Chiaki jolted awake, sweat soaked her clothes and her head howled in pain. I need to take a dump. She thought.
It was pitch black and bloody freezing too, her fingers were aching from the cold, and her face felt a little stiff.
She didn't move for a while, afraid perhaps that she was missing body parts. When courage came, she inspected herself in the dark and found out that she only lost her right shoe. Her toes felt like ice. She was inside a smelly rough sack and, judging by the smell and the repetitive rubbing of the coarse fabric behind her, she knew she was carried in the back of the blonde haired man she treated earlier.
To make her time in the sack more unpleasant, there were bits of broken concrete and nails poking her legs. She immediately took a nail and decided to rip a hole into the sack, to create an opening to see where she was carted off to.
Due to her weight, and her position, the incision she made was good enough for the entire sack to rip in half; she fell unceremoniously to the ground.
Her two unwanted companions stopped walking.
"You're awake huh? Took you long enough! You're freaking heavy and the Captain won't share the burden too," Abuto complained and rubbed his back. Chiaki was unamused, the artificial light illuminating the room stung her eyes.
"Listen, I don't know who you people are and what you want from me, but I have to go home." I have a hungry cat waiting at my dorm and I don't want to be kidnapped dammit! She said in a voice higher and much more desperate than what she was used to hearing.
"Well, if you want to go home, then you should have woken up earlier, unless humans can survive space you're not going home anytime soon." This time it was the shorter creepier one that spoke. "What?" Chiaki muttered, rubbing her eyes with the back of her arm. Kamui waved his hand to the right, gesturing that she should look through a window. Not wanting to walk closer to them, Chiaki craned her neck and saw Japan slowly moving away from her, or her moving away from Japan in the speed of a space ship. She watched in a blank expression as the islands she used to call home shrunk before disappearing from her sight. Then slowly, earth transformed into a tinier and tinier ball until it got swallowed by the dim of space too.
Then everything went into place, she took a glance at the two men, umbrellas, and foreign clothing. She remembered their strange accents from the clinic, she ignored it, and it was a stupid thing to do. With rumors of a large crime syndicate coming for a visit floating around while she was still in Edo, she knew she was kidnapped by pirates, the infamous Harusame pirates.
Memories of Pirates of the Caribbean flashed through her mind at the most inconvenient time of all and she said: "parlay."
Chiaki's eyes were at a blank, its once healthy chocolate color turned into an empty void of despair and nothingness.
Kamui cocked his head to the side in confusion.
"Parlay….. I invoke the right of parlay…. According to the Code of the Brethern, set down by the pirates Morgan and Bartholomew, you must take me to your Captain!" She quoted a scene from the movie in English. Her brain was going haywire with panic and stress. This must be a dream. She pinched herself in the arm hard. Nope. Nothing.
"Oi, this isn't the time to be quoting Pirates of th-"
"I am the Captain of this ship." Kamui piped in, in English as well, but heavily laced with Japanese tones.
"Don't follow her lead dammit! And that wasn't even right! You're supposed to say, 'I know the code' not 'I am the Captain of this ship!'" Abuto said hotly, but Kamui was having none of it.
"I know the code." Kamui corrected himself.
"If an adversary demands parlay you can do them no ha-"
"SHUT UP!" Abuto shrieked, feeling a headache rush in. This wasn't how hostages are supposed to act dammit! They were supposed to cry, hug his legs or lick his boots, beg for sweet sweet mercy and here she was quoting scenes of his favorite movie with his Captain. He felt the urge to re-watch every single installment of the movie. It will take him hours, and he has paperwork to take care of!
"Follow me." He gestured to the girl. He was going to show her the new clinic she was going to work in, which was, secretly, nothing more than a modified janitor's closet.
"Captain, you better start with the paperwork, I'll meet you in a few." He said to Kamui, trying to get his Captain to do something more useful, but Kamui being Kamui, he decided to do the exact opposite.
