[sail] tonight, i'm gonna burn down the garage.

[doodilydoo]

Who: "Sharky" and...
Where: ???
What: Wouldn't you like to know, weather boy?
When: October 5th - ???

[OCTOBER FIFTH.]
[Sharky wakes up an hour after Pratt leaves, still fucked up, nauseous, and reeling from what feels like a decade's worth of good memories crammed into one night. It's almost enough to make him throw up when he sees the room bedecked the room with lights. Is it possible to be so overcome with emotion that you vomit? It definitely feels that way, as Sharky lurches out of bed and staggers into the bathroom to deal with the immediate nausea.

Mistake number one is not falling back asleep after he's done booting. But as he stumbles back to bed, he finds himself reaching for the shoe-box of pictures for a little goodnight nostalgia. The box isn't where it should be, and a quick look around tells him that it's nowhere Pratt would leave it. He remembers shoving it aside at one point, maybe throwing his shirt on top of it? Which means it's probably still sitting up there in the club, abandoned and possibly thrown out with the trash.

Mistake number two is not texting Pratt to go and get the photos for him. The dude's already done enough, Sharky figures, and besides, walking is supposed to help sober you up. He's starting to think that, you know, maybe carrying water around and limiting his drinking to the latter eight hours of the day... was a really fucking good idea, and why the fuck isn't he doing more of that? Right now, he feels fucking awful. How did he do this every day before the camping trip? Holy shit. Is he an alcoholic??? He thought that it skipped a generation, though!

Sharky takes the elevator up to the promenade, bleary-eyed and chugging down water in a frankly reckless manner. It's that weird, empty hour before sunrise, too early for the early-risers and too late for most of the night-owls, and so the whole place is almost completely dead. Rischie is the worst of them all, bland dance music echoing in the empty club, and Sharky quickly picks the shoe-box out of the leftover garbage lying around. The creepy, all-eyes-on-me vibe follows him the whole way out.

The elevator makes a weird noise when he pushes the call button, the grinding, squealing sound of an unmaintained piece of machinery. Sharky knows the ship isn't repairing itself, so he decides to be smart and avoid the potential death drop. It would suck to die in what amounts to a bad trip to Disneyland.

And so, we arrive at mistake number three: the stairs.

Sharky gets from deck five to deck three with no problem. The stairwell is even emptier and stranger than the promenade had been, so he finds himself singing to himself under his breath as he goes. "Mmm-mm-hmm, woman's man, no time to talk; music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around since I was born..."

Singing leads to dancing, and dancing leads to him gleefully stepping off the landing, singing, "Life goin' nooo-where, somebody help me--!"

And it's about then that he realizes he missed the next step in the staircase. His ankle buckles as he goes down too hard, too fast, and he pitches forward. In the half-second before his head hits the landing, he laments the fact that his first death on the ship is going to be falling down the stairs. The thought that he might not die immediately when his neck snaps doesn't occur to him until it happens, leaving him momentarily gasping in white-hot pain and searing panic.

And then, something fucking spooky happens.

Pickles could not for the life of him tell you what the fuck just happened, but he knows for a fact it was spooky as shit. In the endless, yawning chasm of nothingness that had been his existence for as long as... forever... he had felt something. Or seen something. Or -- he can't remember, can't remember anything other than the dizzying giddiness of blinding bright lights and a rattling respiratory system, gasping for air in some stranger's body until, at last, he found himself sitting up.

And now he's here, slumped against the stairs, one side of his face a bright-hot flare of agonizing, delicious pain, a tooth laying out among the scattered photographs around him. He feels like he just got hit by a truck, and then he laughs because fuck, it feels so good. It takes him a solid five minutes before he can finally gather enough awareness to gather up the pictures, staggering to the feet he's wearing -- his feet. And then he makes his teetering, hungover way back to the room that he knows, somehow, belongs to this body. He needs time to think, and if he sits here too long, Friday's gonna show up and ruin everything.]

Comments

[INBOX] - texts/calls

[doodilydoo]

[text/call]

October 6th, early afternoon

[ring_for_giles]

Sharky,

Are you alright?

I haven't heard from you since the party, and with the current state of the ship I'm more than a little concerned.

