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

[decohere]

"My father is already long dead. Blew himself up, and my mother along with him, it was all very dramatic," Ava says flippantly, because it's better than getting emotional about it to a stranger who clearly has more immediate problems to work through. "But I'm here for weird prizes, not therapy. Just try not to take that 'kill dad' energy out on the Captain, or we'll all get destroyed by Eternity."

Ava's rather distracted as she aims her claw for one of the stuffed toys. The metal prongs close around its head and lifts the toy up a couple inches, before it slips right back out and into the pile again. Ava sighs.

"Dumb thing is rigged," she grumbles, hands one her hips as she glances down at Klaus again. She can see why he got himself stuck there. "So they're giving out a ransom note now, huh? What's it say?"

[busball]

"Dad's, am I right?" He laughs at that for a moment, which doesn't seem like the correct response to that statement. He wonders if she actually cares about her dad or not, but he doesn't ask. "Mine did something weird to Mom's programming so she wouldn't save him when he killed himself." He's still squirming to get free, so there's a little distraction to his tone. "The best way to bring people together is at a wedding or a funeral," he quotes, with an exaggerated impression of his father.

"Last time he killed Luther and me. Well, left me to die, I guess." He waves it off with his free hand because he's also of the mind to make things seem like less of a big deal than they really are. "But that's what you get when a man who hates kids buys so many."

He stills for a moment as she asks about the note. "Oh right. Hold on." He squirms again, this time to get the paper out of the pocket on the side closest to the arm stuck in the machine. He fishes it out after a while and hands it over. "Guess it's not really a ransom note. Just a...whatever this is."

[decohere]

She cares for her father so very much, and none of that will ever bring him back. None of it will change what happened to her, so there's really no point in elaborating. "Your Mom's... programming?" Ava asks curiously at the choice of word. "Ah, so the problem took care of itself," she comments of his expressed desire to kill his father. And then giggles at the impression, even if she doesn't quite know who it's of. Probably the subject at hand.

But every single sentence this man says just throws Ava for another loop. Buys? Who buys children? Then again, SHIELD probably handed over the orphanage some hush money when they took her away. "No wonder you're needing drugs," Ava almost sounds sympathetic.

She's too busy with the claw machine still to take the note, a dismissive wave of her hand as she tries again for the stuffed toy. "Does it say anything about how your energy is being siphoned away to power all this and that soon enough we'll all be lifeless husks?" she asks instead, managing to drop the small stuffed fish into the hole after a few more attempts, right along with Klaus's stuck arm. "Oh yay."

[busball]

"Yeah. Mom's a robot," he says without any sign of how strange that would sound. It was like saying he'd eaten a sandwich or liked the color yellow. "Yeah, but then it untook care of itself." But that was cause they went to see him in the past and that had apparently been the wrong choice? Or something.

"That's..." He frowns. "It was the ghosts, really. Well, not here. There's not any and I apparently don't have my abilities anyway, so..." He shrugs. It's fine.

He groans at the mention of having his energy siphoned away. "Not that again. I just finished having my energy siphoned and it was the worst. Now I don't have my powers or any of my tattoos weirdly." He's brought back to the present by the feeling of something hitting his arm and looks over. "What even is that?"

[decohere]

She knows Maeve is a robot and a mother, so it shouldn't surprise her so much. Still, Ava wonders how that works. "Are you? A robot," Ava asks. "And that's typical around here. People die, they come back the next day... so it honestly creates more problems than it solves. If you're going to go the serial killer route." He has vibes about him, but maybe not those ones.

"Is that why you were bought? For your abilities?" and now she does manage to sound sympathetic enough, even as she drops a bag of what she hopes are candies into the prize hole as well. It took her a few tries, but she looks rather pleased.

She's not sure how any of that would get rid of tattoos, of all things. "A fish, I think. What were you trying for? The dead lizard?"

[busball]

Klaus laughs at the question, but he seems obviously not insulted. “No. Dad just built a robot so he didn’t have to deal with raising kids or our general emotions.” But dying over and over? Also old hat. “Huh. I feel like this is just my life on repeat. Just constantly a mess of dying over and over. But eh. I’m not really the killer in the family. That’s Diego or Five. Apparently Allison, too. Also once Viktor caused the apocalypse and exploded the moon.”

He sighs as another thing is dropped on him. “Yes. We were all bought for our abilities. Dad made us think Viktor didn’t have any for a long time. Made Allison rumor him to forget he even had powers. But what else is new?”

His nose scrunches up and he continues struggling for a moment before trying to squirm out of his shirt again. “Why would I want a dead lizard?”

