[IC] The Forge of Vision

(( A post written jointly by WaywardDreamer, Daguerrotype, Desire, Kurokiku, Sandwich Explosion, and Twilight Blues. ))

Of course the basement door wasn't locked. Who in Victoria locked their doors? It wasn't as though the marijuana dealers were prone to breaking in. No, it seemed that today, the crazy fans were breaking in. Paul gushed about the band, introduced himself as Paul, offered to road, and gushed some more. Rafael stared at him, in that perfectly blank manner he was so good at maintaining, for several seconds. And then he looked from Calvin, to Estelle, to Dierk, still as blank as ever, and commented...

"I think he's geeking. About us. I'm not hallucinating again, am I? I'd really rather not be... um... hallucinating."

Throughout it all, he didn't actually acknowledge Paul's presence with any look or comment to the newcomer's person. He wasn't entirely sure Paul was real yet, after all. Fans were not exactly a commodity Tragically Canadian had in quantity...

"U-uh....sure, Raphael." The blond adjusted his glasses, mouth still frozen in its half-gaping state as he stared at the newcomer with a mixture of horror and awe. Ever since Paul made his seemingly-whirlwind entrance (everything was a bit whirlwind to Dierk right now still), the Finn had kept his eyes glued upon him at all times. It almost resembled the awkward stare you get on the first day of lunch at a new school. Except coming from Dierk, the glance resembled less of 'fresh meat' and more like 'potential new best friend'. Even though he felt awkward around his fellow bandmates 99.7% of the time, the prospect of someone new to add to the mix was both intriguing and frightening at the same time. What if they thought he was weird? Would his bandmates agree? Would the kick him out like a puppy and he would be forced to roam the streets in search of new bandmates/friends? The blond's face seemed to be on overload from thinking about all this too hard, eyes still fixed on Paul as if removing his gaze would kill him right then and there.

Calvin cocked an eyebrow (haha, cock) at Paul's very sudden introduction. He counted himself among the few in Victoria to actually lock their doors, on account of not wanting his shit stolen even if the crime rate here was comically low. As long as he'd lived here, a very Amurican (spelled properly) fear of some crazed ethnicity dragon kicking his door open and stealing his VCR had not left his bones (call it a good upbringing or a lot of syndicated Law & Order as a child.

"Excuse me, but who exactly do you think you are? Coming in here and critiquing our band like some guy who ... critiques."

He straightened his back, assuming his usual stance when handling band related business matters. Given Estelle's apathy, Rafael's flippancy and Dierk's ... European-isms, business matters usually fell his way, and Calvin often got them gigs or whored their demo out to anyone with ears.

"What kind of experience do you have with sound, exactly?"

Estelle watched the stranger with wary eyes. If there was one thing she disliked, it was things that surprised her. She generally preferred to live in a world where feeling was optional at best, and so surprises (which forced reactiveness by their very nature) were most unwelcome. Nevertheless, her face betrayed nothing of the most unusual circumstance that had befallen their wayward little noise machine. She looked not at the stranger, but at Calvin as he went about his little awkwardly-worded interrogation. Critic... the word he was looking for was critic. Not that she'd ever tell him that, mind you. Instead, she bothered to say something else that had come to her mind.

"We don't exactly need a roadie, do we? I mean, wouldn't we first have to, you know... go on the road? Or have a show somewhere?"

The band had preformed in front of (mostly highly intoxicated) audiences before, but not for quite some time.

Paul was taken aback by the unwelcoming reception. True, he was technicially trespassing, but he was doing so in order to offer free stuff! And that Swede was terrifying him.

Even so, he continued, "well...uh...I don't really have much uh...experience with sound mixing...but I have this PA type thing and uh I could learn to use it. I've also been in bands that were way too loud so I know frome experience how terrible this is. So I'm will to donate the equipment on the requirement that I get to set it up and stuff...and I can see you guys need it. And um, I could try to get you a show at my college. There are plenty of strange areas to places to play there."

It was the best Paul could do. At least he wasn't running away. In terror, of course.

Just outside of Rafael's basement, Jason took one final drag of his cigarette before flicking the butt away and inviting himself to the party. He didn't knock - from the bits and pieces of that conversation that he just overheard, it was obviously something that wasn't expected of anyone anyway. Thus, it was with some awkwardness that he found himself staring at a bunch of people he didn't know, bandana tied to his head and guitar case slung over his shoulder. There was a punctuated moment of silence before he said anything at all.

"So, who's ready to rock?!"

It was, really, quite fortunate that Jason entered when he did. Rafael had been just about ready to tell Paul something unflattering. Or sarcastic. Or whatever. Instead, he just waved the tall boy over to one corner, flailing his arms to direct the band towards the bandana-clad newcomer. This inadvertantly ended with him knocking his microphone over, which created a sound just shy of ear-breaking.

