DISCLAIMER: All I own is myself and a few characters. The rest are commandeered from Disney and possibly you.

A.N: I am operating on some basic assumptions regarding Davy Jones's crew, some of them confirmed by the movies and online information. One: The less human-like they look in general, the longer they have been in Jones's service. (confirmed) Two: Any injuries obtained within Jones's service do not heal over like human skin but rather become reminiscent of undersea life or merge into the ship. (unconfirmed but it makes sense to me) Three: The ship spends most of its time underwater. (logic- how else would they get barnacles growing on them unless they were under the sea?) Four: Having spent in many cases up to hundreds of years underwater, they know many things about undersea life that were not generally known in the 18th century. (unconfirmed)

I have taken the liberty of sketching in backgrounds/stories for a few of the crewmen while remaining true to all the information I have about them. The only members of the crew whose origins are actually known are Bootstrap Bill and (to some extent) Davy Jones. I can't find any information about any of the rest of them other than their nicknames, appearance, weapons, and behavior in the movies. Anything other than that IS NOT CANON and should not be taken as such (though if you like any of the ideas I provide for their pasts/origins, you're welcome to use them.) I went for as much variety as I could think of- a Spanish conquistador, Portugese fishermen, a pirate captain, a Danish smuggler, a Javan merchant, and so forth.

Shoney is a Celtic sea god who presides over all things sunk into the deep ocean.

References to Davy Jones predate both the first Brethren Court AND the legend of the Flying Dutchman by centuries, and in the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the captain is not Davy Jones, so I sort of rationalized the only explanation for all this that could make sense without contradicting canon. (It contradicts Wikipedia in a couple small details, but it does not contradict canon.)

Also keep in mind that since this is pre-AWE, none of the students know any details of the story of Davy Jones or the Flying Dutchman not revealed in DMC.

As in the movie, Hadras speaks Cantonese sometimes. As stated below in the story, Siren does not know Cantonese. She had to look it up on online phrase sites. There may be mistakes.

Abby woke by slow increments, her body feeling both heavy and unusually light at the same time, distantly aware that something was very wrong. She was lying on a surface of some sort, she realized. Her motions were slower than usual, as if the air had thickened, and when she opened her eyes, everything was dark, hazy, and greenish.

She was underwater.

She was lying on the deck of a ship.

Also, she was not breathing. Which would mean, theoretically, that she was dead. But she could feel the sides of her neck expanding and contracting rhythmically, sucking in and expelling water. How….? She lifted her hand and found that she had what must be gills.

She sat up with a groan, feeling various parts aching fiercely. As she reached up to rub her temples, she saw an odd dark spot on her hand and tried to wipe it off on her sleeve.

Nothing happened.

She had gills and there was a black spot on her hand, and the last thing she remembered was the kraken pulling her under the sea…

"The Flying Dutchman!" she cried, and instead of bubbles, more seawater came out of her mouth as she spoke, her words muffled and watery, but audible. Her lungs must be filled with water. That would gross her out if she stopped to think about it, so she didn't. She heard a groan come from somewhere nearby and squinted at the deck around her through the murky greenness. Someone with red hair was crumpled on the deck a few feet away. Slowly—as much because of her dizziness as the fact that the water slowed her motions—she began to investigate the upper deck, carefully stepping over a couple fellow students who were still unconscious.

"Hello," a gravely voice said from behind her. She spun around and then shrieked.

The apparition before her was seemingly made out of coral, with no trace of humanity in its face- a tangle of coral forming a twisted mouth in the center of the face under a single red eye. He—it?—was wearing a ragged bandana. She tried to remember if she'd seen him in the movies, but abandoned the effort. Did it matter? He was here and, well, holy crap.

"Am I dead?" she asked shakily. The creature let out a derisive noise and shook his monstrous head a few times.

"Not yet, girlie. D'ye wanna be?" he offered, holding out a slightly barnacled but very sharp hook in what she later realized was probably the politest death threat she'd ever gotten. At the time, however, and coming from the monster in front of her, it was just freaky. She stumbled backwards a few steps, groped for her sword only to realize it was still in the hold of the Dauntless where Beckett had stored all their weapons, and waved her hands in front of her as if they could provide some sort of protection.

