returnjourneylogs | SET SAIL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

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SET SAIL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

January 1, 2022 – January 7, 2022
Welcome to the new year and the Return Journey's opening event! We're starting with something light to get everyone acclimated and so no one feels they've missed too much if they app after the holiday season. We'd like to make it easy for any new players to jump in right away.

If you have any questions about the event, please ask here.

1. What? My name is who? My name is—

Salutations! Now that everyone's respective warden and inmate orientations are out of the way, you've been given a helpful, mandatory name tag. It instantly appears on your shirt and can't be taken off, though where it appears on your shirt is a bit more unpredictable; it's an imperfect science, so it's just as likely to pop up on the back of your shirt as the front. If you try to remove your clothes, the tag appears on your skin; they're waterproof, so a quick shower won't get rid of it, either. What can we say — it's mandatory.

While the tags all follow the standard "HELLO my name is" format and have your name or most common alias, they also include some other information. For wardens, it features a space that declares "I LIKE" and one or two of your most choices hobbies. For inmates, it features these hobbies and "I have killed [x] people" (this may be a specific number or something akin to "a lot of" or "no"). Fun icebreaker, right?

2. Twenty Questions

Speaking of icebreakers, a brief announcement summons everyone to the observatory. Again, yes, it's mandatory; wardens must retrieve absent inmates before any more information is revealed. Better hop to it!

Upon arrival, passengers will discover that the Peregrine's resident bot force has reconfigured the observatory with small, portable cubicles, each with a transparent wall that retains a lovely view of the observatory's massive window. Each inmate is assigned their own cubicle and, upon entering, cannot leave without a warden's say so; the door only unlocks with a warden's CommLink.

Wardens are tasked with interviewing at least one inmate, to get a feel for their prospective charges. They can have as much time as they need to formulate what questions they want to ask, but that might leave some inmates waiting. Maybe that's on purpose, though. In any case, the exercise is over once an inmate is asked five questions and a warden receives five answers.

Archimedes will collect name tags after the interviews for incineration. The robotic owl is, notably, the only one who can remove them.

3. Polite Picnic

The greenhouse doesn't always have enough fresh produce to go around (and often what is collected is frozen and preserved), but given the circumstances — a new mission and new passengers — everyone can reap the rewards this month...if they share. A bot stationed in the mess hall mechanically tells anyone who crosses into range (whether they mean to visit the produce table or not) that they aren't to take more than three fruits and/or vegetables. If you choose not to abide by the rules...well, that depends if you're caught and by who.

The produce available are as follows:

Adalfane: Tastes like cocaine, but very nutritious, especially when eaten raw.
Tuadath: Smells awful, but very hearty when cooked, tasting a little like steak.
Tsanyi: Pure, sugary sweetness. Can be made into a refreshing drink, eaten raw, or sprinkled over a desert.

There are notably fewer tsanyi than adalfane or tuadath. But if everyone's nice and cooperates, each person can get exactly one.

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The eye contact is unnerving. Volk's fingernails are chewed down ragged under the scraps of last month's matte-black-and-topcoat. He does not want to be here. He would like to be anywhere else. The joke did not work, which probably means he fucked something up, and he has no idea what. He has no control over this situation, and the dread is vivid in his expression.

"No one likes it. - What?"

The simple gesture he makes here - tucking his chin down and sharpening his stare - gets turned by the combination of the black in his hair and around his eyes and the hard shell of his coat into something like a phalanx of soldiers locking their shields together as a wall.

"What the hell kind of question is that?"

Also, why is your name tag on your head. Rhys mentioned the name tags, they're real, maybe?

...Interactive theater.

Hm. That's something. That's a piece of this puzzle. Give him a second to turn it over.

It's not an unfamiliar sight: fear locked behind someone's gaze, alive and wild. Sometimes all it took was a touch.

His hands curl up. He sits back. The eye contact a thread he can't let snap. “Overdose?” he says in a low voice. As though they're speaking not across a table but over a corpse.

