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

[businessorlibation]

As she starts to reach the extent of the Gargle-Blaster's cruelty, he begins building a second drink for her, something just slightly less toxic (thought it three ounces of liquor and neon green to boot).

"Sir Mimley Bastrop--solid six feet tall, dark skin, pencil mustache. He'll work to present himself as a fop, but he's not nearly as useless as he'll pretend. He's both a skilled fencer and talented with fisticuffs. His maid, Ducky, is a woman who's a shorter than me, with heavy-lidded eyes and a lovely beak of a nose. She listens more than she speaks, but when she does speak, it's worth listening. Razor-sharp wit, excellent strategist. And then there's Madame Theresa Ferrier. Dark, dark skin, bald as an egg, tall enough to reach the top shelf here without a stool. She walks with a cane, though. Hard lugging a body that large around at her age. She's a detective by trade."

[abhorrently]

It hurts her head in a comforting way, like being cheerfully buzzed around a fire and listening to stories, with the bite of the liquor strong on her tongue and in her throat. She listens, and notes the names down, how he speaks of them. He cares about them, enough to hold them in his mind's eye as if they were right there, even under these conditions.

"You miss them greatly, don't you."

As if anyone wouldn't.

"They sound like quite the group to have around."

[businessorlibation]

"They were. They are. From what we've been told, there's still a version of us, back in our worlds, with the ones we care about. It's...reassuring, knowing that they're not missing me."

He's not sure if this is new data for her, but he did wait for her to be properly pickled before laying it on her.

[abhorrently]

"...Fuck. There's two of me now?"

At least she's half drunk for this. It keeps the pure sting of it out of her for the moment.

"Fuck. I'll have to go kill my double. Or she'll kill me."

[businessorlibation]

"She can't get here because you're here; you won't be able to get to her to kill her. She's not currently your problem. You are, and you're here."

Is that a useful explanation at all?

[abhorrently]

"But when I get to her, or she gets to me, then we duel to the death, right? There can only be one of us. Two is too much trouble."

You know, when she gets unstuck. At some point. The cocktail isn't done, so another sip can't make her thought process worse. It's already a mess in there already.

[businessorlibation]

"You're not going to get to one another--for one thing, she doesn't know you exist here. For another--no one's been able to get home. If you think you're going to make quick work of the problem, you're insulting the skills and abilities of everyone on the ship."

[abhorrently]

That statement is making its way through the parts of her brain that retain coherence but are luxuriating in a bath of strong as hell spirits. Okay. She frowns, but it's more the sad look of someone who just got told they have to eat at home instead of dining out, so she'll get over it.

"But...I can help, right? Now that I'm here? So the ones that need to go back can go and the people with a better life can stay?"

[businessorlibation]

"Right now, your job is to get settled in, make friends, figure out who you can work with. I've been her for a year and a half, you know? It's not going to be a quick thing, solving the whole thing."

He hates this part of The Talk.

[abhorrently]

She's not going to argue with him, her expression says, she just wants to look mournful for a bit and take the last drink of the cocktail, knowing she'll wholeheartedly feel it in the morning and that it will be the sort of suffering that she can only call her own fault. None of that is bad, at all, but still, she feels like she's being halted from what she needs to do. From everything that demands her time and attention. It's rather the opposite of helping one settle.

"That's where the whole time separation comes in, doesn't it."

[businessorlibation]

"Only partly. But a little, yes. The thing of it is, when you're brought here, the version of you that arrives here is pulled from a singular moment in time, and time happens with you there, but that version is here now. Moving along a different timeline. Like...a thread, there's a knot, and now you're on a different branch."

He shakes his head. "I'm explaining poorly."

[abhorrently]

"It's hard to explain anything to someone drunk." Shaking her head, she takes the dregs, and nudges the now empty cocktail glass to the side. "But maybe it'd be the same if I wasn't."

Dragging a hand down her face, she looks at the surface of the bar, and then reaches into her pockets, rummaging around for a moment before pulling out two gold pieces.

"Okay. Okay, before more and I get useless. Okay. So you're saying there's me. The me I know, going forward." One gold piece goes down on the counter. "And then, I get elected here. And that's a me." The second one goes next to it. "So now it's gone and forked itself." Moving them apart from each other with two pointer fingers, and then looking up at Johnny as if waiting for praise for her brilliance.

[businessorlibation]

Johnny's next creation for the drunken sorcerer is...a glass of water. He does try to bartend responsibly.

"Yes, that's what I'm saying, pretty much. Also, you're still on the gold standard? Intriguing."

[abhorrently]

Thank you Johnny, you're a marvel, no wonder you landed two husbands.

"Mm. I'm not...economically based." She means an economist. "But gold's always good. Or trade."

Slipping the coins back in her pocket, she takes the water.

"Anyway, none of it changes the main part. If there's another Fever, I've got to kill her if she comes near. Both of us can't....we can't stand in the same room."

[businessorlibation]

"You'll never be in the same room as her while on the ship," says the man who dealt with his doppleganger in the Labyrinth by dancing with himself.

[abhorrently]

"Good. Good. It'd get very ugly very fast."

Drinking the water, because she knows it's good for her.

"A year and a half, though? Does this place just keep travelling?"

[businessorlibation]

"Yes and no. Are you familiar with the concept of 'pocket realms'?"

She looks like the type who might be.

roll: 20

[abhorrently]

Drinking more water, she probes her brain to see if the alcoholic marinade has done any good, and her mind clears enough to point out some obvious links in the chain. Connecting, extrapolating, and even with the booze in her to cause a stagger, the implications honestly couldn't have been easily accepted sober.

"You're saying this entire place is a demiplane."

Of course she gets pocket realms. She'd walked straight into one, at the creche. Only it was a knotted bit of Astral pulled in on itself. And this entire ship being something created by that god Erin had mentioned - well, of course it's within their power. It feels slightly embarrassing that it didn't click sooner, but there was enough to confuse and bamboozle her to make it less obvious. Or she just wasn't thinking about the right things.

[businessorlibation]

"We're not actually on an ocean, going anywhere in physical space. Yes, this is a demiplane, and sometimes it visits or connects to other demiplanes." Well, that makes it easier.

[abhorrently]

Fever's going to gulp more of her water while she contemplates that one.

"Why couldn't anyone just say that to begin with?"

She shakes her head, as if it was impossibly simplified by that explanation.

"No wonder it seems like we're stuck. The door's on the outside."

[businessorlibation]

He lets out a bit of a laugh. "Not everyone comes from a background where that explanation can be a useful one. I had to be introduced to the concept slowly by a necromancer."

[abhorrently]

"How many of those do you have kicking around the place?"

And can she get them to write scrolls for her...

[businessorlibation]

"Mm, unfortunately, Palamedes and Bash are no longer aboard. I'm not sure if Maxwell counts, but he is a user of dark ritual magic all the same. Let's see, who else. Klaus is tied to ghosts and the dead, but I'm not sure how much he identifies that ability with magic. Valdis is...powerful, and she and I don't often talk. Darcy...Darcy."

That last comes with a loose handwave.

[abhorrently]

"Not your friend?"

She can guess.

[businessorlibation]

"He's young and energetic and in some ways I relate to him, and in other ways I find him utterly unfathomable. We're not close, but if he showed up at my cabin needing help, I'd give it freely."