[party post] come sail away with me

[varymydays]

You've come through a door, and you are on a boat. Specifically, you're on a cruise ship in the middle of some giant body of water. You've come through the door behind you which is attached to nothing and may now be locked. It's relatively empty as giant as it appears to be. The only other passengers that are here appear to also have come through the door for the most part and it is not nearly enough to fill up this entire cruise ship.

Also, who knows who the hell is driving this thing since all of the employees appear to be either ghosts or holograms...

Is this your first time here or your hundredth time here? Do you want a drink or a dip in the pool? Is it day or night? Do you stumble on your room or some other situation either fun or painful within its many rooms, shops, and facilities? Do you run into someone you know or a complete stranger?

The possibilities are unlimited!

Comments

OTA

[consumes]

Damon just kissed Elena Gilbert, and she kissed him back (and then went inside and cut off Uncle John's fingers, but he doesn't know about that part). He may have failed at his attempt to do good by the little Gilbert, but all in all after the hell that has been the past half year waiting to spring Katherine lose when it turns out she didn't give a solitary fuck about him and had been free all this time? He could be doing a lot worse really.

Of course, as he walks away from the Gilbert house with Elena's (Katherine's lips) still over his, he is... suddenly on a boat. "Okay. This is... not normal."

Damon narrows his gaze as he stares at the nearly empty deck, makes note of the bar there by the pool. What are the chances the entire last how ever long have been a dream that he is still unfortunately stuck in?

"...I need a drink."

[anendlesswar]

"The bar is two decks up. I think."

A tiny blond glances up from the notepad she's writing in, and immediately glances away to avoid the headaches she normally gets from looking at people dead on. Cloudy auras are becoming a fact of life for her in a place like this and the splinters of people being shoved in from other worlds were only making things worse. But she has somewhat mastered the art of not looking at a person directly, but still making it seem like she's looking at them.

Or at least not ignoring them.

Zoe holds up her pencil, counting up the decks for a moment before nodding. "Yep. Two decks up. They have a pretty good selection."

There's a beat.

"Not that I'm actually drinking there. So who knows, it could all be terribly elaborate ruses and the booze may actually not be booze at all. Who knows?"

[consumes]

Damon turns when he hears the voice, lifting up an eyebrow at the sound. So it is not a totally empty cruise ship, there appears to be a tiny blond teenager who has information. He needs information so it is enough reason to stop him in his tracks for now.

"...are you making a map? Because if there's a direct route on how the hell to get off this ghost ship, I'd really like to know that too. I'm good with drinking elaborate, ruse-y booze."

There are worse things to drink and many ways this ship could kill him if it can apparently grab him mid walking, but he will keep his booze.

[anendlesswar]

"No. Just ... taking notes."

She glances back to him again, trying to see what exactly it is she's dealing with, before she goes any further. His aura is shattered, fractured, but it's the color that gets to her. It's red, but deeper and darker than any druid she had ever seen and it gets under her skin, but she keeps her face calm. She's always been good at that.

"The only way off the ship is through your door." Which is why Zoe never goes near hers. She likes it here. But she'll push up from her seat and gestures for him to follow. "Come on. I'll show you where the bar is."

[consumes]

"...Notes? How big is this place?"

Damon lifts his eyebrows, but well if it is a cruise ship, there are probably hundreds of stores.

He grimaces, because he'd been afraid of that. Unliving for the rest of eternity on a cruise ship isn't his idea of a good time, but if there's booze and music and people to dance with, he'll make do. Damon smirks that smirk of his, inclining his head in the direction she's headed. "After you."

[anendlesswar]

" ... Big?"

It's the vaguest answer in the world, but it's true. The ship is huge. She doesn't think a ship like this should exist by the laws of physics but it does and it made Zoe want to pick it apart, for better or for worse. Still, she hops up from where she's sitting and starts leading the way to the bar.

"I'm Zoe."

[consumes]

Damon looks back at her, raising an eyebrow at the vaguest answer, but he is getting the sense that it may be difficult to figure out how big this mysterious, magic ship actually is. He scans the area as they walk, glancing at her as they walk.

"Damon," he says, knowing he is dangerously low on information at the moment. "So how long have you been riding on this hunk of metal?"