"Rock and-or roll. I'm good with either. Everyone, this is Jason. I don't know his last name. I met him at Borders, though. And, and, I told him he could suck Neko Case's ten inch wang. Which she totally doesn't have. And then he mentioned he played bass, or he might have hit me with a bass, I don't know... one or the other, and I realized he would be a good addition." Rafael nodded intently. "See, he has two somethings that we've been lacking. A really bad attitude and a bandana. Oh, and a bass too, I guess."

Estelle was just confused by this point. Ask the girl her opinion on Postmodern thought, and she'd have an answer at the tip of her tongue within seconds. Ask her to interact with any large-ish number of people, and you had a problem. Since the only thing she woudl have been able to manage was likely inarticulate, she settled for raising a brow and turning back to her drumset until such time as somebody else decided to resolve the situation into something that made some degree of sense to rational minds. Now that she got to thinking about it, that might be asking too much. Maybe just until they got baack to playing or something. Why did Tragically Canadian need a bad attitude anyway? The only thing the band had going for it was that hey all more or less made something resembling music without trying too hard to murder each other. You really shoudn't mess too much with success.... or at least the only modicum of it they ever had a hope of achieving?

Arguing. Dierk absolutely hated it. It was in his pointedly-Scandinavian nature to be as neutral as possible in all situations. And it was also in his nature to jump at all loud and unexpected noises like he was competing in the High Jump event in the Olympics. Thus, his frantic looking back-and-forth at Rafael and the two newcomers, coupled with his startled reaction at the microphone having been knocked over, was completely and utterly Dierk. This was getting to be a bit too much for such a fragile guy, in all senses of the word.

Timidly he cleared his throat and attempted to make a decent reply so as to give both Paul and Jason a somewhat-decent first impression. "U-uhhhh......"

"........"

One hand hesitantly lifted, and then waved at both, small smile gracing his face before he slipped back into a shy silence.

As it were, Jason was already in the process of setting up the badassery that was his black Fender bass guitar. First impressions meant precious little to him; not because he was an asshole, but because he thought it was unfair to judge anyone based on what ultimately amounted to an uneducated guess. He was subject to that treatment far too much to torment anyone else with it. He would come to understand these strangers on his own terms.

"So, we're winging something about dinosaurs? Alright, LET'S DO THIS."

Upon "hooking his shit up somewhere", he strummed a few notes to test the sound, and it became immediately apparent that our resident rocker was well above-average in the skill department.

If Rafael had been a cat, his ears would have been laid back flat against his head as he glared at Calvin.

"Hey! You can't tell me to shut up, I'm the frontman! That'd be like George telling John and Paul to shut up while Ringo (that's you, Estelle) sat in back and was quiet and..." That was exactly what had happened during the sessions for Let It Be come to think of it. "Okay bad example. Let's do this."

He hit the first chord on his battered old Rickenbacker, and that was the only chord he hit. Since after that first chord, something else happened, something that made continued practice impractical at best, and hilariously idiotic at worst. You see... the front wall of the basement exploded inward, in a shower of shrapnel, broken drywall, and... rhinoceroses. Rhinoceri? Rhinostronauts? Whatever. A veritable stampede smashed first through the front wall, then the back wall, and though the gargantuan beasts seemed to take great pains to not crush our esteemed heroes, they did crush everything else in their way. Walls, furniture, wayward amplifiers, extension chords, even that old nalgene bottle full of shampoo that Rafael had been given by an acquaintance as a, quote, 'much-needed gift'.

The stampede was short, somewhere during the course of it Rafael had wound up going down into the fetal position, arms and guitar thrown up to protect his face, and when he let his face show again, it was clear. And, where the rhinostronauts had tread, there was no longer a split-level Victorian house in Victoria, no longer a basement where a less-than-brilliant garage band played, no longer a city of Victoria. A savannah of tall violet grass and low, willowy trees stretched as far as the eye could see.

Now, for Paul and Jason, this might be a rather strange and traumatic experience. Rafael, however, showed a slowly brightening expression that gradually gave way to a whooping squeal of delight. Seriously, a squeal. Like, a schoolgirl squeal.

Awkward greetings aside (and ignored), Dierk trudged back to his theremin and readied his hands. That is, until the rhinos arrived through the wall. The poor Scandinavian's mind wasn't so much astonished as it was genuinely afraid and so, like any sane person when confronted with rhinos, Dierk did the first thing that came naturally: screaming before fainting to the ground in a equally graceless manner.

As the song about dinosaurs started (seriously what the fuck?) Pauline was going to go to her dorm, race back with the PA, a Mic, and a fab skirt in time for the next song. Instead as, she reached for the door, Rhinos stampeded. Pauline stuck herself to the door, frightend as all fuck. When the chaos ceased, she found she wasn't leaning on a door. It was air. It was at this point Pauline fell. She quickly started a panic attack. Strangely enough, it subsided soon after. "The fuck?" she said, weakly, still on the ground, "I don't think the PA is rhino proof."

