come_sailaway | It never got less strange, showing anyone just a bare face

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It never got less strange, showing anyone just a bare face

Who: Maeve and YOU
What: Contemplation, a minor injury, stuff
When: Post camping June times
Where: Topy, the deck, wherever
Warnings: Injury, Westworld as a whole, will update as needed

I. Topy | OPEN

Maeve's decided to celebrate - rather tamely, but still a celebration - her return from the ship with a drink and some crafts. She's gotten quite a few art supplies from the craft place at camp. She wasn't sure what crafting supplies existed on the ship outside of potentially paper. So now she didn't have to worry.

She knew, somewhat, that the Captain knew a lot about them, but now she's seen it first hand. It wasn't a lot, but she gets the feeling he was just throwing a touch in to show her that he did know. She's uncomfortable with the power held over her. So she's sipping at her whiskey, trying to enjoy the fact that she is not dead while also trying to figure out how to address the truth of home.

But tonight she's focusing on something a little less troubling and trying to have fun with it. Even if her art is, well, quite unfortunate.

She's working hard to try to sketch a picture of Hector's hat. A little something of his she could hang up or at least keep in her room. She looks up as someone enters. "Care to join me? I figure we're all due for a drink and some art." Even if they did just do a week's worth of arts and crafts already.

II. Deck | OPEN

Maeve wants some sunlight without the blinding sun of the pools. So she's taken to the deck. She walks for a little while before pausing in a spot of sunlight. She feels much like a cat, just taking it in, hands on the railings.

She's quietly humming a song from the Mariposa. She doesn't quite know the name, but she remembers the tune of it and it reminds her of a time before everything seemed to go sideways. She misses not knowing in a way that she can't quite explain, but that doesn't mean she'd go back to being an unknowing puppet. It's just easier to not know. Ignorance really is bliss.

III. Wildcard - If you have another idea, hit me up or surprise me. You can really just go for it. She's going to be out and about all over. You can find her in Tauva overthinking or in the hottub or the pool with fruity drinks. You can message me on discord at kingdonkey#6187 if you have something particular you wanna run with.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Max is far more at ease and back to his normal self now that he's in his suit again. He's wearing his original one, the one that Murderbot had shot, but he wanted something that he knew was his. Not something that the Captain had conjured up. He'd sewn up the bullet holes with thread he'd scrounged from a shirt, and while it wasn't a perfect match, it was a decent attempt. It's apparent that if Max had the proper materials it would be almost seamless. Unfortunately he doesn't have the proper materials.

He's back to strolling around the deck and taking stock of their surroundings, he's still never seen land, but might as well keep looking just in case. Spotting Maeve by the railing he approaches her, for being roommates, he barely uses the room, so he hasn't seen her in a while.

"Good afternoon. Anything of interest out there?" He gestures to the ocean, coming up beside her to look out at the horizon.

Maeve glanced over as she heard him speak, smiling a little. She hasn't seem him around in a little while, but she's been able to tell that he's around. Coding is easy enough to hone in on if she wants to.

"Nothing terribly," she says after a moment of taking in the finer details of his suit and the apparent bullet holes being patched. It is a shame when a perfectly good outfit gets messed up by bullets. "It's mostly empty, but I guess that's to be expected. I mean, there's water and sunlight, but not too much else at the moment."

"More than just that is empty. I spoke to someone who went into the water and there is apparently no fish or plant life either. It's truly desolate. It feels manufactured to me, like the land we were on at the campsite where the plants were all fake. Same with this ocean, it can't possibly be real."

Nothing is. The weather, the environment, it all felt like they were in a simulation.

"I still come here daily assuming that at some point it may change, yet it never does."

Maeve looks down at the water. "That's disappointing, but not entirely surprising." She would have liked to see something different, some sort of animal. She's never actually seen sea creatures. She knows of them, but has never seen one in real life.

"Do you think this is simply a lack on the Captain's part or just a way to make people feel unsettled?" Because the silence of the forest was enough to make her mildly uncomfortable.

"My best guess is he simply didn't bother. I haven't talked to him to confirm, but I'd assume he didn't see a point to it. His focus seems to be on us and adding in birds and weather patterns doesn't net him much value." He crosses his arms as he thinks about that.

"I think we may be giving him too much credit that he plans things out. He may do things for no reason at all." Something that Max can't understand. He tends to plan out everything and have multiple backup strategies. Though not as much here when everything is so unpredictable and he has to react spur of the moment.

She hums thoughtfully. She hasn't considered that. It seems likely. Still, she'd have at least liked to have something to look at besides water and a general nothingness. "It's short-sighted," she comments. "And boring."

