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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.]
no subject
"Oh." They don't have a wine cellar. At least she doesn't think they do. They don't have a ton of electricity in general, but enough to get by.
"Um. Not really on the movies and TV shows. We do most of the reading for English class. We read some poetry and like...books like The Giver and stuff? I dunno." It doesn't really matter, does it? She looks at the drink for a moment, not really sure if she should drink that. It looks...uhhh...why does it look like that? Maybe she'll just get mountain dew from somewhere. Still, just to be nice, she takes a sip and resists the urge to make a face. "Hm."
Right. About school? "School's fine. I like going! I have friends and people like me and I get to learn stuff!" So that's goo, right?
"Yeah. They tried to kill them over it. And they look down on them. Even when they save the world and stuff." She shrugs. "Well, you couldn't have. Plus, all powers come with a weakness. It's the rule." Not her rule, but a general rule. Like how she just falls asleep if she exerts too much energy. That's what coffee and mountain dew are for!
Molly just stares at the rant about his character. "Maybe you shouldn't write such annoying people if you're gonna hate them so much." There's a small sigh. "But it's gotta suck to be hated just cause you exist, too. Sometimes you don't even have a choice in existing...and people hate you for it." Sometimes your grandma is a somewhat evil scientist that clones your mom and now she's being held hostage (as far as Molly's concerned) by the Avengers.
no subject
A squint! "What's the Giver? Is it any good? Same with the poetry." He liked Poe. And that was it. Most poetry was Shakespearian and he hated it.
As she tries her milk tea and makes a face, Arthur worries instantly! "Ah, no good? Want some of my coffee? Or... I think there might be hot chocolate around here."
Clearly surprised, "Really? You like school? Do your best then. It must have changed since my time. What do you like about it?"
"Kill him?" Arthur looks pretty horrified. "I guess that's true, about weaknesses, even vampires have weaknesses, even if it's not the ones Bram Stoker conceptualized. He wrote the book Dracula." Since odds were against her reading that.
"I don't write annoying characters. I write funny characters, but everyone loves him most. And I wanted to write other things. History, serious journalism. I wrote a piece on the injustices in the Congo. Or on Indian travesties and prejudice. But all anyone ever knew about me was him. And they would write letters to me addressed to him. I don't hate him for existing, I hate him for being everything I'm not and never want to be. I wanted him to teach people to be more observant, and it worked, but they still like him more than me." He realizes he's being too serious and so casts it off with a giant smile. "Ah well~! It's nice how much of a gold mine he is!"
no subject
"Um. It's okay? It's about this society that is trying to be perfect? And to do that, they don't let people remember all the bad, difficult stuff. The temperature and the weather are always the same and like...nothing bad happens. Except that they...um...they um...kill babies that they think are flawed and old people that they think are too old to be useful." She looks down at that. "So the Giver um...The main character is assigned as the new Giver and he holds all the memories of humanity...and so...well, I think you should read it, maybe. I don't want to spoil it. But it's like a book about morals and ethics in society at large?"
She's already slipping behind the counter to look for the hot chocolate, finding the things easily enough. It's not as easy as the swiss miss hot chocolate packets that Chase gets them, but it'll do.
"Well, people do try to kill him a lot. Once someone kidnapped us and tried to kill me because of my parents, but Wolverine saved me. It was right after I threw him through the ceiling cause I was upset. But he...didn't get mad at me. He just saved me and hugged me when I cried. He's not really that bad, but sometimes he's just...UGH! Annoying." A beat. "There's not as many Mutants left in the world, but there's still some."
Molly shrugs, holding up her hands in surrender. "You're the one that sounded annoyed with him, not me."
no subject
"Sounds ghastly," the Giver. "But you liked it? Is it a movie too?" Since everything else is, apparently.
"Sounds like you and Logan have a complicated relationship." British understatement. "Why aren't there many mutants left? There used to be a lot? Was it like the Giver, and they just euthanized anyone who was different?" Sounds awful.
A small grin over his coffee. "Oh and I am. But I'm the only one in the world who is. The general public loves him. And that's what annoys me. And I tried to write characters people could love even more, but it didn't work."