Estelle did the only rational thing there was to do when several stampeding rhinos charged toward you at full-tilt: she simply stood there and let them go around her. This was getting old, fast.

Not that she didn't enjoy the most peculiar sensation that accompanied the change from this world to the other one. If you were brave (or stupid) enough to watch it happen with your eyes open, it easily beat the best acid trip in the world. Not that Estelle had ever actually been on an acid trip. She just sort of figured that this was what it must be like, minus that weird part where the people sometimes started clawing at their own skin.

Still, it wasn't every day that something happened to throw your deeply-held metaphysical notions about the way reality worked into complete turmoil. For Estelle, it was more like twice a week. She suspected somehow that it was Rafael's fault, though the only evidence she had was that nothing quite this bizarre had ever happened to her before she started playing in this band-like conglomeration of what might have been artistic talent if it didn't sound like the drug-induced spazz-out of twenty three tone-deaf squirrels.

So even as some of the others managed to regain their feet, Estelle was looking around with an expression of mild interest at the latest manifestation of what she privately termed the "Shatter-my-illusions-of-sanity-and-reason-to-replace-them-with-things-that-should-not-exist-thus-triggering-frequent-existential-crises-which-I-always-pretend-are-hallucinations-but-aren't," but most often referred to as the Otherworld, with a most decisive capital O.

It would seem the grass had decided to be purple today, and the sky a light shade of green. It was mostly devoid of life other then the low, sparse trees for the moment, but she had come to understand that almost just by thinking it, something else was sure to appear soon. The only question was: what?

Jason had witnessed a lot of weird and fucked-up shit in his life, but there was nothing he learned growing up in the slums of Boston that could have ever prepared him for something like this.

It was enough that the walls caved and shattered when Rafael struck that first note; like any normal person, Jason cowered in his chair behind what little cover his bass guitar could give him. But it was the stampede of rhinos immediately thereafter that made him fall over screaming like a little girl and forced him to relinquish all of his pride as a man. Really, though, who could blame him? YOU try sitting in a basement one second, getting ready to play a song, and then have a bunch of raging rhinos raising hell the very next. It was traumatizing in the most bizarre way imaginable, and - for as tragic and unfortunate as his life had been to this point - the poor guy was not mentally prepared to die like that.

Thankfully, it never came to that, but the sudden change of scenery did very little to comfort him.

Quickly emerging from his fetal position on the floor (grass?), Jason took his sunglasses off and looked around frenetically, his heart racing and breaths labored after suffering from a sky-high adrenaline rush. He looked confused, and terribly so. From a human standpoint, that was probably a good thing.

Clutching the neck of his guitar with a white-knuckle grip, he turned his attention to everyone else, clearly crazed with paranoia. "Sweet mother of God, what the FUCK was that, man?! The fuck! Where are we?!"

He held his free hand to his forehead, trying to calm himself down.

Calvin had encountered a few rhinoceros in his time.

Once, on a fourth grade class trip they had been carted to, he admired two such specimen of noble ungulate, made ignoble from years of domestication and lackluster zoo keepers. Another time, in the bathroom of a seedy club, a burly man who may as well have walked on all fours attempted to take advantage of a much younger Calvin. While not a rhinoceros in name, he was built like one and Calvin suspected equally intelligent. Despite this, a swift jab to the groin sent his thick hide sprawling and, half a can of bear mace later, screaming in pain.

Despite his past encounters with such beasts, no amount of experience could have prepared him for the speed of their charge and the destruction that followed suit. Their proximity, despite their lack of murderous intent, was plain alarming. As they took out walls and furniture Calvin had had the sense to lift his guitar above its head, sparing it from a hoofed death. It took only a second to determine who, exactly, was at fault for this little reenactment of Jumanji. His expression shifted towards Rafael, something akin to the ">:|" emoticon that I'm too lazy to describe with words but you get the idea well enough.

The last rhino gone, he was satisfied that they were here for the long-fucking-haul. Calvin cocked a head towards Paul and Jason and spat in a mildly condescending tone. "Welcome to the band, guys! A bit of an occupational hazard, true, but I promise benefits are just awesome."

This had not been Calvin's first encounter with the Otherworld, and surely would not be his last. He'd yet to become accustomed to it, as anyone outside raving lunatics and habitual potheads will not readily accept your house becoming a one-eyed seagull roaming the depths of the cosmos. No, Calvin lacked the desire to understand his situation, and so opted to do the laziest thing possible and play along! Why the hell not? It was like some fucked up Japanese game show, except with less public humiliation and more cowbell.