Off the subject of whether or not he's going insane, Volk's gaze is blazing. Shields are up. You're not even a doctor, are you??

"I'm not fucking dead!" High and shrill. "I'm talking to you! Hello!"

He smacks the table in front of him as a frustrated substitute for actually smacking William. And it helps that it makes a loud, vehement noise. HELLO! HELLO ITS ME, MOVING AND ALIVE.

He had a nightmare about dying, true. It's the last thing he remembers, true. But clearly - not dead? There's not even an injury, which there absolutely would be if he'd been raised by a necromancer? Which is insanely illegal, but these guys seem completely off the reservation, so who even knows.

The table shudders under William's hands, the loose fists they're in. His eyes snap from Volk's hand to his face—his attention momentarily tentative. “Sorry. I'm sorry.” The words are slight but considered. Extracted with care. “When it happened to me I didn't believe it, because I didn't feel any different.”

Another glance at the table, the grain of it. Volk's hand, the veins. “What do you remember?”

Volk's eyes shut as if he cannot Believe this Bullshit right now, which is in fact the case.

"Oh, you died too, huh? We must both be ghosts. What a miracle of modern medicine. I remember that I'm not a fucking idiot."

A slow exhale from William's side of the table. He takes the opportunity to look for Volk's name tag, but with the other man using his jacket as a tarp it's hard to pick out.

“Burbank, July twenty-seventh.” He says it quietly, as if to himself. A pause: his gaze is back on Volk. “What time was it? Must've been hot.”

The nametag is on his shoulder: Volk, no deaths, likes to argue on the internet, likes a band that hasn't been cool in many, many years.

It was hot. It's always hot there - even on another world, with a mix of familiar and unfamiliar geography, people prefer to make movies and television in places with consistent sunshine. The coat does not match the season.

"Oh, is this important? If I say it was raining it's because I'm dead?"

Edited 2022-01-16 01:38 (UTC)

The more Volk deflects, the more William focuses on body language, gesture. He keeps coming back to those nails. “It's either dead or crazy.” His tone stays even; the rise and fall of his shoulders is gentle. His expression pinches only briefly, at the last word.

“Walk me through it. What'd it smell like? Were you sweating?”

The body language is: impatience, tension. He doesn't know what's going on, but William is absolutely not a doctor, so this is interaction has slid into something he knows how to deal with, someone he owes nothing trying to get him to do something he doesn't want to do.

(He hasn't had a smoke in a few hours, though. He knows they took his Juul, but the finger drumming as that creeps up on him is going to start getting more persistent.)

"Absolutely not, Creepy."

Volk isn't like A-list famous, he can usually leave his front door and go to the store without being mobbed or anything, but he's famous enough that people have asked him some real real weird shit.

"Sweat on your own time, stop wasting mine."

William allows himself a moment of annoyance—mouth twisting unpleasantly, halfway to mockery. Eyes cutting to the side. Bothered less by the dismissal than the familiarity of it.

He scrubs his hands over his face. “Okay,” he concedes at last. The guy's being a profound fuckhead, but he's not wrong. Trapped in a cubicle because some AI heard it would foster introspection. It's on William not to waste his time.

“I was off the coast of China on...” An island populated with robots designed to be killed or fucked. He leaves that out: doesn't need Volk entertaining the all-too-plausible possibility that he's a host on top of everything else. Doesn't care to pry open that can of worms himself. “Call it a retreat. Something between a spiritual exercise and a hunting trip. October. I don't remember the date—it all kind of bled...once I got there.”

His gaze isn't on Volk anymore, or the table, or the walls: it's adrift. His voice curled in on itself, his clipped vowels widening. “Where I was, some of it was built up—real elaborate—but I liked the wild parts, the fringes. It got beautiful out there. Beautiful and...” He flutters the fingers of one hand. “Unconstrained. Like, um, when you let the weeds grow.” Like a digression.

