sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #2

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!tdm

TEST DRIVE MEME #2

1. this hotel room got a lot of stuff

[you wake up.

it doesn't matter where you were before. going to bed? dying? opening the door to face a great evil? same result. you wake up in a soft bed with starched sheets in a cool, darkened room, sunlight peeking out from behind thick curtains. maybe you're alone; maybe you aren't. maybe you immediately notice the folded paper on the bedside table near your head. if you don't, you better fix that real quick: you won't be able to even open the door before you read it.

the note itself is written in a neat hand on white card stock; there is a stylized logo of a ship with the words SERENA ETERNA printed underneath. the note reads as follows:

Dear Passenger(s),

As your cruise director, it is my great honor to welcome you aboard the Serena Eterna, your destination for fun and adventure! We know you could have chosen any cruise line for your vacation, and we're very grateful you chose ours! On behalf of the Captain, I would like to assure each and every passenger that will we do whatever it takes to fulfill all your needs and desires during your journey with us.

At your earliest possible convenience, please attend the mandatory lifeboat drill by the end of the day. I'm sure everyone is very eager to get started on all the fun and sun, but safety always comes first! You can find your life jacket in your cabin's closet; carry it to your assigned muster station on deck one, where I will take you through the drill. If you can't find me in the crowd, just look for the gal with the winning smile!

See You Real Soon!

Sincerely,
Gal Friday

you walk to deck one. you have no other choice: every time you try to step in a direction some unseen being considers "not towards deck one," you find your legs no longer move, staying stock still, frozen. whether compelled quickly by curiosity, or delayed by pure stubbornness, the result is the same, and you are left milling around with other similarly curious or stubborn people.

you see someone in uniform near the front of the crowd. she seems to be a gal, but is missing the winning smile, along with most of her other features. she seems to see you, though, rushing to your side and placing a lei around your neck with great formality. a voice, cheery but artificial, sees to come from nowhere and everywhere.]

Welcome aboard! We're so glad to have you!

[you touch the lei. rooster feathers, lotus seeds, and a carved circle of something white and hard, linked onto a silk string.

after the drill is completed, you are seemingly free to go. or, well, your legs work, now. and maybe that's as good as it's gonna get.]

2. and a touch-tone phone

[chatterbox isn't exactly the most popular venue onboard. it probably has something to do with the distinct lack of open liquor bottles. so, nothing personal. except it seems that it's decided to take it that way, suddenly.

anyone enjoying the other amenities of deck five will feel the distinct sensation of being watched while they do so. the kind of feeling a prey animal gets while being stalked on the grasslands. something may slither by their foot, or past their elbow while they rest it on the bar, but nothing appears to be there when they look.

until there is.

a black electrical cord originating from somewhere will, first, wrap around their ankle, tugging in a very clear "follow" instruction. should this instruction be ignored, a second cord will wrap around their other ankle, and, once again, tug. should this clear final warning be ignored... well, now they're being dragged down the promenade, and that's really their own fault, isn't it. don't struggle. struggling means more cords show up. and none of them seem terribly aware that most species need to expand their lungs to live.

their final destination, no matter the journey, is chatterbox's main stage, where the karaoke machine awaits. the cords place a microphone in their hand; the mic's cords bind it tightly to their hand.

they don't have to pick a song. there isn't an actual gun to their head, in any literal sense. it's just, those cords really don't seem that interested in letting go until they do.

and if you were heading to chatterbox anyway? welcome to the weirdest goddamn karaoke night you've ever seen.]

3. and a bucket of ice (cw: cannibalism mention)

[no longer will scoops be bound by the shackles of only having 31 flavors. for this month, and this month only, a sign that very much looks like Friday hand-wrote it announces, they will have 32!

what is that mysterious 32nd flavor? it depends, really: the letters on the display case seem to shift and change with each new pair of eyes that fall upon them, with the contents changing along with it. someone from the capital wasteland might find some Nuka-Cola ™ branded ice cream. twilight town residents will be thrilled to find sea salt on the menu. and a frankly concerning amount of people bring out a flavor that only describes itself as "long pig." it's a weird off-white color. don't think about it too hard.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not much of anything outside of the ship, really. Although I've only been here... I don't know, a few hours? A day. The sun hasn't set, but that doesn't say much here, I don't think.

Okay. I'll... be right back.

