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Doors Verse ([info]doorsverse) wrote in [info]doorslogs,
@ 2013-10-18 21:51:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:plot: halloween

Who: Everyone!
What: The Halloween plot
Where: Passages → The RMS Mauretania
Notes: This is a group log, so anything goes as far as adult content. Please provide locations and warnings, whenever appropriate, in subject lines. Characters may only be in one place at a time, not in multiple threads simultaneously, and you must post using the “doorsween” anon account. This post is anonymous; no names, accents, or defining fonts, please. Lastly, comment with "dibs" on threads you intend to hit, and feel free to exit your characters from threads at any time.



The Mauritania is a ghost ship.

Launched in 1938, it's been decades since she sailed the oceans, and yet the doors of Passages open onto the night-darkened deck of a ship that is barely afloat. She tilts, she lurches, and she is cobweb-lined from her deserted bridge to her silent deck. There is no land to be sighted from any railing, and no light save that from the stars overhead. The promenade winds around the upper level in ominous silence, and haunting music can be heard beyond the doors that lead into the ship's interior.

Promenade; Elevator: It's a curious thing, this ghost ship's elevator. Opulent and splendid, it takes up the entire center of the grand entrance, and it is meant to carry passengers down into the belly of the ship. But it doesn't work just right. Sometimes, the elevator drops impossible lengths. Sometimes, the elevator stops altogether for hours at a time. Yet somehow it's always empty and awaiting new passengers.

First Class; Baths: The upper-level, with its height and distance from the ocean, feels safe and bright. Classical music can be heard in these halls, though there is no orchestra and the ballroom is ominously dark. Laughter leads passengers to the one mostly-lit area in first class, where a swimming bath leads to smaller, more private Turkish bath. The lights here are quiet, flickering and barely there, and shadows dance elusively in the depths of the pool, while ghostly laughter can be heard in the private bath stalls.

Second Class; Theater: Down a level, the second-class floor is louder than the elite first-class floor. Here the air is thick with cigar smoke, and glasses can be heard clinking from the open doors to the smoking room. But it's the theater that draws passengers on this floor. It is cramped and entirely dark, save for the monochrome film on the screen, hauntingly devoid of sound, where a collection of terrifying collages and darkly sexual imagery fill the screen.

Third Class; Dining: Claustrophobic stairs lead down to the narrow passages of the cramped third-class rooms, where the air is heavy and thick, and where the lights flicker and cast the hall into windowless darkness. Here, the ghostly gears of the engine room can be heard sputtering dangerously, and the sensation of the ship's tilting is most pronounced. At the end of the hall, the dining area gives the illusion of windows where none exist. Chairs are pushed aside to allow for dancing to soulful and intimate music, while ocean water teases shoes and heels.



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Re: Dining room
[info]doorsween
2013-10-19 04:07 pm UTC (link)
It had been a rhetorical question, mostly. The beast in whose belly they sat, she was awesome in all the old, literal ways; she filled the doctor, with his unassuming brilliance and his crisscross palms, she filled him with awe. Every asymmetrical howl that filtered up from the sodden floor beneath his feet, traveling up the spindly legs of his chair and drilling into the marrow of his bones, oh, it was wondrous. Clever little bits of engineering all wound together to propel a thousand passengers over the distant horizon and farther still, with naught a one of digital technology to be found in the mix. The ship breathed, and she had a heart that matched his own.

Like something sleeps beneath us.

But this slip of a woman in her swathes of swaddling skirts the color of algae, she tongued the word around in her mouth as if it tasted suspect. As if he had ever been wrong about the inherent presence of genius in human achievements. And maybe there was something more heady that wound its way into the voice that beckoned him like silk, and maybe she was just an actress waiting for a scientist to forge her a gilded trophy in the furnace flames that smoldered somewhere, floors and miles beneath them.

“I think,” he murmured with a tenor of piqued interest, crossing his arms over the yielding wool of his cardigan and tapping two calloused fingers against a bicep. “That I would like to know all of the secrets. But I’m guessing that you aren’t going to lecture me on the specifics of dark matter versus dark energy, ma’am.”

The grin had shifted into something more expectant, dark blonde eyebrows arching gracefully behind the thick, black plastic of his frames. He stretched his legs out in front, heels propped against the floor. Getting comfortable.

“Go on, then. I’m all ears.”

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Re: Dining room
[info]doorsween
2013-10-19 10:00 pm UTC (link)
Engineering did not fascinate her, did not lend life to what had never lived. Places, things, were built by human hands, molded by human fingertips and marked with the oil of human fingerprints. What made a place alive was the sweat that had been worked into the grain of wood and iron, the fingers that came after the making, the feet that wore at carpet and wood and stone, memories that had seeped into the pores of the ship to make her more than she was when she sat by the docks, the hands of her creators molding her.

All things that lived, died. Stripped of life, relegated to a thing instead of a breathing, shuddering beast beneath their feet, she could become immortal, a monument that bore no names, but held the memories of thousands on her walls, in her holds, in the blemish of glasses and the wearing of silverware.

"No," she said, cleanly, evenly, almost haughty at the beginning and sly as the 'o' rolled racetracks over her tongue. Dark matter and dark energy had something to do with the universe, but she trusted her universe to keep on going, no matter if she knew its intricacies (its dark secrets) or not. It would keep on going until it no longer did, but until that time she would continue on, a tiny ship adrift in a very big sea, paddling with oars made of gold and platinum on a sea made of diamonds and sapphires.