That is also possible. Maeve doesn't understand not having a plan and just sporadically picking things out of a bag or her own mind. She's had a plan set in her head since the start. Her motivation has always been her daughter. Here? Well, she's not entirely figured that out. "It's unsettling. Even Serac had plans. And at least I got to kill him."

"I'm sure someone will get to kill him. Though I doubt it will be me." He's not delved too much into the mystery of the ship or the reasoning for what the Captain does. For him it doesn't matter - what matters is that it's happening and he wants to escape it. But others certainly have been busy trying to understand the Captain's motives, and then to end him. His current top contenders are Clarke, Darcy or Skulduggery.

He's hoping for Clarke because she'll make it entertaining.

"Who is Serac?"

“I hope so.” Unless that makes getting off the ship more difficult. Whatever happens, she wants the end result to be getting off the ship and getting home. She has things to do.

“The latest human who decided to control me with what I wanted most,” she says quietly. “He had an invention called Rehoboam. There was one before Rehoboam, but it was considered unfit in some way. It could predict human behavior and decided who was worth putting effort into and who wasn’t. Predicted their deaths and things they would do. Damned some to poverty and crime.” She clearly doesn’t approve.

“Rehoboam even told Serac what to do.” She frowns. “Serac put a control in my spinal column so he could freeze me with a button. Threatened me with hell when I wanted my daughter. In the end, he couldn’t even get me that.”

"Something that could predict humans? With any sort of accuracy? I find that hard to believe since their entire nature is a study in unpredictability. They act against their own interests, self-sabotage, and do things that are entirely ridiculous."

It's one of the things that both infuriates Max and has his grudging respect. He's easy to predict - nearly
everything he does furthers his own self-serving goals. But that does make him easier to outmaneuver which is why he has to do so much in secret.

"Were you able to get the control removed once you killed him?"

“Perhaps, but he had one that did it anyway.” She shrugs. “It’s destroyed now, but I’m not sure what that means for the world. I guess it will either fail or not.”

She’s more focused on finding her daughter. The state of the world only really matters so much. She gives Max a look that clearly says what she’s about to say anyway. “No. It’s still there. I could destroy my body again and get a new one, but I don’t have a machine to build me a new body and I doubt it would actually work here.” Can’t just set herself on fire and go with it.

Max can see how that would make someone extremely wealthy and very, very unpopular. And being on the receiving end of both those things, he's not envious of him. "It's probably for the best it's destroyed, regardless of how the rest of the world fares."

He sees that look, but he had to ask, "Even if you could I wouldn't trust anything from this place. Especially nothing as critical as your entire body."

And since he's very curious, he continues, "How does that work? Do you grow another one and then inhabit it? Is it manufactured?"

"Yes. I think so. It never ends up in the right hands. Always the worst." And she's quite certain that Serac was the worst hands. Well, perhaps not the worst, but not great either. Especially not the way things went.

"I suppose you have a point," she says after a moment. "I'd have to trust someone not to make a mess of it." And she'd have to trust that they wouldn't just add another device even worse than the one she had now. She sighed.

There was a pause at his question. "We have...Pearls. They have all the important information. So we're...I suppose it's like being printed." She remembers the the tanks they were in, can picture them now. "I'm not certain I'd trust the Captain with the technology of it."

"After seeing the forest he made I'm not sure I'd trust him with anything even remotely resembling life." Not that either of them are alive in the same way that a tree is, so he might actually fare better with mechanical sentience than trying to create a human from scratch.

"That is sadly the way of things, because those who actually desire such power are the worst at wielding it. If they were truly competent in handling such things they'd know better then to ever attempt it. Which means the ones we need to be in charge, never are." He sounds bitter, because in his world he's caught between the clear terrorists that he's associated with, and a heroic faction. The problem being that the people who are in charge of both are not competent to lead.

Doomfist is a narcissistic egomaniac. The leadership of Overwatch resorts to the same tactics as the terrorists because they're so fractured as an organization.

Neither deserve to win this stupid war over the fate of the world.

"Do you mean the lack of life? There weren't any bugs or animals. It was eerie in a way." That's what she noted, but she also didn't spend too much time in the forest or look too closely.

She nods a little. "I think Caleb was the one in control at the end and he made sure it was deleted." She wishes that she knew what it meant. She notes the bitterness to his tone. Not that she knows enough to know exactly why.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it's a common theme in most worlds."

"It's strange honestly. I'd expected different worlds to be, well, different. Instead it seems to be subtle variations on the same thing. Like slightly changed but the underlying premise is identical."