He re-cocked his head towards a mewling Rafael, retaining his most hardcore stoneface and extending an even more severe index finger at his target. "You. Rafael. Up. Explain. Them. Now."

While everyone experienced reactions ranging from the surprisingly tame (in terms of Estelle and Calvin) to the completely logical (Paul, Jason and Rafael), Dierk was still laying face-down in the savannah dirt, still very much unconscious and traumatized from the recent stampede.

Dierk had seen the Otherworld before. It just never ceased to catch him off-guard when the plane between the real world and the Otherworld blurred into one fluid existence. (And if he were conscious to affirm it, Dierk would never get used to it for as long as he lived--granted, this entrance into the Otherworld was a bit more abrupt than the last few instances, but still.)

The grass moved once again to accommodate a sudden group of neon antelope bounding through the grass, their horns and legs creating odd angles along the lines of the tall brush. Upon their backs were strapped several silver dishes filled with what appeared to be salted whitefish. The antelope passed only close enough for one to make out their forms (one even seemed to be wearing a top hat and monocle), but disappeared as quickly as they had made their presence known.

Yes. Not only was Dierk out, but his subconscious was in high gear.

And apparently, he was hungry.

The initial rush of exhilaration eventually passed. Rafael ran his fingers through the soft, purple grass... it was almost like strands of velvet, startlingly soft and yielding. And when he brushed his hands through it, Rafael was momentarily surprised to find that it... purred. The grass purred. It wasn't much like a cat's purring, but it was, nonetheless, distinctly and unmistakably purring.

And it only took a moment before the purring spread from those few blades of grass to a raucous, noisy purr all through the expansive field. The violet grass purred and chittered, beneath the soft green sky and blazing indigo sun.

Rafael didn't rise, even as Calvin practically demanded it of him, instead just gazing with a grin and a giggle in his general direction.

"Explain? Calvin, Calvin, you know I can't explain this. Besides why would I want to? We're in Otherworld now, and everything's wonderful." He rose up to his feet at this point, slinging his guitar off his shoulders because it was kind of awkward to hold it like that. "And, you know, there's not really any point in complaining about it, because we'll be here for awhile, at least until something happens that sends us back home. Last time we had to win a dance-off with the rat-people of Longbottom Row before we could get back to Victoria."

Rafael yawned dramatically. "I like it here better, anyway."

The grass shifted, all at once, from the purring and chittering to a much more distinct brand of chatter, individual blades whispering and gossiping amongst themselves. There was quite a range of languages to be heard in the grass, though every so often a few lines could be picked up in English. The grass seemed unimpressed by Tragically Canadian, going so far as to call them exceptionally unattractive bipedal monstrosities, and also calling 'the awkward one' an obvious tourist.

Estelle shot Rafael a half-lidded glare. She thought they'd agreed never to mention the dance-off again, ever. There were some things she'd prefer to keep private. Well, this encompassed most things, actually, and definitely included the fact that she could, indeed, dance.

Well, if Calvin wasn't going to do the explaining, and Rafael wasn't even going to try, and Dierk was... apparently laid out on the ground, she supposed that the awful logical rule known as process of elimination meant it had to be her. Oh, how she detested speaking, especially to those she did not know.

Still, her pointed looks at Calvin, subtle screaming calls for help or mercy or something, were apparently either unrecognized or ignored, and Rafael was clearly mostly-gone with childish wonderment already. She was of half a mind to see if she could convince the ground to swallow her up, but ultimately decided against it. She wasn't sure if suffocating while buried alive here would translate into anything similar in Reality with a capital R, and besides that she didn't really want to put in the effort of persuading the ground. This grass was almost as cranky as Calvin right now.

"Welcome to the Otherworld," she said tonelessly. "If you have to blame someone, blame him." An absent gesture in Rafael's general direction, and then a halfhearted sigh. "We'll get back... eventually. For now, I'd recommend just not thinking about it too hard." Passing the two new people, she made her way over to the unconscious Scandinavian. One of the neon antelope looked up at her approach, and then bounded away, followed by her eyes until it disappeared into the savannah.

Crouching beside the blond, overly bony-looking individual who generally ate too many strange things to contemplate, she poked him gently in the shoulder. "Hey. We're here." Deciding that was more than enough talking for at least another few hours, she nudged him again, hoping that this would be sufficient to wake him. Generally, all of them had to be awake and moving for them to find their way back, assuming this was what any of them really wanted, an assumption Estelle was not entirely sure she was comfortable making.

(( A post written jointly by TwilightBlues, Sandwich Explosion, Desire, WaywardDreamer, and Kurokiku. ))

While trying to make sense of the...senselessness, Jason did his best to calm his nerves in the meantime - pulling a cigarette out and lighting it up with shaky hands. He took a deep drag and exhaled just as Estelle finished her explanation. "...right. Okay, okay...so, what now?"

