WARNING: Part II of Calypso's Sea Lioness is rated M.
It contains instances of coarse language, adult and sexual themes,
and potentially triggering content.
Content not suitable for children or teens below the age of 16.
Reader discretion is advised.
Geneva had been treading water for hours now. She was beyond tired, but she wouldn't let herself drown. She resorted every once in awhile to floating on her back in order to try and rest, but it didn't do a whole lot of good.
She had managed to pinpoint somewhat where she was in the ocean now that she was floating in it. She was at least twenty miles off from the closest land, and she couldn't see a thing. It was pitch black. All she could hear were the waves.
Suddenly, she felt something, a shock wave in the water. She jumped and began alertly treading water to look about. She couldn't see a thing. She kept searching, though, hoping for something to pop up in the darkness.
She felt a massive presence in the water and became deathly still. She didn't like that. She'd never felt anything like that in her life. The presence quickly passed, casually as a gust of wind, but her lungs were still adamantly strained, as if she were pretending to be a dead body afloat on the surface in hopes of being overlooked by a creature lurking below. The presence was distant now, but it hadn't entirely disappeared.
She felt close to nothing for a while, and so she began to float on her back again, worn out and exhausted. The sudden rush of adrenalin had not helped her present situation. She sat there for a moment, listening to the peculiar sounds echoing in the cavernous depths below her. One thing was for sure; she was definitely treading deep waters. She was certain the darkness went down for miles, an endless abyss of alien uncertainty, and a gaping jaw which swallowed up so many men before her. She shuddered.
Suddenly, a larger wave hit her and went over her head, submerging her for a moment. She swam back to the surface again and cleared her mouth and nose of saltwater, and then looked about in an erect position. The wave had hit her from behind; from a general northeast direction, which was not at all natural for this part of the ocean. Her eyes strained. That wave had been large, and its trajectory had been odd. The waves in this part of the Atlantic generally traveled westward.
Approaching through the darkness, carried by another unusual wave, she could just barely see a chunk of wood floating in front of her, although she could mainly see it because she could sense it. It was substantial enough in size that she could partially mount it and take a rest from treading for a spell.
Then, she noticed a faint light not too far off among the waves. She couldn't see it enough to tell what was producing the light, but there was a flickering bit of gold showing over the waves. She had no idea what it was. It could have been anything. But she was swimming in the middle of the Atlantic, right over a trench for all she knew. Approaching an unknown, glowing force in the middle of the ocean could not possibly bring about any worse a fate for her than if she chose remain cautious and secluded in the endless blackness. The latter, at the sight of probable safety, seemed quite foolish.
She expended most of her remaining energy simply swimming toward the light. The heaviness of the shard of wood had not provided any real efficiency, except for that it gave her a means by which to rest for a few moments before continuing. Finally, she reached a point where she close enough to the source that she could peer over the waves and catch a glance at it, and so, she paused in the water, climbed clumsily onto the hardly floating chunk of debris, and she peered over the white caps.
Of course, a shard of hull would be ideal for floating upon, but only if it were larger. But it was quite apparent to Geneva that she had probably secured the only shard of debris that was even worth trying to commandeer. The rest of its mother ship was littered about carelessly in a black stew of water with a radius of about twenty-five meters and growing, and at its epicenter sat the inflamed remains of about half of its quarterdeck.
Geneva had never laid eyes upon anything like this. Over half the ship was completely gone without a trace. At first glance, with bits of burning wood strewn about, it would have seemed probable that the powder magazine had ignited, but that failed to account for the lack of debris. Judging from what was left of the quarterdeck, the ship had been substantial in size, and if its powder magazine had blown, there would have been other large chunks of the ship floating around. The radius of debris was so small that there was no chance the ship had exploded and sunk all within such a short time period. Geneva didn't like the look of it. It didn't make a whole lot of sense.
