sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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.]

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“I know what it is,” Erik says almost sharply, though his voice is softer a moment later when he adds “though it’s been some time since I practiced.”

"We don't really, either," Steven replies equally quietly. "I thought we did, but. I guess I imagined it." He takes a deep breath in through his nose and huffs out a sigh.

"Well it won't be that long now before Rosh Hashanah. We're in room 135. You're welcome to come by and. We can do a little something?" Steven offers with a tight-lipped smile and a glint of light in his hopeful eyes. He thinks Marc could have used the community. Maybe he can encourage them both to. Just sit around and eat lots of sweets and drink things. It doesn't have to have all those complicated emotions tangled up into it.

Clara doesn't know all the details, but she does know him.

"I know he really didn't want you to kill anyone. What do you mean, 'for all the good it did you?'"

She only has Missy to draw from, but she knows he always had hope for her. "His timelines are weird, but I think he regenerated then." Clara's been in his time stream and it was jumbled, so there's always the chance she's wrong. She only remembers his shouting, really.

"Doesn't matter," she answers when Clara asks her to clarify. The Doctor had left her to rot, and she'll probably never forgive that particular incarnation of him. Though she's warmed up to other ones.

"The Doctor?" she asks, turning back to Clara. "No, I don't believe so. He lived for quite a while after we parted ways. Certainly long enough to make himself a half-human clone." She doesn't know the details of all that, but she met that one and he remembered very well who she was and what he'd done to her. He even seemed a bit guilty about it.

"I'm sorry he what?"

Clara's head tilts to the side because...he failed to mention that out there somewhere he has a clone of himself running around. She doesn't even know what else to say to that, staring at Lucy and waiting for more.

She shrugs. "I've met him a few times, but I honestly don't remember the details of how it came about. If I ever knew," she elaborates - as much as she's capable of elaborating.

"He's out there somewhere, one heart, human lifespan, still got the Doctor's face - and his hang-ups. Well, mostly. This one actually has sex, it seems like. Real uptight about it though."

That had been one of the topics the last time they met. Much to Lucy's amusement, and his embarrassment.

"Me, specifically, or us in general?"

Two very different answers.

There's plenty of clues that Ava has strung together between his line of questioning, his reactions and lack of to her own.

But she doesn't plan on giving away her full line of logic. Because part of it is also a bluff. And also it becomes harder to get info out of people once they realize you're a spy. Best to play down her strategy.

"Oh! Statistics, mostly. Unless you're here as fodder like the rest of the normies. No offense," she holds up her hands, flickering in and out like a faulty hologram. "But also when I mentioned being here for our powers, you didn't... deny having any. You kinda missed your 'what why me?' moment. But if you don't, oof, good luck."

1. not subtle revealings

This is, shockingly, not the most jarring return to consciousness Jack has experienced.

A moment ago: lying on a wet tiled floor, wind knocked out of him, exhaustion and what's probably another concussion pinning him down as he watches a giant of a man get brought down and stabbed to death by five little girls. He feels his consciousness slip away to the sounds of metal piercing flesh over and over again, and his vision goes black.

Now: a clean room, with light too bright and warm to be artificial shining through the cracks of the heavy curtains in front of them. A bed that's softer than any floor or bundle of clothes in Rapture. Air that's dry and clean compared to the heavy, moist, stagnant air he'd been breathing for the last howevermany days. The room smells nice, not from any special scents or perfumes but because it lacks the stench of rust, blood, salt, and rot that stuck to everything.

... If this isn't a dream, Jack's probably going to have to shower.

Jack sits up carefully, and the fact that nothing hurts doesn't cross his mind. Or maybe it does, but it's at the back of the line to be noticed after every other difference between where he closed his eyes and where he opened them.

The room doesn't vanish, and isn't suddenly populated by ADAM hallucinations. No one kindly asks him to grab a radio or anything.

His mind stops spinning in place as his eyes land on the curtain. His feet hit the floor (solid, carpeted, dry) and bring him over to the curtains. He grabs them and yanks them back, maybe a little harder than he should, but--

It's the ocean and sure, he's had his fill of it, but it's the surface of the ocean. It comes with a view of the sky and the light of the sun, so fuck, he'll take it.

He reads the note, grabs the lifejacket, and steps out with the intention of making his way to deck one eventually, just not directly.

But he turns, and can't move.

It's almost like when he tried to force himself to the metro, before that second dose of lot 192. Almost, because he could, with effort, force himself forward to a point, and when he couldn't anymore, it felt like he was leaning against a current. This is just his limbs locking up entirely.

This is closer to when Ryan told him to stop. To sit, to stand, to turn, run, stop. He can't make his legs move, he can't even lean himself forward. The phrase should be out of his head, the strings should be cut, but something has control over him.

Anyone else on the way to deck one, or simply on the way to or from their cabin, will see a man frozen on the spot and looking a heartbeat away from a panic attack.

2. a permanent reminder of a something something

[When you've made a recent habit of injecting experimental gene-modifying drugs into your body, there are some things that don't phase you. Like, for example, ghostly figures where they shouldn't be. Like anywhere, but in this specific moment, in place of Jack's reflection in the mirror.

Jack just stands a good foot and a half away from it, arms crossed, cigarette held in his mouth (unlit, Friday, cool your jets), just watching the shapes in the mirror.