[this isn't a horror movie so skulduggery is going to be right back. he's going to have to hunt down a way to ask for a non-menu flavor, and he's going to have to gesture a bit, and maybe he even has to at one point raise his voice like he's talking to a hard-of-hearing grandparent, BUT...

the d20 says it's a 7 and I'm a sucker for failed throws. So he winds up with more brown ice cream, dumb boring brown ice cream! At least this time it's in a cup and not precariously balanced on the world's worst sugar cone???]

Well. It was certainly worth a try.

The same, shortly under six hours.

[5 hours and 42 minutes to be precise but he's learned that people generally get unsettled by that sort of granularity.]

I suppose for the sake of all this I should order one as well.

[The long suffering sigh he gives says enough about what he thinks of that. But fine. For the sake of the experiment he will go get ice cream that he can't eat. But he won't be happy about it.

When he returns with a small cup it is definitely not brown, nor boring. In fact its garishly pink and its.. sizzling. Sparkling. The equivalent of poprocks and soda but in scoopable form. The horror that science hath wrought in turning an energy drink into an ice cream.]

They certainly do not appear to be giving us the same thing.

[He's holding it as if it might eat through the cup and disintegrate the floor beneath him.]

No. Mine isn't sending off sparks. And it's just a regular color.

[The jealousy is so real in Skulduggery's voice. Why doesn't he get to order the funky ice cream that's probably chewing through the styrofoam as we speak???]

Well, damn. I wasn't expecting any sort of world-shattering revelation, but I can't help feeling incredibly disappointed anyway. I suppose positive thinking doesn't count for everything...

Would you like it?

[He holds the cup of chaos out to him, as he will be generous and share. Otherwise he's going to chuck this into the garbage and then be promptly somewhere else in case it starts crawling up the walls and puts a hole in the ship.]

It's not as if I could eat it anyway. Though I can smell it and it is absolutely horrific.

[He estimates this is what it would smell like to fall into a vat of cotton candy while it's being made. He can almost feel the sugar getting into all his joints and seams.]

[Oh wow! He immediately drops his cup onto the nearest table so nobody thinks he just got food to throw it away and grabs this new fantastic flavor. He really wishes he could taste it. Or that he had a wily teenage sidekick to foist it off onto.]

I'll take it off your hands, anyway. It's the least I can do. [So casual, so cool, like he's not debating sticking his fingers into it to see what happens.] So, fellow new passenger, what sort of dimension do you come from? Is any of this normal for you, or...?

[Max accepts no liability if it melts his fingers off, eagerly handing it over so he can get it as far away from him as possible.]

Not in the least. My name is Maximilien, and I suppose saying I'm from Monaco might be completely meaningless. But well, I'm from Monaco. On Earth.

[Just in case there's a Monaco on Venus or something.]

[Lots of Earths! That sure is convenient.]

Glad to meet you, Maximilien. My name is Skulduggery Pleasant and, like you, I'm from Ireland -- also the one on Earth. An Earth, anyway. So far, everyone's had a different one.

Skullduggery.

[He likes that. That is a very good name. Thematic even.]

Yes, one other person I spoke to is also from Earth but more than a hundred years prior to me. So I suppose it could be the same one, but.. the time difference makes it hard to tell.

Having multiple earths raises the uncomfortable timeline paradox of wondering if there's multiples of us too.

[Is he going to have to have deep introspection about potentially meeting a duplicate of himself? Maybe even consider if he would sleep with his clone? He's not prepared for this..]

Somebody I spoke to earlier mentioned a completely different history for his Earth than I was familiar with. So it stands to reason that we could very well wind up dealing with ourselves at some point or another. ...Or strangers who know some other version of us.

[That would be awwwwkwaaaard]

Well that's even worse. Thank you for that horrible thought.

[Meeting someone who knew a different version of him is approximately 10,000 worse than a just a different version of him. What if Tracer shows up and hugs him because he's in Overwatch in some timeline?

He needs to go bathe in bleach to forget that horrid possibility.]

Though I suppose taking only one person from each place arouses less suspicion. There'd be a lot more alarm if hundreds of people vanished suddenly.

Though even if anyone was looking for us I'm not sure they'd find us here. Wherever here might be.

That would explain why so few passengers seem to have friends aboard. Not that I've talked to many people, but it's been the case almost every time. One person I spoke to, who had a friend arrive alongside us, said that they were only separated by hours in their dimension. Not weeks. But, if it's a matter of picking people out of space and time, then... who knows.

