Young Writers Society

You've been to hell and back. You've loved, lost, laughed and cried. You've been on the top of the highest mountain and the bottom of the deepest valley. Then, in the midst of it all, you blacked out. You woke up on a ship. A cruise ship of sorts, inside of your own comfortable bedroom with a view of the ocean.

There are restaurants that serve the most delicious food you've ever eaten, meals that remind you of your childhood. There's a pool and a hot tub on the top deck, a movie theater that plays movies every day, on a loop, but for some reason, never anything made after 1960. There's a ballroom, a spa, coffee shops, anything your heart could desire. For the first time in a long time, you've felt peace. You're not sure if any the trials you just faced really happened, or if did, what it matters.

Something's up with the staff, though. They all treat you like kings and queens, but when you ask where you're going, how you got there, they tell you the voyage has no ending.

That you are where you've always meant to be. One day you wake up and see glaciers and the the next you see palm trees. Where are you? Have you died? Who brought you here?

The other passengers seem just as confused as you. Maybe connecting with them will be the key to figuring out this mystery.

Note: I'm intending for this to be an exercise in character development for existing characters you may have but please feel free to use whoever you like. I'd ask that you do no more than two characters, though. Write a short bio before your first post!

I'm intending for this to be a fun and relaxing roleplay with a few twists along the way. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Alex was woken by the bright glow of the sun. She sat up and heard the chirping of birds, and saw that she was in a nicer room than she'd ever been in in her entire life. She was wearing a silk pajama set. An sky blue one with soft pink polka dots. It was comfortable. Vaguely familiar. And then she placed it.

Her junior year of high school she'd seen it in a catalog and had asked for it because her pajama pants were years old, scratchy and had several tears in the seams. Instead, Marcia had bought her a used copy of Fahrenheit 451, a book she already had, and told her to learn how to sew so she could fix her pants.

She sat up, taking in the sound of seagulls and the ocean. Where was she? She'd fallen asleep in prison. She'd been there for nearly year now, and was about to turn 22. She'd still held on to hope that she would be cleared, and that she and Jay could be together again, but that hope seemed to be growing more distant.

Maybe she was dreaming. Still, it felt so real. She sat up and went to the wardrobe. There were several beautiful dresses, but her eye caught a white and yellow one just like what Grace Kelly had worn in Rear Window. Later.

Maybe this was a mistake. Still, she left her room, and saw her name clearly on the door. Alongside a hallway of a dozen others.

"A. Altman."

This was strange. Still, it wasn't prison. Maybe she shouldn't question it. Or, at the very least, hold onto the dream as long as she could.

Tim wasn't even really sure when he had fallen asleep. The last thing he remembered was pouring over his notes on Jason at the kitchen table, a cup of empty coffee beside him. He must have nodded off at some point. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he tried to remember what he had been reading last. It was the weekend, and Batman was on official League business. He had nothing to do beside try to figure out what he had done wrong in his life, and how he was supposed to make it right.

It was as he was trying to remember what he had been reading that he realized he wasn't in the kitchen. He wasn't even sitting up; he was laying in an unfamiliar bed. The room wasn't from his house, and wasn't part of the Wayne Manor. He had studied both of them extensively. This was something else.

He glanced down.

His breath caught in his throat.

This pajamas were so simple compared to what he had been wearing when he remembered to change into them. They weren't something the Drake heir would wear, or something that Bruce would have lying around the house. It was a simple, blue shirt with a guitar on it, and a pair of soft, plaid pants that someone could have gotten at the department store.

And, more importantly, he knew these pajamas.

They were his favorite pair from before he died.

He knew this was all a dream, or maybe even some kind of trick. Maybe Scarecrow had made a new kind of toxin that didn't just show you your worst fears - it showed everything you missed so, so dearly.

But without even getting changed into something else, he slipped out of the room and headed out into the hallway, a name he should have no longer been saying leaving his lips with a hopeful tone.

"Lila-" he started to say, hurrying out into the hallway.

But Lila wasn't there.

Why would she be?

There was a girl that certainly wasn't Lila, with a certain look to her eyes that reminded Tim of someone else. He didn't question the look that much. He just glanced back towards his door, studying the name that had been chosen.

"T. Drake," the sign read.

