pressure, and he remembers tearing away the mess of tubing and the breathing mechanism and the telepathic entry point stapled to his head, and he remembers wriggling free, getting on a ship, getting out. He remembers this. He remembers it. He remembers Manhattan. It must have happened. It must have. So much has elapsed since then, that cannot all have possibly been manufactured. Unless he has simply never left, and they courteously let him believe otherwise. They could have distorted his perception of that. They're capable of it.

He breathes through a breathing apparatus in a tank of ionized water and his only defense is his hatred of his captors.

where is the ship

They leave him in aching silence. Time drags. It's impossible to tell its passing, until Rush can finally reconstruct his bearings, his physical position, his own name. He is floating in a tank of ionized water, and this time he has no escape. If he were allowed an open mouth, he would howl. If he could thrash at his confinement, he would slam himself into the clear walls with claustrophobic ferocity. All he can do, now, is knock an open hand feebly against the glass and wait for dissolution.

[ooc: this is a recurring nightmare for Rush, so just pick a date if you tag in for dream-y funtimes. For context: Rush has been kept on an alien ship for some time and he sure would like to get off that wild ride. The aliens that took him look like this - cw for unnaturally tall or skinny things - and he's being held in a thingy that looks like this - cw for people jars.]
postictal: (yeah charlie we can be sneaky)
[personal profile] postictal
[warning: this thread deals with some very heavy topics, including drowning, acrophobia, blood/gore, lots and lots of body horror, disturbing imagery, emotional trauma, emetophobia, buckets of self-loathing, derealization, anxiety/paranoia, drug overdosing, suicide ideation, and probably more. Individual tags will have more specific content warnings. Read carefully, friends.]

Between darting over the dense carpet of dead leaves, weaving around jagged, crooked, wrong trunks that stretch unknowably and distantly and away, Tim wonders how has he been here and for how long? Time doesn't breathe how it used to, it's staggered and burning itself into loops. Maybe he was here before. Maybe he was gone. Maybe one day he got out, and it just wanted him back.

Maybe he never left at all.

no eyes no eyes

The tangled branches overhead form a ghastly arc, knobbed and knotted, skeletal, that reaches too far above his head to give him any form of enclosed comfort. It’s not the trees themselves he hates; it’s their potential, it’s the way they jut up like bars, like back when he had a room with a window a million years ago; it’s the horrifying stillness gapped between each bark-clad column. It’s because he knows how it watches, unwatching, unfathomable, limbs reaching for some sempiternal point beyond the scope of sight, comprehension, anything. The parts of it, the pieces of it, the thing that Tim can't perceive or see properly, that makes the camera stutter and fuzz like the static in his mind. He sees it, he knows it's there, he doesn't know what it wants, he never did, it just reaches, seeps toward him -

Duck between the trees with their blackened, scorched bark. Run, boy, run faster, keep running, it'll catch you either way but running lets you forget. There's a camera strapped to his chest and he doesn't know if it's still recording, or still working. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't look at anything. He runs, faster, faster, run; little broken toy made of stumbling limbs and warm organs and blood and heat and ragged panting breath, who can't escape its own packaging.

The crackling snap of another pair of feet hitting leaves whips his head around so harshly he feels his neck crack. No no no no. There's nothing else here, nothing but breaking trees and the crumbled wreckage of Tim's own head, and the thing waiting with arms, no arms, outstretched to reel him in.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
 photo dream party visual_zpsua3sjlqf.jpg



Hello, dreamers of Manhattan. The Rift knows that things have been kind of rough, lately. The last dream didn't go as well as it had hoped. Consider this an apology of sorts, and a hearkening back to the good times you've shared.

It's a grand old (and potentially familiar) cabin house that the dreamers will find themselves wandering. The furniture is plentiful and comfortable, the floors are strewn with cushions and blankets, and there are cheerful fires burning in the grates. It seems a little odd that the house still manages to be on the chilly side despite looking so warm, yet it is.

Oh, well. You'll just have to find another dreamer or two and spoon up and fall asleep like little baby cats get cozy. It shouldn't be difficult; most of the dreamers (excepting those with strong telepathic defenses or deeply ingrained cuddle-averse personalities) will find themselves feeling friendlier than usual, along with an almost overwhelming desire to snuggle up to someone. How convenient that the house seems designed for that very purpose!