Pauline was slowly coming out of her daze. She slowly stood up and brushed the sand off her pants, muttering about how lame they were. She had no idea why she wanted to be a lady now of all times, but in all the chaos she really wish she had been wearing a skirt. That would’ve been awesome, she thought, but now it seems I’ll never get one. This Otherworld place kinda sucks.

Secretly, Pauline was terrible in awe with the whole deal, but not being dressed as the correct gender was pissing her off. Oh well. When Rafael started making the grass purr, that was when she forgot her discomfort. “I’m…not sure whether or not to find this terrifying or adorable. While I’ve always wanted a cat, I’m not sure that’s a good substitute for one either.”

Calvin let out a hefty SIGH, all too familiar with the events that transpired in their last visit to the Other. Calvin had never considered rat people as particularly fond of dancing, but matters of life and death were governed by just how much YOU GOT SERRRRVED! Yeah. It ended awkwardly.

"Now?" He forced a smile, gesturing the technicolor pasture before him. "We do whatever the hell it is we have to do until we go home. So get ready to do silly shit, because that's the rules here."

"Don't listen to Cal, he's just bitter about how much better I was than him. I mean, I always figured the genuine gay guy in the band would know a little bit about dancing, but damn! Three left feet, plus one of them was a club-foot, and I think his..." Rafael started rambling in Jason's general direction, irreverant and chatty as he became when he was presented with positive stimuli, like Otherworld in general. But he stopped abruptly, looking down at the passed out Finn.

"We should probably get Ikea on his feet again. Or in a stretcher. Or Calvin could carry him like a potato-sack, since he's kind of dressed like one anyway, and smells like dead ungulate... potatoes don't usually smell like that, I guess. A venison sack?" He wrinkled his nose, leaned down to poke Dierk a couple times. "Well. Whatever. We should get moving in any case. I'm sure there's something nearby. There always is."

Estelle rose from where she'd been attempting with little success to rouse the passed-out Finnish player of bizarre instruments. Shrugging, she moved off a ways. Generally, it didn't matter which way one chose to go in Otherworld; you always wound up somewhere eventually and really, she suspected that space here was much like time: entirely irrelevant.

"We could just leave him," she speculated.

Technically, not all of them had to accomplish whatever task had to get done in order to return to Reality, or at least she assumed so given Calvin's dancing skills relative to rat-people. Either way, she sort of wanted to get moving. Whether this was because she wanted to get back or simply because she wanted to see more of Otherworld, she could not be sure. Who knew? Maybe she just really, really wanted Rafael to shut up about the rat-people incident.

Silly shit? Jason stared long and hard at his abstract surroundings, still in something of a daze after his understanding of reality was trampled by rhinos. He had more or less ignored Rafael's rambling as he burned through a rather potent-looking cigarette, wondering what exactly Calvin meant until Estelle brought to his attention that Rafael had actually addressed a legitimate problem. Or what would be a legitimate problem, if obstruction of progress was even a problem in this crazy world...

"Is it really alright to leave him?" Jason inquired dubiously, readjusting his sunglasses over his eyes and slung his guitar over his shoulder. "I mean, I can carry him...I guess. Fuck. I don't know."

"I'm all for the leaving of leaving him. Make him fend for himself like a hipster feral child." The notion of leaving fragile little Dierk to be feasted upon by the wilderness was a humorous one. Calvin relented, however, not wanting to have a Finn's blood on his hands for fear of gypsy curses or whatever it was they did when hey weren't yak herding or goat milking. "I'll help you carry him, not that he's heavy enough to be a burden. You're Jason?" He asked as much, hefting the limp frame on one of his shoulders.

Rafael would have objected voraciously to the leaving of Dierk, but fortunately he didn't have to, as Jason and Calvin took on the task of carrying him. This suited Rafael, who tended to avoid things that could be called 'work'. Well, for the most part, anyway. He'd worked a part-time job once, it hadn't exactly ended well. Ancient history: not content to let Estelle lead on this grand adventure, he hurried to catch up. Whatever direction she'd picked seemed just fine, it wasn't as though direction had ever had much meaning here.

"So, um, I hate to be the one bringing this up, but the grass really doesn't like us."

And it was true: the grass had gone from gossipping to hissing and chanting. Though it was difficult to tell what exactly was being said, the words 'legs', 'blood', and 'sacrifice' seemed to be coming up an awful lot.

The people starting talking about Rats and dance battles and this didn’t make sense, so Pauline started singing to herself. As for Dierk’s fate, Pauline felt very sympathetic for the awkward Swede. She knew that he was probably the only person in group as awkward as she was AND the only person in the group who reacted to the sudden...Rhinos worse than herself. Unfortunately, she then got distracted by the talking grass. Their chanting became an overwhelming cacophony in Pauline’s ears. Her sense of perception became distorted and she sensed their murderous intent without understanding a word they meant. Shrieking in fear, she began to run blindly through the Otherworldian grass, damn the consequences!

