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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You ever see a cheerleader get absolutely and unabashedly bodied by a linebacker? This moment is not dissimilar. Clarke had just been walking along down the corridor lined with cabin doors, fully immersed and entrenched in her own thoughts. All of which likely ranged from full blown morbid in regards to their entire situation to mildly peeved about the continual mess throughout the ship that serves as the ghosts formal statement of strike. At some point the people here would have to come together and either agree to stop shooting holes in walls, busting doors off their hinges, defacing property, breaking dishware, throwing chairs, blasting fireballs, and willfully bashing up the fake potted plants — or they're going to have to at least agree to clean up after themselves.

Then a door slots open immediately to her right. A white, and red and black all over freight train of a person slams into her abruptly. And while Clarke doesn't go sprawling, she does stumble back and instinctively reach up a hand to massage at the shoulder that'd taken the brunt of the impact. The look she levels Gideon with is reproachful, tinged with bitter; then wary, when the first thing she truly focuses on is that two handed sword strapped to the human bowling ball's back. Then on to some strange mix of pissy and pouting and a flicker of confusion once looking up at the other girl's face — struck suddenly with a niggling thought about that face paint that hasn't quite hit home yet. Like hearing retellings of fairytales but suddenly confronted face to face with how the main knight actually wore their armor. ...huh.

"...Don't worry about it," Clarke says after a beat, clipped but calm. Drops her hand from her arm and even goes so far to give a casual half-shrug; no harm no foul. "Just be a little more careful? There's kids around, and a lot of people around here are pretty on edge."

There's a moment when the girl Gideon nearly ran over gives her a look that goes straight through her like ice, where Gideon is back looking at a much different girl with a similar look on her face. She tenses up, ready to go through her sword the moment she summons up half a dozen skeletons to gangbang Gideon into submission.

But she isn't Harrow because she backs down instead of going for Gideon's throat, and she doesn't open up with some withering insult about Gideon's intelligence. Gideon also backs down a little, and doesn't lay a hand on the girl or boot her through a wall.

"Of course there are kids around." She mutters to herself. Maybe all 200 of her ex-playmates. Loud and actually directed at the girl, Gideon adds- "I'll keep an eye out. Is there a map around here?"

Clarke watches Gideon's mouth move in a quiet aside to herself, words formed that don't seem entirely kind but that she can't quite hear. Mostly she just really can't get over this facepaint — it borders on the creepy distortion of human features intermingled with a morbid sense of anonymity. We all look the same when we die meets a mask is a mask meets I fucking hate clowns and this is not dissimilar. But still it utterly fascinates...

"...none that are commercially produced. Are you new?"

Rumbled yet again, and this time she didn't even drag it out long enough to pretend she wasn't. Gideon bites back a sigh. "New enough."

The girl's staring pretty openly at Gideon's facepaint, reminding her very much of the reactions of the other Houses. She leans in somewhat, just to see if she's more frightened or fascinated. "Never seen one of the Ninth's glorious nuns before?"

Maybe it starts as a frightened sort of fascination, but that's about to morph into flabbergasted excitement in all of three seconds flat.

Literally all it takes is one word: Ninth. And every ounce of lingering wariness and distrust melts off her features. Suddenly Clarke's transported back to driving in the desert with Palamedes and listening to him talk about his home world with only the vague distraction of the open road before them. She does that a lot, just sit and keep her ears primed around him; has picked up on the finer points of his particular brand of magic by now, as well as integrated a bit of his lexicon into hers. But has also just absorbed the parts of his story he'd been willing to share and taken them to heart, enough to belatedly recognize when coming face to face with another key player. The Sixth were librarians, steeped in knowledge. The Eight were zealots who thought themselves above reproach. The Fifth were spirit magicians, the sort they'd desperately needed throughout the month of October. The heirs of the Third dabbled in flesh magic, but he wouldn't trust them as far as he could throw them. And the Ninth, he'd told her, were bone adepts. Had spoken as fondly about Harrowhark Nonagesimus's failures as he did her successes, as much as he did her —

"Never seen one," Clarke confirms, and there's a whole new level of conviction filtering into her voice now. Her eyes dance, she practically beams. "But I've heard a lot about you, Gideon Nav."

There's no universe where Gideon expects to hear her own name coming out of the mouth of a total stranger, and it just floors her for a moment, leaving her jaw dropped and her eyes wide behind the shades. There's not a single answer that comes to mind, except for one deranged, delusional thought that somehow, this one's from the future and Harrowhawk has gone on to do something absolutely dramatic and has had Gideon immortalized.