Tim it was, then.

Not that he was really anything else these days.

Bo had just come home and passed out on his couch after a long day of working overtime on a Friday night. He hadn’t even bothered to change or take off his shoes, collapsing onto the couch with a huff in his clothes that still smelled like fish and spices. He had been expecting to wake up to the same fishy smell when his alarm inevitably went off, but there was no alarm, and no fish smell.

His eye opened halfway for a second in a bleary haze, but that was all it took for him to realize he was not home.

His eye shot open and he sat up in a bed more than long enough for his legs so that they weren’t dangling off the edge. He didn’t think he’d ever been in a bed so large before.

He looked down at his shirt and threw off the covers. Someone had put him in his pajamas - just a soft fitted t-shirt and big loose sweatpants - and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. A voice in the back of his mind was ringing off alarm bells, but there was something louder shutting them up. There was a sense of calm he felt that was unexplainable, and had it not been present, he was sure he would be panicking. Especially because he realized very soon that he was on a ship.

Instinctively he grabbed onto the sheets to ground himself and turned from the window that looked out at the ocean. There was a door. Hopefully, it led out to a hall without windows.

Getting to his feet, he swayed for a moment, feeling the subtle shifts of the ship beneath his feet. Why wasn’t he freaking out? Why wasn’t he freaking out about not freaking out? Everything felt fine, but things weren’t fine.

This wasn’t Kartiel’s doing again, was it? No, he wouldn’t. They defeated Soren. Kartiel was his friend now. But what else could’ve brought him here?

He poked his head out the door and saw two people standing outside their doors in pajamas too. Okay, so it wasn’t just him who got dragged here. Thank God.

He pushed open the door and closed it behind him, glancing at the plaque with his mame engraved on it.

“A. Petrov.”

Hm. So they went with the name on his birth certificate and not his nickname, whoever they were. Oh well. He could go by Andrei for a little while.

He looked back at the guy and gal standing in the hall. They both looked pretty confused, so he figured he’d break the ice.

“Hey!” he called, giving them a wave. “You guys look a little lost. Did you just wake up here too all of a sudden?”

Alex flinched when she heard the man's voice, not expecting to find anyone so soon. But still, maybe they'd know what was going on. She turned to find a younger guy, and an older one. Both in their pajamas. The older one was very tall and seemed to be about Jay's age.

Still, he looked nothing like Jay and was covered in scars. Maybe this was Linda's boyfriend that she always talked so much about, the one that was in the men's prison in Fort Collins that had been busted for selling drugs years before Linda herself had decided to follow down the same path. Linda had always bragged to Alex about the fact that the two of them had been engaged, and told her, "your man sounds like a square."

Maybe this was some kind of twisted experiment. But that didn't explain the younger one. He seemed more approachable. He couldn't have been older than fifteen, and there was no way he'd been in prison, or even juvenile hall. Alex gave the boy a tired smile.

Then, she processed what the other man had said. Did you just wake up here all of the sudden? What if they were just as clueless as she was?

"Guess so."

Then Alex saw the looks on their faces. Maybe they weren't convicts. What was this, then? She could feel herself shaking.

A moment later, she thought she smelled fresh baked chocolate chip cookies wafting from down the hall.

"I did," he said. He kept his tone pleasant and a small, hesitant smile on his face. He wanted it to seem like he was worried about the situation and not the people involved - even though he very much was.

The girl still gave him an uneasy feeling, and the man was...

Where to begin?

He was tall and muscular. He only had one eye; the other was covered by a very noticeable scar. He had a beard lining his face. His clothes and personality were the only things that took away from Tim's sense of wariness, but both of those had little influence on someone's personality. If someone looked at him right now, they were never suspect that he was both Robin and the heir to a rich, vast fortune.

His name was going to ring a bell when he gave it, so he would have to chose the persona he went with carefully. Robin was out of the question. He didn't even know if the people who had brought him here knew that. Realizing that should have been worrisome, but the hallway was oddly calming - he wasn't nearly as worried about this situation as he should have been.

Timothy Jackson Drake was good, to some extent, but he wasn't really dressed the part. Tim Drake, then - that was how he would act around them. A nice, healthy blend of his two other personas.