Abuto went into great detail about what she was going to do while Kamui insistently interrupted after every few sentences or so. He had a few medics to work with her, kidnapped too from what he implied, she was to actually receive wages, a percentage of what they earned in the ship, much to Chiaki's surprise it was twice the sum of what her parents earned. But everything went to a blur after that. She wished that she could have at least parted with them in good terms, her father was most likely still angry with her, until he receives the notification that she has been missing. Her mother would worry herself to death. Her cat would starve and the few of her friends would start placing missing posters all around Edo.
But most of all, she needed to find a way to defend herself and escape.
Abuto was talking about the lack of medical supplies when he noticed the silence.
He turned to see her bowed down, fat wet tears threatening to fall and he could see Kamui getting ticked off because of it. But the man was still smiling like a maniac.
For the sake of his Super Captain Kamui, and not because he has a soft spot for crying women, he patted her shoulder and said: "You'll get used to it", which was a pile of shit, because whoever they kidnapped killed themselves after a week or so due to stress, overworking or some other reason that Abuto creates every time a member of Kamui's crew wasn't working as efficiently as he wanted.
"Here's the clinic." He said and slammed the door open as cooly as he could do it.
Three rotting corpses hung from the ceiling with nooses around their necks, crates away from their feet and a large I QUIT was written behind them in blood.
Abuto slammed the door shut.
Ahh, yes, there was another smaller clinic near Kamui's office; hopefully it would be devoid of dead medics.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Chiaki never took the time to be interested in the anatomy of space. But she never felt so hopeless when she recognized the shape of the nearest galaxy by the ship's window. Canis Major covered the entire window with its massive cluster of multicolored stars. She couldn't help but wonder how fast alien tech could move in space. It was impossible to fathom that she was already thousands of light years away from home in a several weeks.
How the hell was she going to run away? How was she going to go back? The ship's massive body swam space like a giant fucking sperm whale in the vast oceans. It seemed to her that if she was going home, it would be decades after. But there was a tiny voice in the back of her head that laughed in a short and sharp sound, telling her that she was never going back. Chiaki swallowed and forced her emotions down. She needed to survive as long as possible. She had to find a way, she always did.
Four days later, her first patient arrived.
A man, who looked forty something, had ridiculous face piercings and an equally ridiculous pompadour, was hauled by two other men into her clinic. They, without knocking, went inside and dumped the unconscious man into her feet and scurried off like large black rats without a word. Chiaki was confused about their sullen reaction upon seeing her face. She helped the mumbling man out of the floor and put him to bed, unsure why they brought him there. He looked okay in her standards, until she checked his temperature. He had a mild fever.
She went into a small bathroom to wet a towel- she tried cleaning it, but the suspicious stains were stubborn- and screamed. Her face was pale, like paper, strawberry blonde hair an afro, and her capillaries burst from crying, giving her the entire glowing red eye look. She was half tempted to go out of her clinic and start scaring Yato, pretend to be the ghost of the poor nurse who got kidnapped and killed herself in a very successful suicide attempt. But their umbrellas looked sharp and she had a patient to take care off.
She later found him to have severe food poisoning.
Chiaki interviewed the man when he woke up and when she asked if he ate something that might have caused his illness, he said:
"Well, when the Captain left, Taku and I went out of the ship, we wanted to do some shopping when we got lost in some forest and ended up eating wild mushrooms."
"Wild mushrooms?" She repeated.
"Yes, like they always say, the edgier and the uglier it looks, the tastier it will be"
"… I see. Next time, try to ask before ingesting weird things okay?" I know you're not going to listen and eat a whole lot more, hopefully poisonous mushrooms might fix your ugly face."
Chiaki didn't like how most of the Yato were racist, sexist bastards who treat her like a three year old who got a hold of a toy stethoscope and played doctor. She didn't want to be treated very seriously, but she would like it better when if people acted like she was an actual nurse…. er, student nurse- everybody still calls her human, or pinky- and not an easy score who wanders around every now and then.
Truly desperate ones knock at her clinic in the dead of the night, hoping for a miracle cure of baldness, halitosis or tooth aches, she would help them to the extent of her abilities but she couldn't do much due to lack of supplies. After a month of avoiding the Captain and the Vice Captain, and learning that they had docked into Mesa Planet, Chiaki knew that she needed to talk to salmon hair.
