Here's my first POTC fic, and my first oneshot. Enjoy!

P.S.: I actually don't mind Beckett, but he's just so fun to make fun of. (I do like Mercer though, shun me as you will).

Cutting Corners

A short story by E350.

In an age when the world's navies showed their wealth by building extravagant and ridiculously overpowered ships, the Royal Navy's HMS Endeavour was…well…a bit of an embarrassment, really.

When Britain's top admirals inspected their new investment, they were not pleased. For a start, the wood was substandard – as in, one could punch through the wood of the vessel. The punch that demonstrated this was from an eighty-five year old admiral with heavy arthritis.

The second big problem was in the gunpowder. Apparently, someone really liked it, because it had a truly huge powder magazine. Naturally, gunpowder has a tendency to explode when dealt too much damage. Naturally, having too much damage was quite easy; given the ship's hull was essentially glorified cardboard. In essence, this made the ship a giant, poorly manoeuvrable floating bomb.

So the admirals of the Royal Navy met in private, to discuss what to do with this disgrace, apart from sacking everyone involved in building it of course. One man suggested sinking it, but that would leak to the public. If the public learnt that the navy sunk a new ship because it was awful, they would be laughing stocks.

Another man suggested flogging it off to the French or Spanish for a cheap price. This was rejected. The Royal Navy, the head admiral growled, would never sink so low as to deal with her enemies.

A third man interjected.

"Why not the Company? Surely they could find some use for it."

The admirals thought it over. None of them actually liked Lord Beckett – he was growing frightfully powerful, he was threatening the balance of power and he cheated at cards whenever he was in London, the perfidious knave – and if the ship exploded, few would miss him. Best of all, they wouldn't have to pay a cent, lose any face or dishonour themselves – much.

So, they transferred a substandard, unsafe vessel to East India Company control.

Thus, Beckett got his new flagship. He liked it, and danced around the decks and hugged the masts and made Mr. Mercer briefly consider getting a career change.

Then one day, the sewerage hit the fan.

Beckett had moved his fleets to engage the last major concentration of pirates in the world, and by moved his fleets, he meant send exactly one ship in to deal with the enemy's flagship while the crews of the other ships cheered and booed and ate the eighteenth century equivalent of popcorn.

Unfortunately, the captain of this ship was Davy Jones, who could live forever provided no-one stabbed his heart which for some unexplained reason he kept in a chest. The heart was promptly stabbed by some bloke called Will who is important for some reason and Jones suffered a critical existence failure. As a result, the Flying Dutchman changed sides and both it and the Black Pearl ended up moving to engage the Endeavour.

All of the other British ships continued to stand back, for reasons we do not know. We assume one of three things happened – the captains were too baffled by a submersible sailing vessel to think straight, the captains had fallen asleep out of boredom because they'd done absolutely nothing, or nobody, not even his own fleet, liked Beckett.

Anyway, Beckett had gone into shock, presumably because he'd just realized he was a git and nobody liked him and everybody just followed him because he had a nice wig. Apparently, he picked officers for his ship who exchanged brainpower for their positions and couldn't think under pressure if it was about to kill them (literally) who immediately decided to simply stand there and gibber like idiots.

The crew, meanwhile, realized that their commanders were playing Idiot Ball right now and wouldn't be available for some time, decided there was no time like the present for a nice swim.

Thus, the Endeavour was in complete disarray when the Pearl and Dutchman fired.

Then the ship exploded, but not before Lieutenant Groves decided to do some ominous Latin chanting.

The crews of the opposing ships cheered, unaware that had the explosion would have hit them (i.e. the laws of physics) and parts of their ships were probably on freaking fire, but then again this is a Disney movie, and good guys never catch fire in Disney movies. (Neither do bad guys. They like falling from ridiculous heights instead.)

So Beckett was essentially ripped off by his own country and died and everyone was happy!

…except Beckett, of course. But he never complained about it.