sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #10

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!tdm

TEST DRIVE MEME #10

a. that's where we both belong

[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 aboard! I'm so happy you could join us!

[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.]

b. and there's plenty of that down by the sea

[it’s strange to think about, isn’t it? how all those new passengers, the ones grumbling or shouting their way through the forced muster drill, have absolutely no idea what happened just last month. no idea about the labyrinth. no concept of why anyone around them would be a bit more hesitant around shadows.

they’ll learn.

sometimes a shadow is darker than it’s supposed to be. very rarely does anything come of that; just a vague sense that someone is watching you, and little more. sometimes, though, the shadows move. sometimes they grab at your ankles as you walk. sometimes they give you a shove as you go down the stairs. sometimes they pull your hair, or pinch your arm.

sometimes you feel something sharp cut into your lower leg.

that’s not a shadow, though. that’s a fiddler crab. you see the crab, sometimes. the cut isn’t from its claws, which don’t look very intimating; it’s not a very large crab. the cut is from the large kitchen knife crudely taped onto its back. it’s probably fine. it's not chasing you. there isn't evil in its heart. probably.]

c. think I'll go back to the Keys

[one day, in the atrium, two pedestals suddenly appear. on each is a large button: one green, and one blue. pressing the blue button gives you a little treat, popping out of thin air next to you. pressing the green button sends a small electric shock through your body. weird, but, hey, pretty avoidable, right?

except, it seems to be spreading. to every other button on board.

in the elevator. on the soda machine. the arcade. your phone. the bell on Friday’s desk.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Erin's ears twitch and swivel in the direction of that murmur. She'll remember that.

"Good to know. I don't get like, smashed-smashed a lot but sometimes you really can only drink about things." She gestures grandly to the entrance of Topy's and takes a moment to adjust her sword belt, tightening it back up. "Choice of bottle is yours, I can't read labels. Well. Lemme correct that, if you find me a label I can read and it isn't in braille? Yeet that bottle into the sea."

There's a moment of hesitation.

"You saw my light orb, well enough to compare it to a Pocky mascot. Why would a bottle you can read be a problem?"

He's really trying to work through the matter without being too nosy. Yet.

She taps her blindfold. "I can see things with a fate, and so far usually also magical things. An object so attached to someone as to be part of them? Visible. But usually if it's not a person and I can see it, that shit is curst as hell. Think...Excalibur is usually my go-to..."

Erin suspects this guy is not American and she's drawing so many blanks.

"Excalibur, I'm familiar with. Video game references are also going to land. Soul Edge, Buster Sword, the Ebony Blade, things like that. But yeah, I get what you mean. Cursed wine isn't on the menu today."

For what it's worth, Shiroe's staff, coat, and the oddly blocky bag worn at his hip are all absolutely magical, though the enchantments on the first two are fairly minor. Protection, magic enhancement.

Shiroe takes a moment to look through the wines, and there's a couple soft sounds of dismay as he reads the labels. "...these can't be right. This wine says it was bottled 437 BC."

Oh good, that saves so much explaining.

"Caveat emptor, my man. If you wanna try it I'm not nursing you back to health."

More shuffling around, looking at bottles.

"I haven't found one less than a thousand years old yet. What's going on?"

"They're just...like that," Erin says with a shrug. "If you want an explanation for their advanced age you're best off asking Ms. Friday. I haven't asked, chiefly because I suspect I can only regret knowing. Which is gonna be a bit of a running theme in my life just to warn you in advance."

"See, I'm the opposite. I'd rather ask and live on, cursed with the burden of forbidden knowledge."

He finally settles on a bottle of Spanish red wine from the 1100s, after looking around to his satisfaction. "Especially if me knowing means I can protect others who would be happier ignorant."

"I've got enough forbidden knowledge as it is. I served my nickel, I get to pick what I don't wanna know." Beat. "That said, look up Lieutenant Tayrey and Peter Smith, they're both of your persuasion and there's far worse people to bounce ideas off of. Bobby B's is this-a-way but you're either gonna want to make peace with whiskey glasses or grab wineglasses. I'm cool with either."

"Lieutenant Tayrey, Peter Smith. Noted. If you see either of them before me, mention I'd like to meet them?"

Shiroe doesn't bother to grab wineglasses--he's hardly a snob. Look, before becoming a guildmaster, before being sucked into an MMORPG, he was a graduate student. He's very good at 'take what you get' and living on cheap ramen.

Truly this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, possibly involving dipping crab legs in syrup together. Erin nods to show she heard and understands and leads the way out to Bobby B's, where she flops into a comfy chair and digs out a cigar and one of her knives to cut it. It smells, faintly and oddly, of savory herbs; when she lights the thing up you'd swear she was cooking something with garlic.

Shiroe's gonna have to get the glasses, Erin's not gonna knock something over and get yelled at for breaking 'em when the ship is repairing itself so slowly these days.

"So," she says at last, after a few puffs and plenty of time for this guy to get comfy. "You said the last time you were on an Earth. Not to be overly blunt but how many layers of being kidnapped into another dimension are you on, my dude?"