And if some of the cushions are Hello Kitty themed, well, that's just coincidence.


[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply. Characters will be affected by the dream-whammy to whatever degree makes the most sense for them, and will remember or forget the events of the dream at the player's discretion. Backtag into infinity.]
andhiswife: (frightened)
[personal profile] andhiswife
Greta dreams of falling (again, and again).

The path ends abruptly. Maybe there never was a path, only a deceptive stretch of ground, free of any undergrowth, that looked like it could be one. Either way, she's left standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, looking down at the leaf-strewn forest floor far below her. A small rock tumbles down, as if for the sole purpose of illustrating the length of the drop. It seems to take ages to reach the bottom, clattering off exposed roots and finally thudding to the ground.

There's a roaring in her ears like a great wind, but it isn't the wind. The earth shudders beneath her feet. She reaches out wildly for something on which to steady herself, knowing even as she does so that she'll miss; she always misses, it's so stupid. Maybe she deserves whatever comes next.

But she doesn't miss. Her hand closes around something - not a branch. An arm? Whatever it is, she isn't letting go.


[ooc: whoops, Greta's dropped into your dream. Or you've dropped into hers. Whether you want them both to be in her giant-plagued forest or in a setting more familiar to your character is up to you. Poor Greta's just gonna have to roll with it either way.]
eliotwaugh: (melancholy)
[personal profile] eliotwaugh
He doesn't remember how he got here, but here he undeniably is, sunlight all dappled across the mossy forest floor. Eliot looks around. What was he doing? There is a vague sense of unease despite the summer afternoon, and if Eliot could only remember where he was before this he might know what he was trying--he was trying to get away from something? That much seems clear to him, but what?

He takes a breath to steady his nerves. Of course he feels uneasy, he was probably brought here for something, and Ember and Umber are probably going to be lofty and cryptic and dire about it, and whatever paltry thing was on his mind before he came will just have to wait. It's not important now, he has a mission to get on with.

Because Eliot knows where he is, of course, the picturesque quality of his surroundings gives it away immediately, the colors all hyperpigmented and pristine. Like England, but moreso: he's in Fillory, and people don't get brought to Fillory unless there's something important to be done. He remembers that from childhood and reading battered copies of the books that had been thumbed through by countless children before him. Ugh, maybe that's where he was before here, stuck in the bleak church basement where his parents left him every week to try to force him to care about Jesus. He doesn't want to go back there. He doesn't want to go back there ever again.

Eliot needs to find out what his quest is, why the rams brought him here. Maybe if he does a very good job in helping to save Fillory from whatever danger is going to befall it, they'll let him stay.

He starts to walk though the woods, in search of a path or some landmark he'll remember from the books. It's slower going than he'd expected, though, because he keeps tripping over roots and leaves like he can't move correctly. Or maybe he's younger, somehow? Time works differently in Fillory, maybe he's a child again. But Eliot looks down at his hands, and picks up a leaf (perfect and gold and amber, and for all he knows maybe it is made of precious stone, stranger things happen here) and it looks like a normal size for a leaf against his palm.

A rustling sound startles him, and he turns sharply, his heart racing. The leaf he was holding drifts to the ground as slowly as if the air were made of oil. Eliot wishes he had a sword or something. This is Fillory, he should have a damn sword.

"Who's there?" he calls, trying to keep his voice from shaking.
peacefulexplorer: (Flashback | Abydos | Ascended)
[personal profile] peacefulexplorer
He knows it is a dream when he opens his eyes and breathes the air, hot and dry and granular, and closes his eyes again to the blazing familiarity of the suns that shower him with photons in duplicate. He knows the spread of alien sand in its spectrum of oranges and yellows and golds, the watery white cast of the cloudless sky, the trails of dust that hiss over his clothes and his hands and his face and the unkempt fringe of his hair that is long like it was years ago, in every rush of arid wind.

He knows it is a dream because for the first time since Manhattan, Daniel dreams of Abydos.

The sand dunes are infinite in context; finite here, in the parts of his mind that haven’t been compartmentalized by quiet avoidance of unavoidable memories, an impulse shadowed by the inescapable nature of his old grief. Abydos exists as he best remembers it, appearing uniform but merging, seamless, from one sheen of melancholic gold-bronze to another.