Chiaki took a large herbal tome written in Yato, a Yato to English dictionary and English to Japanese dictionary and started heading to the direction of Kamui's office, arms straining from the weight of the collected books. Chiaki wasn't weak like, "I will absolutely lose if I fight one on one with a Yato clan member, but if I have my friends behind me and I have to protect them, I might be able to block a few of their blows." Chiaki was weak like, "If a Yato clan member hits me with an umbrella, I will try to block it but I will still fly in an amazing 20 feet trajectory before falling down head first, dead, with my organs in a jumble. So I better keep all my snarky comments at bay "
She stood at Kamui's office, legs shaking from fear.
"I'll do it next time." She said with resolute devotion, turned around and slammed into the Captain.
"What are you doing?" Kamui asked with piqued curiosity. He was going to escape Abuto's motherly rants about paperwork and responsibilities as a captain by hiding in the last possible place Abuto would think Kamui would hide … inside his own office.
"I… uh.." Now is not the time to back down! Courage Chiaki, COURAGE! "I wanted to talk to you concerning the lack of medical supplies in the clinic." She said cooly.
Kamui looked at her, trying to recall who she was. She had brown eyes and dull pink hair…. Ah! The human from the time in Edo! Her name…. her name is Elizabeth Duck! He remembered the little quotes from Pirates of the Caribbean they shared. Ha! Kamui secretly praised himself for having good memory.
"Come in." Kamui pushed the heavy doors open and led her inside. He gestured for her to sit on a thin rickety wooden stool while he went behind his sleek black manager's table that was probably worth an entire decade of her parent's salary. It was most intimidating.
Chiaki cleared her throat for a moment. Trying to decide how she would open conversation with the man. She wanted to ask him if she could get out of the ship and get a restock medical supplies, and woman stuff too if she could be persuasive enough, but she also recently found a way to stop ageing Yato waking her up in the middle of the night begging to cure their bald spots.
Taking all the courage she could muster she said,
"Captain, I was reading through the medical books when I found this Herbal." She lifted the book to show the cover.
"Conveniently enough, there was a section here that shows a kind of plant that can cure baldness permanently, found in Mesa Planet."
"Cure baldness… forever?" Kamui felt excitement run through his veins… FINALLY he thought. You what they say, the stronger the Yato, the more bald spots he'll get when he's older. And Kamui, being the son of the great Umibozu, was starting to see the symptoms of baldness slowly appearing like the pimples he got when he was experiencing the horrors of adolescence.
"Yes." She opened a page of the book and pointed out a few lines of sentences he couldn't read.
"And the other books with you?"
"Dictionaries, to translate Yato into Japanese." She said calmly, this time not as nervous as she first came in.
Kamui squinted, which wasn't evident to Chiaki since his eyes were all squinty from the beginning, but they squinted even more.
"You're of more use to me than I imagined." Kamui said. "And here I was about to drag you tomorrow as a sacrificial goat for the promise of peace and hospitality to the lizard people of Mesa. I normally don't give shit about sacrificial bullshit of tribes, but the last time we didn't offer women, they snuck through our cooling system and our ship crashed half way through the universe." He prattled on.
Chiaki gaped…. Sacrificial goat….. She was going to be sacrifice? She wasn't sure how she would feel about that, she should be angry, yes, angry, but there is logic in the back of her mind that if she didn't act like she's all chill with it and start being snarky to the Captain. She will become dead in seconds.
"Ahahahhaa… I'm glad I'm not going to be sacrifice too…" She felt like crying.
"Eh?" Abuto appeared from behind her. "You're still alive?" He was referring to Chiaki. Abuto wasn't really looking for his Captain yet, he went to Kamui's office to steal, ahem, borrow umbrella wax, since his own run out.
"Still alive?" She repeated, turning to his direction with her limbs iced with suppressed emotion.
"Normally, people we kidnap only live for a week, it's a miracle you're not dead yet, or missing limbs."
"So that you'll get used to it speech was bullshit after all?" Chiaki felt migraine seep in.
"Ahahahaha…." Abuto tried to laugh away the awkwardness that came after that, but it was futile.
