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

[ss_buttcrack]

He sees the wince but he's not sure how to take that. What, is this one of those things they aren't supposed to talk about around here? 'Little hard not to when they are popping out of the cutlery.

"If you intended that to sound comforting, I got some bad news for you. It wasn't. And it ain't frostbite, trust me; I know what that looks like."

He tries to flex the finger experimentally. No feeling. Barely any reaction. "Had to be the trigger finger too..."

[myagic]

Just a teen with a childish level of fear--not that she'd ever admit it.

"Hm. Too bad." There isn't actually any sympathy in her voice, though. "Guess that means fire won't fix it." Trigger finger is itself an unfamiliar phrase, so she looks at him in mild confusion even as she shrugs. "You have plenty of other fingers; surely you'll survive with a single useless one."

[ss_buttcrack]

"I'm not sure I want to know what you mean by 'fire won't fix it.' You know heating up a frostbitten limb too quickly can cause more damage, right?" Hopefully, she'll heed that warning now.

As for the rest... damn that's cold. He's going to get frostbite from her attitude at this rate.

"Excuse me if I'd rather not survive with a single useless one? It's going to be a lot harder to shoot a gun with my middle finger, but thanks for your concern." Should have thrown the spoon harder he thinks to himself.

[myagic]

"Oh. Really?" Yeah, don't leave the medical treatment up to her.

Still, the way he's going on about one little finger makes her sigh in annoyance. "Are you always such a baby? It's just a finger! Even when you do need your gun, you can fire it with your other hand. Oh, unless you've died by then... Then it'll be back to normal."

[ss_buttcrack]

Crichton sure does hope she's not planning to be a nurse when she grows up because her bedside manner leaves much to be desired.

"Excuse me? If by back to normal you mean all the other fingers will be dead too?" Lucky her, she gets to break the news to him about the cycle of death and reviving here... if she chooses.

[myagic]

"Oh...you really are new here, aren't you?"

What a pain...but she supposes he should learn sooner rather than later. "I mean if you die, you revive the next day totally whole and healed, no matter how many bits and pieces you were in the day before."

[ss_buttcrack]

"I thought that was pretty obvious." Maybe he's just used to everyone treating him like he's new all the time out there in space.

"You're serious? People die and revive here like they got extra lives in a videogame?"

[myagic]

Friday really needs to show these people more than a useless lifejacket drill... Despite being mildly confused over the video game comparison, she ignores it and explains for him--seeing as nobody else has, so he should be grateful she's taking the time!

"That's right. It's the captain's stupid magic, I guess, but don't think he does it out of a sense of goodwill or anything. You're basically just a power source for him now--like the rest of us."

[ss_buttcrack]

"Great. Perfect. As if I didn't have enough to worry about already." He sounds defeated above all else. Clearly, this is not his first rodeo. He sure hopes this energy vampire has better fashion sense than the last one he ran into. Dammit, this better not be the same guy.

"You seem awfully calm about the whole thing miss...?" Does she have a name to give him?

[myagic]

"Rita. And you're one to talk, considering you just found out." She has the benefit (questionable) of living it for over half a year at this point, after all. "I mean, don't get me wrong--it might be old news to me, but I still seriously hate it."

She sighs, shooting a glance at the spoon getting carted off by the gho--invisible cleaning crew. "Well, whatever else you had to worry about before, you might as well forget it all now."

[ss_buttcrack]

"Okay, Little Miss Sunshine," she gave him her name but he's still calling her this forever now anyway just because, "what do you expect me to do? Run around screaming? You all better just hope the trouble that follows me doesn't find its way here for all our sakes."

[myagic]

Her brows furrow at the nickname, because in this context, it's hardly a compliment (and nobody would ever compliment her with a nickname like that!). "You haven't even been here a month-" or so she presumes, anyway- "and you're already paranoid? That sure bodes well." Don't mind the sarcasm in that last bit before she continues, "Unless they can cross dimensions, they're not following you here unless the captain brings them."

[ss_buttcrack]

"I haven't even been here a week," he corrects. "But I was paranoid long before that."

He taps his chin in thought. Can Scorpius cross dimensions? No. That might be the one thing he can't do. Not without wormholes. Could Crichton actually be safe here? Her addendum bursts that bubble immediately. The only thing worse than sharing Moya with that overgrown crocodile is being stuck here with him instead.

"How likely is it for people we know to show up here?"

[myagic]

"Clearly." Well, it's also clear that there's someone (or multiple someones) he doesn't want to show up here, but there's not much she can say about the exact odds, so she shrugs.

"More likely than if it was mere coincidence. There used to be a couple people here from my world who I already knew, but there's been no others from Terca Lumireis. Not while I've been here, anyway. And there sure are tons of people from that Earth place--what makes it so popular, anyway?"

[ss_buttcrack]

That's not exactly comforting. So, the possibility is still there. All he can do is pray it won't come true. While he also tries to figure out how the hell to get away from here.

"Terca Lum-what? Is that your home planet?" She did specifically call out that she's not from Earth. Good to know.

"I couldn't tell ya, kid. Humans and Earth are both unheard of in the parts of the Galaxy I got lost in. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this ship is modeled after the ones on Earth. Captain might have a soft spot for us?" He shrugs. That probably shouldn't be a good thing.

[myagic]

"Yeah, I guess." It is technically the name of the planet itself, as he correctly surmises, even if most people don't really think of it that way--space travel is the stuff of fairy tales, after all.

