Disclaimer: I don't own Peter Pan or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Paniacs like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.

Rating: T+

Spoilers: This takes place after the real story leaves off and goes completely AU from there, so shouldn't be many spoilers.

A/N: Finally! I thought this chapter would never come out right! I don't know what was wrong but it really sucked the first couple times I wrote it. It turns out I'll be going in the hospital for the week of December 14th now, so I'm "good" 'til then, just pissed off. I wanted this over with.

Chapter Ten: Acers Wild

"I'm imagining the crew not staring at me, but it's not working."

"Imagination only works so far, my dear."

"Well, can you exert your influence as Captain, then?"

"I think you may just overestimate my influence as Captain. I can threaten lives, but something tells me you wouldn't want me to go quite that far."

"Let me think about it."

Mackenzie sighed and leaned back against the main mast with her arms crossed over her chest. Cooper slithered down from above and onto her shoulders and she reached up absently to stroke one of his iridescent red coils.

"You seem restive, my dear," James said. "Is it your fear of water making you uneasy or something else? The eyes?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "The eyes are part of it, yeah, definitely, but there's more to it. I'm… antsy. I'm on a pirate ship, in the freakin' Neverland. This is a pretty damn big thing to have happen in my life. There are two possibilities as I see it: either something massively supernatural has occurred, or I have gone shitballs crazy. Either way, kinda hard to accept. I think I need to keep busy so I don't have time to think about it."

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I… don't know," she said. "I expect you don't have motorcycles for me to repair."

"I don't even know what a motorcycle is."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. I… could write, I guess. With paper and pen, I suppose. Or parchment and quill, if that's what you've got. Old school. Haven't done it that way in a long time. Wish I had a stereo. Music always helps me clear my head."

"Is that some sort of newfangled instrument?"

"Um… no, a stereo is… a box that plays music that someone else played somewhere else a long time ago and… trapped… on discs. They can be played any time thereafter, and you don't have to have the instruments or the people who know how to play them, and they can be duplicated as many times as you want so many different people can play them."

"That… sounds like quite the invention."

"Oh yeah, there are a lot of things like that nowadays; not at all necessary but really, really nice."

"Do you play any… actual instruments?" he asked.

"Flute, although I'm very out of practice," she said. "I also tried to learn piano, but while I can play the melody of pretty much anything by ear, playing something else with my other hand is right next door to impossible for me. I took lessons trying to fix that problem but my teacher made me nervous as hell, and worse, after only a few weeks of once-a-week lessons I had to play in front of the college music teachers for my grade! I practiced what little I knew like hell but when I got up on that stage everything I actually had learned went right out of my head. I did all right, but my God, I never wanted to go through that again."

She gave him a look. "You play harpsichord, don't you? By which I would assume you can play piano, too."

"How did you know that?"

"Barrie. He also said you're a fine singer, and a raconteur of repute. He intimated that you attended Eton as well: I have to admit you do seem quite a bit out of what seems to be the average pirate's educational class."

"How did he intimate that?"

"He said at a pinnacle moment that you thought back to witnessing a Wall Game from atop a famous wall. That's Eton, right? The ludicrously brutal Wall Game and the wall you watch it from is theirs. I don't know why you'd be watching a game at Eton unless you attended."

"Well, your deduction is correct. I did attend Eton."

"How does an Eton scholar end up a pirate?"

He laughed. "My dear, that's what they train us for. They just assume most of us will take the path of bankers, lawyers, politicians, and lords - pirates all, just higher class."

"A fair point."

"Ahoy!" called a voice from far away.

"Ah, Mr. Buffett returns," James said. "Someone go get him, please." The men scrambled to get a longboat ready.

"Who is Mr. Buffett?" Mackenzie asked.

"One of my crew. I gave him your keys. He seemed to have some idea what to do with them. He's been gone quite awhile. I had begun to think he'd jumped ship."

When the longboat returned a man in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts got off and handed Mackenzie a heavy black tablet with a bow. She recognized him as one of the men she had kneed in the groin upon first encountering the pirates, and she recognized the tablet as…

"Uh… this is great, but… I've got maybe twenty minutes of battery before it goes dead, and there's no electricity here to charge it," she said, opening up the Acer laptop screen. "Oh well, if it works at all it'll give me a few minutes to show you what a stereo is like."

She went over and sat the heavy computer down on top of a barrel and brought up her music library and dug through it for a specific song she had in mind that seemed to fit. She didn't have "pirate" songs, but she had Warren Zevon. She turned up the volume to maximum and the raucous march melody startled all the older pirates nearby. They approached cautiously, looking the machine over curiously, wondering where the musicians were.

I started as an altar boy, workin' at the church,

Learning all my holy moves, doing some research,

Which led me to a cash box labeled "Children's Fund."

I'd leave the change and tuck the bills inside my cummerbund.

I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store,

Laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score.

I loaded up their furniture and took it to Spokane

And auctioned off every last naugahyde divan.

