sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #7

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TEST DRIVE MEME #7

1. before she hung up, she said she was a skeleton

[there is no note in your cabin. no forces stall your legs if you decide to walk anywhere but the atrium. in fact, for the first time in hundreds of years, newly arrived passengers on the Serena Eterna are waking up with absolutely no guidance. nothing but your fellow passengers in the halls - or maybe in your bed.

perhaps you end up in the atrium eventually anyway. it is where guest services is, and where Gal Friday… actually hasn’t been in a few days. until today. and she is visibly frazzled, her hair uncoiffed, her suit rumpled, something a bit like a bruise blossoming down from her hairline and over her smooth features. more papers than ever cover her desk, and when she turns to face you, her voice is as cheerful as ever, but audibly strained.]

Welcome aboard the Serene Eterna! [a pause] You know how to work a life vest, right? Everyone knows that! You don’t need me to teach you that!

[a light bulb burns out behind her head.]

… I’ll get right on that!

[freedom includes the freedom to not know what the fuck is happening. maybe you should reflect on that.]

2. grandma went and can't stop screaming

[it’s something about the lighting fixtures, this month. has the Bellona always had a massive chandelier? maybe. who knows. don’t ask questions. either way, in the stillness of the night, or day, or late afternoon, there is a noise like a cord being cut, and the chandelier plunges into the audience below.

it hits nothing, of course. no one is ever in the theater. and that, perhaps, is what the trouble is.

so, the chandelier starts to… travel, one could say. it starts to hang in various rooms: the dining halls, the bars, the clubs… sometimes, if you’re out on the pool deck and suddenly realized you’re under a shadow, you can glance up and see it suspended 20 feet above your head, securely fastened to nothing in particular and yet remaining perfectly in place.

until it isn’t. until it falls, crystal shattering on whatever surface it lands on: floor, table, person… and, wherever the chandelier goes, a lilting childish voice follows it, singing without any obvious source.]

Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of posies… ashes, ashes, we all…

3. jeff bezos murdered the infinite tommy bahama

[the lights of the Infinite Tommy Bahama go out three days into October.

barely an hour after its closure, the lights go on again, and a new banner is unfurled.

physically, it is the same store. you can even see the old signs hidden behind the new ones. however, long gone are the tropical prints and khaki dress shorts. now, one can purchase any number of officially licensed or legally distinct Halloween costumes, decorations, and various other haunted accoutrements, leading back as far as the eye can see, and then farther still. is that a Gal Friday mask? spooky! well, at least you’ll be good and ready for the Halloween party at the end of the month, which is absolutely just a normal party and in no way whatsoever anything even remotely resembling a trick. there are only treats at The Infinite Spirit Halloween!

note: bahamanuel is still here! somewhere! it kinda looks like dan bongino.]

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Gideon's head whips around, nearly knocking the sunglasses off her face as she hears - and then sees - a ghost. Her mouth falls open and for a moment, the sound cuts out as her heartbeat drowns out everything else.

She's known she's dead, she's known it since she woke up here, but there's knowing and there's knowing and staring at Palamedes - alive, well, notably intact and not a thanergy explosion - she finally knows for certain that she is completely gone for good.

It says how affected Gideon is that she doesn't even go for a stupid nickname, just shouting- "Palamedes!" and scooping the smaller necromancer up in a great big bear hug and whipping him around like she's about to hammer-throw him into a rack of masks. She doesn't of course - not her new-old pal Pal, who just gets set down after another of those bone-crushing squeezes. "Finally, somebody who makes sense here! I feel like I'm losing my mind looking at everything. Not a bone in sight but flimsy and plex and real paper everywhere!"

At some point the two of them are going to have to have a conversation about life and death on the Serena Eterna, and the strange fact that the line between the two is shaky at best.

But for now Palamedes is being wrapped in a bear hug the likes of which he has never seen, particularly because they don’t really do bear hugs on the Sixth. He yelps in a rather undignified way, but that’s just a symptom of his surprise, and he is still smiling when Gideon sets him down. Dizzy, but smiling.

“Never fear, there are plenty of bones if you know where to look.” He clasps his hands together. “There’s a lot to catch you up on, Nav. How long have you been here? Have you tried ice cream yet?”

Ice cream seems like a good accompaniment to the general Serena Eterna rundown.