She didn't have too much room to be picky, though. She looked down at the water, as if she were making sure nothing was waiting for her below the surface, and then, after she'd sufficiently caught her breath, she jumped in and braved the rest of the distance to the quarterdeck, leaving behind the chunk of hull. What she hadn't been able to see from the distance came into full detail as she neared, and she realized that some of the scraps of sail floating about haphazardly in the water were not at all sails, but bodies.
The quarterdeck was nothing more than a rich man's raft. The portside rails were ablaze but beginning to hiss, charred and sputtering due to the saltwater mist that perpetually sprayed them and pissed away the flames. Geneva pulled herself up onto the deck and stood.
Oil had been dumped across the rails and the floor, but the fire hadn't reached the splotches of flammable liquid yet. In all honesty, it seemed the ship never stood a chance. Whatever it was that happened, the crew had meant to set the ship on fire. It hadn't been a mutiny. Setting your own ship on fire in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night, was suicide. If anything, desperate measures were executed when desperate times called for such. This hadn't been an accident either. These men had been trying to protect themselves.
There was crumpled, bloody body in the corner of the deck, and Geneva stooped over in front of it and took the hat from his head. It was a wide-brimmed hat, and an ugly one at that. It was dirty beyond belief, but it would serve well enough. She wrung out her hair and stuffed it underneath the cap. Hats like these were useful in concealing her gender. The wider the brim, the less her face could be seen, and she had good reason to keep from being seen. Something wasn't right, and she didn't like a bit of what she saw. This ship had been attacked. By who, or what, she didn't know. But she wasn't about to walk into a situation, possibly a situation regarding this "associate" of Jack's called Davy Jones, without taking the utmost precautions.
Geneva knew who the Davy Jones was. She was quite certain there wasn't a pirate alive who didn't know of Davy Jones. He was the subject of nearly every folktale regarding death at sea. She'd never seen him, though (not that she ever should've been looking for him in the flesh either). Jones, the Flying Dutchman; it was all a legend, but still a legend which sailors took completely seriously. If you ever did see Jones, you were as good as dead, and wouldn't live to tell the tale, and so, nobody ever went around looking for him. It was just believed that he existed behind the next wave, and he'd call the Leviathan upon you if you cursed him in any way, and one way or another, you'd always end up in his Locker without escape. If Bootstrap Bill had died upon the lifting of the Curse of Cortez, one could only assume that he was in Jones' Locker now, dead and gone, mysteriously disappearing from this world and surfacing in the next.
That was when she heard something. A creak. She turned about, wondering if maybe there were survivors amidst the wreckage. She hadn't noticed anyone, but there was always a dimwit's chance for anything. But there was nobody. She would have brushed it off, but she could have sworn she sensed someone. The wind picked up a little bit, and the waves became unusually strong for a moment, and then, they suddenly died down again, as if nothing had ever happened. Geneva was on edge. Something wasn't right. Her hands brushed against the hilts of her swords, ready to pull them out at a moment's notice. It was dead silent now.
She heard the creak of a board behind her and she whipped her cutlass out of its sheath, spinning around to face the person behind her. Instead, she was met with a monstrous face that was anything but human.
She recoiled. She glanced up and down wildly at the creature standing before her, trying to convince herself that her eyes were tricking her, that the light was bad, maybe even that she had gone mad. All she could see were barnacles, coral, and seaweed. She let out a small cry—of fear or feigned courage, she didn't know—and charged the thing, shoving it away from her with her sword, and it grunted, just as a human would. She froze, her insides going cold. Was that a man?!
She heard more noises coming from behind her, and she whirled around, seeing more of them, the stench of fish and sweat overpowering. They were everywhere, all at once, and she hadn't even received any warning, and she pulled out her rapier and began swinging wildly, and she chopped off an appendage, maybe an arm, and a horrible cry of pain erupted at her side, and she jumped away from it, slicing behind her, blood all over the deck before her, the smell of entrails, a twitching arm on the deck, covered in what looked to be vomit. The armless thing retched again as she looked up into where the bile poured out of its face, and Geneva let out a wretched scream as she felt herself being pulled backward, and she swung wildly at what was behind her, but she felt a blow to the back of her head, and suddenly, there was only pain and blackness.