piper90 | [Don't Touch That Dial] [network] [locked on principle]

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[Don't Touch That Dial] [network] [locked on principle]

[nb: if you are not trapped in the hell town, you can't see this, per mods]

[Saturday's image, when you open the video feed, is faintly green-tinted. This lends a yellowy look to the bright-red stripes on her short-sleeved shirt. She's also wearing jeans overalls, with shorts that end above the knee. It looks like a ten year old's outfit - because it is]

Hi. Hello? Is anyone else out there? I'm with three of us - besides me there's Loken, Kerrigan, and, uh, Guts.

[The camera pans over to the meanst sonuvabitch-looking three-legged junkyard dog you ever saw. Its eyes are unnervingly human.]

Guts is. Not quite himself at the moment. He's still in there, just - did anything like this happen to anyone else? If there is anyone else? Something more then this place dressin' us up funny an' trynna make us read off a script.

And does anyone remember how we got here?

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[Crikey, and he thought he was the worst off. At least his accent keeps him recognizable.]

Give Guts my condolences.

Dan's here too. We're searching town. I ran into Stacia and Kenzie at the school but no one else yet. You all safe for the moment?

[Even with the accent, it takes Saturday a confused, squinting second to clock him]

Bunny? Criminy. Yeah, we're safe enough - place has us playing happy families, but it's just us, so as long as no one sees us being ourselves outside the house we don't get screamed at. What about you and the others?

[ Cammie blinks a little. Okay, Toothless becoming a dog is one thing—he's a dragon, dragons didn't exist in old sitcoms—but this place turned a person into a dog too? That's... sure something. ]

Me, Robbie and Hiccup have been grouped up, and Toothless got the dog treatment too. Also, somehow it got rid of my accent? I'm Scottish, not this generic American shoot. This is all kinds of weird.

None of us remember how we got here and Robbie woke up thinking he actually belonged here, which was really freaky. Had to snap him out of it.

I also found Brainy at the autoshop this place thinks I own. He's been turned human.

[out comes one very irritated borf]

Edited 2021-03-18 22:25 (UTC)

I'm... in a house. And the angry laughing people want me to make a pie.

I don't know how to make pie or anything else.

I also don't know how we got here. I just. Woke up here. Um. Oh, and North is also at this house with me? He's my fake husband or something?

Okay. Can you find a crust and a filling? Anything'll do. Preheat your oven to 350 and let me know what you find.

[Saturday has already been screamed at. She's not about to let that happen to anyone else]

It's really important to do what they think you should do, as long as they can see you.

[he gives a small 'yeah that's me' groan in acknowledgement.]

Dan and I are holing up for safety in numbers. If anyone else got sent here without a happy family I'd suggest the same.

Two things: I'm pretty sure I found a request for help in the pharmacy. The pill bottles in the locked case spelled out "help me" if you read the first letters. The pharmacist didn't acknowledge it when I gave her the opening to talk it out, so it could be a coincidence but in this town I'm willing to run any coincidence down.

Second thing: has anyone in your household, ah - [he pauses, wondering how best to phrase it.] gone into character? I tried to leave town when I woke up here first, blacked out and blacked in pruning bushes at the school. And Dan's gone under and stopped answering to anything but his role here. I'm worried others might be doing the same.

Edited 2021-03-19 03:50 (UTC)

[Rowena, dressed in a much more matronly outfit than she'd be caught dead in otherwise, shows up on the screen, raising her eyebrows and curling her fingers under her chin as she takes in these new people, sizes up the contents of Saturday's missive.

When she speaks, something about it sounds off, like the phrasing she's choosing belongs to a dialect different than the American accent she's speaking in.]

Oh my, did someone turn a strapping young man into a wee pooch?

[Were it not for whatever strange curse, enchantment, or - ugh - technology that's dampening her power, Rowena might suggest that she could transform him back, if there were something in it for her. But that bargaining chip isn't up her sleeve anymore, and it fills her with a whole new rush of annoyance.]

I was in bed at the Waldorf and then I was here. The only thing I've noticed is that I woke up able to practice the art of a remarkably good American accent.

[Saturday sucks in an upset breath, exhales it hard]

Yeah. It tried to get me when I woke up. An' I got no way of knowin' if Guts is - cutting out. Loken's sort of real confused, but mostly himself, and Kerrigan's got her wits.

[No need to say that ain't good. She's sure he knows]

[strewth, none of that is comforting.]

Right, stay together as much as possible, and look for more signs from the town. I'm sure someone was asking for our help. We might get more messages.

If it helps, if Guts is having a time anything like mine, he might be keeping his mind better than the rest of you. It keeps you real alert, being in the wrong body.

[the body dysphoria never really does let him relax.]

You should work out a check signal though.

They let me keep mine. Reckon there's only room for one funny foreigner in this town. Who are you?

[Bunny is immediately suspicious of anyone claiming to have been brought here from somewhere other than the Rig. Of course, there's no real reason this place can't be plucking people from other places.]

[Oh, but he's got dreamy little features, doesn't he? Rowena grins, batting her lashes.]

