come_sailaway | We're wide awake now, our eyes are wide open. We're running this world, we keeping it turning

"It does seem to be a fairly standard cruise ship," Skulduggery says, which is at least true on its face. "Almost perfect, too. But it's not quite right. Like somebody who's seen home videos of cruises, but never experienced the thing firsthand."

It would explain Gal Friday, anyway.

"Now you're just trying to intimidate me. Come on, I'd like to think we're friends, given the circumstances. You don't need to worry about me trying to pull one over on you."

"Part of that is the emptiness of the whole thing. Normally I presume there'd be tons of people everywhere, both staff and those on vacation. Where here it's simply a handful scattered around. Though I've never actually been on a cruise. They seem vile."

He hates boats for starters. Also people.

"We'll see about that once we've played and run out of pointless plastic discs to bet."

"I'd say the place is packed. The only trouble is, we can't see all the other passengers." Or what's left of them, anyway. "I know there were more passengers like us fifteen years ago, and I know one of them is now some kind of... storm giant. The rest, as far as I can tell, are floating around next to us. All I want to do is make sure I don't end up like that."

And after the party's over, Skulduggery figures it'll be time to finally stop lollygagging and start actually trying to deal with the situation at hand. The shock has to wear off at some point -- he's over 400 years old, for crying out loud. Getting mysteriously zapped into a strange dimension should be nothing.

There's a joke to be made here that Skulduggery is already a skeleton and therefore cannot become a ghost. It's a branching skill tree and the 'bones' skillset doesn't have much overlap with the 'incorporeal' one. "You do have a talent for making things seem so much worse than they already are. Do you think we're going to slowly fade away into nothingness and then they'll take on a new set of passengers?"

Because wow, that's horrifying.

He slides a few of his chips forward across the table, glancing at his cards. But now that he's thinking about horrible things he can't stop.

"Why a boat I wonder. Just the isolation of it all?"

Skulduggery's hand is... okay. He sorts his cards, figures a pair could become three of a kind, and discards two. He's not sure if beating Max the first time around will be better or worse for the other's dignity. He needs it to sting just enough to make temptation irresistible.

"You're probably right about that. Fear of drowning keeps most people aboard, I think, and the lack of distant landmarks makes it impossible to tell where we are, how far we've moved, or how fast we're going." He's already got some ideas about that, but it can wait for another day.

"I think we'll probably become withered husks of our former selves. Our souls, spirits, chi, whatever it is you want to call it, it'll be sucked dry until we're nothing but remnants. It's obvious it's not blood, or meat, or... I don't know, brain matter that the captain wants. It's all about pain and suffering and torment. Stick us in the middle of the ocean, where nobody can find us, and then..."

He tilts his head. Okay, that was pretty grim, even for him. "That... doesn't really make me seem much more cheerful, does it."

He'd had that conversation with the BDSM pirate and came to some not great conclusions. "It doesn't seem like we're moving very fast at all. Exceedingly slow I'd think."

He's also.. Spent a majority of his time either being shot or arguing with children so hold up, pause the game real quick, "Captain? There's a captain?"

Obviously Skulduggery took the 'find shit out' suggestion and ran with it while instead Max grumpily got into a bunch of fights and found out next to nothing.

Skulduggery is a detective. It's what he does. He's chronically incapable of digging for dirt, even if he's not sure what he's digging up yet. That's a problem for future Skulduggery.

"...Yes, there's a captain."

There's a word for Skulduggery's tone and that tone is dry. Bone dry, we might say. But luckily for Max, he's not about to stop info-dumping. Mostly because he hasn't had a person to tell all this to in... days. He really needs to find a new side-kick. Maybe another skull to hold. Anything.

"Well. A captain looking thing. A thing that likes to look like a captain. Or what it thinks a captain should look like. I'm not really sure about that, yet. Nobody seems to be -- they just know that he feeds off pain and suffering. Our pain and suffering, to be precise." He sighs as if he's disappointed. "It's pretty standard bad guy stuff."

He'd really been hoping it was all a big, inter-dimensional misunderstanding. Oh well.

"What I meant is I assumed they'd be invisible, like everything else on this ship." Invisible chefs, invisible cleaning crew, stands to reason an invisible squadron of sailors keeping this thing afloat.

And then Skulduggery keeps talking and the card game is all but forgotten.