"Don't kill me! I'm… very useful! And clever! I can um…" she struggled to come up with any skill she had that wasn't posessed in much greater quantities by every other sailor on the Dutchman. "… knit? Do you want a sweater? For your pet fish? Do you have a pet fish? Or, or…" she bit her lip, mentally eliminating skills inapplicable underwater during the 18th century. Wait, she had it! "I can predict the future."

He made a gravely noise and his mouth contorted to reveal the tips of sharp teeth. Abby realized after a moment of sheer terror that he was laughing. At her. She mentally reviewed what she had just said and grimaced.

"I'm smarter than I sound?" she offered before cracking up in laughter that had a touch of hysteria in it. She laughed until she was almost in tears, then abruptly realized that he had stopped laughing about a minute ago and was looking at her with an expression that could have been anything—it was hard to read that inhuman face.

"What's yer name?"

"Abby. Um, what's yours?"

"Ogilvey," he rumbled. "Welcome to the Flying Dutchman. You an' yer friends are bound to serve Davy Jones fer a hundred—" Abby's face began to go pale in horror—"hours."

"Oh. Oh! Hours. Hours are good. Hours are very good. A hundred hours. Okay," she babbled. "How did we get bound to serve anyway? I need to sit down." Ogilvey watched with… some other undecipherable expression… as she plopped herself down on an algae-covered crate.

"Forgot 'er name, but the lass over there said you signed a contract," he said, gesturing towards the other end of the ship. Her eyes were still adjusting to the dark, but she could see a vague outline of a few other people standing in a group.

"The small print on the application form. Damn it."

"I'm drowning!" someone yelled suddenly, and Abby stood and walked in the direction of the voice to find Becca flailing clawing at the water around her with wide eyes, trying to swim upwards.

"You're not drowning! You have gills," she told the younger girl, who looked at her blankly and shook her head. "Yes, you do. I can see them. You're breathing with them. Otherwise you'd be dead. How do you think you're still alive?"

Becca made a few choking noises, then started patting her torso frantically, trying to feel for the gills.

"They're on your neck," Abby reassured her. "We're on the Flying Dutchman. It's all right. This was planned."

"Th'Fly'ng Dutchman?" Tierza slurred from a few feet away, struggling to a sitting position. "mm not dead. Think I'd know if I were dead." She looked down at herself, dazed, her pupils so fully dilated that it looked like she had no iris at all. "I'm not wearing shoes," she said to nobody in particular, then passed out, slumping unconscious on the planks of the deck.

"Crap, what was that?" Abby stood. "I'm gonna find Siren, or somebody. Don't let her get up if she wakes up again." She ran towards the group of figures Ogilvey had pointed out before, feeling like she was in a dream with the slow-motion movements that the water limited her to.

Siren, Summer, Angel, and Cate were standing in a little cluster talking to Bootstrap Bill and another crewman who appeared to be made entirely of coral, with tentacles and anemones where his face ought to have been. They turned at her approach.

"There's something wrong with Tierza," she told them, speaking loudly so the sound would carry through the thick murk of the water. She couldn't help staring at the coral man. How does he see? How does he talk? "She woke up for a second, but her eyes were all funny and she was slurring her words and then she passed out."

"That sounds like a concussion. Crap. Did you have to smack them around so hard?" Siren demanded, looking off past the railing of the ship to a huge dark shape. The Kraken? "Abby, this is Palafico and you probably recognize Bootstrap Bill. Hadras is around here somewhere—"

"Dim a," said a voice from down by their feet, making everyone but Bootstrap and Palafico jump. A shell with a giant hermit crab walked by, it's body shifting momentarily to show a man's smiling face.

"Have I mentioned how creepy it is when you do that?" Siren demanded, looking down at the ambulatory head/crab. "And none of us know Cantonese. I can say hello and curse a little in Mandarin, but that's the extent of my Chinese."

"At? Gok yu? Tse guei po." Hadras, or at least his head, spat contemptuously. "Mandarin. Höü se la lei." He twisted himself back around and scuttled away, perhaps to reunite with his body.

