TEST DRIVE MEME #10

[sailmods]

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.]

Comments

C.

[guildmastermind]

"From what I've seen it's hardly the Milgram experiment. More like an operant conditioning chamber. Skinner box."

The fact that the person making that comment is dressed in a white cloak and carrying a tall wooden staff, like someone cosplaying a wizard, may make the situation weirder. But he does, at least, hold up the staff silently, offering to press the button with it instead.

[chipsahoy]

"Alright, anachronistic, much?" he asks, looking the other man up and down and gesturing at the cloak and staff before nodding towards the button. He's more than happy to accept help where he can't get his sugary, fizzy pop fix without suffering an injury.

"So what is it? Hedge witch? Wizard? Warlock? Definitely not warlock, you're too cheery-looking for that or necromancy. Always pushing the stereotype in black-on-black. Could be a priest..." he trails off in thought, tongue darting across lips that move too quickly, spilling words in nervous bursts of unfiltered thought.

"Sorry. Dr. Hallewell," he hums, holding out his free hand, all spindly fingers and slightly too-short suit cuffs.

"Chip is fine. Not sure my degrees mean anything here, anyways."

[guildmastermind]

The offered hand is accepted, once the cup is safely filled. Wooden staff--it doesn't conduct the shock at all.

"Shiroe. Enchanter, and engineering graduate student. What fields are your degrees in? They might somehow end up relevant."

[chipsahoy]

Offering a firm, polite shake, Chip nods once, pausing to sip from his drink as he regards Shiroe with a sidelong look.

"Enchanter like imbuing things with magical properties or enchanter like manipulating the minds of others, because that distinction determines the trajectory of this conversation, I'm afraid," the Londoner remarks, taking another few sips of the drink with an expression of transparent relief.

"Well, I have my undergrad at Cambridge. I got my doctorate in Western Esotericism, then went for my MA and DPhil in philosophy and religious studies. Mostly Hermetic Tradition, magic, esoteric influence, spirit possession, alchemy, ahh, metaphysics, ethics, and radical political philosophy. I was working on Ancient Near Eastern Prophetic Tradition. Writing a dissertation on spirit possession in the early modern Jewish world. Then I got a little side-tracked. I don't think my degrees are going to mean too much under the circumstances," he remarks, gesturing around them with his cup and arching a brow.

"But I've been wrong before. It's actually quite surprising how often science and magic tend to intersect."

[guildmastermind]

"Oh, you're going to hate this answer then. Neither, Enchanter like the support caster subclass in the MMORPG Elder Tale. That said, you're going to be surprised how relevant some to the all of the everything you just listed might be here, given the different worlds and different magic systems people here are used to. And the fact that, um. This ship used to be powered by ghosts?"

Look, he's still catching up on everything, he's only barely been here longer than Chip.

[chipsahoy]

"Well, I don't know the first thing about video games. Mm, actually not entirely true, I've played a little here and there but I'm more of a books man. Couldn't afford games as a boy and couldn't afford the time as an adult, you know?" he muses, rubbing his chin a moment as he considers the revelation regarding his education; no less interesting is that Shiroe isn't put off by his specialties.

"I'm sorry, powered by ghosts? As in, lingering spirits of the deceased?" he asks, blinking at the other man a moment before reeling back with a shake of his head as if just registering a strange flavor in his mouth, only then connecting things Shiroe said to the conversation at present.

"Hold on now, wait. A what? What is a 'support caster subclass'? Are you putting me on right now? A video game?"

[guildmastermind]

“You’re going to need to pick a conversational path. Do you want to know about the ship or about me and why I’m kind of a video game character now?” Like, they can circle around to both, but it’s hard to handle simultaneously.

[chipsahoy]

"That's some very lawyer-y talk there. A conversation can branch in a dozen different directions if you're ADD enough," the man quips with a soft sniff.

"I'm not going anywhere soon, I imagine. Start with the video game. You're here now, which makes you a sight more important than the ghost ship Hell I'm trapped in. Are you kind of a video game character or actually one, and if you are one, how are you self-aware? And no, I'm not terribly surprised by the idea either way. You study enough metaphysical literature on parallel universes and before long you assume there's a world where pizza eats you. Go on, Mr. Shiroe. Enlighten me," the man hums, slurping at his drink and gazing over the rim at the man in question.

[guildmastermind]

“In my world, tens of thousands of people were pulled into the MMORPG Elder Tale at the release of the Noosphere Pioneers expansion. What you’re seeing is my avatar; I’ve been living in this body for months. I have my in-game skills and magic, the abilities of my class and subclass. But all the memories of a life on Earth before that.”

