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[theotherright]

Cabin 127. No calls, we text like men on our disney cruise phones.

If you send Arthur a message it will be read out loud in one of a selection of friendly automated voices!

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[inhairently]

[ As a certified Basketball Boy™, Steve has no problem catching the shirt. It takes a few moments but he manages to work a tear into the fabric and begins ripping it into strips, as instructed. ]

Maybe we should tell someone else, [ he says thoughtfully as he works. ] If he gets away he could try to flip it back on us. Tell people we're the messed up ones. If it gets out that we drugged him and tied him up in your bathtub it's gonna look pretty bad.

[ That, and if more people are suspicious of Smith and put work into watching someone who isn't even possessed, it'll be better for the ones who actually are. ]

[theotherright]

[ Arthur laughs under his breath at the notion that this will look bad. Yes, he's aware it looks bad. Strangling his building's maintenance man also looked bad. Hiding Parker's body also looked bad. Drowning himself in spirits looked bad, skipping the country looked bad, stopping going to church looked bad, he knows, he knows. It's not that he doesn't care what he looks like here, but it's surprisingly easy to fall back into an old pattern; a pattern that always seems ready to welcome him home when the person who'd pull him out of it is cold and dead. ]

You're going to tell Bash, remember? Dotting that i.

[ And Arthur is too, just as soon as Steve is gone. Crossing that t.

He finds Smith, and then Smith's face, and rests a hand loosely across his mouth -- not blocking it, but making sure his breathing is still strong. Ketamine doesn't exist in his universe, as far as he's aware, so he wants to make sure. Even if they were using something he was familiar with, he'd want to make sure.

Then he rolls him onto his front again with a grunt, and holds out a hand towards the sound of Steve, ready for the first of the shirt strips. ]

Fabric.

[inhairently]

Right, yeah. Bash.

[ Consider that i dotted. Ish. Possibly more like a leaky pen dripped a blob of ink on the paper that could maybe pass for a dot over the i. Nothing strange here.

He hands Arthur a strip of fabric. ]

What do we do if we can't stop this?

[ The obvious answer is "nothing" but that's not an acceptable answer, not for Steve Harrington. Steve Harrington would want to plan, he'd want to talk it out, go over every detail until there are no more details left to consider. He'd want to be ready for whatever comes next.

He'd want to know there's a chance to win, however small. ]

[theotherright]

[ Arthur... doesn't have an immediate answer to that. He makes a vague noise, a considering noise, while he ties Smith's hands behind his back. It's far from a hack job. He may be blind, but he's dextrous, and good at working without seeing, and he ties knots better than some people with both their eyes. ]

There will be a way to stop it. Some puzzle to putting them all back where they belong. There always is, I just have to- to find the first clue. There were a lot more ghosts than passengers on the ship, so- so why aren't we all possessed, if they're able and willing to do that? There's something stopping them, a- a bottleneck, or some other weakness, and that's to our advantage.

[inhairently]

[ HEH HEH HEH is what he thinks about that. The first clue. Good luck on that one, buddy. ]

Yeah, okay, [ is what he actually says, resolute and firm, determined to solve this mystery and save Mr. Smith. ] We find the first clue. It might be something super obvious that we just haven't noticed. It's like that Sherlock Holmes quote. The world has obvious things... something, something. I can't remember the rest.

[ Steve's butchered that quote before, he will not be butchering it again in front of Arthur, thank you very much.

In this moment, he does find himself wishing someone else were here with him. One of the smarter people from his own cruise. Dr. Rick Dagless, for example, would surely be able to come up with some brilliant misdirection, send Arthur off on some wild, fruitless goose chase.

But he only has himself, and he's self-aware enough to know he's not clever in that way. He's not going to risk botching things by trying to play chess when he only knows checkers, so he settles for leaving it at that half of a Sherlock quote and waiting with another strip of cloth at the ready for whenever Arthur needs it. ]

[theotherright]

The world is full of obvious things, which nobody by any chance ever observes.

[ Good timing! Arthur is just holding out his hand for another fabric strip. And because he's now thinking of gloss on a hat and boots, he does so with a bitter little muttered comment: ]

Look after your powers of observation, Steve; you'll miss them when they're gone.