"All right then," Siren said, a slightly bemused look on her face. "We need a bunk for Tierza, preferably one that moves as little as possible. She's going to have to stay in it for a couple days, and I'll talk to the Captain about getting her excused from physical labor. Get…" she paused as if going over a mental list. "… see if you can get Becca to look after her, she said on her application she was qualified to do serious first aid. I'll figure out what to do about someplace for her to rest, meanwhile try not to move her too much. Why don't you guys," she directed this remark at Cate, Angel, and Summer as well as Abby, "go see who else is awake. Nicely, Angel. And Summer, keep the volume down. They probably have headaches. I know I do.

Eventually they had rounded up all their fellow-students and gathered on the foredeck. Most of the crew of the Dutchman joined them, muttering, leering, snickering, and (purposely, Abby suspected) being disturbing in general. Davy Jones had still not appeared.

"All right. Time for introductions," Siren announced. "Would you guys mind introducing yourselves? I admit I haven't quite gotten you all sorted out yet myself. And we'd like to hear anything you want to tell us about you as well. We didn't get to know you through the movies as well as we'd have liked."

The crewmen looked at each other as if wondering who was going to go first. Finally the one with the hammerhead shark's head stepped forward. His left hand and arm were covered in what looked like a crustacean shell, and when he spoke, he revealed a mouth full of sharklike teeth.

"Maccus. First mate." He glanced at another crew member, who spoke without moving from where he leaned against the mizzenmast. Half his face and part of his shoulder were covered with the spiny skin of a pufferfish, which inflated and deflated with his breathing. The human side of his face was covered with pockmarks and actual holes, as if it was rotting away. He seemed to be wearing a shirt made of some sort of seaweed.

"Koleniko. I'm underwater navigator on account of seein' in the dark," he said, gesturing to the large, dark fish eye on the spined side of his face with a finlike hand. His voice had a slight, unfamiliar accent. "I was captain of m'own ship before I died. Crash there was m' first mate." He nodded towards a crewman with mandibles instead of a mouth and a right leg that seemed to turn into a tentacle, who grunted wordlessly in acknowledgement. The next crewman to speak was covered in seaweed, with rough, green skin and an almost conical head. His eyes burned round and yellow from slit-shaped sockets.

"I'm navigator the rest of the time. I've served for near three hundred years. I'm the oldest save for Wyvern, Palafico, and the Captain himself. Don't need food nor sleep anymore." There was an impressed murmur from the students. Abby glimpsed mussels growing inside his mouth instead of teeth. "I'm called Greenbeard."

Sarah raised a hand hesitantly. "You don't have a beard, though."

"'S a joke," Greenbeard said. "Y'know, an elder, a graybeard? That's me. Only it's green I am, not gray. Greenbeard."

"They're too daft to get it," sneered a crewman with a bumpy, barnacle-ravaged fish face and a fin coming out of his back. "I'm JimmyLegs. I keep order 'mongst the crew. You set a foot wrong, you answer to me and the captain's daughter.".

"Davy Jones has a dau-" Linsey began to ask, only to be elbowed in the ribs by Grace, who muttered something in her ear. Abby thought she overheard "cat o' nine tails" and "shut up" from where she was sitting. JimmyLegs gave a cruel laugh.

"I'm Ratlin," said a crewman- one of the more human-looking ones, with rope and sailcloth seemingly fused to his face. "I was the quartermaster on a merchant ship wrecked in a storm off Cartageña. I been here nine years next Tuesday."

"Penrod, cabin boy," said something that looked more like a very large lobster with a cutlass than a human. "First one of you scum that makes a joke about the name, I eat you for lunch." Siren and the students carefully kept their faces empty of anything even slightly resembling humor.

The crewman made of coral with the tentacles in place of features spoke next. "I am called Palafico now, Don Fransisco Palafico in my youth. A few of you I have already met. I see with these—" he indicated the tentacles and antennae on his face. "—by feeling the movements of the water and air. Once, I was a seaman and conquistador. Though I condemned myself to this fate in a now lost age, I keep my name and my honor." Abby vaguely recalled that he'd been the one in Dead Man's Chest to assert that the captain should go down with the ship. Was that what he meant by honor? From what she'd learned in school, conquistadors were not particularly honorable guys, but Palafico didn't seem to find any contradiction there. She couldn't stop staring at his mouth, which was not quite where a mouth should be on his face. Until he'd begun speaking, she'd not known it was there.