Everything is bright here. The suns rebound their radiant energy off the sand’s receptive topology in vast, sweeping arcs. Even here, in the shaded slope of the pyramid’s entrance, Daniel can feel the thickness of the atmosphere in xeric acuity. He breathes it in with lungs that only exist for as long as this place does, which is objectively not very long at all. Dreams here are distorted, but their dissipation upon waking is axiom.

He doesn’t want to look behind him at the pyramid’s interior, nor does he want to see the smooth silvered arch of the ‘gate he knows lies within, imposing and inert with its chevrons that are dead, unlit. He doesn’t want to think of the doorway they thought they closed that he knows will open again with disastrous results before it swallows him back to Earth in a flare of vortical bright-blue, a dragging backwards slide away from everything. Away from home. His personal definition of the concept shouldn’t be so transient and dead, but here it is, in flat defiance of the typicalities.

Quiet footsteps solidify the ache of familiarity. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't. He knows who he'll see.

His eyes slide closed, and the pharyngeal constriction of grief is almost too much to bear.
theoldgirl: (vortex golden)
[personal profile] theoldgirl
When the TARDIS sends a message to Gabriel, she is in fact not sure what she 'has in mind' for it. All she knows is that she would very much like to be in Gabriel's company for a while, with all his charms and intimacy and distractions. And perhaps he could use much the same from her.

So she invites him to the telepathic current, which is slightly more suited to temporarily escaping their various unpleasant circumstances than meeting in the physical plane would be. Once she's pulled most of her focus away from her inhabitants and opened herself up to Gabriel's mind, she realizes that purely telepathic togetherness might be enough for her, but would probably not be very satisfying for him without some visualizations. So she manifests her console room, vibrant and welcoming, and her humanoid form in something she can only guess he might like to see. In a sudden burst of wanting to show him something new and more exciting than her usual appearance, she sets the time rotor in motion, remembering the thrumming of her engines and the powerful pulse of Artron energy in her conduits, the time vortex rushing past outside her doors, eons flowing through her. For a moment, the memory burns with desperate longing, but she pushes it away, doggedly intent on the single purpose of wanting to offer Gabriel something better, something more amazing than what they keep having to contend with here.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
Somewhere in the cosmos, there is something bright, and young, and playful. Somewhere, this being watches over their little flock and does their best to make those people safe and happy. Somewhere, that godling and their flock celebrate the winter holidays in the happiest of dreams.

And somewhere closer at hand, a sleeping giant stirs.

The bright tapestry of dream threads gathered by Zephyr is suddenly yanked hard enough to pull it from its temporary mooring. Something entirely unlike the little godling reels in the dreamers so neatly gathered and packaged up for it, bringing its own toys back to their proper place and taking all the others it can with them. Unsatisfied, it reaches out again and again, dragging in dreamers from all across the multiverse. It will snare them, all of them, and then it will possess them completely.

Perhaps it's fitting that when the stolen dreamers arrive in this new shared mindscape, they'll find they've been designated the Rift's Christmas gifts to itself. Each might awaken inside a dark box, or cocooned in…is that tissue paper? When they claw their way out they'll be greeted by the sight of an enormous evergreen tree laden with twinkling lights and kitschy knickknacks looming overhead. Beyond the shadow of the tree the rest of the world -- that is, the living room -- is just as large. Or is it that the dreamers have just become very small? Giant packages wrapped in bright paper form an obstacle course, but the wooden floor of the room is wide open between the tree and the hearth where an enormous plate of cookies and glass of milk await a cataclysmic Santa Claus.

All in all, things are fairly normal as far as the rift's dream gatherings go…at least on the surface. The more telepathically sensitive among the dreamers may notice an undercurrent of something darker, more urgent, and more possessive than normal. The rift isn't just sampling the wares of other worlds tonight; this time it means to play for keeps.


[OOC: This is the second part of our crossover with [community profile] wethelost! Part one can be found here. Usual dream party rules apply: all players and characters are welcome regardless of whether they are currently in the game, and characters may remember or forget the events of the dream party at the discretion of their players.