As he was mulling over everything, the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies floated down the hallway. He stopped, mid-thought, and was immediately reminded of when Alfred had made them the other day. The smell wasn't entirely the same, but it had the same comforting effect.

"My name's Tim," he offered. "Tim Drake."

He turned to face the source of the smell, torn between returning to the comfort of his room to get a change of clothes, and to wander towards whoever had to be making cookies.

Winter awoke in an unfamiliar room, in very familiar clothes. She rubbed the silk of the pajama's between her fingers in awe. They were spectacular, with the beautifully intricate embroidery around the cuffs and the way they were tailor-fit for her. She smiled and climbed out of bed.

She hadn't gone to sleep here. She'd paid for a room at a tavern last night, she believed. This must be the work of some strange magic. A d'jin or fae who felt like doing a good deed today.

She stretched and wandered around. She was barefoot. She giggled at that. She hadn't been able to walk around barefoot anywhere in a long while. She danced around, giggling a bit as she discovered that the ground was swaying, ever so slightly, beneath her. Perhaps this was a treehouse, suspended by long twisted ropes between two enormous oak trees to be rocked gently by the wind.

She smiled and looked up at the door. There were voices coming from outside, and she opened it.

Collected in the hall was a strange bunch. She gave them a kindly smile, "Hello," she said, looking at none of them in particular so it looked like she was just staring into space.

xXx

Megara's eyes flew open and she reached for her knife. First, she realized her nightmare wasn't real and she calmed, only to panic again when she realized that her knife wasn't there either.

Her eyes scanned the room. She didn't know this place.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and got on her knees next to the bed. Leaning against it was her cane. Good. She ran her hands inside the crack between the frame and the mattress, looking for at least one of her knives. None. There were none.

She steadied her breathing and grabbed her cane, flicking the near-invisible latch a the top and partially unsheathing the rapier hidden within. At least she still had that.

She stood up using her cane, then, and noticed what she was wearing. Typically, she would just go to sleep in her regular clothes. She didn't have enough time in her life to bother with pajamas and one could never know when her base would be discovered and attacked, so already being dressed was convenient. But what she was wearing now was a simple white nightgown made of soft cotton that she knew wasn't hers.

She tried to calm herself and looked at the door. She could faintly hear the sound of voices outside, like they were coming from a little ways down a hallway.

It's not like I have much choice.

She opened the door and stepped outside. As she closed the door behind her, she noticed the nameplate. M. Tailor.

Who's M. Tailor?

She shook her head. Later. That's a problem for later.

She turned toward the collected group of people and-

"Tim!"

At the sound of the familiar voice, relief immediately flooded Tim.

He wasn't facing this on his own, and he wasn't facing it with someone he'd have to protect on his lonesome - it was someone who was very capable of handling herself.

And someone he'd consider a friend.

"Meg!" he said, with an honest happiness he rarely felt.



His bed felt very comfy right now, and Kirux didn't really want to get up. He pulled Klein closer to himself and tucked himself down deeper underneath the covers. It was only when he realized the bed was softer than his ever had been that he popped his head back out.

He wiggled himself free from his blankets, clutching Klein close to his chest as he hopped out of the bed. The room was really fancy, but he was still very confused about where he was. Had he forgotten about going to another world?

He glanced down at Klein.

He would have asked Klein, but stuffed animals didn't talk.

Frowning in confusion, Kirux decided that his best option was to head for the door. Doors led to other places, and other places probably had people! He could even ask them if they had seen Riku. Yeah, this was sounding like a great idea! Even if they hadn't met Riku before, they would probably know more about where they were than he did.

With a skip to his step, he went over to the door and opened it up.

And then immediately stopped in the doorway, eyes wide and skin pale, when he saw just how big one of the people in the hallway was - and how he had a really, really scary scar over his eye!

If he hadn't been frozen in fear, he would have seen that the nameplate on his door just had the letter "K" on it.

Bo smiled slightly at the girl's reply, even though he wasn't necessarily happy that they were in the same boat (pun intended), he was glad that he wasn't alone. Of course, there was always the possibility that he was being lied to and that one of them was actually behind everything, but that didn't seem to be the case. They gave him no reason to suspect them of being ingenuine so far, so he wasn't going to jump to any conclusions.