Rowena MacLeod. Three hundred year-old witch - nearly four, actually - diviner of the mystic energies, channeler of natural forces, founding member of the Megacoven.

[What? She's not about to downplay herself. Some madness is clearly going on here and witches have high market value in a supernatural panic.]

And you might be?

[maybe those are some bona fides where she's from, or she's bragging. This multiple universes thing makes it hard to tell.]

Congratulations. I'm the Easter Bunny. Got something in your eye, there?

[he knows that's not whats going on, but it gives her the opportunity to bow out of flirting gracefully.]

[Rowena has never been gracious about anything in her life.]

It's called flirting, dearie. I'm sure it's happened to you many times.

I'm not your dearie and the bunny part is usually literal, so no.

[this is getting rather off the point and being off the point makes Bunny irritable. ]

Have you done any magical digging into why we're all here yet or not?

[Rowena raises her eyebrows again and makes a little shrugging motion with her head to illustrate just how much she doesn't care about the rebuff, or about the fact that he is, apparently, actually a talking rabbit in temporary human form. Bodies are so malleable, anyway. The materials you need to turn someone into a newt are so pedestrian you could get them at the Safeway.]

I wouldn't have expected a pagan icon of fertility to be so opposed to intimate affection, but the folklore has always said you're the judgmental type. [She shrugs again.] No matter. No, I haven't had the materials available to do much in the way of digging, but in my search for said materials I did find it odd that there's no cemetery here. Usually, if you want the man pulling then strings - or woman - you can find them by the trail of dead.

Edited 2021-03-19 08:58 (UTC)

[who said that? He will fight anyone who called him judgy until they agree he is super accepting all of the time.]

Do you not agree we've got more important issues to deal with at the moment? Or have you not blacked out into your "role" yet?

[maybe he's edgier than usual because he currently hasn't managed to bring Dan back from his latest in-universe blackout yet, and it's worrying him.]

Look, did you turn up here with a family, or by yourself? None of us should be alone right now. There's too much of a danger of someone falling into character and not getting pulled out.

[The more Rowena riles someone up, the more inclined she is to continue taking her time to get where she wants to go. Other people's impatience isn't her problem unless they choose to make it her problem.]

My sincerest apologies, Mr. Cottontail, but the day never does get saved by a matter of spare seconds during the planning stage. [If a voice could roll its eyes, hers does here.] I arrived alone, just with knowledge someone must have psychically imparted to me as to which strangers in the town were supposed to be my husband and unlimited amount of adult children. What's this you're saying about blackouts?

[he lets the Cottontail comment slide because it's clear if he flips out now that'll be all she calls him forever.]

Some people have been losing their minds to the role this place gives them. [some people like his safety partner, who is currently still happy to be Jackie Drake, School Janitor.] Its not safe to be without people to snap you out of it if it happens.

[Sorry, Bunny, that's all you're getting called forever no matter what you do.]

Fascinating. [Rowena's perturbed, certainly, but she can't help but just admire the sheer mastery of magic, metaphysics, psychology or pure reality-shifting power necessary to erase someone's mind like that. Her spells that can overwrite free will took her a century a piece to master, and those only replace the decision-making parts of the mind with pure compulsion; to replace someone's whole personality, even in stops and starts, is not only terrifying, but marvelous.]

And what recommendations do you have for snapping people out of it?

[Bunnys not missing that she seems much more interested than alarmed or outraged, and that could just be good adaptability at work, or it could be shes the kind of witch he'd expect from, say, Dan or Sam's worlds.]

If you don't have prior knowledge of the person I don't have a lot of direction for you. Question them about why they're here until they can't come up with an easy answer, maybe.

You definitely weren't on the Rig before this?

I won't be ruling out the possibility that, given everything that's happening [she waves a hand] someone's stolen some time from me, but my last memory is of the hotel I was staying at. Woman on the go, you see.

[But that is a problem, if no one knows her well enough to jar her.]

[that's distressing.]

Most of us are here from a slave prison in a world suffering from the aftermath of an unreality war. They took us from our own universes. I wonder if the 'locals' are also transplants from other places who've lost their identities over time.

Gimme the rundown on your world. Are 300 year old witches unusual, what sort of situation do the mortals live in, major religions, echnological advancement -?

Uh...huh.

[For once, Rowena actually has to work to wrap her mind around something. All the pieces make a sort of sense - she knows alternate worlds, after all, and she's seen several wars come and go - but all of them stacked on top of each other...]

No matter. I'm from the year 2019 on Earth, and we are quite unusual. Most witches end up slitting each others' throats before they're ninety-five, much less into their centuries. Our predominant religions are Christianity, Hinduism, Islam - quite a fanciful number of atheists out there these days. Airpods are the exciting technology but I must confess, I was underwhelmed. Climate change is slowly throttling the planet, but in all reality some deity or other is apt to just end the world tomorrow anyway, so it's probably moot. Oh, and the blonde one with the big ears is James Bond, now.

[She makes a gesture through the screen to tell Bunny that she's expecting him to show her his, after she's shown him hers.] And?

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