Oh God what if Nav's reanimated her corpse and has it shambling about?

She takes her sunglasses off despite how burning the lights are and she squints down at the girl. Her second impulse, arriving far too late, is to lie. Gideon who? Nobody by that name here. You're thinking of some other redheaded beefy greasepaint wearing Ninth nun. It's a funny thought but not a useful one.

So, after running the gambit, she settles on a simple, "What the fuck?"

It's the two of them, in the realm of afterthoughts regarding how to handle this situation at hand. A beat on her end, and a swear from Gideon, and Clarke's belatedly realizing she could have been a little less... creepy about that. She'd never liked being hunted by men and women who knew her name and every atrocity under her belt, but tended to levy knowledge as a weapon when it was in her hand. This isn't the first time she uses someone's name to make a point, and won't be the last. But at least here, she sparingly feels bad about it.

Pushing onward to even out the footing, a hand is extended.

"Sorry. I'm Clarke Griffin. No, we haven't met before. I just know Palamedes Sextus, he's —"

...there are approximately twenty five things she could put here as a quantifier, and each would be better than the last. He's my friend, he's my trusted confidant, he's someone I've been through hell on this ship with, he's a buddy, he's a 'buddy' the likes of which sometimes I straddle in the passenger seat of my car, etc. But, out of Pal's earshot, Clarke's already formed a habit and months have gone by without anyone correcting her.

"— my necromancer."

First, the shock and joy of hearing a name she knows - Palamedes is here! And of course he is, he's dead, she's dead, they're all dead, where else would they have ended up but the afterlife?

Second, and this gets her eyebrows up real high- "Your necromancer?"

Because last Gideon checked, Palamedes had a cavalier and maybe she'd misread what was going on with him and Cam but she was pretty sure that Palamedes wasn't the kind of guy to replace Hect in death. Though this might mean she wasn't dead. But also, that had been hours ago, how had he got himself a new cavalier that quickly? Gideon has no idea what's going on but Clarke knows her and knows Palamedes and that's at least something.

"Take it from the top because I just got here and the last time I saw Palamedes was maybe two hours ago, max." Probably even less if she actually added the time up but two hours seems a fair start.

Well, that time frame at least puts to bed the notion of new enough and firmly paints Gideon as brand spankin' new. Welcome to hell, Nav; we're glad you're here.

The skyrocketing eyebrows are at least enough to make Clarke second guess her phrasing. It never sounded exactly right, but in terms of fully encapsulating Palamedes to people who didn't know him or trust where she got most of her information, it had done the trick.

(She knows about Camilla Hect, she has her own knight from her homeworld, she'd absolutely never seek to replace her —)

"Oh. No, I met him eight months ago. Some of us have been here a while."

"Eight months!" That makes her reel. Eight months! She saw him two hours ago, but he's been here eight months? The afterlife either has a hell of a latency issue or there's something else going on.

And grimly, she thinks: at least that's longer lasting than where she just stepped out of.

"What's this place even? And what's the point of it?" Because it's the point that really matters - that's what decides if this place is going to be even worse than what she just went through.

It's a fair reeling. When Bellamy Blake had shown up and said he'd been existing in space for six months past when she'd watched his rocket exit the atmosphere and subsequently died (or so she'd thought at the time), it'd been a gut punch. A tilt-o-whirl for the brain to comprehend, another sick reminder that they weren't in Kansas, or even on Earth anymore. Clarke senses Gideon's shock and tries to smile apologetically; only succeeds in tilting her head and knitting her brow with concern.

"This is the Serena Eterna. It's a cruise ship in the middle of a nondescript patch of ocean, captained by — well, the Captain. He built this place and brings us here through a weird mix of chance and unexplained magic, all for the point that we suffer and die in order to fuel it." Then, belatedly: "Sorry."

Just because those are facts she's been living with for months doesn't make them any more alarming to hear the first time around. She really ought to be better about remembering that in general, but goes the extra mile to try with a friend of Palamedes.

"I know it sucks, and also sounds a bit crazy."

That gets another confused blink out of Gideon, and she sets her hands on her hips. Cruise ship in the ocean? Captained by the Captain? Suffer and die to fuel it? She runs a hand through her hair as she just sorts this all out, and as her brain rolls through it, she settles on one confusing thing, which is:

"So we can die again? You're right, that does suck and sound crazy."

Gideon, unaware that the question she's asking and the question Clarke will be hearing aren't exactly the same, waits to hear an answer that is probably only going to leave her more confused.

Let's light this candle and make this first meeting all the more weird and unnerving.

