TEST DRIVE MEME #5

[sailmods]

1. not subtle revealings

[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! I'm very glad to have you aboard!

[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. a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling

[the reflections are missing. all of them. in mirrors. in television screens. on the backs of spoons. nothing looks back at you.

then, figures do show up. not your own, like you'd expect. thin, wispy apparitions, people with pleading eyes and hands, reaching out to place their palms against the surface, from their own end. faces familiar and not, beckoning, mouthing words you just can't quite make out. help me, it might be. get me out, perhaps. just until you're close enough, until your skin warms the surface of whatever it is you're peering into. and then, those same hands wrap, all too real, burning-cold against your flesh, and pull, trying to drag you through the surface, making up for their lack of strength with desperation. any flesh unlucky enough to enter the reflection comes back bone-white and cold, all sensation dead, though it will fade within a few hours.

in retrospect, it looks a bit more like they were saying something different. something more like, better you than me. or maybe it's not even words at all. they look a bit more like they're laughing.]

3. complex mementos

[but, hey. sometimes changes are good! like, today, in Playback, there's a brand-new game available for all the children to play! it's an old-fashioned sort of claw machine, the type that's so large, a particularly dedicated kindergartner could wriggle their way inside. the prizes vary, and sit loose: bags of candy, stuffed toys, firearms, painfully early-00s electronics, actually that one just looks like a dead iguana, tiny ship-branded knickknacks... like all the other games in the arcade, the game starts up automatically upon being touched; lack of quarters shouldn't keep you from having fun! pro tip: they are loaded, and they will go off if you suck at claw games and let it fall.]

Comments

[cheerleader]

I really don't think Pac-Man is supposed to be metal as fuck.

[She says it as seriously as she can possibly manage. But her smile betrays her, as she tips her head enough to look up at him and watch him with great interest. It's interesting to her to watch how he reacts to her, to see what will make him smile and what might cause him to pull away.]

He's just a little guy, you know. He's cute!

[Like her, she almost adds on. But there's flirting and then there's flirting, and she's not sure either of them are really ready for the second just yet.]

But we don't have to go there. Not if you don't want to. There's places to eat.

[But eating isn't ever her favorite thing to try and get through. So that might end in disaster too. Chrissy makes a quick decision that quiet is better than trying to distract themselves with loud noises in an arcade she doesn't even want to go to.]

Or you can walk me back to my cabin.

[munstar]

[There's just something about Chrissy Cunningham throwing the phrase metal as fuck at him with that serious little expression on her face that makes his heart race and his stomach do a little flip. He's staring when she turns to look at him and it takes him a solid thirty seconds to snap himself out of it enough to find his voice.]

Hey, you can be cute and metal as fuck. I don't make the rules.

[He's not big on following them, either. It occurs to him, suddenly, that he's not entirely sure if he's still talking about Pac-Man or not.]

I don't mind. Though I feel like the lack of quarters might make the arcade experience a little awkward. Might make trying to eat a bit difficult too- unless you feel like spotting me.

[Money might eventually be a thing he has to worry about here, if only because it always seems to be a thing to worry about. In the meantime, it's back to managing on whatever he can get for free. He's in the process of asking if she'd woken up with any money or any indication of how they'd even gotten here when she speaks up again.]

I could do that.

[He actually has to stop himself from adding if you want because it seems pretty clear that she does want. Otherwise, she probably wouldn't have made the suggestion.]

Joan Watson | Elementary

[formersurgeon]

1. when you eliminate the impossible

[When Joan wakes up, the first thing she notices is this isn't her bed. Her bed has lots of blankets, not starched sheets. Then it registers that this isn't her room. She sits straight up with alarm. What the hell?]

Sherlock? Sherlock!

[Her partner has got to be behind this somehow. He's pulled some sort of trick and redecorated her room so it looks wrong, to prove a point related to their most recent case. But...no. This definitely isn't her room. Maybe he managed to bring her somewhere else while she was sleeping? Although to do that he probably would have needed to use sedatives of some sort...which he would never do, being a recovering addict himself.]

Sherlock!