The guy with the blue skin introduced himself simply as Angler and the one with the eel head, Morey. With the notable exception of Palafico, there seemed to be a trend of the older crewmen going by nicknames rather than the names they had borne in life.

"I'm Clanker," growled one of the others that Abby had immediately recognized from the movie—the one with the flat-nosed face covered in mussels, the hole in his forehead, and the algae-covered hat. There was chain shot and a pistol hanging from his belt in place of a cutlass. He had to make a slight effort to form the words properly, probably because his tongue had turned into something that looked like either a clam or an oyster inside his mouth. A few of the mussels on his cheeks opened and closed.

"Manray," offered the crewman with the head shaped like a stingray. Abby shivered as she looked at his silvery eyes. The pupil was shrunk to a tiny dot in the center, and she thought back to a documentary she had seen on psychopaths. Some of them had had eyes that stayed undilated like that. She looked away.

"They call us the Twins since we got stuck together like this," said a voice from above them, and everyone looked around to see a seaweed-covered plank lowering from the rigging a pair of men joined together like siamese twins at the shoulder and the stump of their center leg. Each twin had one arm and one leg of their own, and another arm grew out of their chest. They both had eyes like coral polyps and barnacle-encrusted feet that looked almost like cement blocks, and one of them had lobster claws growing out of his face. "Used to be reg'lar twins, but seventy years ago when Chris lost his leg too, we got in the habit of gettin' around like this, since put together we 'ad two legs. Then one night we passed out drunk that way, 'n when we woke up, we'd been sorta barnacled together. Weren't no trouble to stay like that, since we sat watch together anyway, an' by the time we thought to do anythin' 'bout it our skins had grown over an' we were stuck like ye see us."

"His name is Chris? What's your name?" Nina asked.

"Cristovão de Sousa," Chris said, swallowing the end of the word and giving it a sort of soft –ng sound. "And Baltasar de Sousa." He nodded towards his brother.

"Portugese?" Siren asked.

"Once. Now, we're just dead."

"How did you both lose your legs?" Grace asked as politely as such a question can be asked.

"He had a leg wound from a barbed hook that stuck in the flesh and festered back when we were fishermen," Chris replied. "I lost mine to something big with teeth. If I hadn't already been dead, I'd not have survived that one."

"Something big with teeth?" Kat repeated curiously. "What?"

"Damned if I know. Sea monster. Something we'd never seen before. When we told Wyvern, he said he thought he saw somethin' like that once, but it was dead." He shook his head. "Lots o' big nasty teeth." Baltasar rolled his eyes.

"Enough 'bout the teeth! He's always talkin' 'bout the teeth," he growled at the students. "Always the teeth. Don't encourage him."

"So you're the lookouts up in the crows nest, then?" Cate asked as the students bit back smiles at the interchange between the two.

"Right. We take turns sleepin'." There was a pause.

"Next?" Siren prompted the rest of them.

"Well. I'm Broondjongen," volunteered a crewman wearing a tricorn hat whose chest had the look of a partway open clamshell.

"Is that Dutch or something?" Tierza asked, wrinkling her brow.

"Dansk—Danish," he corrected her. "Best damned smuggler on the North Sea until the British Navy turned my ship into little bits o' timber." He scowled at the memory.

"Is that a… a skull in your, um, clamshell?" Summer asked, pointing shakily at the maw exposed by the opening.

"Nah, he's just happy ta see ya, girlie," Maccus cracked, leering, and the crew and those of the students who were not staring in horror at Broondjongen's chest started to snicker.

"Eh, him? 'S always been there." Broondjongen waved a hand dismissively. "'Course, back when I was alive, he was just a big funny lump under the skin. Then when I got down here… " he scratched his head. "We all start changin', after a while, see. One 'a the changes happened to me was I started to feel 'im movin' around sometimes. Then one day he started strugglin', clawed his way out. I din't know if I could kill 'im without gettin' myself in the bargain, but din't matter, in the end. He died less'n an hour later. Bloody weird-lookin' thing, he was." There was a low chorus of "ugh"s and "eew"s from the students at the story. The crew exchanged smug, amused looks.

