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sailmods ([personal profile] sailmods) wrote in [community profile] sail_ooc2023-05-23 12:55 am
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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.]
chipsahoy: (70)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
Utter relief floods Chip's face, glee flitting across his expression as he tosses his head back with a delighted laugh.

"Yog-Sothoth? Next you'll be telling me you know Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlehotep, cursed be thy names," he chuckles, tilting his head back down and arching a brow.

"You went through all the years of getting a doctorate just to kill someone? You couldn't have just..." he trails off, gesturing with both hands following someone presumably with a sniper rifle, then firing it off twice.
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 03:50 am (UTC)(link)
"I don't have an actual doctorate, it just took me eight fucking years to figure out how to kill a precog."
chipsahoy: (42)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 03:53 am (UTC)(link)
"That makes slightly more sense, but now I'm disappointed. You could have been furthering your education and gotten a degree in that time, absolutely. Now I want to know how you managed the assassination of someone that could predict your arrival. That's quite fascinating."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 04:05 am (UTC)(link)
He's gonna be so let down when it gets out that Erin never finished middle school.

"Yeah that's the bitch of it. He was clever enough to use it to kill too, hence getting hired to extinguish him. Took ages to figure out it was his only trick; bought an imprisoned succubus and traded her freedom for his life. He saw it coming the whole time, but..." Erin's smile is malicious. "Not a damn thing he could do about it. Your turn, why magic as a career?"
chipsahoy: (Default)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 04:55 am (UTC)(link)
"Bit boring, really. Started out with Theology, just really fascinated by religion and people's relationship with it, branched into esotericism, the snowball kept rolling and picking up more things. Followed social anthropology, for the longest time I studied everything without an ounce of belief in any of it being real, just superstition and tradition. Then the science started matching up with the supernatural and I followed the breadcrumbs, found my first mentors, got deeper into everything. People started side-eyeing me but it was pretty harmless," he recalls, stuffing hands into the pockets of his slacks, turning them inside out to shake out the remains of salt therein.

"Then when I went to the United States to further my study I found an ancient text with all the evidence I needed and it cracked on from there. That taste of the truth spurred on a ravenous appetite that couldn't be sated for a long time. I'm something of a recovering alcoholic, only with magic."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 05:10 am (UTC)(link)
Erin nods grimly. It's a story she's heard before, with a detail changed here or there. It sucks every time. "Well. Fair's fair enough. Most of my tricks are mine, nothing I can do actively to others," TERMS and CONDITIONS fucking APPLY, "but I can hold you to your word of honor, if I choose to. I usually don't, but, witch to warlock, consider it a professional courtesy; you've been advised."
chipsahoy: (32)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 05:48 am (UTC)(link)
"Well, I'm not sure how that would work against me, honestly. Word-of-honor bonds are actually quite meaningless in my world. Any contracts have to be blood-bound, when it comes to mortals. Which I am, mostly. I think. Still. Maybe. Fae can make contracts without blood but there haven't been any of those seen since...well, since before Crowley's time; confirmed, anyways," he muses, arching a brow and squinting at Erin slowly, as if perhaps suddenly asking himself a lot of internal questions, his deeply overstuffed Rolodex of information creaking along to something relevant.

"Actually, I'll keep it in mind to try at some point. I'm very against being bound in any manner, but if it becomes a self-control issue, I may look for you to abuse that loophole."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

By tradition I declare: damn OCs and their one-liners

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 06:13 am (UTC)(link)
"...So is this a good time to clarify that I'm a fairy or...?"
chipsahoy: (Default)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 06:24 am (UTC)(link)
"I mean you didn't have to, I would have figured it out sooner or later, but I appreciated you being upfront about it," he murmurs, voice low as he leans in, narrowing his eyes in scrutiny.

"What sort of fae? You don't look like any I've read about. You're much too social and contemporary for any of the kinds from my world. Too nice, in fact. You're conversational and polite and haven't tried to steal my bones or worse."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
Erin laughs in surprise. "What would I need your bones for - you know what, actually, don't answer that." She glides a hand through the Aura of gunpowder that surrounds her and catches a spark on her palm. "My people call ourselves the Lost. We start human, until we're dragged behind mirrors and under hills, through the third ways that doors open or past the reflection of the moon on the water, and become fey things. I'm human, and I'm fey. Terms and conditions apply. There's more things like me on the axis of being a fairy and they all get wild as fuck. Used to know a ten foot fish man that runs a tavern and if you held me at gunpoint I'd have to say he's technically a goblin."
chipsahoy: (65)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 06:53 am (UTC)(link)
"So you're what happens when the kidnapped come back?" he asks, leaning lower still, face too close, chin tilted upwards as he peers down his nose at her.