Estelle shrugged when they decided to just carry Dierk. She supposed not taking chances was probably a better approach than the one she had suggested, and so she was not going to argue for it. In the end, she simply let Rafael pass by her, apparently wishing to lead their little foray into the wild unknown. That just meant that if something tried to eat them, it would see him first. Which was really quite macabre, now that she got to thinking about it. Oh well, what do you do? Apparently, if you were the new roadie- what was his name again?- you ran shrieking ike a third-grade girl, breezing past both Estelle and Rafael in the process.

She listened to the grass and decided it was, indeed, apparently unfond of them. Well, so damn what? Estelle herself wasn't fond of much either, and this was getting mildly irritating.not exactly sure what was possessing her to do this, she once again knelt in the purple, chatty stuff, spreading a bit to get at the roots. She wasn't exactly sure how the logic worked, but she figured the roots must be the part that did the thinking.

"Excuse me," she said dully, "but if you dislike me that much, just send me back to where I came from."

"Yeah, that's me," Jason answered Calvin as he supported Dierk's other shoulder. Though his passion was with music, anyone with a pair of eyes could tell that the bandana-wearing chain-smoker had some muscle to spare. Which might have boded well for our little Finn in the very near future, now that the grass was chanting something wicked and Jason had no intention of sticking around to find out what it could do. It was with some haste that he followed after Rafael, all the while marveling at Estelle's courage. It was likely she knew something he didn't, but Jason wasn't willing to take any chances.

"Uh...Estelle, was it? I dunno about you, but I think we might be past the point of negotiations here..."

As strange and fascinating as this "Otherworld" was, he bitterly wished he would wake up from this dream already.

Calvin seemed to have lightened up somewhat, some of the inherent irritability that came with the Other having subsided at the onset of manual labor. This was one of the prettier places they had been to, and there was a certain charm to the grass being bitchy. What did grass have to be bitchy about? Photosynthesize and get the occasional haircut; on the whole not a terrible life. He watched Estelle intently, taking a mental note to remember this side of her. She rarely seemed ... open, and it had been a constant goal for Calvin to understand her a little better, and he relished any new opportunity to understand another facet. They were different but similar, Calvin and Estelle, guarded but in different and uniquely separate ways. It took a second or two to realize the roadie chick/guy/thing had fled, and he looked among the group to see if the flight had phased anyone.

"We gonna have to carry him too? I hate carrying stuff. This place sucks and Rafael sucks for thinking it up. God you just suck. Someone think up a 7/11, I need a VitaminWater and some Advil."

"I don't think it's gong to work like that, Estelle..."

Rafael started to try warning her, even as Pauline ran screaming into the distance. It was a rather short-lived flight. The grass let out a cacophonous shriek of thrill - the sort of thrill a crowd of Romans might get from good old-fashioned blood sport at the Circus Maximus. Grass wrapped around the fleeing 'girl's' ankles, dragging her down to the ground quickly. Estelle was the next victim, as her effort to negotiate with the violet tendrils of grass put her close to the ground and in easy reach for the long blades to wrap and restrain.

First or last made little difference, though. The violet prairie went after every one of them, one after another, taking a sadistic glee in the inevitability of each one being dragging down and restrained. After all, how do you outrun a tallgrass prairie that was out to capture you? Rafael pondered that even as the grass dragged him down: he didn't struggle. He presumed there would be something along any moment now to save them or offer a deal or plead for their help. That was, after all, how it had always worked before. Right?

As it turned out, those instincts weren't too far from wrong. Even as the grass lashed them down, chittering and giggling in glee, much of it parted like the Red Sea to make way for... something new. In this case, the something new was a royal procession of what Rafael assumed to be Lilliputians. After all, this scene certainly had a lot of similarities to one out of Gulliver's Travels. Alas - his assumption was wrong. The royal procession consisted of spiders. Very large spiders.

One, held aloft on a colorful litter and bearing a colorful scepter, brought up the middle of the line - reasonably, one could assume it to be the royalty in that royal procession.

Ever the one to be able to sleep through the atomic apocalypse, Dierk seemed no more conscious when Calvin and Jason picked him than he had been post-rhinos. He too fell prey to the long grass' trap, falling to the ground and knocking off his fur hat in the process to reveal the bright mess of Disney Princess blond hair spilling out like a halo beneath him. As the grass did the same for the rest of the band, Dierk seemed to be still unaware of his plight, much less aware of everything else in the Otherworld.

That is, until the fanfare from the royal spider procession broke out in a swell of brass.