[There's no answer. Joan looks around for a note, since Sherlock often leaves her one when he's let her sleep as he pursues a lead. She finds the card on the bedside table, but it's not from Sherlock. She'd recognize his handwriting anywhere, even when he tries to disguise it. She reads the card, and it only deepens her confusion and concern.

She leaves her room, looking around, and tries to go left. Her legs refuse to work.]

The hell?

[She struggles against it for a moment. Nothing. So she tries going the other way, and her legs free up. At the next intersection her first turn makes her legs freeze up again, but they work going in the other direction. Okay. She's being led somehow. She continues, following the directions, and decides that this is a dream. It has to be a dream. Maybe she was exposed to some substance that causes bizarre and vivid dreams? Maybe she was dosed by someone? Sherlock wouldn't do that, so it had to be someone else. A suspect? Someone at the department with a grudge? Could Moriarty be involved?

She gets to the rendezvous spot, and her stomach drops with fear when she sees the faceless woman. She just barely manages not to scream as the woman puts the lei on her. Okay, she thinks. There it is. Definitely a dream. Faceless people are common in dreams. Supposedly you only see the faces of people you know. So it has to be a dream. Just a very, very weird, real-feeling dream. It is the only thing that makes sense.

Except there are other people around who have faces, and who she does not recognize. She speaks to the nearest one.]

Hey...sorry, where are we?

2. whatever remains, however improbable

[Joan is sure Freud would have a field day with the meaning behind a lack of reflection. Lack of self-knowledge, perhaps? Detachment from reality? It's pretty straightforward stuff.

When the other faces start to appear, however, Joan is deeply unsettled. What does it mean? Are these parts of herself? Parts begging to be released? People she's meant to be? Or she fears she is? What does it mean?

Then she sees Sherlock, looking at her with haunted eyes, mouthing a plea for help, pressing his hands to the glass. She approaches the mirror, trying to understand, the desperation on his face causing her heart to wrench. She reaches out to press her palms against the glass as well...

HE GRABS HER AND YANKS HER ARMS INTO THE MIRROR IT HURTS HIS FACE SPLITS IN A WILD GRIN AS HE LAUGHS

Joan screams, trying to pull herself free.]

3. must be the truth

[It's a dream. It has to be a dream. That claw machine has candy and guns and a dead iguana. The metaphors are laughably simple. The candy is Sherlock's drugs, the guns are the criminals they investigate, the iguana is Andrew's and it's dead because Andrew is dead and he died because of her and she's never let go of that...

Clearly a dream. Has to be a dream.

She still can't figure out who all these people are, though. Maybe Jung was right and there's a collective subconscious that connects all minds, and these are actually other people in their own dreams. She wonders if they're having the same experience she's having.

She turns to the nearest person.]

Hey...this is going to sound weird, but what do you see in the claw machine?

[light_mischief]

Alright, he's keeping up. That's good! There's hope yet. Skulduggery gives it no more than five minutes before they circle back around to the but you're a skeleton! problem, but five minutes is all he needs.

"You've become a shade after being trapped aboard this ship, where your soul was slowly siphoned away until you were left as nothing more than a ghost of your former self." He hesitates to even call the shades ghosts at this point, with how little they seem to actually exist. "Which is what will likely happen to us, assuming we don't work out a way to stop it."

Hm. There's always the chance of there being clues on the other side of the looking glass... But also, he absolutely is not going into a mirror on this ship.

"So... it's not a great thing to be stuck here, most of the time."

2

[saltwaterlungs]

[ The mirror-ghosts are, unfortunately, right in Darcy's wheelhouse, and she's been keeping a close eye on the places she knows have a large number of reflective surfaces. 'Protect the living and the dead' was the oath she swore soon after her death, and when she hears a woman scream somewhere on the ship, it comes to mind very quickly.

A moment after Joan's grabbed by the shade of Sherlock, something else appears from her shadow and shoulder-checks her out of reach. There's a flash of steel, and a raspy voice like a girl had been screaming tells the reflection- ]

Not for you! Fuck off! You had your turn!