[anendlesswar]

She makes a face as she easily finds the staircase. She's gotten to know this ship like the back of her hand in the time she's been here, an escape from a life she doesn't want to be living, and she hasn't exactly been too eager to get her door to open again.

(She doesn't want to live in a world where she's afraid all the time, and as crazy as this ship is, she feels stronger here than she does in a world where her power means nothing.)

"A couple months?" she admits, doing the tally in her head. "My door hasn't opened yet." Not that she's been actively checking.

[consumes]

Damon notes the way that she seems to know her way around very well, and it is starting to make him a little tense that the thought of leaving may not be easy at all. Things were going his way for once. ...sort of. He was saved from near death because Elena thought his life was worth saving.

Then they kissed, and he kind of wants to get back too that though he's not looking forward to his brother finding out (lol oh Damon). He follows her up the stairs.

"...a couple months? No. I can't be here a couple of months. How often do you check the non-opening door to see if it'll open with a little more force?"

[anendlesswar]

Oh, Damon.

Zoe glances back at him with a raised eyebrow for a moment, before shaking her head as she hits the stairs. She takes them two at a time, making it to the first landing before answering his question.

"I'm pretty sure that if it were possible to break to down, someone would have figured that out already."

[consumes]

Damon follows directly beside her seemingly effortlessly keeping up with her taking two at a time. He looks her way when they reach the first landing.

"Maybe the door rebuilds itself. Maybe they didn't try hard enough. Why aren't you more worried about getting back? Don't you have something to return to?"

[serbian]

"Already one step ahead of you, my friend."

Damon isn't a friend. He's a veritable stranger, but Nikola is one step ahead of the other, unbeknownst to him, vampire. He's got a glass of chardonnay in one hand, a bottle of it in the other. He's far too civilized to demean himself by drinking straight out of the bottle. Even at his worst, he always finds a worthy, pristine glass to pour it into. The oenophile in him won't allow for anything less.

"The bar's that-a-way, in case you were wondering." With the bottle, he gestures back in the direction in whence way he came.

[consumes]

Damon turns toward the sound of the voice, and he tilts his head slightly. His gaze narrows as he watches him. There is always that suspicion at meeting someone new at a floating ghost ship, and he breathes in with a tiny smirk.

"Wondering and needing. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction," he says with a tiny smirk. He needs a drink at the moment, and his eyebrow lifts a bit further up as he looks from one hand to the next. "Just taking the bottle with you?"

Because he can approve of that.

[serbian]

"For now. I thought carting a whole case of it around with me would garner a little unwanted attention."

Not like he could get drunk off of it. One of the supreme downsides to being his brand of vampire was the inability to get drunk. He wasn't dead, but he couldn't get drunk. Somehow, that didn't seem like a fair trade.

[consumes]

Damon lifts his eyebrows as he looks at him with a bit of a shrug of agreement. It probably would if there was anyone around to gain unwanted attention from. He tilts his head to the side slightly as he starts to walk back in the direction indicated. He may be suspicious and on his guard, but he'll play... casual, reckless. He's good at that.

"So do you usually want to drink an entire case or is that a side effect of being on a mystery ship?"

[serbian]

"No, my emptying of cases and whole wine cellars is more every day, less sudden trans-dimensional free-fall. Old habits die hard, and I'm certainly not going to let a little change of scenery stop me from continuing to indulge."

He's completely serious about emptying entire wine cellars. How many times has Helen had to restock after he's been in her house too long? Far too many times, she'd say. Usually he left the bottles with sentimental value alone, but every once in a while he'd indulge temptation and take one of them down from the shelf. Like that bottle Churchill gave her, not that he was sorry he drank it. The British didn't exactly have a history of being kind to him. Churchill's bottle was practically begging him to drink it.

[consumes]

Damon tilts his head to the side at that response, narrowing his gaze. He's usually pretty good at getting a read on someone else. Usually doesn't mean all the time, but he does seem to be relatively serious about that.