I'm very well acquainted with the Seven Deadly Sins.

I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in.

I'm proud to be a glutton and I don't have time for sloth.

I'm greedy and I'm angry, and I don't care who I cross.

I'm Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt.

I like to have a good time, and I don't care who gets hurt.

I'm Mr. Bad Example. Take a look at me.

I'll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy.

Of course I went to law school and took a law degree,

And counseled all my clients to plead insanity.

Then worked in hair replacement, swindling the bald,

Where very few are chosen and fewer still are called.

Then on to Monte Carlo to play Chemin de Fer.

I threw away the fortune I made transplanting hair.

I put my last few francs down on a prostitute

Who took me up to her room to perform the flag salute.

Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig

And headed for the airport and a midnight flight, you dig?

And fourteen hours later I was down in Adelaide,

Looking through the want-ads, sipping Fosters in the shade.

I opened up an agency somewhere down the line

To hire aboriginals to work the opal mines,

But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut

And whisked away their Workman's Comp and pauperized the lot.

I'm Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt.

I like to have a good time, and I don't care who gets hurt.

I'm Mr. Bad Example. Take a look at me.

I'll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy.

I bought a first class ticket on Malaysian Air

And landed in Sri Lanka none the worse for wear.

I'm thinking of retiring from all my dirty deals.

I'll see you in the next life: wake me up for meals!

"Is it witchcraft?" Smee asked.

"Nope. Electronics," Mackenzie said. "Please don't make me explain that. I'm a grease monkey, not an electronics technician. Just know that a guy named Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and from thence we derived all kinds of nifty things like this. If I had a DVD I could show you a movie."

"Why don't you try imagining one?" Mr. Buffett said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You think that'll work?"

"Why not? Now that you've got a DVD player. We imagine books for ourselves all the time."

"You can do that?" she said. "Holy shit. All right, let's give it a shot. Won't be able to watch the whole thing, but still…"

She closed her eyes. A silver disc appeared in her hand. She popped it into the CD-Rom drive of the computer and pulled up the media player. The movie began. It was Avatar.

"I figured I'd go with something as mind-blowingly out-there as possible, just to prove what can be done," she said, standing up straight again.

Seeing people on the screen now amazed the older pirates even more than hearing music. They sat gathered around to watch. The battery did not die as the movie wound on.

"People can travel to the stars now?" Alf Mason asked. "And put their souls into great blue bodies?"

"No. This is just a story. What we can do is use computers like this one to make it look like we can do those things in order to tell convincing stories about them," Mackenzie said. "This is all just the pages of a book you can see instead of read."

"This is an amazing invention," James said, coming up beside her. "It certainly seems to lessen any restrictions there may ever have been on the human imagination, but I do wonder if it doesn't perhaps limit the average person's imagination. When you read a book, you are following the imagination of that author, but you have to use your own to see what they're showing you."

"Oh, I know, and believe me, you're right. Still, in limited doses it's a nice thing, and it may open up avenues of imagination that wouldn't have occurred to the average person. Most of the time it isn't quite this intensely over-imagined. A lot of times it's just like theater set down permanently."

Mackenzie turned back to Mr. Buffett. "If I can imagine DVDs, is anything stopping me from imagining electricity? TVs? Satellite dishes?"

He chuckled. "I've tried, believe me. It seems limited to what we can use with what we already have."

"Then why does my computer work? The battery should have died a long time ago, and it says it's still at 100% power capacity."

"Because it is a battery. The people here, other than ourselves, have lived here for a good three hundred years. People don't die. Batteries aren't people, but I would expect they're probably bound by imagination once they're here, and I don't imagine they'd die."

"Okay, then I'm also going to imagine that my motherboard will never, ever blow out."

"Good idea. When I got back from Iowa, the path disappeared. I don't know where it went, and I don't know if it'll be back."

"So I'm really stuck here, huh?"

"Could be. The path might come back, you never know."

"Well, with my laptop, all my stories intact inside it, I can be happy here. Provided Mr. Hook continues to play nice. Which is kind of an iffy circumstance, honestly."

"He's been… different… lately," Mr. Buffett said. "Don't know what got into him, but he's been… calm. And not nearly so murderous."

"That's an encouraging thought."

A/N: Song in this chapter is "Mr. Bad Example" by Warren Zevon no copyright infringement intended no monetary gain expected or received.

I've had an idea for a story where James Hook becomes the Inquisitor from my favorite video game series, Dragon Age - number three, Inquisition. He would be the same character with an entirely made-up background since there is no England in Dragon Age and I would want him to be connected to a favorite character from that series. The idea appeals to me because it's another chance to take someone described as thoroughly evil and see if they can redeem themselves willingly or unwillingly. Obviously this story would appeal more to my Dragon Age fellow fanfickers, who would at least know what the hell I'm talking about when I speak of Inquisitors. I have so many irons in the fire right now, I really don't need another, but… the idea has its attractions. Right now I'm just taking notes for it.