Shapes that he assumes are exclusive to his vision, given that hallucinations are a personal experience, as far as he understands it, and that's obviously what he's looking at here. Just the ol' ADAM hallucinations coming back to him, and yeah, those were based on 'genetic memory' or some other nonsense, which should exclude anything on this ship, but - maybe the mirror was close enough to something to trigger it?]

Huh, that's new.

[Anyway, Jack's curious how this will play out, and unaware of or uncaring of how weird it might look to just be standing in front of a decorative hall mirror, unmoving except to wave his hand in front of it now and then, to see how the images inside or the faint sounds from it might change.]

3. complex mementos

[For a guy from 1960, Jack's coping well with the technology on the ship. Sure, it helps that they made him to be able to adapt quickly (though no perfectly) to new challenges, but it also helps that in his mind, this is as much of a plunge into science fiction as landing in Rapture was. But cleaner. And without any mechanical bits to hack, and more convenient, and no monetary cost, and - look, it's not a perfectly 1:1 comparison, the point is that Jack's been a fish out of water in one town of technological marvels, what's a cruise ship?

That all said, this 'Playback' place is overwhelming. The noise and the lights of the place and the array of video games begging for attention are a bit of a sensory overload for Jack, and this combined with a feeling that maybe he shouldn't be here? Maybe he's not in the, uh, target demographic for-

oh hey there's guns in there!

Call it habit, but the second Jack sees a case with weapons inside it - among other fun goodies - he beelines for it. While he knows what a claw machine is, he only ever saw a functioning one in the fake memories they printed up for him at Fontaine Futuristics. But the concept seems easy enough, especially when you don't have to spend any of your own money for it. These buttons move the crane back and forth, these move it side to side, and these move the claw up and down.

Jack decides to calibrate himself by going after a ~~safer~~ easier prize, one of those big stuffed toys. There's a learning curve, but after a few minutes he's starting to get a pile of toys started up beside him, and now he's trying to master grabbing a big bag of candy.]

Edited (what if i put hooks in my top levels what if i did that) 2022-08-14 20:57 (UTC)

He doesn’t buy that for a second.

But in a good way.

“I can manipulate metal,” he tells her. A beat. “I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I can manipulate magnetic fields,” he concedes.

“Pick one and then when you’ve told me it, tell me the other one,” Erik suggests.

Erik watches his profile sidelong for a moment.

“Imagined it?”

Ava just smiles innocently. She likes to figure out these types, their potential as a threat. To her, to the ship.

"Ah, well we're surrounded by quite a lot of it," Ava points out the obvious, curious if there's any limitations on his abilities. Naturally, or enforced by the Captain's control.

"Does that make you a mutant? You look normal enough." But she knows enough about genetics to know mutations are rarely so obvious as tentacles or an extra head.

She obviously didn't know this and looks stunned, blinking at the brand new information. And then Lucy starts talking about his sex life and she raises both eyebrows pretty much to the ceiling.

"You seem to know an awful lot about him."

Edited 2022-08-13 02:06 (UTC)

“I do, don’t I? And yet? I’m so much better than ‘normal’,” Erik explains. “The next stage of human evolution, some say.”

Like him, for example. He says it.

"Oh, humanity is a bit of a stagnant drag," Ava agrees. Her best friends are a magical skeleton and a robot. So. That's about where she is on that subject.

"Spent most of my life wishing to be normal, begging to be fixed."

“Did they persecute you?” Erik asks with interest.

"That's such a simple way to put it," Ava laughs, short and bitter. "They kidnapped me, isolated and experimented on me. Pulled my strings along like their stupid little puppet."

“I’ve seen a lot of that,” Erik says darkly. “Why kill what you can harness and use?”

"I was far too young and naive to see the obvious. That they never intended to let me go. But. Then they got outed as being infiltrated by Hydra Nazis, so," Ava just... rubs at her brow. "Good opportunity to escape in the chaos. Not that I was all that free then, either."

The baby face strikes again! Lucas does wait patiently while she tests out her newfound mobility, offering a shrug in response at first.

"Same as the rest of us. Nothing's really concrete, but a few people have theories the Captain brought us here to like..." How to put this. He trails off, waving a hand idly around as if the answer could be plucked out of thin air. "Mess with us for one reason or the other."

Not exactly a lie, it's not like he knows the truth. "I'm relatively new here myself but I figured swinging by to greet anyone new wouldn't hurt, if I can answer any questions?"

“It was Nazis that experimented on me,” Erik admits. “I’m not familiar with the hydra division, but I was also a child at the time. In the camps.”

If Erik's hand makes contact with Vance it'll just phase right through him like he's some sort of hologram. Which would probably be preferable to bring a ghost, but oh well. It doesn't seem to bother him any.

He just shrugs, "Neither did I, old man."

Alright, 'old man' is a little harsh, but he's a snotty teenager and everyone over 30 is old to him.

There's a very distinct shift in Ava's demeanor, a softening of her expression. "As different as every world is, it's always the same. That pervasive evil of man."

"I monitor the ship with my drones, watch serials, and...I spend a lot of time learning. Dr. Watson's training me as a medical assistant, I'm trying to learn how to draw, and Fio's teaching me ballet. She's, I'm fairly certain, the youngest aboard." It gestures a height that implies that this Fio is a child. Not a teenager, but a little kid, an actual proper little kid.

"A lot of the humans spend their time drinking, fucking and being awkward about who they are or aren't fucking."

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TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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Jack | Bioshock

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not subtle revealings

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