He nodded at the teen boy when he said his name, ready to say his own when two more girls popped into the hall, presumably all having just woken up as well. They certainly looked it, anyway. Everyone was in some form of pajamas. Well, his clothes were technically pajamas, but that was only because he slept in them normally. Under any other conditions they might just look like normal clothes... at least like, normal for going to Walmart, maybe. Though for that he'd prefer shoes.

He gave the pale girl a warm smile and a wave, but his gaze was quick to follow the other girl as she rushed to the boy. Ah, so there were people here who knew each other. Maybe there was someone he knew here as well.

He turned to the two girls that weren't occupied with the whole reuniting thing going on beside them and gave them a closer look.

Everyone around him was smaller than him and looked younger than him by at least five years - or at least, that was his best guess.

The pale girl looked like she was maybe 18? 19? But pretty calm, which was good considering the circumstances. The blonde girl though looked a bit warier and shaken. Like maybe she'd seen some stuff or-

Bo's smile faded slightly as his head perked up and he stared down the hall. His eyes lit up at the smell of cookies hit his nose.

Someone was baking cookies? That meant there was a kitchen. That meant the cookies were fresh.

He blinked a few times, trying to shake away the distraction of food and brought his attention back to the girls.

"Ah - well uh, I'm Andrei," he managed to say, trying to focus on the more pressing matter of figuring out who he was with and where he was and why. It only lasted a second though, because another person entered the hallway, and they were in a onesie with a stuffed animal in their hands.

Okay, that was adorable. And not fair. Why didn't he get a onesie? Oh well.

“Oh, uh, and hello to you too!” he said with another wave.

He tightened his grip on Klein when he realized he had been noticed by the man who scared him the most, but immediately loosened it when he realized how friendly he was. And then he smelled the cookies, and all of his fears faded away.

He happily joined the group, a big grin on his face as he held Klein close. He wasn't scared anymore, but he didn't want to lose his favorite plushie. It used to belong to Winnie, which made it extra important.

Megara gave Tim a smile and pulled him into a hug, something she wouldn't do under any other circumstances, but it gave her the opportunity to mutter into his ear out of hearing of the others, "Where the hell are we?"



Winter returned the warm smile that was offered to her and looked over the group. Oh, they were strange. Strange was good. It always ended in something interesting.

"I'm Winter," she said in that detached sort of way, seeming to be looking and speaking to no one in particular. She then turned and wandered in the direction of a delightful scent, like baked goods but not exactly like any she'd ever had the pleasure of tasting before. Perhaps that would change today.

There was a small crowd now, and the other blonde girl seemed to know the younger teenage boy. Surprised to see him, though.

As the others began to talk, Alex started to find herself on the edge of the circle. Such a thing seemed to be a reoccurring theme of her life.

"Is it just me," Alex asked, "or does anyone smell cookies?" She was starving, and it didn't matter if it was morning. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had real food.

The smell brought her back to when her mother used to make them.

"I'm Alex, by the way."

“Nice to meet you too,” Bo said with a smile. “Even under weird and mysterious circumstances- but uh, yeah, I smell ‘em too,” he answred, lifting his nose again to take a deeper sniff.

“I’m assuming if they’re fresh like that that means somebody baked ‘em, and that person might know what’s going on. So we should follow Alex.” He started to follow in her direction, gesturing to winter and the onesie guy to follow. He glanced back at the other two, hugging.

“We’re gonna follow the cookie smell. Because potential answers, and also cookies,” he explained, even though they were busy whispering and chatting between the two of them.

He caught up to Alex, walking beside her, glancing behind again to see if the others were following.

“So uh, Alex, you ever been in a situation like this before? Waking up in a different place with no recollection how you got there?”

"I don't know," Tim whispered into her ear - just as unnoticeable as her whisper had been. He pulled back, looked around the hallway, and then nodded in agreement when Andrei suggested following the smell of the cookies.

He fell into step behind Andrei and Alex, hoping that Megara would follow him. Even if this situation was worrying, he had someone he could trust with him.

He had observed the other newcomers - the girl and the boy - but hadn't paid much attention to them. It was only when the boy started almost skipping down the hallway, plush turtle in tow, that he realized how odd he was. Something about him seemed different, but he couldn't tell what that something was.

At least he didn't seem dangerous.