"So you all sink to frightening women now for fun?" A crewman covered in tube coral with a scimitar belted around his waist asked scornfully from the shadows near the barrels of shot. "I am glad I have not become so desperate for company."

"Who are you?" Linsey asked. The man just sneered, then turned on his heel and walked towards a hatch that led belowdecks. The students exchanged glances.

"Ah, that's Piper. Don' mind him, he's from one o' them Arab desert tribes what's got to marry a buncha diff'rent women," a mussel-covered crewman in a stocking cap said mildly. "I 'spect the naggin' from all them wives gets so bad that they get into the habit o' just ignorin' anythin' with tits. He was a slave trader back when he was breathin'. I'm called Old Haddy."

"Finnegan here," said a man with a harelip who had the mottled stripy coloring of those fishes you see at the bottom of a reef blending into the rocks.

"I'm Jelly." The speaker was one of the more stomach-turning crew members, covered in jellyfish and seemingly part jellyfish himself, with bloated, almost diseased-looking skin. One of his eyes was solid black and seemed to be dead or blinded. "I was a trader in the waters around Java and Sumatra. I died in a mutiny."

"Your crew mutinied against you?" Angel asked, and he laughed harshly.

"I was one 'a the mutineeers."

A crew member covered with spines and another with a wheel embedded in his back and a compass in place of his left eye introduced themselves, appropriately, as Urchin and Wheelback.

Hadras, now attatched to his body, introduced himself and said he'd been quartermaster on a pirate ship that operated around the South China Sea, and then what looked like a sort of ambulatory smorgasbord of sea life, complete with an anemone where his mouth should have been, stepped forward and began to gesture with starfish-like hands. Greenbeard coughed and began to translate.

"Yeah, he can't speak no more. He's called Quittance. He says he died because of a woman's betrayal and he doesn't trust you women one bit, and he'll be watchin' ye."

"Can you write?" Siren asked Quittance, and received an expressionless look and a shake of the head. "Okay, one-way communication only, I see."

"The signs he uses, he made up his own self after his mouth grew together," Finnegan explained. "We can understand most of what he says. Not much to say down here anyway. He does fine."

"And ye know me," Bootstrap Bill said, concluded, absently scratching at a barnacle that was going on one cheek, "Or so ye say."

"Do we get to meet the captain?" Becca asked hopefully.

"Ye'll meet him when he decides ye will," Maccus told her sharply. "Git out of the way fer now. Penrod, show them to their quarters. We're goin' down to a decent depth, no more o' this warm-water, still seein' the sunlight foolery."

"Um… how will we see, then?" Kat asked.

"Lanterns, girlie. Penrod, remove them," Maccus repeated his order to the lobsterman, who shooed them towards a hatch.

"You have lanterns that work underwater?" Nina asked Penrod quietly, and he snickered.

"Maybe they use luminescent plants or sea creatures inside them," Siren theorized, and was confirmed by Penrod's sharp nod.

"This is becoming a trend, I see," Grace remarked a minute later as they were led into the brig. "Why doesn't anyone like us anymore?"

"Well, if it's this or sharing a cabin with somebody like Maccus or Piper, I think I'd prefer this," Linsey decided.

"Ugh," Sarah muttered, gathering the tattered hem of her skirt to try to keep it from dragging against the thick growths of algae and pools of sticky goo that grew on the floor. "I do not want to know what I'm stepping in."

"I kinda want to know what that is," Summer said, looking in fascinated horror as what had looked like part of the carpet of algae up ahead suddenly opened up into a toothy mouth and began to snap at them, reacting to the vibration of their footsteps. It wasn't much bigger than a bottlecap, small enough not to be able to do much to their shoes even if they were to step directly on it, but a finger or bare toe unwittingly placed over it would be in considerable danger of amputation.

"Hell, that is weird," Abby agreed, cautiously skirting around the miniature thing of evil that she couldn't turn up even the vaguest memory of hearing about in her biology classes. "Siren?"