Pale, slim fingers twitched lightly as Dierk's eyes fluttered behind his thick glasses. "....ugh...are the...rhinos gone yet? Are we about to practice again...?"

Man-eating prairie grass. Yeah, there really was no outrunning that, and as valiant as his struggle was, Jason went down as surely as anyone else in the end. He hissed a few breaths through his teeth as he laid there face-down in the dirt, wondering if he was really a goner this time. That was perhaps a lesser mystery than why the dirt tasted faintly like old chocolate cake, though.

And, as if man-eating prairie grass wasn't enough, then...came the spiders. Big fucking spiders. Now, Jason was not really scared of spiders, but being able to see every little detail on their alien bodies was, well, really fucking creepy. The fact that they seemed to be anthropomorphic to some degree (what with the obvious reverence for royalty or whatever) did very little to comfort him. Fuck. Were they here to feed on them? For all he knew, he may as well have been walking in a spider web all along.

Ultimately, he decided to keep his mouth shut. He didn't know what the hell was going on, and there was no sense in him trying to pretend he did now. Just pray for the best...if God was even paying attention to this crazy drug-induced fantasy world.

Estelle was displeased by the grass's irrationality. Instead of just talking things over like civilized...plant life, it had apparently decided to entrap them all. She was currently still crouched on the ground, ankles and wrists bound by fibrous strands of purple. She contemplated briefly if there was anything one could make out of the substance, but her attention was drawn away from the thought by what appeared to be a... spider parade? With royalty, no less.

She hadn't really resisted her entanglements, so she had a bit more mobility than those who had gone down swinging, so to speak. That and the fact that she could still see over the prairie meant she had a full view of the spiders themselves, as well as the gold-inlaid litter on which the king/queen (how did one discern a spider's sex, anyway?), was being borne. The patterns on it were weblike, which figured, really, but there was also something fanciful to them, and the spiders themselves looked about as agreeable as giant arachnids could. Unless she was mistaken, there was music coming from somewhere, too. Not "music" like Tragically Canadian generally attempted to make, but something that might have inspired Chopin, only on some variety of wind instrument, barely woven into the natural breeze on the savannah/prairie environment.

She looked around, wondering if anyone else could hear it, but most were either facedown in the dirt or staring in some mixture of shock, horror, and wonder at the procession, so it was hard to say.

Fuck. As she was viciously pulled down by the man-hating (possibly eating) grass, Pauline realized she was stupid. You can't RUN away from grass, not unless it's following you, although even in that case it is probably under you. She really needed to get a hang of these panic attacks. Although, they were probably understandable given the circumstances. As the giant spiders approached, Pauline became extremely detached. She began to focus on their beady eye things and their bristly leg parts. She thought she was lucky to land on the ground in such a position that she could move her neck and see the creatures. But what if they were going to kill her? Then she would watch them as they devoured her. At lease I'm not panicking, she thought.

Rafael's attention was rather wholly focused on the spider procession by this time. If there was music it was lost on him, he was far more fascinated by the spider queen borne on the litter. The procession came to a halt, somewhere near the middle of the restrained band members (and one roadie) of Tragically Canadian. With a blaring of small trumpets, the spiders at the front of the procession announced their queen (how spiders could possibly blare trumpets with pedipalps and chelicara was entirely beyond Rafael), and as they made that announcement, the grass let up on the captives slightly.

Each of them was allowed precisely enough freedom to sit up, but not to stand, so they could see the spiders.

A single spider skittered to the front of the procession, unfurling a roll of vellum and announcing in a decidedly human-like voice and with a definite air of authority, "Behold and be amazed, and awestriked, and enthralled, by her most arachnalicious, splendtastic, fantasteriffic, and indubitably goodifferous majesticality, the Queen of All She Beholds and Crawls Upon, as well as That Which She Doesn't, whose mercy and glory are both without limit, whose wisdom puts the gods themselves to shame, whose many eyes are both sexually and aesthetically pleasing, our Dear and Fearless Leader, the Lady Xylani!"

Rafael, at this point, having stared at the queen spider - Lady Xylani, apparently - for some time, blurted out a line of his own. "I think she was in James and the Giant Peach."

As he said that, the entire procession fell silent. So did the grass. Every one of the hundreds of spider eyes turned to stare upon him, every blade of grass leaned slightly in his direction. It was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. There were no pins, of course, but if somebody had had a pin, and then dropped it, you could have heard it.

Rafael cleared his throat. "I... um. She was, wasn't she? She looks like the black widow from it. I liked that movie." His voice grew smaller with every word. "With, you know, with the claymation and the shark machine... I like the shark machine... it used to give me, um, nightmares though..."

If Jason was already doubting his chances of survival, then Rafael's blissful outspokenness was only making his odds look even less appealing.

