I usually write at a snail's pace, so I figure it's better to post shorter chapters more frequently than longer chapters that take forever. Anyway, Raph's awake, so the language gets a little salty.
Don't own the turtles. Make no money. I forgot to say that before.
Chapter 1 - Waking
Raphael
The first thing I became aware of was the weird dream I was having. I was floating in darkness, only at the same time I was the darkness. And there was this wave action going on, rocking me up and down with stomach retching nausea that climbed to a crescendo of queasiness at the top of each swell, then receded a little. And at the same time I was also the wave and the queasiness. I was at the center of this whole universe of nausea and the universe was me. Then something shifted, and I was suddenly tiny and standing at he edge of my own throat, which looked to me like the precipice of a volcano. I stared down the shaft of my volcano/throat, watching my own stomach flowing and ebbing, forcing its way farther up my throat with sickening persistence at each roiling swell. The gray membrane bubbling up in my direction looked taught to the point of exploding, and I knew there would be some serious putrid shit spewing all over the place if that thing ever burst. I couldn't let that happen, but I wondered how the hell I was going to get all that shit back down where it belonged.
I gradually realized that it wasn't just a dream. My stomach really was heaving, and I was about as sick as I had ever been in my life.
As I got more awake smells began to hit me - of human body odor. A smell like stale, old corn chips crushed under dirty, fungus infected feet, rancid vinegar, musk grown overpowering and gag inducing from lack of washing, shit and piss. I thought maybe I had been thrown into an alley among a particularly foul smelling pack of homeless. The stench led to an awareness of a violent pain in my head, and the combination of not exactly pleasant sensations became too much.
I tried to roll over as my stomach finally went over the top and tried to heave all of my guts onto the floor. That's when I found out I was chained, my wrists behind my back and my ankles together. That really got my attention. I struggled to get up, get to my knees while my stomach struggled to find something to purge from itself. In reality, it was pretty empty. A thin stream of liquid, mostly acid, burned its way up my throat and out my mouth. There wasn't enough of it to splatter, so it dangled peevishly from my lower lip in a syrupy stream. I spat and shook my head between the dry heaves, trying to sever the lines of saliva and stomach acid dangling from my mouth.
I had no idea what he hell had happened to me. I had no idea who nailed me, or how, or where the hell I was. Where was…? Mikey. He had been with me. What happened to him? That thought was enough to make me knock off the bullshit and pull myself together and focus. I gave up trying to get the streams of acidic spit to let go of my lip, and just turned my head and wiped my mouth against my shoulder. I took several deep breaths and forced my stomach by a sheer act of will to stay the fuck in place, because it wasn't going to get any more out of me.
I looked around and took stock of my situation. The first thing I noticed was Mike's body, face down on the floor, across the room from me. He was bound like I was, with his hands shackled behind his shell and his feet shackled together. A chain ran from his bound feet to an iron ring bolted to the floor, like mine. I called his name a few times to no response. I told myself he was still alive but unconscious. No one would bother to chain him up like that if he were dead. Even so, I didn't look away from him until I was sure I could see his shell rising and falling slightly with his breathing.
We were in a big rectangular room made entirely of wood, it looked like. Wooden planks for the floor, walls and ceiling. The only light came from a square hole cut into center of the ceiling, fitted with an iron latticework and open to the sky. What I could see of the sky looked gray and overcast. In any case, it wasn't letting in much light. Beyond the stink of whoever the hell else was rooming here with me and Mike, I could smell salt water. I suddenly realized that it wasn't just my stomach that was rocking me with nausea, but the whole room was slowly rolling up and down. I never been on a boat before, but it was pretty clear we were in the cargo hold of a ship at sea.
I starting checking out the rest of the cargo. There were maybe seven or eight of us all together, counting Mike and me. Mike was in a corner, wall on one side, and a scrap heap of a woman on the other. She didn't have a stitch on, and she was shackled only at one ankle, with a chain and ring of her own bolted to the floor. She was chained far enough away from Mike that they were out of each other's reach. We were all bolted down a good distance apart from one another. The woman was moaning, and in fact, had been moaning this whole time, a soft, steady whine as measured and regular as the ticking of a clock. Moan for four point five seconds, stop, take a breath, moan for four point five seconds, stop, take a breath, over and over. I could already tell that it was quickly gonna get on my nerves. She was sitting up, but I couldn't really tell if she was fully conscious or not. Something was definitely off about her, out of it.
I had the corner across from Mike and to my right – Oh fuck …oh holy fucking shit…I was looking at a human being, but a human being so messed up I almost gagged again. He looked like that guy from that movie, The Elephant Man, he had Elephant Man's disease, Don would know what it's really called. The right half of his body was fairly normal, but the left half was deformed is so many ways I couldn't even begin to take it all in. The misshapen half of his head was huge, like someone had pulled back his skin and shoved rocks the size of grapefruits under there, piling them on in all directions and fusing them to his skull. That was just the bone structure. The thick, sickly grayish skin grew rabidly in lumps and folds all over the deformed half of his hairless head and face. One of the growths actually started from somewhere inside his mouth, protruding past his teeth and coming out the corner of his lips like a fat, tumorous cigar. He couldn't get that side of his mouth closed because of it.
The deformities went on down the side of his body. The left sleeve of some kind of tunic he was wearing was cut off. His left arm, impossibly thick and gnarled, ended in a hand five or six times the size of his other one, his useless fingers each the size of cucumbers. His left leg, that side of he pants also cut off, was the same way, massive and disfigured. There was nothing that looked like a foot in evidence, just a big clump of dense, rank flesh at the end of his leg.
Looking at him, the first thing that came to me – completely irrelevant to the situation but it was all I could think of – was damn, you know this poor fucker ain't never gonna get laid in his life. I may be a freak myself, but I'm doing better than that. One of his eyes was completely obscured by a big fold of lumpy, cauliflower like skin growing out of his huge forehead and drooping down his face, but the other eye, looking back at me, was perfectly human, sane, and rational.
"Hey, Freakboy," he greeted me. His voice was slurred from that - growth – coming out of his mouth but, all things considered, his tone was pretty amiable. "Welcome to the Ship of Fools."