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

1. arrival

She was supposed to be taking a detour to Earth-138 on her way to mission. The coordinates are even still programmed into her watch! But no matter how many things she pokes, even things she had been told very much not to poke, the read-out for this dimension stays glitched and she can't open a portal. Which is not good! It is the exact opposite of good and Gwen can already hear Jessica asking her what happened, how she managed to break the nigh-unbreakable thing, and really this is the last thing she needs right now and—

Gwen stops her restless pacing hanging from the cabin ceiling and breathes. Chill out, Gwen. You've done this before. Sure, if the watch is broken the glitching is going to really suck, but you handled it in Miles' universe! Just get out of this room, figure out where you are, and go from there.

It's about then that she notices the note, which, honestly, doesn't really help, but it answers half of a question: she's on a cruise ship. As she ducks out into the hallway, still in her full suit, she says to herself: "...there can't be a Spider-Man that operates entirely on a cruise ship, can there? Or— no. Though maybe— a retiree Spider-Man, like those old people that move onto cruises? ...no, no that's silly."

She has every intention of ignoring the muster drill, until, of course, the moment where she literally can't! Which, fine, okay, she'll take off her mask, go to deck one, sit through the drill from the lady with a slightly disconcerting lack of face, but as soon as she has control over her own legs again she's looking for someone who might be able to answer some questions. It's hardly her first rodeo at trying to blend in and get information at the same time.

"Hi, sorry, silly question, but what's the next port we're stopping at? And when are we stopping there? I seem to have misplaced my itinerary and I'd like to be properly prepared."

2. crab???

Gwen has substituted her spider-suit, which has been stuffed into a drawer in her cabin under a bunch of other clothes, for Tommy Bahama chic, namely a pink dress over a tank-top over a pair of cropped pants. Even if she's getting the idea that this place isn't just another branch in the spiders' multiverse, better to act like a normal civilian when you're walking around amongst normal civilians.

Her spidey-sense keeps pinging, but every time she looks for what's setting it off, there's nothing. It happens enough times that it's only because she knows better than to just ignore it outright that she manages to whirl around and hop out of the way of the knife coming at her calf before she gets stabbed. By... a crab?

Gwen blinks. Takes a step back every time the crab scuttles after her. "Soooo. What're you, then? Mutant crab? Human mind placed in the body of a crab and taking your poor circumstances out on everyone fortunate enough to still have ankles? Spikey the roomba joke?"

3. buttons

You're about to push a button somewhere, anywhere—elevator, arcade, windjammer—only for a teenage girl to pop up next to you and either tap you on the shoulder, cover the button, or bat your hand down lightly.

"Don't touch that. Trust me. It's one of the zappy ones."

She wasn't here a minute ago, so how does she know without trying it? It's a mystery.

4. up high

Atop the bridge, on the giant golf ball above the sports deck, next to the big screen, anywhere high up and improbably accessible to a normal looking teenage girl—there's Gwen, staring out over the endless ocean. It's a far cry from New York or the other cities she's become used to flitting around, over the last couple months. There's something... lonely, about it. Or maybe that's just a side effect of taking her first multiversal whoopsie-daisy into a world where she's the only spider-person. Or maybe that's just the loneliness that's been following her ever since...

Gwen shakes the thought off and just sighs.

Wildcard.

I am voice testing, be gentle with me lmao. bluecitrine or artisticblueteam in the discord if you want to poke me about anything, but otherwise go wild. SPOILERS WISE, I'm pulling her from somewhere in the off-screen timeskip before Miles's reintroduction.

"Uh," Darcy blinks for a second ~~at the cute girl~~ until the question actually registers. This time they weren't even hanging around to intercept new people, they were actually just trying to get to the gym.

"Oh, you're new," in the tone of someone who's had to do this same schpiel a number of times, "okay- good news or bad news first."

Well that throws Gwen right off her groove. Now it's her turn to blink confusedly at the stranger, her number of questions about this dimension increasing tenfold—if this was a normal cruise in a strange universe (though, let's be honest, Friday's lack or face or the hint of external control are not the weirdest things she's ever encountered) that should have been the right in! How do they know she's 'new?' What more bad news can there be?

This all cycles through her head rapid-fire, before her lips purse for a moment and she answers: "...you know what, let's start with the bad news. That's usually a lot more illuminating."

"There's no ports and no leaving the ship except on excursions, which are usually designed to kill us. We're trapped on a tin can in a bubble run by an asshole who's dating my dad. We've all been dragged here from a bunch of different universes, places, and times. Also-" sort of gestures at her face, "and I know you're new because there's less than a hundred of us and I patrol every day, and also we never got an itinerary. Cute trying to subtly sneak in though, it would've worked if this place wasn't bullshit."

Points for trying.

The least surprising part of that explanation is the idea that everyone here has been dragged from a different universe. That might as well be an average Tuesday morning for her at this point, it'd almost be comforting in its familiarity if not for other key words like 'no leaving' and 'designed to kill us' and 'trapped'.

Never mind Jessica. This is a problem of 'being personally lectured by Miguel' proportions.

"Cool. Coolcoolcool." No panicking. Panicking is not allowed. She's got this. "And the good news?"

"Wherever you're from, you're still there. The you that's here is kind of like... a copy? Like a- a tree branch that's- actually, do you know computers? It's so much easier if you know computers, because then it's like. You've been copy-pasted into another file. So. Back home, you're still doing whatever you're doing and upholding whatever responsibilities you have to do."

Jazz hands.

"Also the food here is free. So."

"What? No, that's—" not how the quantum mechanics of hopping between universes works, except she doesn't say that because that's not a normal thing for a teenage girl to know with the certainty she thought she did. "—that's insane. Me being the equivalent of a code branch is the good news?"

Then again... Gwen thinks of everything she's learned in the last couple months, thinks about every other Gwen Stacy in the known multiverse and, well, as far as being a version of herself goes—

"...oh my god that really is the good news. Wow. Okay. Would you just— give me a second?"

Without waiting for an answer, Gwen walks to the edge of the deck, pulls her hood over her face, muffles a scream in the thick material, breathes, then throws her hood back down and comes back over with a renewed calm on her face.

"So, let me make sure I'm understanding this: we're copies of ourselves, trapped in like, a bubble dimension, controlled by someone, who sends us on trips where we might die? Is that why there's less than a hundred of you left?"

Darcy remains patient and sturdy and neutral throughout the whole thing- the quick skip from denial to acceptance, the running over to scream, and then coming back calmer again.

"Mm, not quite 'left'. People arrive and disappear all the time. I've been here a year now, but we were never a very big group to begin with. Ah- shit, left out an important part of the good news- nobody dies here. You just come back. We used to have, like, an introduction book for people but people kept adding bullshit and misinformation to it so. Had to get rid of it. We're working on re-doing it."

Nobody dies. They come back. Well, that's both worth it's own kind of existential crisis and a sick sort of relief, all twisted up into a lovely colourful knot. Congrats, you don't stay dead! Condolences, you will still die!

"A year." A year? "Wow, that's a long time. A really long time. Does no one have any ideas how to get out of here? You are trying, right?"

Thaaaat sounds more judgemental than she means it to, but too late, it's out of her mouth now.

Gwen Stacy | Spider-verse Movies | ATSV spoilers

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