"No clue. Though I think I'll name it Vincent. It looks like a Vincent," Siren declared, shrugging off the confused looks her students were shooting her. "I think Vincent and I will be friends. I know how he feels."

"You mean, you also feel like a moldy floor with teeth?" Cate asked slowly.

"No, like my territory is being invaded by noisy creatures and I want to tear their throats out, only I can't move." There was a moment of silence.

"Which is not exactly on our list of top ten things we want to hear from a person who we will be sharing a small, confined space with for the next several hours," Kat said quietly.

As it turned out, they were only in the brig for an hour and a half before they heard the ominous, slightly uneven footsteps of the captain approaching. At the sound, they abandoned their attempts to race two uncooperative crabs against each other and sat up straight. The crabs scurried into the corners of the room and the door swung open a moment later to reveal Davy Jones.

Abby found herself noticing a lot of tiny details that she hadn't caught while watching the movie: the color of his hat, the rot and algae that marred the wood of his peg leg, the fraying hem of his jacket.

"What a lot o' bloody oobits," he said, looking darkly at the students.

"Oobits?" Angel asked, looking offended. "What in hell is an oobit?"

"Three lashes," he replied calmly to her, "An' none 'a yer cheek."

"Scottish slang. A child who really really needs a bath," Summer translated at the same time. "You are from Scotland, then," she said, looking up at Jones. "Not Dutch."

"O' course I'm not Dutch," he sneered. "The Flying Dutchman is a name for the ship. Do I look like a bleedin' ship ta ye?"

"A name?" Nina asked. "How many names did you give it?"

"Not a one," Jones replied. "Mortals name it as they like. Legends an' such keech. An' I dinna come down ta blether with ye. Ye're on my ship now, ye follow my rules. Ye're told ta do aught, ye do it. Ye keep a civil tongue in yer mouth talkin' ta crew. Ye don't go guddlin' wit' nothin' or botherin' no one."

"Aren't you going to teach us, though?" Becca asked, looking up at him with sad puppy eyes.

"No. Ye'll be learnin' from the crew. Got somethin' wrong with yer deadlights, lass?"

"I… don't think I have any?" Becca replied hesitantly and Siren covered up a laugh with a cough.

"Eyes," she explained briefly.

"But we'd really, really like to learn about you and your history and stuff," Holly said hopefully to the captain, returning to the original subject.

"My history is none 'a yer concern," Jones snapped, stiffening. "Ye want history, go talk to Wyvern; tain't like he has aught else to do but answer yer questions." He turned on his heel and left.

"Well, that went well," Koneka said dryly.

"PMS?" suggested Angel.

"It didn't go that badly." Siren rose to her feet. "We got permission to talk to Wyvern about his history. He'll probably be willing to tell us more than the captain would anyway."

He was. Abby got the impression that he was rather lonely being stuck in the wall of the hold. Lonely and nice enough, when you came down to it, but very old fashioned. For example, the first thing he did upon being woken up was to gaze at them in consternation.

"Ye're women!" he proclaimed, shaking the lantern he held at them in emphasis and sending their shadows dancing across the hold. "What're ye doin' here? Get back on land, quick!" Abby hid a smile.

"That may be a little tricky, since we're in the middle of the open sea and probably a bunch of fathoms underwater as well," she told him, trying to sound apologetic.

"Women! Women!" he repeated, shaking his head. "What're them boys up there thinkin'? Ye can't go lettin' such onto a ship! Sure death, it is."

"We were under the impression that you guys were a little bit past worrying about death," Grace replied gently.

"What? Ah. Yes, right. Already dead, already under a curse… still, 'tis the principle of the thing," he grumbled. "What did ye want then?"

"To talk to you," Siren said. "We want to know everything about the Flying Dutchman and it's history and yours."

"And Davy Jones," Holly reminded her.

"And Davy Jones," Siren repeated.

"Oh, the new boy's a troubled lad. Got tricked into the job, he did, but that sort o' thing's to be expected when ye go playin' 'round with goddesses." Wyvern rolled his bloodshot eyes. "Took the whole thing rather badly."