Isekai bullshit, in other words. Then again, is it really weirder than those British books about kids being taken to Heaven by Jesus’s fursona?

[chipsahoy]

"Oh! Simple enough. Out-of-body experience and astral projection taking on the form of a familiar character figure in a parallel universe manifesting the appropriate hallmarks of your video game. Not that difficult to understand," he remarks cheerily, snapping his fingers and pointing to Shiroe with a pleased expression that immediately falls.

"But, my degrees do not give me access to your acronyms. I have no earthly idea what an MMORPG is. I feel like I am failing my generation with every word coming out of my mouth."

[guildmastermind]

“Massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Though, strictly speaking, I think your explanation of it being a parallel universe might be more accurate than the shorthand I use of saying I was sucked into the game. There were enough differences between lived experiences and the game mechanics to make it seem…well, a question that I didn’t get complete answers to.”

There’s a bit of a sheepish laugh there.

[chipsahoy]

"I don't imagine anyone here is getting a lot of answers, to be quite honest. Part of me wonders if this isn't some...quasi-celestial cosmic dumping grounds for people that fell between the cracks in time and space," Chip mutters to himself more than Shiroe, clucking his tongue a few times in thought before shrugging sharply and turning to face Shiroe with a tight smile, gesturing at him with his half-finished drink.

"You seem collected enough, though. That's a relief. Most of the people I deal with that talk about magic and enchantments and the like tend to be fairly murderous. It's refreshing. So what's it like living in a video game, then? A role-playing game, was it? So you were already pretending to be someone else anyways? You sure you're not just in a coma somewhere?" he asks, turning to lean against the soda machine with a cocked hip.

[guildmastermind]

“I’m not sure about anything. About all I can prove definitively is that I’m thinking, so I probably am. But that might be putting Decartes before the horse.”

He shrugs expansively.

“Anyway, I have yet to meet a murderous magic-user on this ship, though I have heard rumors about a cannibal were-cougar.”

[chipsahoy]

"You should be summarily guillotined for that joke," Chip remarks, putting on an aghast expression purely for theatrics sake, only for the expression to solidify into reality.

"Once again, I beg your pardon. A cannibal were-cougar implies there's more than one were-cougar and they're eating one another. Please tell me this is some inside joke I'm not currently party to."

[guildmastermind]

The reaction to Shiroe’s joke is, momentarily, a delight.

“To my understanding, we’re running with a looser definition of cannibal. One were-cougar who occasionally eats people. But I’ve never met the guy.”

[chipsahoy]

"Alright so we're just ignoring that there's folk around that aren't humans, and grouping everyone under the gentle umbrella of 'people'. So there's a person out there eating other persons. Right, that tracks," he mumbles, jaw flexing as he turns to sip his drink again in a moment of contemplative silence.

"Can't honestly say I'm surprised. I've encountered my share of cannibalistic cults. None with a were-cougar, but - wait, is it actually cannibalism if there's a cougar involved, because it's an apex predator anyways?"

[guildmastermind]

“Good question. Also, does cannibalism count if death doesn’t stick? Apparently people come back to life here, instead of staying dead. I’m used to that in the game world, people resurrect at the cathedral or the safe zone in a dungeon. Here, they wake up in bed.” Three days later, but no one’s passed that detail on just yet.

[chipsahoy]

"Ah, tut tut tut, cannibalism isn't about the killing, just the eating. So that identifier sticks so long as someone is consuming someone else. There's a variety of cases of people consuming one another's flesh out of mutual curiosity and agreement to partake in a safe and controlled environment," he points out, glancing up as someone somewhere else shouts a curse.

"Another victim of The Buzzening," he sniffs, sucking his teeth noisily before taking another sip of his drink.

"A better question is, are you a dyed-in-the-wool cannibal if you've only tried it once as part of a tribal union invitation while spending time in a secluded jungle with the local primitives, or do you only become a cannibal by making it a frequent practice? Enquiring minds want to know."

[guildmastermind]

“You’re the one who’s studied ethics and philosophy. That question is outside the purview of engineering.” Not that there isn’t discussion of ethics in his curriculum. The Citicorp Building Incident was definitely brought up in lectures. But that’s beside the point.

[chipsahoy]

"Ethics is hardly the point here, but in a philosophical debate it could go on for hours and I think neither of us really needs to be picking that apart. Rather like going on about the ship of Theseus. Never ends," he huffs, taking another sip from his cup, the straw rattling a fluid garble as he finishes it off.

"So you were an engineer before you were an enchanter?" he smirks, cocking a brow and nodding slightly to Shiroe.

"Fair. I was a professor before I was a warlock. My my my, how the world turns."