[ It recedes back, and now that the excitement has simmered down, her savior is... very clearly a teenage girl, with an old looking sword in hand and a strong French accent. ]

You good?

into the deep, what do they seek? | Darcy

[prince_of_beasts]

saltwaterlungs

The mirrors Dimitri knows are mostly polished silver or copper. Glass mirrors are rare and obscenely expensive even by the standards of royalty; the ones that do exist are small, and don't even begin to approach the clarity and evenness of reflection of the mirrors on-board the Serena Eterna. Which is to say that the full wall of mirrors in Calgona's yoga studio is an object of wonder and some fascination, and Dimitri's taken to practicing sword and lance drills there. He won't let his skills rust, even without access to a proper weapon, testing out the novel ability to critique his own form.

Today, something is wrong. The moment he steps into the studio, Dimitri snaps to alert, sensing something off before he processes the emptiness in the mirror. Where his reflection should greet him, there's nothing but the empty room, doubled in apparent size ... until the mirror isn't empty. Cloudy shapes reach out to him, hands outstretched, pleading.

His lampstand -- it helps to practice with something in his hands -- clatters to the floor, chipping the waxed surface.

The flames he feels are illusory, he knows that. But he can hear them, crying, screaming behind the pane of glass, begging for salvation -- there's no ground here, after all, no permafrost for them to be trapped beneath. How can he have been such a fool? The mirrors must have taken them instead --

Dimitri sprints towards the mirror, flings out his arms for the grasping hands. He gasps, startled, when his hands are dragged into the glass, but the numbness doesn't perturb him, nor the bloodless, dead tissue he manages to reclaim. He struggles not for his own sake, but in desperate effort to drag the shades out with him, to save them from their silvered prison.

"Please," he begs, heels skidding on the waxed floor. "Please! Father -- " The shades warp into faces he knows, the same pleas, the same dying cries ringing in the empty room. " -- Glenn -- stepmother, all of you -- " He'd never seen Dedue's family's faces, barely glimpsed his mother crumpled in the dust, but with dreamlike conviction he recognizes them amongst the dead. "I'm trying, I'm trying -- let me help you!"

[formersurgeon]

[When Joan is knocked out of the way she quickly scrambles back to the wall on the other side of the hallway from the mirror. She watches, her breath quickened by fear and pain, as the faces fade back from the mirror's surface. Then the girl turns and asks if she's okay, and Joan glances down at her hands. They're as white as the underbelly of a dead fish, as is the skin halfway up her forearms.]

I can't feel my hands.

[Her voice is quiet but tight, her surface calm holding back internal fear.)

[saltwaterlungs]

[ Thankfully this isn't Darcy's first rodeo with the effects of the shades, and she withdraws her sword back to her belt, taking a few steps closer. ]

Yeah, they do that. The feeling comes back eventually. You'll be fine.

[ Darcy gestures broadly to the closest exit, trying to usher her out like a good osychopomp. ]

Next time, you'll leave the creepy mirror ghost dickheads alone, ehn?

[saltwaterlungs]

"DIMITRI-" is all the warning he gets before Darcy's physically shoving him out of the reach of the ghosts. Someone Darcy has come to consider a friend this close to death at the hands of ghosts is unconscionable, and when she strikes back at them, it's half-blind with outrage, shattering the mirror and the shades along with it.

"What the fuck were you thinking?!" she hisses at him, balling a fist in the front of his shirt, "are you trying to get yourself killed?!"

[formersurgeon]

Ghosts...

[Joan gets to her feet despite not feeling or really being able to use her hands. She's still looking at the mirror, trying to make sense of it all.]

Are they the people they look like, or do they change shape?

[saltwaterlungs]

No idea. Knowing this place, it's the Captain fucking with us. But either way, it doesn't matter. There's no helping them like this.

[ There's a grim stoicism to her words that... might sound a bit ridiculous coming from someone who still has pimples. ]

What's your name?

[prince_of_beasts]

Darcy's rescue comes none too soon, as Dimitri's foot slips and crosses beyond the glass. He snatches it back, but it's too late. The deadened limb refuses traction, and he stumbles, giving up precious inches of space. He loses that leg up to the thigh; his bangs brush the silvered surface, and the mirror's just claimed his other foot when Darcy hauls him back to safety.

It's for the best, honestly, because Dimitri fights. If he had all his limbs he could wrench himself free, or worse, drag Darcy in with him; as it is, he's a gangly, flopping deadweight, and he can't stop Darcy from shattering the mirrors, let alone throw himself back towards the shades.

