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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.]
girls on film
clarke's walked and mapped the length of the ship enough times by now to be able to catch when things are out of place. pieces of paper stuck to the wall usually belong to stede bonnet on his matchmaking, crew recruiting, and therapist advertisements — some of which she's made a solemn vow to pull down on sight, and all of which she reads. so this day, passing by photos at sea it's the same old routine of scrutiny until the advert actually registers. then she's turning her gaze from the piece of paper to the internal design of the storefront itself.
what's new inside the doors is made plain and simple soon enough; there's an actual person sitting behind the desk, a new face whom clarke immediately turns to and addresses. )
So how's that work?
( for april's perspective, they may have spotted clarke's likeness among the photographs plastered across the wall before. not prominently featured, but a few lively snapshots here and there for anyone who deigns to really look. the time she'd climbed onto the outer side of the deck railing, backlit like a crappy titanic remake, and focus plainly stated by the deep lines of intent on her face — ready and determined to jump. sitting at a table in Windjammer, head in her hands and trying not to throw up after overindulging; a slightly emaciated apocalypse youth, coming off a self-imposed hunger strike and making the definitive mistake of heaping her plate full of chocolate cake when she could only stomach a bite or two of it. battered and wet, slimy actually, sitting against a wall next to a boy with purple hair and blood all over his abdomen; the two of them mirror images of exhaustion. passed out on a pool deck chair in a navy party dress, playing cards strewn about, like a full on renaissance painting of bad choices and futility. an action shot of being shoved off a plastic motorcycle replica in the arcade, eyes bright and half a laugh already painting her face, though not reaching the competitive determination in her eyes. sitting beside a corpse on the deck, head bowed in a silent moment of regret and seemingly covered in ink...
this shop never fails to scar, even without curses involved. )
no subject
For Clarke, a face April indeed has seen already in many photos here, through many undoubtedly interesting and traumatic points of her journey, April gives her a big smile with a mouth that they obviously have.]
Oh, it's simple, I just find you a picture of yourself (or your friends) (or maybe your enemies!) that came out super creepy. One hundred percent, genuinely scary and unsettling.
[April's customer service voice is in peak form, but they know even that won't be enough to make this pitch sound legitimate on a ship like this. So they lean in a little, like they don't want to be overheard sounding rude.]
See, "cursed images" and "creepypasta" are all the rage with the kids these days, but as with any popular art, for every really good, long-lasting horror that will linger in your thoughts after seeing it, there's two dozen of the same ol, "I blacked out the eyes on this picture and wrote a generic ghost story for it!" or "I photoshopped the mouth and eyes slightly bigger isn't that creepy?", which like, nice of kids to practice but it's not scary horror, you know?
[April sits up again, a pleasant look on their face. What's that look like? Oh, you know. Pleasant.]
So, I'm just curating the good, organic creepy stuff from the rest of the pictures here. Not just any old blurry face or misplaced shadows, but the ones that will truly give you the "heebie jeebies", stuff you'd regret looking at late at night!
[After April adds their own touch to it, of course, but this isn't a real sales pitch and there aren't any paranormal feds here or quality control. All that matters is that they said these would freak people out, so if unsatisfied customers actually succeed in tracking April down, they can at least say they were warned.]
no subject
what's creepypasta? what's photoshop? this particular apocalypse baby isn't dumb by any means, and can more or less gloss over strange terminology in favor of absorbing the overall context of a sentence, but still snags on the
spooky linguiniwords themselves. after a brief buffer period, what clarke ultimately interprets april to be talking about is something along the line of uncanny valley. that an image would be distorted — more effectively than just resizing features, or painting on clown makeup — and play on the same instinctual fears of human beings that horror movies do.not a lot scares her anymore. death had been the most pressing thing, but never a thought she'd shied away from. here on this cruise liner even that's losing some of the mystery, the instinct to avoid it lessening with each crisis. so... ultimately, color clarke intrigued. )
Blurry face and misplaced shadow basically sum up Gal Friday and the Captain, only they're three dimensional. But... yeah, okay. Show me?
no subject
Alright, let's see...
[April reaches under the desk like they're picking through a stack of photos. Which they could be! But anyway, after some shuffling they pull one up.
It would be far too easy to pick a picture from an upsetting time, just after a battle or during a moment of personal darkness. Rookie moves.
Instead, April picks one from the arcade, this girl falling off a fake motorcycle. It's good and a bit blurry to begin with, like a flash picture actually taken in the 90s or 00s at a party or something, so it's not a lot of effort on their part to add to it.
Not much, there's just a smear between two cabinets in the background that could be a person, and a reflection on a screen that could be a face. Pareidolia does half of the work honestly, turning dark spots in a white glare into sunken cheeks and dark eyes, and guilt will fill in the blanks to make it hauntingly familiar. At least, that's the excuse the skeptics out there would make. The smears of colour from the motion blur angle beautifully to lead the eye from the actual subject of the picture to the maybe-face on the screen. And unlike most development errors, there's something nagging about this one that keeps the eye stuck on it, just a little bit.
All in all, it's a light effort, a small sample. April's still testing the waters here, so to speak, and they've done very little research on their current client.]
See, they put up all the good pictures here, but for every good picture there's two-to-three that didn't turn out right, and that's where the magic happens.
[April places the photo on the counter and slides it across for Clarke to inspect.]