Luckily she's working on the hot chocolate. That's probably for the best.
no subject
She shrugs. "It was okay! It was just a book I had to read for school. I guess to teach us whatever the moral point of the story was? I don't know??" If there is, she hasn't seen it.
"Yeah. When I was a kid, I wanted to marry him, but then I met him and he...is not someone I'd marry." Which is fine. "Oh. Um. It was M-Day? Scarlet Witch cast a spell. No More Mutants. Um. But because the Runaways were in hiding and most of us weren't known, I guess I escaped being depowered."
Molly isn't going to pretend to understand. If you don't like something, why keep doing it? It seems dumb. "Well, I don't think I'd keep writing something I wasn't happy with because people got upset about it. People are upset about things all the time."
no subject
Arthur makes a face. "Now I'm suffering," he teases right back. M-Day, mutants, Scarlet Witch, hiding. Okay.
"You're underestimating public pressure." Also because, "I wasn't hiding back then. It was impossible to escape. I started off as a Doctor, so I had to establish community ties and trust, and that's a big part of who paid my bills as a writer. Everywhere I went, someone would complain about it. And the writers they sent kept coming. I did stop for 8 years. That's what, over 60% of your life time? It was a long time. And it didn't die down."
no subject
Oh right. Arthur probably.
Wow. What a disappointing life.
"Well, you should be." Cause that's the mature response.
"Mmmm. No. Cause you know how many people have tried to force me to join the X-Men? A lot. And I never do. And then there's the people that tried to force me to live with other people and that didn't work either. And theeeen like the Gibborim tried to force us AT LEAST TWICE to kill people to feed them with and we didn't do that either. Also our parents probably were gonna force us to let them kill our friends so that whatever parents and kids survived would have the world and give it over to the Gibborim. But we exploded them instead." There's a sort of sad look here because Molly, despite nearly being killed, does still miss our parents.
"Lots of people try to make us do a lot of things." A beat. "It's the people that take advantage of what we want to do that are better at it than the others."
no subject
"At least you changed your mind, that's some condolence." He stuck his tongue out at her. The most mature!
Blue eyes just widen. That's a lot. Even by Arthur's standards of dying children and murder mysteries, war, and the dark side of humanity.
"Is the Gibborim some sort of cult? Or monster? I guess... I like writing. I like making people happier than I could as a Doctor. So everyone just--" took advantage of that? Too real. "What is it you want? Other than not to be an XMen or have adults tell you what to do or when to do it or try to feed you to Gibborim or get you to manipulate others and feed them as sacrifices?"
no subject
Molly gives him a somewhat annoyed look before shrugging. "I don't really wanna date boys or marry them. I just wanna have friends and fight bad guys! Oh! And hang with Doombot!" And Gib, but she doesn't wanna talk about Gib to a stranger. He won't understand.
"Yeah. They're supposed to inherit Earth and feast on all the souls of the humans for the rest of eternity." There's a shrug here. "They kinda suck. They're like multiple monsters? But then we killed the parents and their kids woke up and came after us." Laaaame. "Um. Not to be hunted and killed most of the time. I just wanna have a normal life. But like...I also like fighting bad guys and helping people." This gets a long sigh. And some of Doombots potatoes.
no subject
What the blazes?
"It's a card game?" He loves card games. "Like p--" a card game for children. So NOT poker, pinochle, pontoon, baccarat, "heaaarts?" He asks slowly, not really covering for himself, but sure. "But you collect them too?" Like books. Art. Or how Le Comte collects literal artists going the extra mile in rich person things. Okay, but not books, she said she only had the ones they read in school. "Like... butterflies?" No wait, girls don't do that. "Or you're an American so... marbles or--" wasn't there cards the boys collected from candy? "Baseball cards?" Maybe? That sounds wrong, but he's not an American child.
"You can be friends with boys without marrying them. I am. Friends with women too. Not married." Anymore. "Is Doombot a superhero or villain?" Does it matter?
"That does sound rather unpleasant." Severe understatement. "I don't think a normal life is in the poke-a-mon cards for you." Hello, fellow children, how do you do? Is he doing this right-o? "But helping people so you're no longer hunted might be." He can't help the sympathetic expression. Even whaling and hunting seals, you wind up feeling very sympathetic to anyone hunted, whatever the circumstance.