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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.]
Wildcard: Bar! I hope i understand the setting right haha
But, uh, he's in a much more civilized ocean-themed inescapable hell now, and unarmed besides, so... He keeps walking and sits down at the bar.
Boy, this feels weird. Simultaneously out of place, since he didn't get out much back on the farm and never anywhere this fancy, but almost familiar from the many, many looted bars and lounges he had ducked through while in Rapture. He was only there for maybe a weekish (or half his life depending on how you counted it), but it made an impact.
Hwoof, yeah, he's ready to get drinking. Jack taps his fingers against the bar, and realizes on spotting a floating glass and bar towel that he's accidentally summoned whatever serves the drinks. Presumably the same as whatever serves the food here.
Is he supposed to talk to them? Fuck-
"Uh, strongest thing you have?" Jack asks whatever ghostly presence is there. A bottle comes down from the shelf and the glass settles in front of Jack, and something clear is poured into it.
“Huh.” Jack says. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”
He assumes he’s saying it to himself, because while he’s making admirable progress in remembering people aren’t actively trying to kill him, he’s forgotten they might want to just talk to him instead.
All good!
Once he speaks though, she does look over. She's the only other person in here, so she assumes that even if he's mostly speaking to himself, it's still a bit of an invitation.
"What, you didn't have ghosts serving you drinks in your world?" she asks with gentle sarcasm. She's used to just rolling with whatever insane thing comes her way, but she's aware it can take some getting used to.
no subject
He loses he wide-eyed look and recovers smoothly (in his opinion), shrugging and smiling.
"Not serving drinks, no." he says, and takes his glass. "Usually they just yell about their lives."
Jack says that lightly like it's a joke, but now that the words are out of his mouth, he realizes that it might be too, uh, niche to land. Fuck, was he always this bad at talking to people? Then again, when would have he got the practice in-
Trying to recover, he raises his glass a little and buries his joke under an introduction: "I'm Jack."
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She does pick up on the cadence of a joke, but it's not particularly funny. Presumably she's lacking some context. It sounds like the sort of thing ghosts would do though. Stuck on their past and all that.
"Lucy," she answers. "I take it you're new?"
no subject
"Yep." Jack says, and takes a sip of his drink--
Which sure is strong, just like he asked for. Not the worst thing he's tasted, though, given the number of times he accidentally drank from a molotov while working his way through Olympus Heights. So he doesn't choke on it, just swallows like it's nothing and sets his glass down.
"Just got here today. How about you?" he asks.
no subject
"Quite recent, yes," she answers, without giving specifics. He sounds... Midwestern? She's not too good at American accents, but it's very quite different from her posh upper-class English one.
no subject
... Fuck it, Jack's here to drink and now's as good as time as any to keep working on being a normal goddamn person again.
Jack nods. He guesses from the accent that she's, uh, from England? Hey, that might make for good conversational material later.
"How're you finding it here?" he asks.
Because yeah, the ship and amenities are nice, if unsettling sometimes, but nobody seems to be a fan of the 'can't go home' part of the deal and being honest, Jack's on the fence about that too.
no subject
"Small. Dull. Confining," she answers, taking a sip of her drink. "Last time I was stuck like this, I had a whole city. Theatre. Bars with actual people in it," she continues. "Multiple people, I mean. Places to go where no one would know you."
no subject
As soon as that thought crosses his mind, he takes a longer drink from his glass. He'd have to down the whole thing like a shot if he wanted to get tipsy (thanks for nothing, genetic modification), so for now the whole exercise is just to use the bad taste of the drink to wash out the worse one of Rapture.
"Hmm." he says as he swallows, to prove he's still listening, and looks her way again.
"Yeah. It's a lot quieter here than where I left, that's for sure." he agrees. "I almost don't mind it, though."
Mostly agrees, then. He's tempted to ask if she gets stuck in places like this a lot, given her answer, but there's no tactful way to pry into that off the top of his head. Probably was less literal than what they have going on the ship, too, so he lets it lie.
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"Where'd you leave from?" she asks. Partly out of curiously, and partly because she doesn't care to carry the conversation with sharing stuff from her own life.
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He downs the last half of his glass, and that helps for a few seconds.
"Was also stuck in a city." he says. "Underwater, a real miracle of engineering. But uh, sealed off, so when things got bad, it got... Messy."
That's enough, right? Jack puts the glass down, and motions for the ghostly bartender, and manages to smile slightly.
"Long story, and I'll need to drink a lot more to tell it."
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"You don't have to," she points out. "Tell it, I mean."
She gives a little shrug and sips her drink. She's firmly in support of forgetting all about traumatic events of the past. It's something she lives by. (She should probably get some therapy at some point, but, eh.)
no subject
"You can-" -leave the bottle, he means to say, but the moment he touches it, gravity reclaims it. "-Oh."
His hand sinks for a second before he adjusts his hold on it. He blinks, shrugs, and pours himself another glass. It's more polite than chugging straight
"So, all things considered," he says as he pours, "this ship isn't too bad so far."
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New York was... Well, it didn't care. For better and for worse. Once you were there, you were there, and that was it. You could disappear in the crowd, if you wanted to. If you were able to survive, with zero savings and no ID. Here, she has the distinct impression that things will happen that she'll have no choice to take part in. There's only so many places they can hide. And from what she understands, the entity that brought them here is, well, an entity. Not just a weird rift in space time.
She sits there in silence for a moment, contemplating. Then she finished her drink, pushing it aside, and reaches over the bar counter to get a simpler glass. She holds it out towards him - an unspoken request for him to share.
no subject
But he doesn't hesitate to reach over and pour her a glass when she holds it his way.
He had asked for the strongest thing they had, and needless to say, the drink has a sharp scent, something definitely not meant to be drunk on its own for any other reason than to get smashed as fast as possible.
Jack sets the bottle down and picks his own glass back up again, though he keeps an eye on her to see if she'll commit to this.