[decohere]

"Oh, of course. Just like the Captain built whatever Friday is to probably deal with all our whining and general emotions," Ava figures that's the purpose of customer service desks, after all. Why not build a robot nanny when you clearly don't view the children you bought as anything but opportunity to exploit.

"... Good, fuck the moon," Ava proclaims because that's a whole thing around here, shaking the machine a bit to get a prize that fell short of the hole to topple over the edge. She's not above cheating. Have another plushie, Klaus, as she hums along in acknowledgment to him airing out the dirty laundry of his apparently very dysfunctional family.

"I don't know. You seem the type. Dead and lizardy." She wiggles the handle and picks up the barrel of a gun, with little luck as it slips right out of the handle. She tries again.

[busball]

"He and Dad would get along super well," he says, a mixture of amusement and annoyance in his tone. "Guess that makes sense why she feels mom-like. Only Mom's name is Grace, not Friday." Honestly, he's not entirely sure that this place isn't his dad in some respect. It has all the general Reginald Hargreeves vibes. Maybe he has a brother they don't know about.

"I mean, we all died after," he says, remembering what Five said. "I wonder if Luther ever did fuck the moon. He lived there long enough." He snorts at the idea of it.

"Wow. Are you really going to call me a lizard like that?" He's not sure what his animal preference even is. He has the tiger tattoo - well, probably not anymore - but he's pretty sure he's not really a tiger. "I'm...more like a sexy trash possum if anything. They play dead a lot and are immune to snake venom and shit." But his attention is caught by the gun. "Shit. Is that thing loaded? Who puts a gun in something like this?"

[decohere]

Ava makes a bit of a face. More than one of those types would be unfortunate. But maybe they'd see each other as direct competition and look to eliminate each other? "She hasn't seemed particularly mom-ish to me," Ava shrugs, though her experience in having a mom is rather limited. "More like... you know, the automated customer service voice when you call a company's hotline that keeps telling you to push certain button combinations..." She hates those. Almost as much as she hates talking to actual people.

And she makes MORE of a face about the comment about somebody... literally fucking the moon. "Hate that, don't ever say that again." It overrides the thought of how neat it might be to visit the moon. In theory. She's sure it's rather boring after the initial novelty wears off. Not worth it for that long of a trip.

"What is a possum, if not a furry lizard?" Ava claims teasingly. "Oh. You know, it might be loaded," Ava comments as she tries for it again. "As skinny and apparently powerless as you are, you could probably use some prote- shit," the gun drops again, this time from much higher, and it indeed goes off and shatters one of the sides of the machine.

Ava... stares, openly startled at what just occurred even though she honestly should have expected that. She glances down at Klaus again, who is now covered in shards of glass. "Oops."

[busball]

"I mean, have you asked her to be mom-ish?" Cause he's pretty sure if you don't let someone know you want them to be more like a mom to you, they might not know. But then again, maybe she hasn't experience robot moms before. What does he know about her life?

Klaus laughs at that. "What? You don't like the idea of the moon having lovers?" He's not sure he believes that humans wouldn't fuck the moon. It's pretty human. There's people who claim to be in love with statues and everything. Why not the moon?

He rolls his eyes as she comments about how powerless he is and that a possum is a furry lizard. That sounds wrong. And then the gun goes off and he jumps, letting out a surprised yelp, which is even worse as the glass falls on his arm.

"What the fuck?" He shifts, finally wiggling out of his shirt and slowly getting up. "I'm not Five. I don't need to be a one-armed weirdo." Not that that wasn't healed by now. He leans over to grab his shirt and then grabs one of the stuffed things, shaking the glass off before shoving it in his pants. "And this is for trying to shoot my arm off."

[decohere]

"Well... no," Ava considers the few times she's interacted with Friday at all. She's friendly enough, even if Ava is overall wary of her purpose and how she might use the information she gathers about the passengers. But she certainly has more consideration for Friday than Skulduggery does, but he has a thing about faceless beings. Maybe she's more of a mom figure for people that aren't her.

"I think I'm a bit too old for... momming," Ava shrugs. "And I only know one mom. Janet. And she was stuck in the quantum realm for... well, about as long as I've been alive." She knows Maeve too of course, robotic moms seem to be a thing.

He's quite lucky the whole commotion of the gun going off distracts her from telling him off for continuing on about the moon when she had told him to stop. Or maybe that was the warning shot.

"What the fuck," she repeats right back, watching him shove the poor stuffed fish right down his pants. "No, ew," he can keep it. She reaches in for a little stuffed ghost instead, shoving it right down her shirt in retaliation.

"Fine, I'll get you out of there. But I hope you learned your lesson."