Giles

[doodilydoo]

o ya man
im cool
supes cool
suuuuuper cool

heads killin me tho
uhhh u got 1 those hangover cookies btws

[ring_for_giles]

Unfortunately they're not something I'm capable of making. I'm not sure where Oswald is at present, but I could contact him for you if you'd like, I'm sure he'd be only too happy to oblige.

Otherwise, in the absense of magic cures, I could bring you some painkillers from the infirmary. Are you still in your cabin?

[doodilydoo]

aw bummer
ya im in here now

no roommate??? idk
probs all good

[bastardofipswich]

hey bestie
turns out my tall dark and spooky boyfriend is going to be a real problem

[doodilydoo]

oooo noooo
did u suk his cock 🔄 instda 🔃
o im so sorrrrry 4 u

[doodilydoo]

wait wat kinda problem

[bastardofipswich]

i didn't even get to suck his dick at all 😔

[ Absolute tragedy, as far as Chase is concerned. He wanted that hot goth d! ]

well
you know he's a god of dead things right?
and i'm a dead thing
you do the math

[doodilydoo]

uuuuuuuuuuuh FUCK NO I DIND NO THAT!!!!!!
WTF!!!!
gdi chase tf man

[AND OF COURSE HE COULDN'T PRETEND TO BE JEFF. Chase could never be Jeff. 😞]

kk lay lo well handle it the way we always do
🔪💀🪦⚰️

after crabb gets got

[hadnoright]

you seriously took out TWO people in two days?
how in the hell did you manage that

[ Hi, Pickles, can you guess who this new ghost is. ]

[doodilydoo]

[oh..................]

🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼
ezpz i kabongd em
🏺🎸💥
u ant seen me yet
im v big v strong now

[He will never get over jumping from 5'5" to 6'...]

[hadnoright]

oh good. at least you guessed right
chase guessed hermione

[ Can you tell how unimpressed she is by that? ]

ugh did you get an upgrade?
that's not fair
this body doesn't have any of my usual perks and isn't even much taller

after she finds the notes

[yourpiecenow]

EAT MY ACTUAL ASS YOU LIMP DICK POSER MAYBE IF YOU SPENT LESS TIME FUCKING AROUND AND MORE TIME KEEPING YOUR SHIT TOGETHER YOU FUCKING SKIDMARKS WOULDN'T KEEP GETTING CAUGHT BY THESE RUBES

[doodilydoo]

woooooowwweeeee
sum1 woke up in the wrng morgue loker
i wuz js tryin 2 help!!!!

[yourpiecenow]

i swear to god if someone with a fucking brain doesn't get into the next loser i'm killing everyone and starting from scratch

[1/2] text - after... whenever pickles' chatterbox prompt takes place...

[oldpuppet]

[ ...Mary definitely stood creepily right outside Chatterbox to listen to Pickles sing. Not because she enjoyed it, but because there was a sense of familiarity bubbling up in her as she heard the singing. Oh, she's heard someone sing those songs before... during her time on the ship.

And she has to confirm who it is. She's pretty sure she's correct. It took her some willpower to not just march in there and shove the man off stage. Somehow, in this even tinier, annoyingly weaker body of hers. What if she was wrong? ...She wouldn't care. It doesn't matter. This place has plenty of bodies! Mary, stop wanting to attack people that are already possessed, please... ]

hey

pikk

pick

[ Whatever. The text sends and she doesn't bother deleting anything.

Mary does not have the patience to fight with her phone and type this all nice and correct like the little model student that Fio tries to be. It's not that hard to type Pickles..... her spelling's worse than Fio's though. ]

[2/2] audio

[oldpuppet]

[ As irritated as she feels right now, she sounds perky when she speaks. Just a cheerful little girl!!! ]

Hello! Is this youuuu, Picklesss?

audio

[doodilydoo]

[UH..........]

Iiiii... Deeepends on who's askin'???

[There's a cute lil' kid wanderin' around, but... is she... you know...]

(frozen comment) -- ʙᴇᴡᴀʀᴇ ᴏғ ʜɪᴛᴄʜʜɪᴋɪɴɢ ɢʜᴏsᴛs! --

[doodilydoo]

[OCT 7TH] night @ the roxbury

[doodilydoo]

[There's a lotta shit Pickles missed, yanno, in the endless yawning void of Nothingness. Drinking, drugs, sex, dancing... eating, talking, moving...

