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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.]
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"...yeah, uh." Gwen pulls her eyes off him to return to a more polite amount of looking at who you're talking to, brushing her hair back from her face. "Back home I've always liked sitting in my bedroom window or out on the apartment fire escapes. I live in New York, so... there's always something going on."
None of which is a lie, at all. Even if there's a lot more to it.
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"The balcony around our dorms was the same way for me, or up on the rooftops out on patrols in Musutafu proper. Like you said, always something going on."
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"Patrols..." she muses. That's enough to confirm a suspicion that had immediately bloomed when she saw him, but she asks as if she's only now connecting any dots at all: "So are you, like, a superhero or something?"
She knows there's no use in pretending her world doesn't have superhumans, heroes and villains alike; it would only make it harder to explain her relative lack of surprise when faced with the more unusual aspects of life on the boat.
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As much as he definitely doesn't look like it right now, in floral print with the sleeves removed over a plain tanktop and board shorts.
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Him and her both, she's restricted to Tommy Bahama for the foreseeable future—though of course, she's the one acting like she's just a totally normal teenage girl and not a superhero in her own right.
"Just starting out or is there such thing as a superhero apprenticeship?" And now she's thinking about Jess, again... "There's a few heroes back home. New York has its own, actually."
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"It's a school actually, for kids like me with different powers. UA's actually only one of them based out of Japan. I've never been to the States but you always hear news of the American heroes." All Might and his allies out West, Star and Stripe, a certain spider-themed college student in their iteration of New York...
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Having the option certainly does help, she doesn't know how the Spider-people who ended up with more obvious mutations after their bites manage, in all honesty...
Her brows go up at the thought of an actual school for heroes. For one sharp, bitter moment, that catches her off guard, she thinks why wasn't there something like that for me? before she manages to squash that down. Deep, deep down.
"There's that many kids with powers?" Enough to need schools, she means. "Wow. We definitely don't have that many. Spider-Woman would probably have to do less on her own if we did."
...okay maybe not deep enough down. Squash it deeper, Gwen, c'mon...
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"About eighty percent of the global population in my world do. Not everyone's are obvious at first, but we find out pretty young whether or not we have them at all." He lifts a hand, and the appendages adjacent, letting hands form where the inert nubs were. He's found that making them look more like proper arms is more comfortable for most people. When she mentions Spider-Woman, it's his turn to be surprised.
"Your Spider operates alone?" The immediate equivalency in his mind is probably a little bit off, but between her mention of New York and the hero in question, he'd been imagining the spider-person that worked with a tiny little agency coordinating with other east coast pro heroes.
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Eighty percent... that's like no world she's ever heard of before, and she thinks for a moment that it might be biased sampling on account of the Society dealing with Spider-People's worlds with all their underlying commonalities... and then Shouji says your spider. Not just 'your hero' or 'spider-woman'.
"Um, yeah, she's the only hero in the city, if there's a superhuman event... it's her on the scene. Your world has a Spider hero too?"
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"Yeah, they operate in and around New York City. There were rumors that they were going to retire but I think they had a change of heart." Things were...not exactly going well in a few places, especially with the way the war was going. Reinforcements getting called in from other places meant local heroes picking up the slack in their respective jurisdictions.
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"Huh. Wow. That's either a huge coincidence or... something else." It's something else, and she knows exactly what that something else is. There are so many Spider-people out there that it's impossible to know if a specific individual has been brought into the society's web, but now she's wondering. "Spider-Woman just kind of... appeared, one day. Started helping the cops deal with the villains popping up. But I guess it works a lot differently when there's so many people with powers, being trained."
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"My name is Shouji, by the way. Hero name Tentacole. What's yours?"
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"Yeah, I bet. The heroing business seems... whoo, intense, you know? All those crazy villains. There's a guy that's like, a Rhino, or something, it's not fun running into that on the way to the subway."
...she's overdoing this a bit, isn't she. It never used to be this hard to play civilian. She clears her throat and laughs a little. "Um, anyway," what's hers, what's hers, your name, Gwen, come on— "Mine's Spider-Woman." Beat. Wait. No. "Um— Gwen! My name's Gwen! Gwen Stacy! I'm— I'm not Spider-Woman, why would I be Spider-Woman, that's crazy, I'm— going to stop talking now."
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There's a definite amusement in the way his eyes squint above his mask. He's doing a very good job at not laughing as she fumbles her way through her own name. She's not used to keeping secrets, he suspects. That, or he's said something that tripped her up. Probably just being on the topic to begin with.
"It's nice to meet you, Gwen," he replies smoothly, though that smile is obviously still in place. It's reflected on a full grin from one of the arms on the opposite side.
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Gwen groans, dragging her hands down her face. "Oh, don't you— stop that, I am— mortified, I'm telling you. Mortified, beyond comprehension. If I had my webshooters on I'd be on the next deck, right now. I can't believe..."
She draws in a breath and releases it in a 'whoof', lifting her head again and brushing her hair back. "How obvious was I being?"
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"On a scale of one to ten?" There's an ease to it that comes over him with the break in tension. He's not watching like a hawk for signs that he needs to immediately disengage. He leans back on one hand, keeping one eye on her and letting his posture relax, legs hanging off the ledge. "If you don't want anyone to know, I won't say a word."
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"That bad, huh? Man, I am out of practice." She thunks her head back against the supports behind her, staring back out over the ocean ahead. "...please, I'm— trying to keep it quiet. I don't know, it's this— this whole thing, you know? I've spent some time with other people like me, people who get it, but that's... different. So people not knowing, it just— it feels safer."
Maybe it's not logical. Maybe it's completely irrational. But Gwen spent so long with the public opinion of Spider-Woman split between adulation and hatred, a cacophonous roar of discordant tunes that came together in the crescendo of a gunshot, that it doesn't feel irrational.
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Carefully, Shouji lifts a hand, settling it on her shoulder in a gesture that he hopes reads as solidarity. The other limbs fall to rest on the sun-warmed metal beneath them.
"Having people on your side helps, but it doesn't change that sometimes people look at you and don't see you, just the preconceptions. I'm sorry that it's something you deal with too."
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For a moment there's the pull of tension across her shoulder blades, before she breathes and consciously relaxes. "Yeah. Exactly. I'm sorry, too. At least when I take off the mask, no one sees anything but a normal girl."
She had to fight for that, too. To be seen as she wants to be seen. And yet that perception is, in itself, a kind of isolating she still struggles to put into words, but it's that isolation that kept her safe.
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"If it's any consolation, nobody will stop you from being normal here."
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Gwen tilts her head a bit to look at him out of the corner of her eye. "Except the excursions designed to kill us?"
She knows that's not a somebody, except maybe the guy in charge she guesses, but she did hear about some of the dangers from Darcy.
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"Equal opportunity death traps. Sign-up and you too can experience death alongside superhumans and civilians alike!" She laughs, quietly, shaking her head. "Hobie would call that one hell of a metaphor for... something."
"I can just see a lot of ways that a trip like that might show I'm not quite as normal as I look. I guess I either... stay away, or cross that bridge when I come to it."
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"Maybe I'm worried I won't be able to stay away." Every time a supervillain attacked somewhere, Spider-Woman was on the scene. No matter how likely it was that the cops would be there, that Captain Stacy would be there, hoping to arrest her even as she tried to save people. When people are in danger, sitting back has never been an option. Even if you might fail.
What does any Spider-Man do when faced with an impossible choice? They try to do both.
"How long have you been training at school?"
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