But not to this guy, obviously. She can't even be too surprised anymore, since he's not the first on this bucket to say so--but she does snort with a bit of derisive amusement. "You got lost out in space? Some things really never change."

As for the captain, though... "I'm not sure I'd call it a 'soft spot' so much as a creepy obsession. The guy's some Earth movie nut, apparently--enough that he goes around looking like some character he remembers, or something like that." Rita shrugs again, because it's not like she has any idea what movie or character it could possibly be.

[ss_buttcrack]

"You guess?" He raises an eyebrow at that. Is she still just having an attitude with him or what?

"What do you mean some things never change? How many people from your home planet are getting lost in space, because I'm the first from mine." That he knows of. He still has some questions about that small pyramid he found on that ancient planet with a suspiciously Egyptian-looking mark on it.

"Captain goes around playing dress-up? Charming. But, hey, maybe that's something we have in common. The movie watching, not the dressing up thing. I only did that one time and it was for a mission."

[myagic]

"I mean idiots getting lost because they have no sense of direction--that never changes. If you're the first from your planet, that must make you a special kind of idiot, too." It's...not...exactly personal that she calls him an idiot?! She's at least equally insulting to most strangers. (And then wonders why they get so grumpy around her...)

And, well, it's a good thing he clarifies that he's into movies rather than dressup, even as the way he keeps talking just makes her raise a skeptical eyebrow. "I don't need to know about your hobbies." It's sort of an attempt to poke fun at him over dressing up, and her light tone gives it away, before she gets more serious again. "But you might actually have an advantage there, assuming he's seen the same movies as you."

[ss_buttcrack]

"Yeah, but how many of them designed their own spacecraft to get out to space first, huh?" Note that he is not disputing that he is, in fact, an idiot.

"For the record, my sense of direction is fine. How the hell was I supposed to know there was a wormhole up there ready to drag me in and spit me out?"

He wore the dress one time. And it was kind of fun. But you'll never get him to admit that.

"Why would that be an advantage?"

[myagic]

Okay, that's finally the detail that makes Rita look just a little (if reluctantly) impressed. "You did? You're an...engineer for space--ships, were they?" It might not alleviate a bad sense of direction, but perhaps she'll consider him...less of an idiot. She approaches his table now, instead of just awkwardly standing there while they have this conversation.

Speaking of directional sense, though... She furrows her brows in confusion. "What's a wormhole?" She's never heard of it, and she can't even imagine how it looks or behaves solely based on the name.

"He likes to base stuff that he does on those movies. Maybe books, too? I don't know any of this Earth stuff, but anyway--what did he call it? 'Fifties'...? The last place we went to was based on something like that. I'm guessing the...'walking dead', or whatever you want to call it, came from one of those stupid movies..." She just about shudders with the memory--the horror, the smell, the escape, everything about it was awful.

[ss_buttcrack]

"I've got my Ph.D. in astrophysics, so yeah, you better believe it Sunshine. I didn't build it all on my own, but I did help develop it."

He's pleased to see this might be winning her over, and he pats the table helpfully to encourage her to join him.

"Wormholes are like tears in space and time. If you go in one, you could get transported far, far away in the blink of an eye. So far, it might take lifetimes to get back to where you were." Which is... a problem. He's not just lost, he's hopelessly lost.

"So, this guy likes, what? Recreating horror movies? Wait... did he sic a bunch of zombies on you guys?"

[myagic]

"Hm...guess there really is something to that saying about books and covers, huh." Look, she can't just sit down at the table too politely, so she just throws that little jab out there as she takes a seat, her sandwich long forgotten at the other table.

The wormhole explanation is...different, to say the least. "Tears in space and time..." she echoes softly, more than a little fascinated, despite herself. "And you...what, got caught in one somehow? That has to be some colossally bad luck." Okay, yeah, she pities him a little for that.

"Yeah--if 'zombies' are what you call them. Well, we've only been to three different places so far, and I'd wager two of them were based on 'horror' movies, alright." She doesn't particularly feel like describing the first one to him, but she doesn't know what piece of fiction it was based on, either--if she did, explaining would probably be easier.

[ss_buttcrack]

He's going to ignore that barb from her. Yeah, he's more than a pretty face, who'da thunk?

"I did. And, you have no idea how bad. I wasn't alone when I got out the other side. I ended up in the middle of a firefight." Maybe he's a little lucky just for the fact he wasn't immediately obliterated.

"Different places like... the ship makes port places?"

[myagic]

"Wow, it must not have had it out for you." No, she doesn't think the wormholes are sentient--that's just such impressively bad luck, it might even be worse than her practically cursed friend. "How did you survive that one?"

She taps her chin with her fingers as she considers. "Yeah...in a way. They're just more pocket realities--or whatever you want to call them--that he makes himself specifically for the occasion." Well, the diner was a bit different since he supposedly repurposed that reality, but ultimately it functions the same. "As long as I've been here, there's been an island, some forest training camp, and that 'fifties' diner."

[ss_buttcrack]

"By the skin of my teeth. My ship was pulled onboard a larger one full of prisoners in the middle of staging an escape. They thought I might be useful to them. I did end up helping them out, as a fatter of fact, but it was a hell of a close shave." That is a very condensed retelling, but it covers the basics.

"Really. Weird. Do we know why he does it? Just for kicks?"