"Just got here! Last thing I remember-" And she pauses, because the last thing she remembers is the biggest downer possible and she can't even tell SexPal for sure that Hect is okay because she'd been speared badly while Gideon still had a body. And after Gideon didn't anymore, she'd only had a brief time inside of Harrow before she faded away. Gideon just shakes her head. "I woke up a few hours ago in a bed. I've been wandering around ever since and stumbled over this place."

She gives him a friendly slap on the back and makes herself smile again. "Show me the ice cream and tell me what the hell's going on in the afterlife."

Gideon pauses pointedly after the last thing I remember, which is, frankly, unsettling, given the situation in which they had last seen each other. Palamedes had blown himself up knowing he might not be able to stop the Lyctor who had come to Canaan House with murder on the mind, but he had hoped that he might injure her enough to allow his friends to finish the job. Otherwise…

Otherwise, it was all for naught.

Otherwise, Cam is dead.

The possibility he has not allowed himself to imagine for months now makes his stomach flip over.

Thankfully, Gideon’s enthusiastic backslap brings him back to reality. He stumbles forward a little (despite running from zombies, scrambling up and down the ship in the middle of a storm, and generally operating in an environment less-than-ideal to necromancers, he hasn’t gained an ounce of muscle mass), straightens with as much dignity has he can manage, and makes a follow me gesture.

“I assume you’ve had your orientation? Met Gal Friday, received the necklace thing they call a lei? You will want to hold onto that, by the way.”

"Uuuhhhhhhhh? Nope?" Gideon has no idea what Pal's talking about. She tucks her hands in her pockets as she follows him out of the store and onto the promenade once more. "Like I said, woke up in my room and wandered out here. I've run across a few other people on this place but that's it. Then I saw the skeletons-"

She jerks a thumb back to the store display. It's pretty self-explanatory from there. "... should I have gotten an orientation? Nevermind. You can get me up to speed."

Gideon just hopes he doesn't spend most of it talking about whatever observations he's made here about the density of the post-morbid something-or-other. She really just wants to know what exactly the deal is with the afterlife, not get turned into a semi-unwilling audience.

“You didn’t—?” Palamedes stops dead in his tracks and takes a little notebook and pencil out of his pocket, which he immediately flips open. “Fascinating. Well, it would fit the pattern. Service has been a bit lax this month, you see.” This is what passes for a joke during the month of October on the Serena Eterna. He writes something down, and then puts away the notebook again. “We’ll have to get you a lei. They’re warded, though against what I’ve yet to figure out. Given some of what we’ve come across already, it could be anything.” He glanced at his friend, grim for just a moment. “This ship isn’t safe, you see.”

They reach the ice cream parlor, and Pal pushes aside the partition to go behind the counter. “What can I get you? I don’t recommend the one called ‘long pig.’”

Don’t get complacent, Nav. The density of the post-mortem something or other will come later.

Gideon sighs loudly and unashamedly. Of course this ship isn't safe either. "Nothing's ever safe, even in the afterlife. Should have known. The nuns wouldn't have lived so long if death was actually a break."

She glances around the ice cream parlor, taking in the aggressively bright colours and light that seems to be everywhere all the time. Gideon's glad for her sunglasses or she's pretty sure her eyeballs would be melting out of her sockets by now. Who can even stand this much light? She turns her attention to the so-called ice cream, planting her hands on the counter as she looks at the buckets and buckets. There's names on them, some she doesn't know, some she knows only from her smut (usually in the context of 'She tasted like [name]', 'she was like a ripe [name]', 'her juices gushed down her chin, like biting into a [name]'). Thankfully none of them are named anything like Ration Oatmeal or Dried Meat, or worst of all, Mystery, which really should have been called 'vomit'.

Gideon rubs her chin a few times and decides to invest heavily in details found in pornography. "Give me whatever mango is. .... are Isaac and Jeannemary here?"

Palamedes remembers the way Gideon had responded to the food served at Canaan House, clearly in awe of the mere existence of lightly-dressed vegetables. Food on the Sixth had always been a bit more varied than the Ninth, but even that was nothing like the Serena Eterna, with its milkshakes, its bubble tea, and its pizza.

He makes a note to insist that Gideon acclimate to the sudden cornucopia of choices gradually, lest she end up doubled over with stomach cramps for days.

Scooping the ice cream into the little coated paper bowls, he frowns faintly at the reference to the poor Fourth House kids. “I’m afraid not. This isn’t some kind of afterlife you’ve never heard about—not everyone who dies ends up here, and not everyone here died before they arrived.” Pal almost almost wishes it were that simple.

