sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #1

1. now it's fun to wake up in a strange chateau

[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! We're so glad to have you!

[you touch the lei. rooster feathers, lotus seeds, and a carved circle of something white and hard, linked onto a silk string.]

2. messing with my mind was fun at the time

[freshly lei'd, your legs are forced to lead out onto the deck and towards your muster station. the same woman is there, carrying a clipboard. this time, she introduces herself as Gal Friday, the cruise director, before immediately going into the muster drill spiel. it is very boring, and you are not allowed to move, except when you are required to show you know how to put your life vest on. you could try to not do this, but Friday will move to stand in front of you very closely and just. look in your direction until such a time that you decide to do it. and I'm sure your fellow passengers want you to just get on with it, too.

but, once it ends? she reiterates her desire to welcome you aboard. and, then, you're free.

well, free to move about the ship at your own leisure, of course. which is a kind of free, and probably the best one you can hope for. you could try to escape, maybe, if you have the means to; Friday certainly won't be one to stop you. that's what the barrier is for, after all.

but, wouldn't you much rather have fun?

the buffet is full. the pool is open. the casino jingles and chimes.

welcome aboard.]

3. lots of mystery in the history of the devils I knew

[you were never alone.

a few days have passed since you first arrived on the Serena Eterna. perhaps you've made yourself a little routine, and settled in a bit. or maybe you haven't done that at all. either way, you're here, and it looks like somebody is pretty pissed off about it.

it starts small. sometimes nearby plates skid off tables, or a pool chair upends while you're walking next to it. and sometimes that chair is aimed right at your head. objects are moving with quickly increasing frequency, and a wide variety of styles: some are dropped, or pushed, and others and others are tossed, but a few of the items are thrown, with great force and odd accuracy. if Friday is around during the lighter moments, she simply titters and cleans up whatever mess is made. if a pot of soup sails off the buffet line and nearly drenches you in boiling minestrone, she simply walks away.

and then there's the voices. hundreds, maybe thousands, calling out. not all are intelligible English, but you seem to understand them anyway. some sound scared, or angry. some are screams, others whispers. some sound entirely strange, while others are achingly familiar. and they're all saying the same exact thing:

Get Out.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He stares at the offered hand for a long moment with clear hesitation. He knows this. He's seen it done. He has no idea how to actually do it, himself. Techs weren't exactly shaking hands with HYDRA's weapon. And he doesn't actually want to start now.

But he's pretty sure it's going to look really weird if he just keeps staring at it. So he lifts his hand, reluctantly, and puts it into Ravi's. The shake is slow and careful, the next best thing to limp lest he go too far the other way and crush the poor man's hand, and there's only one, before he hastily steps back again. He resists the urge to immediately wipe his hand on his pants, feeling sweaty from just that moment of contact.

"You're welcome. Try to keep an eye on your surroundings. When you're not in your cabin."

...well, certainly a few interesting things to note in that reaction. Evidently hasn't had a proper interaction in long enough that he barely knows how to do a basic handshake anymore, and with great reluctance besides. He almost wipes his own hand from the weirdly limp sensation of the shake.

"...right." And second, the Soldier didn't give his name. Which would be awkward later. "Do you, um. D'you mind if I ask you a few questions, while I have you?"

Good thing you already know who he is, then, huh?

Questions are much easier than handshakes. So he nods. "Ask. I might not have an answer. But I'll try."

"Right, well. 'Do you know how you got here' is probably right out, so." Let's skip that one. "What was the last thing you were doing before you got here? Anything... unusual?"

His idea of "unusual" is probably... a really high bar. He looks vaguely baffled by the question, but does answer, "I was digging in a trash can. Which I'd done several times that day already." So, not really unusual, though it might give Ravi some weird ideas about what the Winter Soldier was up to.

...he's not passing judgement, but that's not quite what he meant.

"Sooo... nothing like. Strange faceless ladies kidnapping you?" he prompts instead. "Any strange lights in the sky, a sudden sense of disembodiment? Didn't step into a ring of mushrooms in a field or anything?"

You asked what the last thing he was doing was, Ravi. What did you expect him to say?

"I would have said so, if there were any of those things," he says, a little warily. "I was alone. There was nothing like that. I turned around, picked up my backpack, and then I was in the cabin."

"Just wanted to establish what our relative baselines for weird are," he says easily. "For example, I come from a literal zombie apocalype. It's worth checking what exactly counts as 'weird'-" complete with two-handed air quotes "-to whoever I might be talking to."

He eyes the air quotes uncertainly, then after a pause says, "I don't know what is normal. Not. Really." His normal is not anyone else's normal, and he's come to realize that. But his normal doesn't encompass anything like this place.

There's another pause, then he admits, "And I don't know what a zombie apocalypse is."

That makes Ravi blink in surprise, and his hands drop. "Oh. Um."

...why would he expect the soldier to know that?

"Basically, uh. Zombies, the living dead, are real where I'm from," he says carefully. "Zombie apocalypse means that there's enough of them to be a tangible threat to the current way of existence, so. They're mostly all locked up in quarantine in Seattle - like a police state but hungry."

He's heard the word before, but it had been leveled at him by techs who fully expected him to not respond. And he hadn't. Because responding just got him hit or zapped or wiped again. He knows there was at least one tech whose favorite nickname for him was zombie, but he can't actually remember his face.

He frowns, looks down at the deck. "Living dead," he repeats. "What does that mean. Exactly." Because he's pretty sure it doesn't actually mean him, in this situation.

"There's...a few different definitions, depending on what kind of media you consume. They're either legitimately dead things brought back to life, or something with such sub-optimal and unusual anatomy that they can't technically pass for alive. Reduced heart rate, for example, ten BPM."

He can't help but talk about it in technical terms.

Technical details are fine. He knows what that means. So he nods. "And they are a danger to others," he surmises, given that having them there constituted an apocalypse level threat.

TEST DRIVE MEME #1

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