Clarke gets a particular shade of sad smile dancing around her mouth. It's pinched and mournful, resigned and exhausted all in one. But bright in affirmation when she nods and says:

"Oh yeah, we can die over and over here. I'm at... three? And sometimes revival means the Captain keeps one of your internal organs."

She's usually pretty hush-hush about her missing kidney but, given Palamedes was the one who figured out its surprising absence... Gideon really does just essentially skip four friendship levels and get the blatant truth from Clarke at first blush, it's weirdly refreshing.

Well that-

Uhhhhh that is not what Gideon was thinking of and she takes a moment to turn it over in her head. It's still not clicking. Three times? Losing organs? She blinks a few times as if that'll reset the part of her brain that can't snap this all into place.

It doesn't work.

"What's he doing with the organs? Flesh magic, or eating them?" Are these the only two possible choices? No. Are these the only choices Gideon is willing to entertain at the moment? Yes, get off her ass.

Oh no, totally fair assumption; Clarke even presumed her kidney long since chomped on until actually asking the shadowy manshape that is the Captain. Now she only 15% thinks he eats them, and 60% that they're being used for nefarious purposes (the reveal of the stupidity death tax has not yet been confirmed and made public at this time).

So she just shrugs. "Could be either. Could be he's just collecting them, or just takes them to torment us."

"Out of the fire and into the even weirder fleshpit." Gideon mutters. It never ends does it? She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. "Suppose we have one advantage this time around then. And we've got Pal."

It might be stupid to throw in her trust with Clarke this soon but fuck it, if Pal thinks she's worth trusting enough to tell this kind of stuff, then Gideon's got no reason to disagree with the smartest guy she's ever met. So she plants her hands on her hips and faces Clarke. "Fill me in on the plan. I promise to listen and only occasionally make vile jokes, and only if you really set me up for it."

As one who also tends to flit from one crisis to another, that's an incredibly apt but mildly upsetting sentiment that Gideon parses out. Please never say fleshpit again, it's a horrifying visual. But Clarke shakes off a mild dismay at phrasing, somehow manages to brighten a little more when the taller girl braces herself and seems ready to dive head first into the grit of their new reality.

...a weird sort of brighten, though. Delight not yet worn off from finally having met the Ninth House cavalier, but apprehension because this is a... somewhat delicate subject? And a little depressing the more one thought about it. It's just hard to share, but here goes nothing:

"More than a few people have plans around here, and they differ. Some want to help the Captain because they think he'll eventually grow a conscious and drop us off somewhere to live out our lives instead of killing us all. Some want to force their way out of this pocket universe, but that hasn't worked for anyone who tried. Some want to kill the Captain, even though it's a commonly accepted hypothesis that killing the Captain would kill all of us on board."

Two guesses where on that spectrum Clarke falls. Hint: it's not the popular option.

Well great news Clarke, Gideon has a lot of things but a sense of self-preservation certainly isn't one of them. She grins at her. "Well Clarke, I'm already dead, so a second go-round doesn't scare me at all."

Good to know, good to know. She likes a good bit of enthusiasm, and every war needs soldiers ready to lay down their lives for the betterment of others. Both eyebrows raise like she's a fish, caught on the line of intrigue. But veering away from sounding too gung-ho about the concept of slaughtering every passenger on board in the name of the greater good, Clarke plays it safe. She hasn't even talked at length about this ultimate end-goal with Palamedes yet.

"Right. But don't rush into anything, okay? You're still new here, and should be allowed to form your own opinions. There's a book of everything we currently know in the library, and you should read that as soon as you're settled."

Truthfully, if Palamedes thinks this is the way to go, then Gideon trusts him. He's the one who figured everything out, and she's seen firsthand that when he chooses the self-destructive answer, it's because it's the best choice. She can agree with him on that one.

"Don't worry, I won't go after anyone on my own. I'll read the book, and make up my mind." Mind's already made up but sure, she'll look. It's not likely she'll see something that Pal missed but hey, it's probably good to be sure. "Until then, I'll just keep wandering around this place and figure out what exactly I've been dragged into."

Really, really quickly:

"You don't have to wander alone. I can show you around in the meantime."

Because let's be honest, it'd be really great if Gideon eventually made up her mind in the same fashion Clarke has. And what better way to encourage that than to give a tour of their setting, complete with idle commentary about what atrocity happened where?

Well, why not? Gideon gives Clarke a nod. "Alright, play the tour guide and I'll trail you all over this place. Lead the way!"

And with that, Gideon is happily lead about the ship.

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TEST DRIVE MEME #7

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