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

[hargrieving]

"It's a commercial cruise liner, Klaus. Bunch of people stuck at sea, stir crazy and seasick... Best way to keep everyone from losing their absolute minds would be to have a bar on every floor."

In for one rude awakening then, since the likes of John's, The Drunken Sailor, and Topy have done remarkably little to prevent cabin fever and all out slaughter on board the Serena Eterna. And a second in the form of: Five doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. No idea what's going on here, nor how remarkably wrong his immediate assumptions are. But it's only been the better part of an hour. Barring any sudden and instantaneous paradox side effects that would somehow melt this reality down to atoms as well, he'll eventually figure it out.

As for his suit — it is kinda sad, isn't it? They're drawing level with the glass elevator on the atrium, and Five's pulling his hand from his pocket to shake the frayed sleeve experimentally before pressing the call button.

"When would I have found time to fight someone? No, this is all Guardian." Diego's good, Lila's steadily inclining from average to alright, but if Klaus thinks there are enough brain cells between the two of them to pull off roughing him up this severely? ...well, it wouldn't be wrong, just terribly insulting to say out loud.

"Ugly bastard cut off half my arm. Still not entirely sure how I got it back..."

But! Whiskey first, existential crisis later.

[busball]

Klaus supposes that makes about as much sense as anything else. Really, he's just trying to come to terms with the faceless lady still and how she could see enough to put a lei around his neck. It's sort of fashionable? Then again, Fei had those birds, so maybe it's like that? But he hasn't seen any birds now that he's thinking about it. Is that weird or not weird? He doesn't even know.

"Wait...you're...that was like..." He looks at Five's arm and then at his sleeve. Klaus is both confused by that and yet...he guesses it makes sense. It doesn't make sense and Klaus is mentally hurting himself doing the mental gymnastics. "I mean, I know you got your arm back after Allison pushed that weird button and we turned up in the garden, but Allison wasn't there. Luther was, though! So that was nice."

He frowns as he stands there, waiting. "Wow. This is weird. I usually don't know more than everyone else." Everyone else being the only other person from home that's here.

[hargrieving]

It's not like anyone really looks to Klaus as a fountain of knowledge, but it'd be remiss not to listen to him here. Maybe he's best equated to a broken spigot, who occasionally gushes out enough logic that his insight makes sense.

"What garden??" Five asks, with all the scoffing contempt of one who's accustomed to knowing the most in any given room he walks into. But Klaus mentions Allison hitting a button, Luther returning to a seemingly tangible plane of the living, and Five's attitude takes a nosedive. He isn't fond of being the last to know important details about the future — rigorously chases them — and stationed outside the elevator door on this strange cruise ship that doesn't bear a single mark of the reality they'd just come from, it seems Klaus has the leg up on timelines. It rankles. Unpleasantly.

And the look he gives his brother is absolutely withering, an interrogation held entirely in the irises of their eyes. They're still inevitably on their way to a drink but for now, a sidebar.

I missed something, Five acknowledges. Like a battle plan with a glaring flaw that's just been pointed out, and he's taking a pointed step into Klaus' personal space to hiss.

"Tell me everything."

[busball]

"The one with the weird mini monument for Dad," he says after a moment. "It's like...a bust on a concrete thing...but okay, that's probably not important. We just kind of showed up there." He's trying to think up all the points of interest. He holds up his hands as Five hisses at him, which should show pretty clearly that he doesn't have his classic hello or goodbye tattoos or his Umbrella Academy one either. He doesn't do that for that purpose, but it's something obvious all the same.

"The stars fueled some sort of machine thing and it was sucking all the energy and particles according to the old bastard. It was draining us. We could have died, honestly. We probably almost did. But then Allison killed Dad and pushed this red button?" He's still confused about that. "And then we woke up in the garden where the Hotel should have been, but it wasn't." He squinted briefly. "Luther walked out of a door and joined us. Lila, Diego, you, me, Viktor, and dick Ben were there. Sloane and Allison are missing. None of us have powers. Annnnnnd I was going after Luther because he went to go looking for Sloane."

And that's it. He's pretty sure that's it.