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TEST DRIVE MEME #7
1. before she hung up, she said she was a skeleton
[there is no note in your cabin. no forces stall your legs if you decide to walk anywhere but the atrium. in fact, for the first time in hundreds of years, newly arrived passengers on the Serena Eterna are waking up with absolutely no guidance. nothing but your fellow passengers in the halls - or maybe in your bed.
perhaps you end up in the atrium eventually anyway. it is where guest services is, and where Gal Friday… actually hasn’t been in a few days. until today. and she is visibly frazzled, her hair uncoiffed, her suit rumpled, something a bit like a bruise blossoming down from her hairline and over her smooth features. more papers than ever cover her desk, and when she turns to face you, her voice is as cheerful as ever, but audibly strained.]
Welcome aboard the Serene Eterna! [a pause] You know how to work a life vest, right? Everyone knows that! You don’t need me to teach you that!
[a light bulb burns out behind her head.]
… I’ll get right on that!
[freedom includes the freedom to not know what the fuck is happening. maybe you should reflect on that.]
2. grandma went and can't stop screaming
[it’s something about the lighting fixtures, this month. has the Bellona always had a massive chandelier? maybe. who knows. don’t ask questions. either way, in the stillness of the night, or day, or late afternoon, there is a noise like a cord being cut, and the chandelier plunges into the audience below.
it hits nothing, of course. no one is ever in the theater. and that, perhaps, is what the trouble is.
so, the chandelier starts to… travel, one could say. it starts to hang in various rooms: the dining halls, the bars, the clubs… sometimes, if you’re out on the pool deck and suddenly realized you’re under a shadow, you can glance up and see it suspended 20 feet above your head, securely fastened to nothing in particular and yet remaining perfectly in place.
until it isn’t. until it falls, crystal shattering on whatever surface it lands on: floor, table, person… and, wherever the chandelier goes, a lilting childish voice follows it, singing without any obvious source.]
Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of posies… ashes, ashes, we all…
3. jeff bezos murdered the infinite tommy bahama
[the lights of the Infinite Tommy Bahama go out three days into October.
barely an hour after its closure, the lights go on again, and a new banner is unfurled.
physically, it is the same store. you can even see the old signs hidden behind the new ones. however, long gone are the tropical prints and khaki dress shorts. now, one can purchase any number of officially licensed or legally distinct Halloween costumes, decorations, and various other haunted accoutrements, leading back as far as the eye can see, and then farther still. is that a Gal Friday mask? spooky! well, at least you’ll be good and ready for the Halloween party at the end of the month, which is absolutely just a normal party and in no way whatsoever anything even remotely resembling a trick. there are only treats at The Infinite Spirit Halloween!
note: bahamanuel is still here! somewhere! it kinda looks like dan bongino.]
Morgan Yu | Prey (2017) | OTA
1. walls keep spinning and my path keeps turning
Morgan wakes up as usual, and half a second later realises there's nothing usual about it.
Firstly, she's a black shifting mass, which her brain tells her isn't normal, despite the fact that she knows better. For roughly eleven seconds, she considers staying that way to be contrarian, but on the twelfth she rolls her many pinprick eyes and draws the face and body of Morgan Yu back over herself.
Thus attired, she's free to realise that there's a second reason why this morning isn't usual.
Much like a bowl of petunias, her reaction can be summarised as: oh no, not again.
The immediate area that surrounds the room she woke up in is unfamiliar in its details, but familiar in its themes. Old blood, new blood, scorch marks, water damage. Doors blown off their old-fashioned hinges, leaving shrapnel through the hallway. It all raises the question of: why? Why this again? What's the point of it?
Morgan wanders the corridors in a beaten-up red space-suit, elbowing doors and finding them locked, and looking around with an expression of mixed confusion, caution, and annoyance. Nothing escapes her attention: walls, ceiling, potential vents or climbable decorations, trash cans. The only thing that doesn't occur to her is to knock on any of the un-blown-up doors.
Anyone wondering who she is might find a clue in the fact that her suit has a nametag on the chest: it reads, in neat sans-serif, M. Yu.
2. patience thinning and my calves keep burning
Whoa. That's a chandelier.
Morgan notices it floating there, and then immediately she starts glancing around for any handily-placed furniture or wall ornaments that she might scale. What, you think she's going to spot such a perfect perching-spot and then not try to get on top of it?