It would also depend on if we're even being missed. Some of us might be expected to be gone for... a while. Who knows when they'd realize we were missing, much less if they'd realize where we had gone missing to.

[Okay that's definitely a lot of thinking-out-loud, but the guy can't help it. Sleuthing's in his bones.]

Whoever has orchestrated this may think that if anyone has a network of friends they are close to, they'd be more inclined to work together to escape.

[It seems reasonable to separate them. It's what he would do if he was going to fill a yacht with people to hunt for sport.]

It could also be random; when you have no personal stake in it your quarry simply becomes numbers on a spreadsheet. [He laughs a little at the thought.] A new meaning to the phrase 'your number is up.'

Maybe it's an inter-dimensional lottery. We all entered, in one reality or another, and now the winners are being declared. Which would be lucky for us.

[And let's be real, they're both on the same page here:]

Or, we'll be let loose on an island designed for inter-dimensional game hunting. Which would be... less lucky for us.

Depends on how they plan to hunt us. I think I can take a few bullets before they'll do any damage.

I wonder if there's a room here with the mounted heads of everyone killed in past hunts.

[Because he now 100% thinks this is what's happening.]

[The joke's on them, then, because taking Skulduggery's head doesn't stop him at all.]

Considering our arrival, I would be disappointed if it were only guns I had to worry about. I'm expecting at least a little more tomfoolery than that.

What's your weapon of choice while hunting down captives on a private island in international waters with no extradition treaties?

Hmm... Funny, I've never thought about it like that before. Maybe some very deep pits? You know the kind, with lots of sharp, pointy spikes at the bottom. Then, you scare them into thinking you're chasing them, when really relaxing on a beach somewhere. I think that would give everyone a sporting chance.

[He is not taking this seriously at all and it shows. Well it doesn't show BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.]

Why, what's yours?

I think harpoon gun is traditional, but also seems rather.. unwieldly.

Traps do seem like a good idea though, then you're not killing them, they're killing themselves in their own negligence by not assuming every square inch of ground is a pit waiting to impale them.

[Then they're not at fault! Win/Win. Except for the losers obviously. Who are dead.]

I certainly hope that's not what's happening though, I don't particularly want to run around the jungle.

You get it. It's less of a hunt and more of a... fun challenge. [Harpoon gun, though? Damn, Skulduggery should have thought of that. The mad skeleton Ahab shtick would be too good to pass up.]

The inter-dimensional kidnapping aspect makes me think we're dealing with something a bit more creative than a simple safari. Which is exactly why I will be looking for the fine print on any sign-up sheet Gal Friday puts in front of me.

I could be tempted by anything to get off this boat. I hate boats.

[Sure he owns a yacht, but he actually hates that too. It's a status symbol, he doesn't have to enjoy it. And the port is just a means to make ~~launder~~ money and ship ~~illegal~~goods. He doesn't have to actually step foot on any of the ships.]

I doubt they'd have us sign up for our own demise. They'll probably start hunting us through the ship if that's the end goal; it's big enough for someone to go missing with no one else knowing. Anything is possible really.

Especially if nobody else knows who you are, or that you're even aboard in the first place. [They are definitely cracking this case. This mystery? It's getting solved right here, right now, by these two chucklefucks in an ice cream store with ice cream they can't even eat. ~~They've almost figured out they're in a jamjar RP!~~]

[The trick will be getting anyone else to believe them once they crack this jamjar RP conspiracy wide open! Just two guys trying to convince everyone else they're fictional characters locked on a ship for the whims of unknown forces.]

I'm curious how many did not go to the morning briefing and are now dead in a hallway somewhere. I guess I'll never know.

Well this is certainly uplifting to think about.

[His voice even more monotone when he says that. He plans for every situation but this one is.. testing him.]

[They're going to find Pepe Silvia, and they're going to get some answers!]

You could ask Gal Friday. She seems... helpful? [Not really but you know, she seems to be the public face of the ship. HAH!] I'm not going anywhere near her, but you're welcome to.

Absolutely not. Everyone who seems attached to this place is suspect. And also she tried to put that florally nonsense on me. It was orange even.

[Which clashed with his suit and he will not stand for that fashion faux pas.]

[Skulduggery is proudly wearing his lei. That has nothing to do with what he has to say next, I just think the juxtaposition between these two is hilarious.]

There are usually degrees of suspects. Some are fully culpable, and some are just... a part of things. I wouldn't necessarily trust her to keep a secret for me, but she could be a useful source of information.

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