For reference, characters of average human height are roughly four inches tall according to the scale of their current surroundings. There is an entire giant house beyond the living room; characters will find a kitchen and dining room on the same floor, a staircase outside the door of the living room that leads up to a second floor with two bedrooms and a bathroom, and another staircase off the kitchen that goes to an unfinished basement. Feel free to add details as needed!

This event takes place on evening of August 8th/morning of August 9th in Applesauce time, and December 31 in WtL time.]
lottawork: (gotta get them consoles workin)
[personal profile] lottawork
The shuttle's base plating is proving particularly difficult. Rush redoubles his efforts to pry it loose and throws all his weight on the crowbar, or the Ancient equivalent of a crowbar, until with a satisfying, groaning metallic clunk, it disengages. He levers it off, tosses it aside, and within seconds is elbow-deep in the innards of the shuttle. Assorted chunks of aged machinery come clanging out as Rush removes piece after piece of the shuttle's internal architecture, regards each with distaste, and flings them over his shoulder to join their fellows.

Destiny is falling apart. When isn't it? But now life support isn't responding, and the rest of the ship isn't responding, it's pitch-dark and dropping in temperature and oxygen levels and the steady creep of hypoxic terror has begun to settle around his ears and in the delicate parts of his chest cavity, but the shuttles run on an auxiliary system that operates separately from Destiny's central network so Rush can cannibalize the shuttles and interface their systems with Destiny's and grit his teeth and hope that will be enough of a stopgap measure until he can rig something better. An inelegant solution to an inelegant problem. As flawed as the fucking Dirac sea Destiny theoretically floats in.

Rush emerges triumphant, desired machinery part in hand, and cuts an unsteady path out of the shuttle and into the unfriendly darkness of the ship itself, shadows steel-edged and sharply cut into graceful swell and curves of its walls. His own destination (at this he smirks transparently, an uninspired pun fed into a neurologically empty space without enthusiasm) is the control interface room, the aphotic nucleus of the ship's function, where he may optimistically begin repairs. Optimistically. Realistically, Rush expects he will die here. One man, even an exceptionally brilliant cryptographer slash scientist, cannot hope to perform the work required of ten, but Rush isn't about to let the discovery of a fucking lifetime wink out of a painfully long existence simply by virtue of not having the right parts. The injustice to that is fucking absurd.

The central column of the interface room is dead when he reaches it, an acharacteristically dim pillar that, last Rush saw it, had been lit in a spectrum of whites and blues. The striae comprising its wired core are cool and lifeless when he rests one palm against them.

He gives his head a small, firm shake in an effort to dislodge the mental detritus of protracted wakefulness. It has been hours, or it feels like hours. Finite resources have not been kind to him; he's been operating without stimulant unless one counts adrenaline, which Rush does not because running on adrenaline is practically his baseline.

The dull ring of footsteps successfully derails any irrelevant trains of thought. Rush half-turns before deciding whichever unlucky crewmember has been sent to ask useless things of him isn't worth devoting the neural space to. They never are.

[ooc: Welcome to Manhattan, Rush. This is his first night so the Rift has decided to pitch him in head first. He's going to be dashing around trying to fix Destiny, the super-cool old ship he's been stranded on for the past four to five years. Feel free to run into him!]
johnny_truant: (startled rabbit)
[personal profile] johnny_truant
Johnny is drifting.

Big deal, he's done it before. Made a lifetime out of it. A big colorful sob story, colorful even without the birds of paradise. Not so colorful now, his eyes shining little pinpricks of black in the fathomless darkness. He's in the house of course, he finally found it, now he's following Navidson's path through it like he was probably always meant to. If only he had some books to burn

Johnny is drifting. Johnny is wandering. Johnny is truant. He cracks a smile hard enough to cut glass and laughs, dry as paper.

The void is formless, so imagine his surprise when there's a form that comes out of it. He was supposed to be alone here. It's behind him but he sees it anyway (he always looks) and he sweeps around, expecting - the Beast? Zagreus? Something unknown, unearned, unnamed?

It's none of those. It's better. It's worse.

"Fuck," he says amiably. "I didn't want you to see me like this."
erratic_hematic: (scrutinizing)
[personal profile] erratic_hematic
It's New York, but it's not the one you're used to. Grand Central Terminal is covered in grime and everywhere else is covered in graffiti. It's 1974, and everything is dirtier.