"What a way of phrasing that." He settles into his chair, and lowers his staff into the boxy little bag he wears at his hip, despite the obvious impossibility of that action, given the sizes of the objects involved. Someone has a bag of holding, or the equivalent.

"This is my second layer, if I'm understanding the question correctly."

"Two nickels," Erin says with a sigh. She slides the knife to him for the cork on the wine. "If you count returning to Earth I'm on three, but I'm not in a big hurry to count that. My sympathies man. Shit sucks."

"I haven't made it back to Earth." There's a pause, as he fiddles with the bottle. "I wasn't really trying to, if I'm completely honest. I was more concerned with the work of ensuring we could live in that reality. Community building, making sure the most vulnerable among us were safe. Negotiations with the People of the Land."

He takes a deep breath, as the cork is popped out, and glasses are poured.

"I was one of tens of thousands of players pulled into the world of the MMORPG Elder Tale with the release of the Noosphere Pioneers update. I found myself inhabiting my character, the Level 90 Enchanter-Scribe Shiroe. I have lived within the world of Theldesia for over six months."

"...The infinite fuck?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, honestly, on the exact mechanics of it. I'm lucky, there were a good few of my friendslist also on for the new expansion. I've since built a guild and gotten involved in the politics of my base city, making sure the crafting guilds and the combat guilds and everyone else are cooperating."

What, Erin, didn't you ever watch Sword Art Online?

Her anime education began and ended at Sailor Moon reruns in hotels, fucker.

"...You are gonna have a fun time with the ship politics. We could use a big picture kinda guy without...baggage." Erin takes her glass and gives it a sip; not her favorite, but she'll take it. "If you're from Earth and got sucked into a videogame then...I'm gonna guess that's not your birth body. Which. My condolences or congratulations, as appropriate."

You know, says the lass with the huge fucking wings.

"It's...close enough. The face is the same. The glasses, the hair. I made my avatar taller than myself, though. For my first few days in the world, I felt like I had to learn to walk again. It was harder for a friend of mine, Akatsuki. She got caught in an avatar that was the wrong gender altogether. Luckily, I had a potion to fix it for her."

He shakes his head, remembering the screams Akatsuki let out as she was transformed.

"Anyway, someone else mentioned the ship politics. Cliques who don't all mingle? Distrust being a big thing?"

Erin makes a Face, and it's not the wine. "That might be a bit fucking harsh. Like, yeah, we've all got our closer friends and our alliances but even a cruise ship is only so big. You can't avoid each other forever." This calls for a deeper drink to steady herself, and a bit of the cigar. The garlic flavor goes surprisingly well with the wine, note to self. "But the big dividing line is pretty stark and simple. One side we've got folks who don't want to go home, or whose fate in a new reality would be lethally uncertain - who are, in fact, only alive because they're here. On the other side there's folks who, not wrongly, find our captivity fucking intolerable, and would like to end it and/or punish our captor. I tend to be in the first camp, but I've got loved ones all along the spectrum."

“Mm. Tell me more about this captor of ours? I haven’t heard anything about what they’re like, yet.” In fact, that a single being is responsible for all this is still news to him.

Erin gestures Upwardly with the glass. "He's up on the bridge, 's the Captain. I haven't had a lot of dealings with the man, he very understandably does not like me much and doesn't want me around him. Fair enough. But he's..." she bobs her head, side to side. "The rules he sets, he is also bound by. The terms on the table, he will follow. The systems he's designed here feed on our passions to fuel the ship, and often he'll extract that through cruelty and horror, so, brace for that shit, but...he's not some lofty god decreeing our suffering. He's running from something, and I really don't wanna find out what."

Shiroe pushes up his glasses as he hears Erin speak, and inexplicably, she can see the sinister flash of light off the lenses of the glasses. A tiny, tiny smile forms on his lips, but he works to keep it out of his voice.

“Good to know. The ship is currently fueled by our emotions, then…that’s an interesting choice. Has anyone discussed alternate forms of fuel with him?”

"You're asking the wrong girl, but I sincerely believe he's investigated those by now. Not saying it's not possible, but...be ready to hear 'I thought of that already' in varying degrees of rudeness." There's that Face again. "Not that I'm attached to regularly going through horrors but I'm still making out good in comparison to home, so."

“…your home being Earth, or the place you were taken?” He’s recognizing the face, but isn’t yet sure what subjects are safe ones to change to.

"For these purposes, 'yes'." She sighs over her glass. "My Earth is linked to a couple other places. Just..." Air quotes, "'next' to it is the Hedge, the place behind mirrors and under hills, through arches in trees and behind every door. Beyond that are the nightmare lands where the conventionally human become people like me, at the hands of unrelenting, inhuman evil. To make it back to Earth is to fight that war forever, and I'm. So tired."

She drains the glass and goes to refill it.

"I'm human, with terms and conditions. My people call ourselves the Lost, but the more rude name humans tend to hit on is Changelings. It's. Wrong. We're not the replacements, we're the originals."

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