He screams as the shards fall, ragged and raw. "NO!" he howls, flinging his arms haphazardly towards the breaking mirror. "No, please -- please don't go -- I can still -- I can -- !"

It takes him a long moment to focus on Darcy's face, confused by the sudden lack of mirror, the replacement of shades with a living face. He can barely hear her over the shouting dead, but he can tell she's angry. "Why did you interfere?!" he cries back. "They need help! Can't you hear them?!"

[configuration_birdwatcher]

They mentally run that sentence back and replay it to make sure they heard correctly. They did, and the human seems very certain that this is a wizard-related situation; this is an established feature of her worldview, not a wild guess after exhausting all other possibilities.

// How do you know? they ask with a nervous whistle. If she's even partially right, that means they're in a situation most closely comparable to the teleportation accident that separated Tracer from conventional spacetime. Without Ganymede.

// I go by Bastion, or E54, they add when Ylva introduces herself.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

// We're the captives of a sadist who can distort physics, Bastion summarises with a dismayed whirr, looking back at the claw machine's jumble of cargo.

That's a lot to process. Should they be glad Ganymede isn't here? He's a fragile creature, much easier to break and harder to put back together than themself, and while they've always been able to protect him from cats, birds of prey and other assorted predators roaming the forest, an asshole human with a gun and malicious intent might be able to act before they can stop them.

[actuallyawolf]

"Well," Ylva says, counting out the points on her fingers, "one, this place is very weird. There's definitely nothing like this giant metal boat full of weird things where I'm from. Two, I don't know how I got here. I wasn't anywhere near the sea, and now I am, and you can't do that without some sort of portal, but like I said, I don't think this is just distance. Three, I've been pulled into other planes before, and even gone on purpose a few times. It's always worked out okay, but sometimes things get little weird. There's always a way home, though."

She gives Bastion a smile that's all teeth. "So I'm not too worried. We find the wizard responsible, and then I'll bite them until they send us home. Easy."

[serialskiller]

"Yeah, that's about the color of things. Some of the people aren't awful, though. I mean, some definitely are, but there's some who are tolerable. And there's at least a couple scientist engineer types, who are handy if things like us get damaged."

Yes, things, not people.

3

[businessorlibation]

An assortment of items. A bag of lollipops. A stuffed shark toy. That looks like some sort of pistol--probably loaded, knowing the captain's sense of humor.

[If the man speaking to Joan is a figment of her imagination, he probably says something about decadence. He's near her height, with slicked-back black hair and pale brown eyes that are almost golden in the right light, dressed in a nice tailored suit with a white dinner jacket. His accent is something European and hard to place (because the country he's from doesn't exist on her earth). In all, he seems a refined fellow.]

3. Also, hello, I'm sorry, but only a little.

[lightconductor]

"Hm?"

Watson gives her a warm smile, because of course he does, and leans obligingly to look in the claw machine. He hasn't paid them much attention, really, but once he looks, it's a bit more surprising than he expected. "Some sweets, some firearms... Wait, is that a dead lizard?"

He shakes his head. "An iguana, I think, but I'm no expert. Good heavens."

Not Subtle Revealings

[serialskiller]

The tall, broad figure was standing off to the side during the muster drill, arms crossed as it examined the newcomers. It let out a snort, just short of a laugh at Eddie's question.

"If you get an actual answer to that, share with the class. I'm pretty sure it's 'never'."

It's almost six and a half feet tall, built like a brick shithouse, and wearing a hoodie despite the weather, the words PreservationAux Survey Team on the front.

1 because we might as well let the timeline break to start lol

[pineapplesalmon]

Sometimes, César attends the briefing to see if there's anyone panicking that could use some extra support. Or, alternatively, to be there for them to ask questions.

He's changed up his looks a bit since being pulled on the boat so Google will fail you. Over a white dress shirt with the first two buttons unbuttoned, he wears a deep v-neck double breasted grey vest. Black pants, dark brown riding boots, and double-looped belt with old-fashioned leather belt bags complete the look. Did she get kidnapped to a steampunk convention on a cruise ship, and did he put his cosplay together at the last minute? One must wonder.