The chandelier, sadly, has other ideas. When it crashes down, Morgan startles (the yell she lets out is probably her first vocalisation since she arrived, at least until she talks to someone on the first prompt) and performs not the best, but certainly not the worst, tactical roll ever seen out of its way.
She springs up again quickly, and now she's joined by three flames, circling her apparently of their own power, leaving white lines of heat in their wake. She spins as the ghostly voice sings, scowling intensely, looking for an attacker to throw them at.
3. maybe I finally reached the point of no return
Morgan has found the buffet.
She stares silently for a few moments, her eyes tracking over plate and tureen, bowl and trencher. She takes in the walls of the room, and the ceiling, just in case. Then, with the gravity of an important tactical decision, she strides towards the crab legs and starts eating them straight off the platter.
You know when you give a dog a treat and it goes down so fast that you're like 'did you even taste that'? That's the energy Morgan is giving here. For every one she eats, two more disappear somewhere inside her suit for later, though... hopefully not too much later.
1
He watches this for half a minute, and then he hauls himself down the hall to finally ask: "New here?"
no subject
He's not approaching aggressively. He appears to be just a regular guy, tall and tired, with clothes that look like they belong planetside. So that means... what? She's supposed to talk to him?
She exhales, and then answers with a toneless: "Yep."
Then, deciding to play along for now: "We're where? Earth?"
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Again! She has to wonder! What is the point and purpose!
"Things are destroyed. Why?" she asks, feeling more or less like she's rushing through the exposition on the second playthrough of a videogame.
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"Because the ship isn't repairing itself anymore, for some reason." Jack says. "And apparently that was all that there was between other passengers and just - blowing shit up for no reason. My room exploded last week. People keep writing in blood on the walls."
Jack shrugs, and lowers his hand.
"It's not usually like this, I think." he says, less like an apology and more like... He's not sure. Just a fact? He doesn't know. He's tired and he wants to step into what's left of his shower. He shrugs.
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The questions she actually has are things she can't really ask outright. Things like: what's she expected to prove here? And: which robot is she actually talking to right now?
Instead of any of those, she asks levelly: "Okay. How can I help?"
Because that's likely what the jury are looking for. As if she hasn't demonstrated enough, over and a-fucking-over again, that she'll help. Because apparently Alex can put his whole sister in her head, and expect her to be fine with it, and fine with him, and still not give her an inch of fucking trust.
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For now, Jack regards her for a moment and says: "You move about a foot to your right." motioning to an empty spot between Morgan and the wall.
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"Oh, I see," she says, some annoyance starting to show under the monotone. "Is this not a convenient time for you?"
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But it's a long month and he's tired so he says, "Not really, no. Are you going to move out of my way or not?"
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But there is, and Morgan doesn't know exactly what criteria they're judging on this go-around (and that uncertainty doesn't sit well with her at all). So rather than going off on this man, she settles for giving him a stare that suggests he is greviously wasting her time. She also plants her feet all the more firmly in front of him, with no care whatsoever to the fact that he is head and shoulders taller than her and built like a dorito.
(If they wanted her to be all the way nice, then fuck them, they should have nonconsensually implanted her with someone more patient.)
"This is getting boring. Who am I actually talking to? Elazar?"
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"Who the hell is Elazar?" he says, then he remembers he's talking to a new person and closes his eyes. Right, okay. Informative.
"This isn't your world, so there's a good chance there's no one else here from wherever you are." Jack explains. There, duty done.
And, fuck it, fine, if she's not going to move and if she's going to take an attitude about it, then Jack's going to just try to squeeze past here there.
3
There's a new woman here. She smells... odd. Very odd. He's learned to accept this by now, but he always finds himself raising his head when something that looks human smells other than human.
She's not eating like a person would. Humans put their food on plates, even if they heap the plate high, and they take it away to eat at a table. She's eating right off the table ravenously. She's also hording the crab legs. Understandable.
"They're bottomless." He tells her, just so she knows she can have as many as she wants. "Never run out. Same with everything else."
And, since she's eating straight off the buffet table, Siffleur takes that as approval for him to set his plate down and do the same, simply picking up some of the sliced roast beef to shove into his mouth.
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(She actually looks and then has to readjust upwards, because, damn. It's surprising how much she notices height, from down here. It's not intimidating, but it's still relevant in a way it wouldn't be if she weren't
disguisedherselfher human selfcurrently wearing Morgan.)But he seems to be here to talk and eat, so she relaxes enough to at least resume chewing.
"Really?" she says, around a mouthful of crab, without much intonation one way or the other. "That's convenient."