Most of the people here don't seem to take notice of anything but what they're doing and where they're going. They move by quickly, or lounge across benches, turning their heads to ignore passersby. Sometimes they seem even to lack faces altogether. Every sound seems muted somehow. It's impossible to be noticed. There's a crowd, but no ones cares, and no one sees. No one, except one man.

It takes a while for you to notice, but the man is watching you. The man is following you.


[ooc: the first of spike's weird dreams! This is Spike pre-soul, alone in New York, and hungry. He's going to eat you. Good luck with that. Feel free to be anywhere in the subway system- train or terminal. ALSO suffice to say, there will be violence and blood herein.]
i_jones: indiefairy @ LJ (guys there's all this pizza and turtles)
[personal profile] i_jones
Imagine a street in New York City. Well, you're not imagining it, someone else is. One of those long avenues where you could stand on the sidewalk in Harlem and see all the way down to the Statue of Liberty, if you could see that far. Which you can't. I mean, you literally can't see that far, but you also can't see an end to this avenue. It just keeps going, which is scary sort of in the way that the expanding universe is. What is it expanding into? Is there an edge? Is it really donut-shaped infinity? You read about that somewhere.

If you explore further, you find that it is sort of donut-shaped, or it must be, because you keep coming back to the same block. Or maybe you never leave it. Every window is - not dark, precisely, but the stores aren't open, and the apartment dwellers are asleep. Actually, not every window. Two wide windows frame a glass door and they're all spilling warm, welcoming light onto the sidewalk from underneath the scalloped hat of an awning. You can't read it if you try, and yet you know that it's inviting you into a diner. It's a really nice looking diner. Not nice like fancy, but nice like, that's exactly the sort of diner you'd like to go to late at night. Hey, it's nighttime. It's so quiet for the nighttime, especially for New York City.

You want to go to that diner, don't you? Yeah, you do. You might see through the window, or as you walk in, that it's full of worn and comfortable (but empty) leather-cushioned booths. Stools (also empty) file along the linoleum-topped counters. Nothing is dirty, but it doesn't look clean, either, like everything from the 70s. And there's just... there's a lot of pie. You probably noticed that first. Some diners might have a choice of two pies, or even three, but this one just might be run by someone who can reanimate things by touching them. It's not, don't get excited. But it could be. That's how dedicated this diner is to pie. They probably serve other food too, since it's a diner. Or they would if there was anyone to serve it. Looks like you're stuck with pie.

What? You don't like pie? Well, you're wrong. But that's okay. Ianto does. He'll eat it for you, after he's finished eating the slice he's picking at in the booth halfway down. Have you met him before? Does he even go here? You know what, it's hard to remember.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
The sleeping rifties might have a difficult time realizing they're dreaming this evening, in part because tonight's dreams are atypically vivid, even compared to the rift's usual efforts. Perhaps that is because it's drawing so heavily from the memories of the dreamers, themselves, and using that information to recreate their home worlds in stunning detail. And that is the real reason the dreamers might not be eager to accept the unreality of the situation: the situation is one that many of them have been hoping for for months or even years. In their dreams tonight, the rifties are going home.

Perhaps they arrive in the same moment that they left. Perhaps months have passed at home, or they might even find themselves arriving before their departure point. But those are small details when compared to the overwhelming realization that they're back where they belong.

They're not alone. Many dreamers will find the rift has given them a companion for the return trip. Well, an uncomplicated return home is probably more than anyone could have hoped for, anyway. And for the unwitting visitor, perhaps another universal displacement will be easier to bear with the addition of a local guide.

[ooc: usual dream party rules apply; all are welcome, and dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Also at the players' discretion: when their character arrives in their 'home universe,' and how many (if any) locals they'd want to run into.]
bibliophale: (dubious | wary)
[personal profile] bibliophale
[ooc: Aziraphale is having his very first nightmare, and it's about Lucifer - not the REAL Lucifer, just a figment of his newly discovered imagination, but Aziraphale won't realize that right away. This thread is going to be unpleasant. Cruelty, light violence/torture, culminating in some zombie gore. Tag-specific trigger warnings to follow. If you want to follow about how it will impact his relationship with Melanie without having to read this stuff, there's a companion waking-world post just over yonder. Tread with care, friends.]


There's something wrong.