"So there's a creature that looks like a captain but might not be a captain and it eats suffering. Am I understanding that correctly?" the term for Max's tone would be: disbelieving.

Good thing, too, because Skulduggery's hand is not good enough to win even fictional money. "You are indeed. I don't know anything concrete, but the pieces are all there. I'm assuming it's a creature, but he could be a very powerful sorcerer. Or... I don't know, whatever you guys have. Technomancy?"

He has no idea and he is too old to care. "Either way, something about the captain requires our torment to... live? Or maybe it's incidental to survival -- maybe it just enjoys the taste of our fear."

Oh he'll get back to the game, never you fear. He's coming for everyone's money including the fictional kind.

"A sorcerer." Because that's sure a thing that exists and that he believes in. Though really he shouldn't be surprised since he's talking to a skeleton right now. "If that's some sort of technological magic, then no. It's just technology - my world doesn't have magic... Do any worlds have magic?"

That's.. not a real thing is it? It's not.

Right?

"How do you eat an emotion? Also you seem remarkably calm about discovering all this."

Skulduggery has never actually had a person look at him -- him! -- and have to ask whether or not magic is a real thing. He... he doesn't know what to do. Does he ask if Max needs a software update? Is he even going to be able to process the concept of magic? Like, what if it turns into some sort of... paradox, or something? He's seen one whole science fiction flick, he knows what he's talking about.

"First, yes, magic does exist in other worlds." He points to himself as proof of that. "And as for the other questions... I imagine it's sort of like absorbing heat, or light. Only more traumatic for us. The reason none of this is bothering me is because... well, honestly? This is what most of my cases are like. The new dimension thing is a twist, but otherwise... Pretty normal stuff."

Because his world managed to technologically create an eldritch horror and that's what he assumes Skulduggery is.

"I figured you were held together on a molecular level or something. I don't know how skeletal structures work, I don't have one." Sure he knows that people can't survive without all the fleshy bits, but maybe Skulduggery's world figured out how to not need the goopy bits. Makes them far lighter, less maintenance, don't need to eat or drink. It's an improvement as far as Max is concerned.

"And I suppose you've thought of a way to fix it?"

His tone indicates that he thinks that Skulduggery is just fucking with him at this point, so.. back to the cards. He sets his hand down, a straight of five, six, seven, eight, and nine.

Well, good thing he didn't hang his hat on this hand. Skulduggery's single pair never materialized into anything good, but he takes the loss with a smile on his face.

"Well, I should have seen that coming, I guess..." He tilts his head, then adds, "I'm thinking of a way to fix it. I have plenty of them, but... most of them rely a little too heavily on my shooting people, and I'm out of bullets."

His guns are back in his cabin, hidden away with the hope that his unseen cabinmate won't find them. He's pretty sure they're useless here, even if he had the ammunition to back it up, but he's not going to just chuck them.

"You can always stab people. I find it's more cost efficient." You don't have to replace bullets, you don't have to try to hide purchases of arms and do any shady black market stuff. Just simple and easy stabbery. "Well assuming you don't get blood all over your clothes anyway, but a necessary hazard sometimes."

He gathers up the cards to reshuffle, not even looking at them as he does so. "I'm told people who die just come back anyway. So better to not waste any bullets you find."

Oh, yeah, like Skulduggery's going to believe any rumors Max repeats. The guy doesn't believe in magic and he's about to lose his dignity to a talking skeleton! Come on.

"Everybody dies, one way or another," Skulduggery replies, oddly chipper for a guy who's living proof of the opposite. "It's probably some kind of trick." Magic or otherwise. "At any rate, I'd rather things not get messier than they are. If a gun's out of the question, it's fireballs all the way."

See if he tells you any more fun secrets he finds out!

"Seeing as I never have, and would like to keep it that way, I'll leave it to the rest of you to figure out." He rolls his eyes, because it's not like they're going to have much of a choice about it. Still he's fine with Skulduggery test driving the death mechanic and letting him know how it goes. Be a team player and all that. ~~Or he would anyway but he'll die first. Whoops.~~

"I think I speak for everyone when I say, don't set the ship on fire. For all the water around, fires on boats are catastrophic."

"I'm sure I'll sort it out eventually." And he will, although he's not yet convinced he can have infinite do-overs if he dies. Not yet, anyway!!!