"There's plenty of writing about people young and old being spirited away by the fae for a variety of reasons. Occasionally they leave behind gifts in trade, completely oblivious to the damage their thieving does. Those that are more mean-spirited leave behind changelings. Copies of the people they took that are never quite right. There's a theory in the circles I run in that there's no such thing as fae as written, but they're just more extensions of other greater evil entities. Maybe. If not, though..." he tilts his head back a moment, leaning away to give her a bit more space.

"It was very distantly adjacent to my preferred fields of study. Rarely intersected. If you're ever in the right mood, I'd very much enjoy hearing as much as you can tell me."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 07:05 am (UTC)(link)
This guy has personal space problems. Erin's pointed ears twitch in irritation, but she does her best to keep it conversational. "After you settle in we can swap notes. Just, word of advice? This place has a lot of magical paradigms and the horror shows are in the distinct minority. You're gonna need to unlearn some assumptions or people will take offense."
chipsahoy: (Default)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-17 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
"No assumptions, otherwise I wouldn't bother to ask questions," the Brit remarks, arching a brow with a soft snort.

"I'm not going to spend my time here walking on eggshells because I might hurt someone's fragile feelings, miss. If people prefer to attack ignorance rather than educate in an effort to eradicate ignorance, then they are the problem. I'll take the advice under consideration, but here's a bit for you in turn: if I were in the habit of making assumptions, then I would have been obligated to kill you the moment I met you," he muses, turning his head slightly and glancing sidelong at the woman.

"In my line of work, anything not perfectly human in every way is a dire threat with no goal other than the complete enslavement and extinction of humanity."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-17 10:23 pm (UTC)(link)
"Not the worst policy. That used to be my line of work. Not everyone's immune to joining the war against an inhuman evil on the side of evil." Erin sighs. "...I got out, but not everybody does. But here we're all passengers, yeah? We've all got the same problem."
chipsahoy: (12)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-18 05:24 am (UTC)(link)
"You say that, but the more people I meet the less meaning the problem seems to have. People are more concerned with their little interpersonal lives than the fact they've all been stolen away by some extraordinarily powerful entity, crammed into a box on water under unfamiliar stars, and set to entertain that entity for heaven only knows what purpose. Even if people have already tried a thousand ways to solve this situation, there are a thousand, thousand more things to try. Does no one have the fortitude?" he asks, arching a brow with a frustrated expression.

"You talk about a war against inhuman evil - and mind you someone already decided to get cross with me for using the word human as in humane because they're so bothered by the unfairness of semantics, evidently - and yet here we are, clearly bound by some inhumane being and people are more content to sit at buffets and plan weddings. It's absolutely ludicrous."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-18 06:15 am (UTC)(link)
"Is it?" Erin arches an eyebrow. "Life under siege sucks. We're less under siege here than I'm used to, and some people are content to play the long game. Some are actively fomenting rebellion, and still others are faced with interesting existential questions. There's a boy here who's dead - a ghost, to be precise. What happens to him if he goes to a real reality? What happens to all of us if this place just collapses? Hell, what if we end up in one of the dozen absolute hellscapes people here have come from? I won't jerk you around, I'm prepared to make a home here - it's that much better for me. But we're not insane." Beat. "Most of us aren't insane. And even madness has its method."
chipsahoy: (46)

[personal profile] chipsahoy 2023-06-19 12:33 am (UTC)(link)
"Madness is the weapon of choice among the monstrosities of my home. That said, I'm not arrogant enough to presume myself capable of solving this alone, particularly as one of the latest additions to the collection. I'd be interested to meet the dissidents above all. And I don't truly judge anyone that chooses to take peace where they can find it. I simply cannot do the same."
crushed_pearls: (Default)

[personal profile] crushed_pearls 2023-06-19 02:07 am (UTC)(link)
"If you're after the dissidents, you're looking for Cassandra de Rolo and Lieutenant Tayrey. They're not the leaders, as it were, but they're definitely the ones with the most focus and ability to articulate their objections." Erin points at Chip and says this next bit emphatically: "Be nice to Cass. That's my lady love and while she can handle herself if I hear a whisper of emotional distress off her after the shit everyone just went through I will wage such a campaign of confusion on you as to make you wish for ol' Hastur in my place. Tayrey..." Erin's expression softens into a fond grin. "Well. You'll see."