"Wait, you can read?" Abuto pointed out at the stack of books on Chiaki's lap that was cutting off her blood system. In the corner of his eye, he could see Kamui make suspicious phone calls to whom it seems to be the king of the lizard people.
Chiaki raised an eyebrow. Will saying yes lead her to become a sacrificial element for the book people at planet library? She didn't know how to answer his question, so she shoved the books off her lap and started running to the door. She almost screamed at Abuto earlier and she didn't want to be whacked dead with a non-waxed umbrella.
"Wait!" She heard Kamui say from behind her. She looked back and realized that Kamui was referring to Abuto who was suspiciously carrying a sack labelled, to "King of the Book people" and was in the prime position to knock her out.
Chiaki shot him a glare, Abuto ignored it and turned to his Captain.
"What is it Captain? Can't you see I'm trying to fix our broken up ties with the Book people since you burnt their main library down?!" Abuto complained, scratching his head sheepishly with his umbrella.
"I accidentally pissed off the Lizard people and the King has the elite members of his army coming to attack us. tee-hee"
"TEE HEE MY ASS! HOW THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT IN LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES?"
Chiaki sweat dropped.
"Fuck the medical supplies; I'm getting out of here" She thought, leaving when a metal panel of the ceiling shook and crashed down beside her, there was now a large whole connecting to upper floors, two angry black cloaked Yato stood on the fallen debris, along with an unconscious eight feet blue armored lizard who had knives strapped on his belt.
"CAPTAIN WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!" The bigger of the Yato yelled at his superior, jumped up, grabbed a gigantic live wire then hoisted himself to the upper floor, to battle a wave of the incoming lizard army. The second one rammed his umbrella into the lizard's gigantic skull to end the twitching reptile.
"HOW FUCKING FAST ARE THESE LIZARD PEOPLE ANYWAYS!?" Abuto howled. Face red with anger.
Then what sounded like thick toe nails and a stampede of savage wolves thundered down the hallway nearing the office. Chiaki screamed and took a hold on Kamui's cloak, immediately. Kamui jumped up the earlier made opening up the ceiling to avoid the mass of lizard and knives. The Captain was good at fighting, but he disliked the prospect of being crushed before crushing. He also unwillingly rescued Chiaki from getting killed by the mass of the angry alien lizard elite force. The student nurse realized that she was still hugging Kamui's cloak and immediately let go, successfully avoiding his kick to get her person off him.
She was the luckiest lucky being in the ship, she thought.
"Get in my way again, and I'll kill you." Kamui said to her, eyes blue and blood thirsty, like a monster in the verge of snapping.
Then he jumped back into the pit, head first, spinning down with his umbrella as weapon.
Chiaki froze in the upper level; she could feel the fear inching closer to the tier of "total brown moment in pants."
"Crap, the Captain is getting in touch with his bad habits again." Abuto said to no one in particular, but he said it near Chiaki so he would sound all cool and wisdomy from her part. He was itching to jump down and join the bloodshed, but he knew that he will get caught into Kamui's umbrella.
"He's going to get killed.." Chiaki muttered.
"Heh, you obviously haven't seen a Yato fight before. The Captain will be bored soon, these sons of bitches may look tough, but once he finds out they cut like paper in the bellies, this will be done in no time." Abuto looked down the hole. "That King is a real idiot."
Chiaki felt strangely safer being in Abuto's presence, the hay haired uncle won't stop running his mouth but his assurance made her feel secure. There was a bloodied knife beside her that she immediately pocketed and felt her stomach churn at the sound of gun shots and the familiar squelch of blood.
Then Abuto jumped down the hole.
"Wait! Where are you going?... Don't go." Chiaki squeaked.
It was a small hissing sound first. Then a blue leg, a tail and a giant head peeped from the hallway next to her. It was a massive lizard, way larger than the one she saw murdered crept near her with an absolute intent for murder.
She stared at its angry for a long moment, her breathing harder than it was a moment ago. This should've been easy, she went out to ask for medical supplies and now she had to fight a lizard thing with a slimy flicking tongue. She figured that her luck would run out, but she didn't expect it to leave her this quick.