He offers her the ice cream over the counter. “It’s a constructed pocket universe outside of time and space.”

Jokes on you Palamedes, Gideon spent the first few days at Canaan House in what was an absolutely deranged amount of gastronomical distress and she has learned nothing from that experience. Like the lactose intolerant of yesteryear, she will choose to spend a few hours trapped in a bathroom rather than do anything in moderation.

However most importantly is the revelation that this isn't the afterlife, which leaves Gideon staring at Pal. "No. What? No, no, what? What?"

Articulate isn't an option at the moment, and it takes Gideon entirely too long to finally take the little bowl from Pal. The stuff inside looks soft, so she's pretty sure it's not something you stick your fingers into - not unless you're alone. There's spoons around so she grabs one of them and ends up pointing it at him. "Make this make sense without sounding like a dusty textbook, because I saw you explode, and I ventilated myself, and I know neither of us made it out."

So Gideon is dead. The fact sends a spike of fear shooting up Palamedes’ spine. He is desperate to ask what happened after his own dramatic departure from Canaan House—had anyone survived? had they killed the lyctor? had anyone else figured out what Palamedes had about lyctorhood? The questions claw at his throat.

But first, he has to explain their situation to Gideon. Doing so could be a matter of life and death—or worse. And for that, he will have to swallow his own curiosity.

“Sit.” Pal waves at one of the tables, then finishes scooping his own ice cream (cookies and cream, in his case). On his way to join her, he passes the cooler of drinks and grabs a bottle of soda. He sets it in the middle of the table and sits down. “Have you ever heard of multiple universe theory? No, probably not. Even on the Sixth, you don’t find many scholars who are interested in it. Two or three philosophers of physics get together every few years and bicker about it, and they call it a conference, if you will believe it.”

He taps the bottle to make the bubbles inside dance. “Simply put, the idea is that our universe, everything we know, everything we could know, is like one of these bubbles. One among thousands, each a separate existence floating through non-existence. With me so far?”

There's definitely a less roundabout way to explain their situation, something like, we're on a boat outside of time and space and sometimes the captain likes to make us kill each other, but Palamedes has always been one to get lost in the details.

Gideon has never heard of multiple universe theory, but she is a surprisingly voracious reader of all things smutty - and between the blood and boobs and bombshells, there's also a place for a certain type of writer given to philosophical musings, asking the important age-old questions like "who tops when fucking your own clone?" and "what if you invented time travel entirely and exclusively so you could go back forty years and prevent a massacre while also banging your geriatric necromancer while her ass was still immaculate?".

Which means that once Pal puts it simply, Gideon gets it, because it's a plot that shows up a lot. She sticks her spoon in her ice cream and stirs it. "Yeah. It's like 'Guns of the Fifth'. Pentadies gets blasted into another universe where his necromancer didn't die and they spend the whole time trying to get back to the world he came from, except every time they try, they end up further and further out until they end up in a world where the Nine Houses don't exist and nobody remembers how to eat an ass, so they spend the rest of the story having orgies."

“Sure.”

Fun fact: there is a lot of very, very freaky porn in the Library collections, and Palamedes has read quite a bit more of it than most people would suspect upon first meeting him. Thus, the main difference between his and Gideon’s literary sexual education seems to be that Gideon’s involved what, to Pal’s mind, sounds like some unnecessarily complicated plotting.

Anyway. “The people on this ship come from all those different universes, all those other bubbles. In fact, aside from us, none of them have heard of the Nine Houses or the Resurrection. I can’t speak to the ass munching.”

“But what’s more interesting,” and isn’t this a hell of a transition, “is that this universe, the one we’re in right now., was manufactured by a single being. He calls himself the Captain, and he’s the one responsible for bringing us here.”

"Everyone eats ass." Gideon says, more of a reflex than anything meaningful because the rest of her mind that isn't devoted to butt jokes is turning over what Pal's saying. Different universes, except real different universes, so far different that they don't even have the Resurrection which is just... how does that even work then? They before their world's Resurrection? Did they not need a Resurrection? Does that mean that there's placed with no Ninth where some lucky bastard version of Gideon didn't get stuck spending her whole life surrounded by grim nuns and bones upon bones, and how can she find that version of Gideon and kick her ass?

"Fuck off." Another mostly automatically response. Gideon pokes more at her ice cream, turning it into a smooth paste. "Why's he want us then? Or me specifically. I can see why somebody would want an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus' Top Nerd Facts-" (delivered with the kind of respect Gideon can only give to a man who turned himself into a bomb to try save everyone) "-but the only thing I was good for was something that's already done."