"I'm not a professor. And if I was, I would not lecture." Experience counted more than hours spent on a hard wooden chair, grooves worn into the seat by the pressure of students' asses. "Your dark matter, would you want to sit through a lecture on it? Wouldn't you rather see it with your naked eyes? Watch it move? Does it dance like a firefly or does it move with determination, like a train upon tracks? Is it horrible to behold?" It was not called happy sunshine matter for a reason. "Is it beautiful? Does it feel like silk, like whipped cream upon your fingers or like sand, abrasive and burrowing? Is it as sweet as your lover's hands upon your skin or is it the steel edge of an enemy's blade at your breast?"

She leaned forward, ringleted hair carelessly bouncing against one shoulder and whispered, barely louder than the rasp of her stockinged legs, "What would you give for the answer? What would you offer in payment for a secret?"

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Re: Dining room
[info]doorsween
2013-10-21 11:16 pm UTC (link)
This particular doctor, he was neither an asshole nor an evermouthy brat – at times a smartass, perhaps, but that went with the territory of possessing a very great wealth of scientific information. At least he wasn’t as bad as a Tony Stark with his snickering smirks and his smarmy little goatee. Right? Right. And so instead of snarking at the woman in her layers of candy colored silks and satins, he merely quirked a bemused smile with one corner of his mouth lifted in her direction and tapped his fingers to a quicker beat; ‘Staying Alive’ sang out in the back of his mind like a CPR tempo. His fingertips beat against the soft, woolen blend - ah, ah, ah, ah - well, it was better than the relentless litany of Led Zeppelin, he supposed. And this woman, what did she know anyway? The sour challenges that dripped from her sensual mouth, well... part underwhelming, and flirting with the border of infuriating in the same second. Heady, like a potent perfume that curled against his nostrils. Beckoning.

“Well, yeah,” he rolled his slender shoulders along with warm brown eyes, shrugging his very being in her direction and shedding himself of her side eyed judgments. “Because only the most brilliant scientists could begin to arrange a satisfactory lecture on the subject… and really, even then? When you get to that level of metaphysical–slash-mystery? I mean, you’re talking pure unknown. Talk about fucking sexy, you know?”

The doctor’s eyed widened with stricken emphasis, dark lashes curling against the pallor of his razor-slice cheekbones and lending him the supposed innocence of a schoolboy on the other side of a birch bark altar, flushed lips and a curious tilt to the arch of his neck. He was structured knowledge and he was painted sin, but in a refined sort of way - the way that a perfectly tailored suit fit a man in all the right places, slender through the ribs and hips and horizon broad in the shoulders.

“Here’s the thing, sweetheart,” he began, the crook of his arms sloping up at one end like a lopsided question, attitude and propriety in one neat little package all tied up with a bow made of twine. “All your platitudes? They sound real pretty, but pretty ain’t got nothing to do with the accessibility of the everloving universe, you feel me? It doesn’t feel like the backwards grain of sand or a lover’s caress. There’s no cream and there’s no crop. Because those things are known. They are the five percent of the universe that we have observed with our pathetic little eyes and our wide open hearts and our starving mouths. I want to know what is beyond, you see.”

You see, indeed. Or not. The doctor didn’t hold no grudge. And still he leaned in when the woman in her pretty colors shifted in her seat, all framed in soft curls and secret soft cuts of fabric. His hands slipped together once more in his lap, fingers lacing together so that the wiped out parts of his fingertips pressed against the opposite knuckles. “Something tells me that’s a trick question. You look like you love money, without accepting substitutes. You want money? I’ve got some. Are you a whore for secrets? I mean, I’m not judging – I’ve been told that I’m a whore for science. Answers. Truth.”

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Re: Dining room
[info]doorsween
2013-10-22 01:21 am UTC (link)
Science didn't fill her with attitude, didn't leave her fingers drumming across any chairs, except perhaps in boredom. The universe was great and the universe was vast, and blah blah blah. Eyes that held teasing humor dropped it now, though it still remained in the tilt of her knees, the hanging straightness of her spine and the remaining tuck of her feet beneath her chair. Others might be watching, those that would buy what she had to offer.

She assessed, she reassessed. This man in his cardigan and jeans with his saddle shoes and big bang mind who lusted for the unknown. The clothes were nothing more than an illusion, smoke screen for the piqued mind within, agitated into motion by mouth puckering sour words that she issued from cotton candy sweet tongue.

"Sweetheart," she purred, sound speedbumping over her tongue, nearly an ecstatic trill as she leaned forward, elbows to knees that lacked the signs of heavy use that one might expect if she was as he said. "No," pointed sword-tip of a word that swan dove off her lips and smacked into concrete.

"No, I don't feel you." She preferred those things she could feel, but not because they were known, variables that she knew the shape and weight of, but because they were tangible. She could taste the sweat of hands on them, feel their heft, their spiky ends that would tear into careless skin, things that could turn from cold to warm to cold again depending on the heat it begged from its surroundings.

Just like her. And she received none from him. Only casual derision which could neither fill her belly nor shelter her, but instead sliced like the chill of wind through her clothes.

"You want the knowledge but not the reality of it. What good are the quantum mechanics and string theories if you can't touch? Can't see? If you can't drift in a nebula, see that moment when everything comes together just as its supposed to and a star is born? When you can't feel the elements of star dust on your skin?" Her fingers rubbed absently together, as if imagining it, or something else, like that feeling of freshly polished silver between thumb and forefinger. "Even as pathetic as our eyes are, there is no replacing the experience of life, and death, and atoms reorganized for rebirth." Her fingers stilled, cream white motion ceased.

"But I do not think you have to go so far to find something unknown," she added, sloe gin fizz on the tongue. "The universe is easier to understand, when what was unknown becomes known," she remarked, slow and sure. "Easier perhaps than women. And now that I have seen your nature and know what you truly desire, I will count this as your payment for this." Her head was lofty, but her eyes were as cold dead sea slugs. No anger, no vitriol, only shuttered resignation.

"I am not a whore. Not for money, not for you, not for any one or anything. Do you feel me?"

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