But music? That, he missed almost more than anything else in the multiverse. It's his lifeblood -- he might as well not exist if he can't get his hands on an instrument and let loose. It doesn't even have to be metal, at this point! He'd spent almost all night bouncing between Renly's and John's, even though all they've got to offer is shitty eurotrash and Billy Joel instrumentals!

His soul is literally thirsting for it, though, and listening just isn't the same as playing. So, late in the evening when he knows there's nobody in the theater (or its rafters), he decides, fuck it. What are the chances that this guy ever talked about being bad at the drums, specifically? Can't, uhhhhhhh, Charlemagne have some hidden fuckin' talents beyond drinkin' and fuckin'?

There's a drum kit and an empty stage. Pickles sits behind the kit, sticks in hand, and closes his eyes. It'd be pretty silly to try summoning the spirits of Dethklok through raw drumming power...

And yet, somewhere deep inside, Pickles knows that is exactly what he's trying to do when he picks up the drum track for Thunderhorse. He's too slow, he knows it as soon as he starts, but he still remembers how to play. It'll just take practice, and he's got plenty of time for that now.]

[cacophonish]

[ Where there's music, there's Jeff.

Okay, not always. That would be totally impossible, 'cause there's a lot of people on the ship, and a lot of music, and he can't be everywhere, all the time, following every single whiff of a tune or a melody and--

--doesn't matter, moot point. The point is, it's only inevitable that Jeff's drawn to the theater before long. He's got his guitar slung over his shoulder, because he had been planning on practicing, but he pauses at the threshold when he hears that killer drum beat.

A drummer.

There's a fucking drummer!

Do you have any idea how exciting this is?? Jeff rushes to the stage, bright eyed with an excitement that only grows when he sees Sharky seated at the kit. ]

Dude! I didn't know you played! Wish you'd told me-- we could've been jamming this whole time!

[doodilydoo]

[Pickles feels his heart rate pick up, BPM equilibrium against the furious reverberating beat. The solo is his favorite, a thunderous declaration of his own brutality and a desperate attempt to beckon spirits as brutal as his to him. If he can play just a little faster, if he can play just a little harder, if --

Someone climbs the stage, and Pickles fumbles. It feels like the worst blue balls in his life, and he glares at the encroacher -- and the memories chucked into the back of his brain pick out names and faces and why is he thinking about Man in the Mirror all of the sudden??]

Aaaah, fahhhhk dude -- [Wait, jamming??? -- Oh, right, grandpa guitar. ...Hm.]

Yeeeah, sorry I didn't, uhhh... it never came up? [Hopefully?] You ahhh, thinkin' about jammin' now??

[cacophonish]

[ excuse you it's a totally sweet Gibson SG, not a grandpa guitar!! Anyway, Jeff immediately winces. ]

Shit-- sorry, dude, I didn't mean to interrupt, it's just, um, I got really excited, 'cause, you know, you can't have a band without a drummer, and I never saw any drummers here, so I was like, 'fuck, I'm never gonna have a band again,' but then I heard you and--

[ Wait that's not answering the question. ]

Uh-- yeah! I was thinking-- I mean, I came here to-- we don't have to jam if you don't want... [ But why wouldn't Sharky want to? Unless he's self conscious. But does the guy ever get self conscious? ] But there's some old amps backstage, so I was gonna go bring one out and... you know. Noodle around or whatever.

[OCT 20th] castle von frankenstein

[doodilydoo]

[There's not much to say about the fortress Pickles has created inside the depths of the Infinite Halloween Superstore. Oh, except one thing:

IT'S FUCKING BAD. ASS.

The walls are a combination of shelving and plastic spikes, covered in cardboard cut-outs of various horror movie franchises. There are fake torches, there's animatronic clowns keeping watch out front and up top -- the whole thing is just, like, literally what you're envisioning right now but soooo much cooler. Trust me.

And inside? Well, inside, the furniture is largely made out of boxes, with a pile of old Tommy Bahama serving as his bed. Yeah, that's right, this motherfucker lives here now. And there's plenty of food and alcohol hanging around to prove it!

There's going to be time to talk as a group and get their plans in order, but this can also be a sanctuary for anyone who needs it. Just keep your living friends the fuck out of here!]