She finally scoops up some of the pale orangish slurry and sticks it in her mouth, and promptly gets absolutely knocked off her ass by a flavour she couldn't even have dreamed of. Gideon goes blank, spoon in her slightly slack mouth as her mind is blown out the back of her skull.

The only thing I was good for was something that's already done. The statement is troubling on any number of levels. It’s the sort of thing that will one day cause the soul of a dead planet to look at Gideon Nav and think her the saddest girl in the world. For Palamedes, it hints at what he missed after he took up arms against a sea of troubles.

One flesh, one end. In an incongruously bright and airy laboratory on a long-abandoned planet, they had all discovered for certain what that actually meant. What, according to edicts written millennia before any of them were born, cavaliers were actually for.

Gideon the Ninth, what did you do?

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he says, mildness belying the way his stomach twists. “I’ve seen you fight, and we spend half our time around here trying survive the latest threat. I can think of lots of things you’re useful for.” He’s about to explain that the Captain, in fact, seems interested in pushing them all to their limits when Gideon’s face all but turns inside-out with shock. “…Doing all right there? Blink twice if you’re still breathing.”

She blinks twice, rendered slightly useless by the sunglasses she's still got parked on her face. But Gideon is breathing and she hunches forward, finally slowly and shakily retrieving the spoon from her mouth to put back into her cup.

"Yeah, just got blasted in the mouth, again. You spend your life reading that things can taste good and you're like, sure, maybe, but when everything you've ever had came in a ration packet or scraped out of the Ninth's crummy soil, you're not prepared for what good actually means." She has a second spoonful, no longer so unprepared that she's rendered silent but god it's still a real punch to get that explosion of fruit once again. She mumbles out- "I'm going to eat myself sick."

“Just don’t ask me to clean up the mess,” says Pal, knowing full well that he won’t be able to stop Gideon from gorging her way through the Serena Eterna. They haven’t even gotten to the buffet yet, for goodness sake. As long as she can aim her vomit towards a convenient toilet and she doesn’t do any permanent damage to herself, it’s probably fine. She’ll learn quickly enough. Hopefully.

Palamedes eats his ice cream more slowly, savoring each spoonful. He’s quiet for a few moments, but finally he asks the question that has been on the tip of his tongue since he spotted Gideon across the promenade.

“Did you kill her? The lyctor?”

Did it work? Has Dulcinea been revenged?

"Palamedes, I wouldn't ask you to hold the bucket while I was puking. I wouldn't ask you to lift the toilet seat while I'm shitting my guts out. I wouldn't tell you the disgusting details as every organ in my body turns to a filth-making machine, because if I did, you'd forcibly tell me facts and from then on, anytime I was yarfing out two pounds of whatever this place serves for breakfast, all I'd be able to think of is 'your stomach has four mucus linings inside of it and every time you puke one up, you have to spend twelve hours regrowing it." And she points her spoon at him. "Don't you dare correct me, I don't want to know anything true."

She has more mango. It's amazing. Less amazing is Palamedes finally asking the question, but it's not like she didn't know it was coming. She watched him blow himself up hours ago to save everyone. He didn't get to know if it worked, and he deserves to. They would have all died without him getting everything rolling.

"Yeah, we got her. Hect was all fury and knives, and even Ianthe bothered to lend a hand." Ha ha ha. "But it wasn't enough. Cam got stabbed in the shoulder, the lyctor tore off Ianthe's arm, and then it was me and Harrow and Hect stuck behind a wall of bone. So. Did what I did, helped Harrow's stupid noodle arms pick up my sword and put it through that ugly black timebomb you set off in Cytherea's chest. Then I checked out, and woke up here."

Palamedes nods slowly, pressing his hands together as he gathers up these desperately-desired scraps of information, analyzing them, cataloging them away. Cam is injured by alive, and Pal sends a prayer of thanks to the God whose grace he no longer believes in. Ianthe had been unexpectedly helpful. Cytherea was dead.

And Harrow and Gideon…

He can no longer avoid the obvious, dreadful conclusion that Gideon has been hinting at. “You’re saying Harrow became a lyctor.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “She used the same method Ianthe did, didn’t see? Damn it, if we’d had just a little more time. I’m sorry, Nav. I’m so very sorry.”