She's still watching him with a closed-off expression. She doesn't comment on his table manners, though, because literally can you imagine caring.
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An important part of meeting new passengers is telling them things. Other people seem to be concerned with the nature of this place, the rules, that kind of thing. Siffleur knows what's really important: food, where to find it, and that it's endless.
Oh yes, and one more thing. He looks over the table until he finds a salmon steak, picking it up. "You should also know that no one can permanently die here. People come back to life the next day."
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"Figures."
Honestly the fact that there's a potential sushi bar is more interesting to her. She hopes it's good.
"When did you arrive?" she asks, mostly to play along.
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"Almost a month ago." He tells here. "Things were still working the first few days. Then it broke, and people started destroying things and murdering each other. Apparently they're done that now. They all killed each other at a Halloween party, and now they're depressed."
He tips the salmon steak into his mouth, chewing and swallowing. It would be so much better if it was raw, but he will just have to wait for the sushi restaurant.
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"Why?"
She mustn't forget that this sim will have a purpose, just like the last one; people keep telling her about violent passengers, and she'll eat her hat if that's not an obvious call to action. Not that she's thrilled by having to do this all over again, but her handlers sort of have her at gunpoint here.
"Were they mind controlled? Drugged?"
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Siffleur decides to thoroughly take advantage of another non-human who doesn't care to pretend their way through human social conventions and promptly allows himself to taste a variety of things he's ignored before, actively moving from one tureen to the next as he dips his fingers in and then sucks them clean.
Though there is one human thing that's convenient, and that's introductions. "I'm Siffleur. Sometimes, I'm a man and sometimes I'm a cougar."
1
The young lieutenant steps out in front of her, wearing her smart blue Tradeliner uniform, and raises a hand to catch her attention.]
Peace and prosperity to you!
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Okay then.
She... sure, why not, she raises a hand in return. ]
I'd like to hope so.
[ Her voice is pretty flat, but don't take it personally. ]
Who are you?
[ Even knowing that this is fake, the paranoia skitters across her, for a moment, based on that friendly greeting, that this is someone she's known and forgotten. The cognitive distortion is frustrating. ]
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She takes a step closer.]
I'm Lieutenant Ari Tayrey, second astrogator on the TS Prosperity, with Captain Kavarai.
[Again, all very proper, all very Tradeline, but she's no longer looking quite so cheerful.]
At least I was, before we all ended up prisoners here. What about you? Have you been here long? [Ari hasn't met everyone yet, and she presumes, entirely wrongly, that she's still the newest arrival.]
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Lieutenant Ari Tayrey's introduction earns her a quirked eyebrow. None of those names ring a bell. ]
Morgan Yu, vice president of TranStar Industries.
[ The name and title roll off her tongue as if she's been using them for years. Half of her wonders whether Ari will react to them; the other half just hopes to annoy her brother if he's watching.
It's worth noting, though, that the state of her space suit doesn't exactly scream 'cushy VP desk job'. It's been scorched, and slashed, and gone through several rounds of field repair to keep it in working order. ]
Less than half an hour. [ The 'prisoners' part doesn't even get a reaction. ]
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Another nod.]
My family's Company. My father's director of finance at Cardalek, but I expect that's as out-of-sector to you as TranStar Industries is to me. [Ari shrugs. Nothing to be done about it.]
[Half an hour, though? That's - it's terrible. Morgan Yu must be just as confused as Ari was when she arrived, and here she is going on about Companies. The thought occurs to her that she ought to be helpful, because she had seniority. It was ridiculous. Mad. This wasn't a starship. As if it remotely mattered. As if she hadn't spent the past couple of weeks trying to convince herself that she wasn't responsible for anyone or anything here.
And yet there she is, giving Vice President Yu here a look of sympathy.]
That's rough. It - it really takes some getting used to. I've only been here a couple of weeks. I don't know what you've been told already, but - you've got any questions, you can ask. Over a drink if you want. I went straight for the brandy when I got here; my nerves were in pieces.
1.
If he had to guess, Thane would say she's in much the same situation that he is. He'd awoken in an unfamiliar cabin. It was old-fashioned in a charming sort of way, but he had no recollection of how he came to be there or why. He had proceeded to scour this hallway for a scrap of information, any shred of evidence, the slightest clue as to why, and he'd come up empty-handed.
"If you are looking for answers," he says in a rich, gravely voice that reverberates from somewhere deep in his chest, "I'm afraid you won't find any. I've checked."