Chapter One – Land Ho!
72 0 2
X
Reading Options
Font Size
A- 15px A+
Width
Reset
X
Table of Contents
Loading... please wait.

“Land ho!” be the call from the crow’s nest.

I look up and shield me eyes against the sun so I can see the woman in the roost. It be Rumguts on duty today, a chubby Irishwoman with a permanently red face due to her nasty habit of drinking on the job. I’ve warned her three times and confiscated her grog twice. Hasn’t worked. Rumguts and the bottle are practically married so I’ve let her have her self-destructive relationship. After the third warning, where I threatened to maroon her, she at least curbed her drinking enough to fulfill her work around the ship. And despite them being permanently bloodshot, the woman still has the sharpest eyes among me crew. 

Mary “Rumguts” O’Malley

Level 5 Sailor

Perception: 11 (17)

Apart from me, that be. I have a Perception score of 13 (19). That’s why they call me Deadeye. Me real name’s Grace Cortez, but no one calls me that except for magistrates and me mother. She’s back in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, running her fishing fleet. I send her letters when I can, but there’s usually a lot of water between me and the Sulu Sea.

“What do you see, Rumguts?” I shout up to her.

“Best I can make out, captain, be a small island, but it’s got a mighty big structure on it. Took it for a mountain at first, but I reckon it’s a building of a sort. Tower, maybe.”

“Alright, keep them bleary eyes of yours peeled. And not another sip until we make landfall, you hear me? Then you can go blind as a bat for all I care.”

“Aye, Captain Deadeye, ma’am. Not a drop until me feet touch the sand.” And to punctuate her promise she bellows, “Look alive below!” and drops her silver flask off the side of the nest.

I wince, imagining that flask cracking the skull of an unwitting sailor, but Inkman’s there to catch it. For a big man, he moves freakishly fast. 

Tamaki “Inkman” McKenzie

Level 6 Marine

Quickness: 13 (16)

I reckon I could out-duel him with a pistol on account of me Flashfire skill, but I’d not fancy me chances with a blade. I’ve seen Inkman slice an English marine to pieces in less time than it takes me to say “Jolly Roger”.

“Good hands, Inkman, as always.”

Inkman winks at me, a gleaming white grin breaking his dark, tattooed face. He’s a Māori warrior from a place called Ōtākou, a settlement in southern New Zealand the local Scottish colonists then anglicized to Otago. He tried his hand at whaling for a bit before turning to piracy as the more lucrative occupation. Also, he likes whales more than he likes people, and I think I’m one of the few exceptions to that rule.

“Would that be the lighthouse, captain?” Inkman asks me this as he climbs the steps to the quarterdeck.

“Aye, according to me chart.”

“You should get that map copied sometime, captain. Could be some important bits under those bloodstains.”

“One day soon,” I promise. “For now they remind me of how hard it was to get the bloody thing.”

“Yellowteeth sure put up a fight that day,” agrees Inkman. “And even in death, he wasn’t letting go of that precious paper.”

“Good thing I waited a day before cutting his fingers off, otherwise I’d have drowned Atlantis in pirate claret.”

Inkman chuckles. It be a mirthful rumbling like thunder in his throat. “Ain’t that the truth.”

“Sail ho! Off the port bow!” This from Rumguts again, a shrill edge of excitement to her voice. Or be it fear?

“What colors she be flying?”

Rumguts squints and I hold back a smile. Her face looks like a red-skinned potato when she does that.

“Union bloody Jack, captain! Limey bastards looking to steal the treasures of Atlantis out from under our noses.”

I take me spyglass from its loop on me belt, extend it and have a gander at these trespassers on our course. This spyglass be me most precious possession, aside from me musket.

Squintlock’s Peeper

Perception + 2

Enables the viewer to see the core stats of any vessel.

“Peer into the gizzards of your prize and see if you have the guts to take it!” - Captain Squintlock

That’s what it says on one of the thing’s polished brass barrels. Well, not on it as such, more like hovering in the air above it. I always find the otherwords strange in style. Stiff as a schoolma’am and twice as aloof. 

“God writes in mysterious ways,” me mother would say to me when she helped me interpret it all, “but She just wants to make good characters of us all. That’s why She gives us the otherwords, so She can read the stuff of our souls.”

Right now I’m seeing the ‘stuff’ of this sleek, freshly-painted sloop. Looks like a maiden voyager to me.

Sea Stallion

Hull Defense: 100

Sail Defense: 50

Agility: 100

Speed: 100

Guns: 10

Crew: 60

“She’s a sloop. Standard outfitting,” I tell Inkman, “probably some lordling out to make their fortune since they’re too far down the bloodline to inherit anything.”

“Pretty, aye?”

“Like a toy ship at Christmas.”

“We’re running low on supplies, too. It’s been a long trip.”

Inkman’s right. We were hiding out in Tasmania before we got wind of Atlantis. Rumors had it that the ancient city rose out of the sea soon after the Mighty Shake. We heard that tidal waves made a mess of every port from Brazil to Greenland in the west, from Liberia to Ireland in the east. But London would’ve been sheltered from all that. Me guess be the limeys are some of the first to get out here for a bit of exploration and exploitation.

“Then let’s be having some of their supplies, then.” I squish me spyglass back down to size and stow it on me belt. “They’re likely full to the gunnels with grub and grog.”

Me mouth waters at the thought of a cool lemon juice and sugar, the standard remedy for staving off scurvy. Bleeding gums and bulging eyes are the first signs of that malaise. Just as well Doc the Croc, so-named for his cold-blooded approach to anything medical, urged me to make regular stops to pick up fresh fruit along the way. We did so in Argentina, just after coming around Cape Horn, but we’ve since run out again. I sure as hell be hoping that sloop be laden with more than Englishmen. I’d take lemon over an Englishman any day.

“Set course to intercept, Jonesy,” I order me helmswoman. 

“With pleasure, captain.”

2