"Nah, don't get soppy on me SexPal, we did what we had to, you and me. Besides, the other plan was for Harrow to fight - and die - and me and Hect to jettison ourselves into the sea and wait for help - which wasn't coming anytime soon - and then I'd be going back to the Ninth. To Drearburh."

A fate worse than death, which is why Gideon had rather thrown herself on the spikes than let Harrow keep stalling the inevitable. The thought of going back to Drearburh to be lambasted by Crux, to see the disappointment on Aiglamene's face, to spend the rest of her life in that dark black pit guarding Harrow's dead crush, that was worse than an immortal glorious end. There's a reason stories end with glorious sacrifices, not crawling back to the same shit you crawled out of.

"It it makes it better, she didn't want it. I had to force her hand." And she tips the rest of her ice cream down her throat. "Mmm, and you know what else they don't have on the Ninth? Ice cream. Fresh air. Mandatory facepaint. Girls who aren't a minimum of 67 years old. This might not be an afterlife but it feels pretty damn good so far."

Gideon doesn’t understand him, but why would she? Back at Canaan House, Palamedes had called the lyctorhood theorem ghastly and obvious, and Ianthe had laughed at him, assuming the Master Warden of the Library was merely too queasy to do what needed to be done. She had misunderstood what he meant then, just as Gideon does now. It isn’t merely that the path to lyctorhood was laid with evil acts; it’s that there was another path entirely. A better one, a purer one. One purposefully hidden away for a myriad.

Given enough time, they could have found it: he, Harrow, Cam, and Gideon. Instead, they had been forced to take desperate measures—Gideon is right about that much. With their backs to the wall, what other choice could they have made?

But with enough time? Oh, the wonders they might have uncovered and the tides they might have turned! Palamedes has to believe that they might still set matters to rights, if only Cam and Harrow can pull him out of his bubble in the River. If only he—and now Gideon—can find a way to escape this place.

He offers Gideon a wry smile. “Granted, the Serena Eterna has its advantages, but don’t get too comfortable. The Captain likes to play deadly games with us. Sometimes he uses monsters, sometimes psychological tests meant to set us against each other. Thus far, the passengers have managed to remain a united front, but our alliances are tenuous at best.”

Gideon groans and lets her head clonk down on the table, dragging the sound out as long as she can manage. Of course it's all deadly games and monsters and more bullshit. When the sound ends and she has to breathe, she sighs and lifts her head up - leaving a bit of greasepaint smeared on the table.

Because as terrible as it is hearing that, there's something Gideon can hold onto, and it's that she doesn't have to go through it blind - and that she's got Palamedes. He's around and upright so if he's managed that without Hect, then there's a plan. "Fuck me. Out of the bowl and into the shit pit. Is this one also trying to kill God?"

“Not quite.” Palamedes spoons some of his ice cream out of his cup.

“He wants to become God.”

After eight months, Palamedes is convinced that that’s even worse.

Well that... Gideon blinks a few times as she takes that in.

"He actually have a chance of doing that?" Because that's the real question, isn't it? After all, God invited a dozen and a half of them to come to Canaan House to find out the secret to immortality and looks how that had turned out? There had actually been an answer to that one too. But what about this one?

“That is the pertinent question, isn’t it?” says Palamedes, pointing his spoon at Gideon for emphasis. The idea that someone could become a god isn’t foreign to their world, but that doesn’t mean anyone can do it anytime. “I suppose it depends what godhead means to him. He already possesses the ability to create pocket universes and elaborate illusions, craft wards and sigils the likes of which I have never seen, and bring people back from the dead in certain capacities. But that isn’t enough for him.”

Pal frowns faintly into his ice cream, once again brought up against the mystery he cannot crack: what does the captain really want, and do they dare give it to him? “Discovering what would satisfy him may be the key to escaping this place. Or it may mean our downfall.”

"Probably the downfall bit." Gideon mumbles. She can't say she's pleased to be back in another terrible game with high stakes, run by someone who sounds nearly as powerful as the Necrolord.

But she takes a breath and straightens her shoulders. Sighing like a tombsister isn't going to get either of them anyway. "Well, whatever you think is the best choice, I'm with you on it. Escape or end, it's better than sitting with our thumbs up our asses and waiting for the worst to happen, again. Just point me in a direction and tell me what to do, and until Hect's here to be your proper cavalier, I'll be your sword."

... oh and speaking of Hect- "I told Camilla that your last words to her were 'I love you'."

TEST DRIVE MEME #7

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