He's in his shop, but it's changed somehow, it's more like the one he used to have back in England. Or was it always like this? Well, of course it was. Is. He's here, isn't he?

But he's not sitting and reading or drinking, like he should be. The shop is a shambles, more than it usually is. Shelves knocked over, books strewn about, lights flickering ominously. The floor is wet, faded old rugs soaked and wood glistening underneath. That'll be because of the fire, of course. He hadn't been here for that, or he thought he hadn't, but now...

He tries to move and finds that he can't, at least not how he'd like, because his arms are bound to the wall, spread in a parody of spanned wings; his actual wings are folded back and trailing uncomfortably against the floor, while his feet can't quite reach it. Panic seizes hold of him as he tries to free himself and cannot - not even with divine power, he cannot - and he remembers why this is so familiar and realizes what must have happened.

This is what Crowley did to him.

The wards must have failed. Or he found a way past them. Lucifer lied to them, which should come as no surprise. Or if he doesn't intend to kill Aziraphale when he's through here, then he will uphold the agreement by only the thinnest interpretation, the letter of the law.

He raises his head slowly, facing the figure who has always been there, if he'd only noticed before.
peacefulexplorer: (Flashback | Floppy | geek)
[personal profile] peacefulexplorer
Loose change can only take one so far in terms of public transport and it's well past noon and Daniel hasn't even eaten today, so he elects to walk even if it is, as his luck would have it, raining very heavily. The present downpour is a great deal more copious than is fair considering the streak of abysmal events that have led him along to this unremarkable moment in his life.

In an effort to avoid the downpour he ducks into the closest establishment he can find, a cramped-looking café or deli sort of place that probably doesn't appreciate him dripping all over the faded blue tile floors and maneuvering awkwardly around the tables so he can get to the farthest, most out-of-the-way corner booth he can find. Shaking wet hair from his eyes, he shoves his two bags beneath it with less care than is really warranted. Both bags are already battered and falling apart at the corners enough, and they hold every possession Daniel has left in the world.

The sole barista at the counter doesn't look happy to (a) be maintaining an almost empty establishment on a spectacularly rainy late afternoon or (b) have to deal with the colony of puddles steadily collecting beneath Daniel's table as he hunches his shoulders and tries to count out his change to see if he has enough to avoid being thrown out for loitering. It's not looking optimistic. He wilts a little at the realization and shoots a nervous glance at the barista who has ceased her mechanical wiping of the countertop to level a simmering glower at him, fingers drumming, silently daring Daniel to think of a reason for why he should be the least bit welcome here. At the present moment, he's coming up empty. He swallows hard and returns to recounting his change in the blind hope that he's miscalculated.

Five minutes and seven recounts later, Daniel deposits the change onto the booth table with a shower of wet clinks and stares at the little pile of coins miserably. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to the board Dr. Daniel Jackson, thirty-one and already the archaeological hack of the decade, homeless and in debt and probably about to get thrown back out into the rain very soon on account of him being unable to afford even a cup of coffee to alleviate the pounding headache drilling itself into the center of his forehead.
applesaucemod: (Default)
[personal profile] applesaucemod
 photo spookydream_zps6b871cec.jpeg


The woods are dark and deep, but not particularly lovely. If anything, they feel dangerous, as if something terrible might come lurching out from behind any given tree and tear into the nearest warm body. What that terrible thing might be is anyone's guess. A cat with hands? Slenderman? Stegosaurus? Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf? All of the above in a horrible mob? It's anyone's guess. But every dreamer will be absolutely convinced that there is something unspeakable out there, and that it's after them.

The dreamers have two things on their side. The first is that there is actually nothing dangerous lurking in these woods (with the possible exception of other dreamers). The pervasive terror the dreamers are feeling is just that: a rift-given feeling, nothing more and nothing less. That snapping twig or rustle in the undergrowth is almost certainly just a squirrel or something else equally harmless.

The second is that no dreamer is alone. They all will be reunited with - or introduced to - their dæmons, a source of comfort in this dark, intimidating wilderness. However frightened the dreamers might be, at least they have someone with them who definitely doesn't want them dead.

[OOC: as ever, any and all are welcome! You don't have to be in the game to join the fun. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. And the party only stops when you want it to; feel free to backtag forever.]

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The Big Applesauce Dreaming

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