"Well, that is a daily ritual that I can actually appreciate though I have to wonder how your liver is holding up spending every day, emptying cases and wine cellars," he says though obviously, there's the chance this man isn't human like Damon isn't, but he isn't about to make that assumption based on wine consumption alone (okay, that is actually a glaring flag assuming he's not the type to exaggerate, and he doesn't seem like the type

to exaggerate, but again, he's having difficulty getting a solid read on him, which is impressive much as Damon prefers to read everyone with ease).

[serbian]

"My liver doesn't damage. My everything doesn't damage, actually. It's as much of a perk as it is downer."

Don't feel bad, Damon, everyone has trouble getting a read on him. He throws people off deliberately; it's a thing. The only person with the ability to properly suss him out isn't here. (Thank God.) There was only so much of her hovering he could take, even when he was thoroughly enjoying the attention. Sometimes, a person just needed to be left alone — especially a person who prefers the company of pigeons over people more often than not.

[consumes]

"No getting drunk for you," Damon says in a lightly snarky voice as he gets alcohol of his own. Granted... it takes really, really, really fast drinking to get him anywhere near tipsy for the same reasons. "So that makes you what then?"

Damon tilts his head to the side as he watches him carefully. He would find this throwing people off deliberately thing impressive if he didn't want so badly to figure out what the hell his deal is. It's the way Damon operates so he can know how to deal with any particular person though he will always be that asshole, too damaged (if he ever got what he wanted, he would break it, destroy it, wouldn't know what to do with it).

[serbian]

Yes, well, there were downsides to everything. Not being able to get drunk just happened to be one of the biggest when it came to unlocking the vampire lineage hidden in your DNA. It was a small price to pay for immortality. He's paid bigger ones, both willingly and not.

Nikola tsks the question. "Someone who's not in the business of sharing his secrets."

[consumes]

Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be, but Damon is a bit damaged in that sense. ...in a lot of senses, lbr. He is a terrible person that does terrible things and always will even if he gets a bit less terrible sometimes. There's growth. It's just never enough to make him anything better than what he is.

Damon smirks at the response.

"Didn't think it'd be that easy," Damon says as he picks out his drink from the bar. "So how about a who the hell are you? A name'd work. No need to get into the business of sharing your secrets for that one."

[believable]

"Famous last words."

Damon needing a drink isn't unheard of. Elena's surrounded by functioning alcoholic vampires, and she understands that for a lot of them, it helps to take the edge off. She can't decide if that's actually true, or something that works as some kind of placebo effect. Either way, the Boarding House boasts some of the more impressive collections she has ever seen, and undoubtedly Damon is pissed he has been taken away from that. Not that Elena is thinking of the Boarding House.

She's thinking of her Damon and the alcohol at the No Name Club.

"This is hardly the strangest thing that has ever happened to us," she adds practically. There was that time they got trapped in a sewer with ewoks.

And the carpet. There was also a magic carpet.

[consumes]

Damon lifts his eyebrows as he turns toward her.

He has no idea this isn't the Elena from his world, the Elena that he believes kissed him back when he kissed her. There is that smirk at the sight of her there though, and suddenly he is not so eager to leave this place. Elena is here after all. The whole reason he'd wanted to get back was that kiss.

He lifts his eyebrows, tilting his head to the side in confusion.

"...what stranger thing has happened to us than getting kidnapped to a cruise ship?"

Damon would really like to know, because he can list out all the things that he knows of, but this still takes the cake.

[believable]

Elena really needs to stop assuming people share her timeline of events.

In this ship, she has discovered Bonnie doesn't and Caroline doesn't and Ethan most certainly doesn't. Why would Damon be any difference? Maybe the ship gets a kick out of playing musical timelines with each of them at the chairs. His confusion is genuine, and it's not as though Elena would have any telltale signs Damon is from before or after. He is an ageless vampire with the ever present smirk and those waggly motions his eyebrows do.

God, but she'd be lying if she said it wasn't good to see him.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Elena asks warily, her gaze narrowed as she studies him.

l-lol.

[consumes]

Damon tilts his head to the side as he looks down at her, gaze narrowing a bit. Of course, it is good to see him, Elena. Why wouldn't it be? His smile widens as he waggles those eyebrows and then winks at her.

"...you know."

He narrows his gaze further at her, because there is no way she could have forgotten.

They kissed. He may be unconsciously tapping his bottom lip.

Yes. >>