It's like infinite remakes of the same movie or book. But instead multiple worlds where humans blow themselves up, nearly become overrun with errant technology they created, and the rise of malicious despots who want to cause untold suffering. Merely the names and locations change, not the story.

"Perhaps that's just how humans are, no matter where they reside."

He has a point. "I suppose the universes as they are like the same stories written over and over again with minor variations." She shrugs. There's so few things that have surprised her. Perhaps the Grimm. The creatures that Ruby mentioned. She wonders if there is any world that is wildly different, but she doubts it.

"I don't know if I'd believe someone if they said that their lives were wildly different. I think the person that seems to have the most normal life I've spoken to is Phil." She shrugs.

"I believe the majority of humans are, yes. There are a few who are not so bad."

"It might be amusing though if someone was from some place outrageously different. Even those without tech are still following the same basic tenets." At this point the oddest has been Ebalon and he doesn't spend much time talking to him. Usually they start fighting approximately 5 minutes into seeing each other.

"Though maybe that's because of some prerequisite that the Captain has for who he pulls in. It can't possibly be random unless we're simply batteries somehow."

"It would at least be something new. Unexpected." She wonders if there are people who are from wildly different, generally normal and untraumatizing worlds. She wonders what that would look like.

"You'd think he would choose people with less trauma if he wanted more fear response from them. I can't imagine I'd be chosen for that when death is on the menu. The number of times I've died makes it less impactful."

"If it were me I would go for fear as that seems the easiest emotion. Everyone is afraid of something and universally most fear death. But perhaps it's not fear he's after." He drums his fingers on the railing, the metal on metal making a dull tinging noise.

"Perhaps I'm overthinking it and it's merely that we all want to leave the ship and return to our worlds. I've met perhaps one or two who wish to stay here instead. Those might have been mistakes."

Sorry Sharky, you might have been an accident.

Maeve agrees with the sentiment. Fear is the easiest. Happiness wouldn't be the one if you were going with murdering. Unless you had collected a lot of people that enjoyed killing. Not that she's ruled that out for some. Perhaps anger or frustration? Perhaps something she hasn't considered.

"We're probably all overthinking it," she agrees. "But there's not much else to do. Outside of play games constantly. But those are the Captain's ideas and choices. So who knows?"

She wants to be home and perhaps that longing is enough for him. Outside of the people who would prefer to stay. She's not one of them. "It would be easier if we understood anything entirely."

"We're all going to have read every book in the library simply for lack of anything else to do." He hasn't quite gotten that bored yet, but he's close. It's hard for him to enjoy fiction, he doesn't have the capacity for creativity and imagination that would allow him to really relate to it. In movies he has the visuals to accompany the story, but in a book it winds up simply being words on a page.

"True. Perhaps the confusion is part of it. I know that's been entertaining the detective types. Skulduggery and Jade have definitely been treating this as a problem to solve. I've refrained from telling them I don't think it's possible to figure out simply because there's no rules or logical sense to be found. They do seem to be enjoying themselves in the attempt. No harm in letting them try."

Edited 2022-07-19 22:46 (UTC)

"I have considered some of that," she says quietly. "Only I'm not certain that I can read every book." Or maybe she can. She's also not sure that she wants to. Not because she doesn't like them, but because she's not sure she'll want to read all off them.

"It's possible, yes." She sighs. "Perhaps they will find something," she supposes anyway. Anything is possible. "But..." She frowns. "Well, I don't know. I just want to get home. However it happens."

He's not to that point of desperation yet, but he's sure it's bound to happen.

"Anything is technically possible, however unlikely. But I do certainly wish them luck. Specifically them, because should anyone else find out how to leave, they'll simply do so themselves without telling the rest of us. And I think those two will be more inclined to save the world, as it may be."

He might be talking about himself, but afterall, that's who he judges everyone else against.

She sighs. "That does seem accurate enough." From what she's seen of people, they rarely help each other. She guesses that there's been stranger things. Lee sacrificed himself for her and Hector. Poor thing. She wishes she could get him a new body and load him in, add the parts of him that were written out and write out the parts of him that they got wrong.

"I think I'd want to help them," she says softly. "If I was able to find a way. I don't believe I'll be the one to discover it, but if I do, I'll be sure to let someone know."

"I've already offered my assistance in scouting the Tommy Bahama for Jade, I believe I've hit my quota on helpful reconnaissance." And even that was stretching the teaspoon of helpfulness he possesses.

"I'm sure they'd welcome the additional perspective. There is something to be said about so many differing perspectives analyzing the same things, your experience will allow you to see things that others may miss." He glances over at her, red eyes piercing, "Why do you think you won't be the one to discover it?"

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