Now sitting on his knees, our restrained rocker chanced a better look at the procession and promptly decided that he was better off laying face-down in the dirt. That might have had something to do with the fact that he did not see the same thing Rafael did - the queen widow and her minions looked like true spiders to him, in no way like a work of claymation or even at all similar to the character from James and the Giant Peach. He might have thought that to be strange, had he been to Otherworld before; alas, he simply assumed this was par for the course and ignored it like he tried to ignore everything else that didn't make sense.

It was then that Jason finally resigned himself to whatever fate awaited him for speaking out. Hell, Estelle and Rafael got away with it, why couldn't he? "Hey, um, not to trouble Your Royal Highness or whatever, but could someone tell the purple grass to fuck off? I need another smoke."

Estelle cringed inwardly when Rafael opened his big mouth. Honestly, just because he was a bloody singer didn't mean he couldn't be silent once in a while did it? Uh-oh. Whenever her Australian accent started popping up in her thoughts, things were bad. Well, bad for Estelle, which was really just emotionally present to everyone else.

It appeared that the new bassist was no wiser. Had the part where they all glared at Rafael informed him of nothing? And now the music was getting louder, and it still didn't look like anyone else could hear it. This was getting ridiculous. She had a feeling someone should really start kissing ass soon, since that seemed to be their best chance of getting them out of this situation. Unfortunately, Estelle's complete lack of social skills meant she had no idea how to do this. Really, Calvin needed to start talking and soon. She was pretty sure that guy could convince people they were gay for twelve-hour intervals. How much herder could it be to convince grass or spiders?

Wait... had she really just thought that? Yes, yes she had. Sighing, she decided she could at least apologize. Taking a few deep breaths, she looked up at the spider guards and their queen, putting on her best innocent-lost-good-girl smile, which was truthfully pretty convincing, mostly because over half of it was true at present.

"I'm sorry about my... er... friends, Your Majesty," she said earnestly, "sometimes they forget to be polite, but they mean no insult by it." She was a little unsure of her word choice there, but it would have to do until someone who knew anything about talking could take over. Apparently, Rafael and Jason were both out.

And the bloomin' music was starting to hurt her head... and there went the accent again. Crikey.

Pauline was panicking. Rafael was kinda stupid, and they were going to die. OH GOD she thought in all capital letters, I. NEED. To. BREATHE. She was audibly and rapidly panting. The constant sweating didn't help either. They are just SPIDERS, she thought, and I like spiders. Spiders are my friends.

Unfortunately, Pauline couldn't fool herself this time. Instead, she resisted the intense urge to converse with Rafael about the nostalgic merits of James and the Giant Peach and decided the best thing to do was, yet again, find comfort in someone else's suffering.

At least I won't die first, she thought. Probably the ones who are the most insolent go first. Or are they last? Maybe it's the weak ones. OH GOD. THAT MEANS ME.

It was then that Pauline realized that thinking wasn't her strong suit. The more she did that, the more terrified she'd become. So she decided to sing, very quietly to herself, a method of coping she had used since the 1st grade after bullies beat her up in the parking lot. "Laaaaaa! La-la-la-la-la la-la la-la la-la-lah."

Unfortunately, out of the corner of her eye she could see a spider eye looking at her as if listening intently. Her voice became scratchy and feeble. "Katamari Damachy..."

Rafael certainly had no intention of letting up. Perhaps he was emboldened by Jason's similar outspokenness, or perhaps he was emboldened by Calvin's silence. Either way, he certainly wasn't discouraged by Estelle's attempts at being apologetic and/or diplomatic, and in a way, Pauline's feeble soubrette provided a rather spectacular theme music for some badassery.

It was notable that the spiders had all remained almost completely silent through this whole sordid affair: perhaps the barrage of conflicting comments, thoughts, and reactions from Tragically Canadian had taken them off guard, or perhaps they were just naturally very quiet when they weren't announcing their queen in a glorious and condescending manner. Either way, Rafael grinned brightly and took their continued stony-eyed silence as an invitation to keep talking himself.

"Estelle's right, I really don't mean to insult anyone, especially since only a total busfucker could possibly be offended by what I said. And I certainly don't think you're a busfucker, your majesty. I'm right, aren't I? You don't look like one." Rafael batted his eyelashes. "You know, if you could just, get the grass to release us that'd be great. I'd really appreciate it. It'd be a mighty swell thing for you to do, eh? It would be, um, merciful and glorious and wise. And it would allow us to better see how sexually appealing your many eyes are."

He coughed.

Whether it was Jason's bluntness, Estelle's reverent tone, or Rafael's continued rambling - or some other stimulus entirely - after a moment more of stunned silence the Lady Xylani nodded. It was strange, seeing a spider nod, but regardless... she nodded. And the grass released the bonds on the band, returning to being nothing more than slightly creepy grass, whispering and chittering about them merrily.

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