"Oh, come on. I've never set a ship on fire. Houses? Sure. Cars, bars, people, of course. But never a ship." ...Oh. "Well, there was that one ferry -- you know what, okay. Promise, I won't set the ship on fire." Intentionally, anyway.

"Now, I wouldn't mind another hand, what about you?"

"Convincing. All my concerns have been addressed." In that he is absolutely expecting the place to go up in flames around them within the next hour.

"Certainly, I have nowhere to be. We might as well amuse ourselves while we can." He picks his stack of chips up, letting them click against each other to count them. Not that it really matters how much he has, he can just pull more out of the bucket whenever he wants. But it's a habit at this point.

"It's either here, or lurking in some abandoned bar surrounded by ghosts." Skulduggery's tone telegraphs just how he feels about that choice - that is to say, not great. "At least there are plenty of people around to make for good entertainment."

He shifts in his seat like he sat wrong, and decides that for his own comfort, he's going to have to play his mischievous hand.

"Hold on," he says, pulling open his jacket so that he can withdraw the gift-wrapped bundle that's been pushed up against where his nonexistent intestines would be. He's relieved to drop it on the table, like a floppy little rectangle. "There," he sighs. "Lucky for me, I'm thin enough not to ruin my silhouette with random packages."

Suspicion Level: 0

"The casino is equally dismal. There's something about an empty, quiet casino that set's me on edge."

He eyes that weird floppy thing on the side of the table now, only slightly curious what it might be.

"Why are you walking around with gifts inside of your ribcage?" Not that he has any better suggestions for what someone should keep in all that empty space.

"I'm less likely to forget where I put them, mostly." Skulduggery straightens his shirt out, then his jacket, and seemingly has the presence of mind to be ever so slightly embarrassed by the situation. Keyword: seemingly.

"I heard that if you got lucky, sometimes there'd be packages waiting for you at the sundries shop. Figured I'd stop by on the way and see if there was anything... well, lo and behold."

He taps the package that is pretty plainly clothes. He doesn't say that it's a special package from Friday, nor does he mean to imply that it could be nice clothes. But it sure seems like that's what he's doing!

Suspicion level: 3

"Who is sending mail to a ship in the middle of the ocean?" His voice disbelieving. How did someone know to mail Skulduggery something? And why? And why something that is obviously clothes and not say a ballistic missile.

"Why haven't you opened it yet?"

Edited 2022-05-05 16:15 (UTC)

"That's what I was wondering, too. My current theory is that beneficial items arrive as flotsam from whatever method is used to bring us here. It's just lying around, so the captain doles it out as prizes to keep us from an all-out war against him."

This is a wild theory, one he just sort of came up with on the fly, but now that he's saying it... it holds some weight. There aren't many other reasons for beneficial care packages, that's for sure.

"As to why I haven't opened it... hm. You'll probably think I'm crazy if I say."

Suspicion level: 5

"How do you know it's beneficial if you don't even know what it is?" Now all his attention is on the package and none on the cards.

"I may already think that, but do go on." Maybe he was wrong and this actually is a bomb and Skulduggery is about to blow them both up.

"Good to know you think so highly of me." Not that he cares -- he knows he's crazy, it's everyone else who needs to catch up.

"Well. Fine." He pats the package, which is definitely not a bomb, because it doesn't immediately detonate and blow them all to bits. "Look. It's stupid, but -- well. I was going to open it, and then I thought... what would be more fun, opening it, or speculating about what it might have inside?"

Yes, this is his "if I don't scratch the scratcher, I'm always a winner" mindset. Or at least, that's the mindset he's pretending to have.

"I mean, I know it's clothes. I can tell that." He slides it towards the center of the table, so Max can poke it and be sure of it himself. "If they were clothes from my tailor, then they'd be... obviously amazing."

They aren't. But that's beside the point.

"And I could probably use another suit, right?"

They both could. They've discussed this. Skulduggery remembers very distinctly discussing this.

"But at the same time... Do I want to accept a gift from the captain? Is that really a good idea?"

Hmmm, he seems to be thinking. HMMMMM.

"I was going to just chuck it overboard out of spite, but again, if it's a nice suit..." He shrugs, holds up his hands and sighs. "You can see my dilemma."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject