driftfleet | At least there's no elevator music...

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At least there's no elevator music...

[At least two weeks have passed since the Drift Fleet passengers woke up on this strange wing of the Marsiva... Some new passengers have even joined the group instead of being Shuffled off to a fleet ship! The large monitor in the central room remains quiet for now, so how is everyone holding up?

Have you been relaxing? Enjoying the Earth media? If you can even remember them, how have Calibrations been treating you? Has anyone started getting a little stir-crazy?

Don't worry... This ship has no shortage of mysteries, and you'll be seeing a few more soon.]

ooc: here's another mingle for the current game event! players can start or continue threads here from any point during the event. the additional setting information is still being postponed due to sickly mods, but y'all are welcome to post additional topcomments for reactions and investigation once it's up!

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This astringent place, that's where you were? I'unno how two of us could be in two places at the same time, but I don't think it's gonna get us anywhere closer to getting home finding out!

[ In other words, too complicated. Luffy's going to discard the question until it somehow becomes relevant to his desire to get back to that dead planet, rescue his friends, and all of them return home.

Which means taking Nami too. He doesn't want her to be exposed to the life that awaits people with her hair color, but he can't abide losing another crewmate, either. ]

[Please excuse your navigator just staring at you dumbly for the next few seconds, captain. She knows you just threw that whole question out the window, and she's trying to think of a way to push the issue in a way that's even worth it.

It's not. She'll just. Work on that herself. But she's frustrated beyond belief now-- someone finally followed her here, but under these circumstances?

...

At least he was spared the despair that came with their last few weeks in Adstring. And how sick he got. And Sanji.

She puts a hand over her face.]

Fine.

What was this other place?

[She really is happy to see him, so don't mind how curt she sounds. It's just a lot of annoying shit has been happening in the last few weeks and this is just the icing.]

[ That was a bad story with a happy ending, an enemy they could take down and wrest from it their freedom and happiness. In the end, everything worked out fine -- they were supposed to go home.

Now it's another story and Nami would be extremely lucky if this one ended in her return home without worse incident. ]

Um... it's the-- thirteenth? Or maybe it was the eleventh planet in the... Flan system? No, Glan! I think.

[ Tides, Nami, he's trying really hard to remember how it was described to him, and he's already screwing up. And he doesn't have his old device, he can't look it up. (And she probably doesn't need to know he'd been recording hours and hours of video 'letters to his crew' over the last few months) ]

Ever hear of it?

[Yeah but Nami doesn't know that, brackets. Shush.]

No.

[Flatly.]

What, it didn't have a pretty name? Four syllables long, maybe?

[EVERYWHERE ELSE DOES.]

...

[ He stands there for a moment, mouth working, until sweat might just be starting to stand out on his brow in concentration. ]

...

...!

[ Let's try that again, shall we? ]

..? I forgot!

[ Nami, no one will blame you for hitting him, but this is going to happen intermittently for a little while. ] I think it began with a-- um...

[He may relax, she's too much a combination of relieved and worn out to employ violence right this second. But she does give him a long-suffering look and a sigh. The more things change...]

Maybe you'll remember later. [She doubts it.] In the meantime, c'mon. I'll show you where you can find food and I can tell you about this place while you eat.

[Draggin' you this way, captain.]

[ Those effects may fade with time, or they might not. Either way, it's tough to dwell on it when one's navigator is promising food; he trots along in her wake as he's hauled on the way to the kitchen. ]

This place is huge!

[ He adds: ]

And kinda empty? I mean, there's people, but...

How many are there here, anyway?

The fleet's pretty small. Ah-- usually, we're not all in this big ship. It's a whole bunch of smaller ships. Kind of like a pirate fleet, only it's space and not the ocean.

[It gives her pause, though, stopping to count. How many of them were there?]

Seventeen ships... most of them have a crew of around six to eight people, I think. So I'd guess a few over a hundred. Everyone new turns up on this ship, and then in a few days they get automatically transferred to a new crew.

There's that many new people?!

[ Because even if he hasn't had the chance to chat with all of them, he's still spied quite a few other people here, besides Nami and he. He didn't exactly hear (or retain) anything about maintenance, either. There's also a slew of other questions he's got to ask: ]

Wow, a fleet of seventeen ships? And all of them with crews smaller than ours, why are they here? Looking for something?

[ Probably a tired question: but why are they here? and so on. Are there audience members who ask what it is the drift fleet is even searching for? Is there even an audience at all?! ]

No. [She gets what he means-- it's a pretty understandable conclusion to jump to. And she doesn't mind explaining-- he still feels off to her, and that's got to do with where he came from, which she's gonna ask about-- but for now the sense of offness colours her explanation in neutral tones, unsure of what tack to take.]

Right now, there's a lot of damage to the other ships, so we all got brought back here for maintenance. I think a couple new people have turned up while we've been here, but mostly we're just... waiting. Until they fix things.

[And traipse through each other's heads. Does she tell him that? But if he only just got here, maybe he won't be affected.]

As for what they're doing, supposedly we're all on TV as entertainment for some audience nobody has any proof of. TV is-- [She stops. He's been somewhere else.] Did your other place have it? It's like being broadcast on the den den mushi all the time.

[ As she explains, Luffy just keeps looking around, not just up and down the length of hallway but up along where the ceiling meets the walls, too. It's just so different from where he's been. You couldn't see cameras because all the surveillance was inside the walls, and sometimes, in cheaper areas, poorer areas, you could see weird sconces that weren't for light and know them for their assumed purpose.

No Chrome patrolling around, making sure to enforce the caste's restrictions, often meeting flouting of those same restrictions with violence and arrest. It's weird to go from a place where you're constantly on alert to a place where you... really don't have to be. ]

What damaged 'em?