He rests his forearms on his belt bags and shrugs, smiling sympathetically. "It's as Miss Friday said. You're on the Serena Eterna. As to where and when we are? I don't have the equipment to determine that. As crazy as this sounds, people are being pulled from all over the multiverse. For example, I'm from Earth, the year is 2013, and my Earth's technology is further ahead than most. Anti-gravity is standard technology and we have a space elevator between Earth and LEO, Low Earth Orbit. But there are other people from the late 1800s and the early 1900s, people from vastly different Earths, people from other worlds entirely, and people even from slightly in the future to me."

Oh, he's a bit of a talker, but at least he gives completely explanations...?

[be_seeing_you]

"I'm no hermit." So, that should answer it for Lucas too.

Number 6's expression softens just a touch as Lucas lets out that sigh. The feeling is very much mutual.

"Bad luck you've stumbled into that nastiness on your first day here. And, yes, there has been an extremely high learning curve." Cell phones? Is that the proper name for these devices they were given?

"I'm told those cell phones are simply a newer form of technology. As opposed to being magic, which is also something that is apparently commonplace here." Oh yes, he is still having a hard time adjusting to it.

[dokkans]

Oh wow, a scarecrow... that must've been really tough! I hope you were careful and didn't swallow any of his straw.

[ The least impressive thing she's heard... aw, she got excited for nothing. ]

Wendy Watson | The Middleman

[dubdubdubbie]

Not Subtle Revealings

On a scale of weird shit Wendy has had to deal with since becoming a Middleman-in-Training, this is definitely going near the top of the list. Waking up a cruise ship and then being lei’d by a freaky woman with no face welcoming her aboard? Yeah, that’s a whole level of ‘what-the-fuck’ that she hadn’t been prepared to deal with today. Especially not after having just come back from a trip to a mirror universe where she’d been an evil bitch and her wholesome-as-apple-pie boss had rocked both an eyepatch and a motorcycle.

Also, her Middlewatch isn’t working which means she’s going to have to rescue herself this time.

Again.

“Well, that wasn’t Judy and this ain't the Pacific Princess, that’s for sure,” she mutters, looking around.

--

A Permanent Reminder of a Temporary Feeling

Okay, so this place is definitely an eleven on the weird shit-o-meter. And that number is only going up the more she explores, especially when she comes across a mirror that doesn’t seem to show her reflection. It’s just blank, until it suddenly isn’t anymore. The distressed apparitions remind her briefly of the Omega Theta Nu girls, and that’s what causes her to lean forward, one hand reaching up to touch the mirror’s surface.

When something grabs her, Wendy shrieks in a way that she’ll probably be embarrassed about later, but right now she’s being pulled towards the mirror and that is absolutely not okay.

“Oh hell no Casper!” she yells, wrenching her hand back from the glass before…whatever it is can pull her through. “I am not getting possessed today!”

--
Complex Momentos

Video games are more Wendy’s speed, the gorier the better, but she’s never met a claw machine she couldn’t go up against and eventually win, so she approaches the machine with only a little less caution than she’s approached anything else on this ship so far. It seems fairly normal, if a bit bigger than what she’s used to.

Then she notices the weird-ass assortment of prizes inside.

“...is that a gun?” Guns, dead animals, candy, and tourist tchotkes. Okay, definitely not your average mall-arcade prize dispenser, a fact which is confirmed when she touches the joystick and the claw begins to move like she’s already put quarters in the slot. But after the mirror ghosts and the faceless lady, having a weapon to defend herself with doesn’t seem like such a bad plan, even if that monkey in the corner holding a banana is pretty freaking adorable. “Gun or stuffed monkey, gun or stuffed monkey…”

[dokkans]

"Very heavy. Not too easy to use either. Mmm... you know, I see your point."

The crane was a good idea in theory! The prize is literally right there, and it shouldn't be difficult to grab.

So then maybe, there might be a better idea.

"You wanna give it a spin? Maybe it just doesn't like me."

[dokkans]

Right, right...

[ Bonnie absolutely shrugs the paw off, but otherwise she keeps the routine going. ]

I just got lost, is all! Now where is that cabin...

[ What the heck's up with this dog, though? ]