He is digressing.

“Anyway, it was nothing special. I was picking my way through a gulch and I stepped wrong. I remember the ground giving beneath me, scraping my hands on rock—those pebbles that get stuck in your skin. Embedded. I was surprised.” He lets out a short, soft breath—not quite a laugh. “I think I died surprised.”

This is very unexpected as a tactic, and Volk stares, disturbed.

(China, a name he doesn't recognize - but it's clearly a location, and that's all the context he needs.)

He turns his head to not look at William afterwards. It's not that he doesn't know actors who couldn't deliver that monologue sincerely. It's not that he doesn't know script writers who couldn't have picked out the words for it. It's that it's improvised, apparently, and weird, and kind of out of nowhere - three things a tight script doesn't have room for.

He could have been coached on it, practiced it beforehand in case people had doubts. That's true. But it also means Volk has to shift his assumption of the narrative a third time. Not a doctor. Not following the rules set out in his own cult story, in which the pitiful misguided dead are being shepherded by the wise and alive Faithful. It's not on-brand. That's what makes it disturbing.

And, you know, the death or whatever.

"You're not dead. You're talking to me. You slipped and fell and ... someone told you you died, like you're trying to tell me I did. Is that it?"

He's visibly relieved—that the words register, that Volk reacts. He'd half-expected it all to be brushed off. William slumps a little in his seat, closes his eyes a moment. “Like I said,” he says, letting out a slow breath, eyes opening, “I didn't believe it because I didn't feel different.”

Not in the literal sense—not because he had to keep on eating and crapping and breathing—but because nothing within him had shifted or altered. Death had transformed nothing. “And I hated how—I hated that it wasn't fitting. It should've been ugly.”

And it should've been impossible.

“You're on borrowed time.” A quick glance to Volk—quick, uncertain. “Me, I don't know.” He'd gone back. Gotten out of the park. Resolved to fix things and started to work at it. But he's seen the man he becomes, doesn't know how or when their paths are supposed to diverge.

Edited (10% more westworld) 2022-01-31 22:58 (UTC)

Or you didn't believe it because it wasn't true. There's some kind of either adrenaline junkie or self esteem issue happening, he's sure cults love to pick for that.

The immediately most alarming thing, though, is:

"You don't know," Volk repeats.

He holds up a hand.

"So you made it through this program, the one that says you can only go home if you finish it, because otherwise they'll kill you.

And you still don't know if you can go home or if they'll kill you?"

“No. No, I went back.” He nods minutely to himself, voice still abstracted. Pauses over the distinction between execution and disappearance—would it help, to hear your death wouldn't be a matter of cold-blooded murder but some unknowable being who'd gotten its claws into you losing its grip?

Likely not.

“Picked up where I left off. My horse was still...” A shrug, one-shouldered, a likewise lopsided smile. “I was there”—half a second too late he realizes he hasn't called it home—“for about a year before I got the offer. I just don't know, uh, how good is good enough. That's what I meant.”

Edited 2022-02-03 00:05 (UTC)

"So just pure institutionalization. Is that what I'm being sold on? Like inmates paroled from prison who commit a crime again to go back."

He'd call it Stockholm Syndrome, if his world had a Stockholm. And in the meantime, he's thinking over this story.

Assuming it's accurate, which remains to be seen -

(Heh. "Remains" to be seen. Yes, show him the corpse or no deal.)

- This sounds like a powerful Court gift. Granted, Volk doesn't know every single Prince there is, but stealing from the Cotard corporation is the last thing any lesser Prince will ever do.

Figuratively. Princes don't actually kill each other with swords any more, Harry Cotard is just going to sue him for his blood and organs.

"What if I don't believe you?"

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SET SAIL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

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SORRY TO IGNORE YOUR HOOK 😔 he just hates cigarette bribes

oh lol no worries i was just doing narration flavor of him being edgy/tense/twitchy

OH AHAHAAH well don't mind me over here galaxy braining

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