[ That's a question he asks idly while he investigates, then turns back to Nami to laugh at the explanation about TV. ]

Yeah! They had stuff like that back there. Shows where they'd pack people in a house and broadcast everything they were doing. They called it reality tv but it wasn't very realistic! Shishishi, it's actually pretty terrible!

[ He smiles a moment longer, and then it finally clicks. ]

WAIT, WE'RE ON A REALITY TV SHOW?

Kind of a big space storm. And--

[UH. Wow, he got that a lot faster than she expected. She just stares for a second, mouth twitching up a bit because now, bizarrely, she feels on more familiar ground. But. Let's get one thing straight.]

Supposedly. Nobody's ever seen any proof of that. For all we know, we're just being lied to and we're here for some other reason.

Edited 2015-11-21 15:45 (UTC)

[ He actually participated in some of those TV shows! He was partnered up with a dour rebel in a cooperative broadcast contest (think a trivia contest meets obstacle course), was an extra in a soap opera (which, by the way, was a hilarious disaster culminating in the set burning down), even a cooking show with Sanji, too, which was a pretty successful pilot (which came with its own set of problems).

Entertainment was a huge deal where he was, and they suspected it was another of the many, many distractions meant to keep the populace preoccupied. Reality tv was so much a part of the culture that he kinda can't ignore it, the same way that its surveillance state and widespread deception is not unexpected, either. ]

...Okay.

[ He cocks his head to one side, considering. Vivi would make nice with the locals. Law would have integrated himself into the administrative functions at the core of a place, figure it out from the inside. Sanji would... disappear, and show up later having done something terribly clever (and probably seedy).

He's not good at any of that, but they're not here, and if he wants to get back to them he has to try, try really, really hard, to play the long game, too. ]

Um, is there anybody here besides people like us?

[...Luffy what are you thinking.

Seriously. She can't read you and that doesn't feel right. Nami frowns, but she answers the question. Uh-- sort of.]

People like us how? You mean from the Grand Line? No, there isn't. Or do you mean people who aren't involuntary TV stars? Because I've only met one, and that was over the screens over there. [She points across the room at a large screen, currently dark.]

They talk to us sometimes. Apparently.

Talk at us, huh.

[ No, no, he gets it. He knows the type. He recognizes too the resigned, disgruntled, impotent rebelliousness of people who don't really think anything will be solved by grumping or flipping off the nearest source of their despair, but do it anyway because it's all they can do. He might not agree with it, but he gets it. ]

Mm, I figured if there were more of us from home you'd have said so!

[ And he can't really hear the 'voice' of his other crewmates, either. ]

Okay, maybe getting cozy with those guys who show up there-- [ And by this, he nods at the screen, indicating Diamond and Co. ] --won't really do much.

[...these pauses she keeps giving him are getting longer and longer.]

How long were you in this other place for?

[ That question's kind of abrupt; Luffy tries counting on his fingers as he sorts this one out loud: ]

Lemme see... there was my birthday, and then there was Torao's... and there's, uhhh... six months right there between those? And then...

[ Although he visibly gives up when counting it out becomes too troublesome for him, it's safe to say it's been at least half a year. ]

[She's trying to work out why he's off.]

Law was there too, huh? [Yeah okay, at least six months. Probably not more than a year, because she thinks he'd pick that. He's still Luffy; just... warier and more subtle than she thought he could be.]

...must have been an interesting place. [She says it casually enough, but her expression is flat.]

And Sanji! My brothers, too.

[ And Perona, but he doesn't think she'd be all that relevant to Nami's interests, so he doesn't bother bringing her up. Just because he and Perona took a stroll through a personal kind of hell and came out friends for the trouble doesn't mean anyone else has to care a whit about a former enemy. As far as he's concerned, his friendship is between them.

The rest of the crew can come to their own conclusions. Sanji was easily convinced; she's a lady, after all. ]

Sometimes it was fun, but mostly it was... [ How do you even summarize it? Without worrying her? ] Yeah, it was interesting! [ His gaze swivels away from her, lips puckering. ] What about you?

[Well, at least he wasn't entirely alone. Also, one thing hasn't changed, Luffy: you're a terrible liar.

In this case, though, she's not sure she wants to push him about that just yet. Besides, he said something else that gave her pause. Because--]

Brothers?

[Even given Ace is dead, which these kinds of places don't seem to care about and if he got to spend time with Ace, that's... great in a horrible kind of way.

But that was also a plural.]

Yeah--

[ Oh.

He brings up his palm to smack the heel of it against his forehead, mouth forming that sound without actually saying it, realizing: ]

You didn't meet Sabo!

No, I didn't. [She nearly asks who's Sabo? but from context she can already guess his response. Nami smiles a little. Baffled, sure, but even if she doesn't know the whys and whats and hows, she thinks this is a good thing for Luffy.]

You never mentioned him before. What's he like?

There really wasn't a point, before. [ Then again, Luffy was unintentionally tight-lipped about a lot of other stuff, it took how long for the crew to find out he had a brother at all? But there's a reason he didn't mention Sabo when explaining Ace and his relationship: ] For a long time, I thought he was dead.

[ And he abruptly smiles, bright and huge and warm. ]

But he was okay! He forgot all about everything, and it turned out he'd become a big-shot with those Revolutionary Army guys!

What're the chances, huh? [ Swinging his arms over his head, he clasps his hands behind it, under his hat. ] He's become real strong, and ate Ace's fruit, too! Keeps busy a lot, I hope he's doing okay.

[So by definition, then, he won the contest on Dressrosa. And that's how they met. Which... doesn't surprise her, even given you were meant to be doing something else. Oy. Still, she can't help grinning in response to that huge smile.]

I'm glad. I hope I get a chance to meet him one day.

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At least there's no elevator music...

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