"What job and what goddesses and why do you call him the new boy?" Kelsey wanted to know, leaning forward. "He's not… uh… particularly new."

"Eh? Y'mean ye don't know? Ah, that's a story, that is. I s'pose ye'll be wantin' me to tell it now. Sit down, then. Sit. Sit!" He was trying to sound reluctant and disapproving, but he had practically lit up with excitement at having an audience.

"Right, so ye don't even know what the ship's purpose is?" he asked. The students paused. It hadn't occurred to them that something as powerful and old as Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman needed a purpose.

"To recruit dead sailors and um, sail around with them?" Cate asked, then looked slightly embarrassed as she realized how lame that sounded.

"No, no, lass! All that, that's the boy's doin'. Keepin' a bunch o' souls on board until they grows fishy bits an' seaweed all on 'em. That's not the way it was in the old days. No, back before he came on, we had a real job. Y'ever heard of.." he paused for a moment. "Ye know them Greek buggers what used to sit 'round arguin' 'bout how things exist an' carryin' on with schoolboys?"

"Yes," the students chorused. Their knowledge of history was very patchy in places, but everyone knew about the Greeks.

"They 'ad a fella. Think 'e was called… Sharon. Big barge, ferried souls who were dead to the what d'ye callit…"

"Afterlife," Siren said quietly. "Charon."

"Cause they thought there was a river," Wyvern continued, oblivious to her correction. "An' ye had to go across it if ye wanted to get dead properly. Somethin' like that. I reckon that story comes from one o' them not understandin' somethin' they was told by a sailor. Cause all we sailors knows it. Don't know 'bout no barges or what-all they does with men that die on land, but at sea, Davy Jones takes ye. No, 'ush up, I'm not done yet." He waved his hand at Kat, who had opened her mouth to speak.

"The way it use ta go was this: the ghost ship would come fer ya an' take yer ghost to the next world. Ancient duty, it was. Always a Captain for the ghost ship, always a Davy Jones or Devil-Jonah or Shoney to steer them on their way. Tradition. Ye takes the souls from 'ere to there. Ship's had many captains. Most of 'em have done their duty right enough. The new boy, though… the goddess what told him how he could live forever t'be with her didn't keep up her part o' the deal, so he figgered he didn't have to keep his. So now…" he waved the lantern expressively. "Things got like ye see 'em. He started lettin' them dead souls join 'is crew instead o' movin' on, leavin' behind the ones what wants to stay dead instead o' ferryin' their souls Beyond. He even summoned up the Leviathan an' had it serve him, when it weren't supposed to rise from the depths 'til the end o' days. It's what comes o' lettin' women meddle in nautical affairs." He huffed.

"So Davy Jones isn't his actual name, it's more like a title?" Nina asked uncertainly. "Like the Dread Pirate Roberts?"

"One o' his titles. Just like the ship—ye were callin' it the Flyin' Dutchman, but that's only its newest name. There was a Flyin' Dutchman a bit more'n a century back, sank off the Iv'ry Coast. Folks tend to confuse one ghost ship with another, an' so the name of the Flyin' Dutchman got mixed into the old stories." Wyvern made a motion with his shoulders that probably would have been a shrug if he wasn't mostly fused to the wall.

"You were a crew member before the, um, current Davy Jones took the job, then?" Siren asked him.

"Currant? I like currant jam on me biscuits. Used to like it, rather. Haven't tasted any in ages," he said wistfully. Siren blinked at him.

"Were you here before the 'new boy' signed on?" Sarah translated, smiling slightly.

"Course I was. I'm the last o' the old gang left, these days," he admitted glumly. "Some o' the other folk left, others he killed fer speakin' against 'im. Finally, it was only me left. The rest—all the rest—they're a sorry lot o' scum. Recruitin' men who're 'fraid to go to hell!" He shook his head in disdain. "The right sort, the kind of men ye really want fightin' beside ye… are the ones who know they're bound fer hell and look forward to getting' some warmer weather."

Warmer weather. Abby gave a little involuntary shiver. She didn't belong here. She'd had an occasional sense of that on the pirate ship and at Port Royal, but now it was crashing over her so hard she wanted to crawl out of her own skin. This was a place where the living did not belong… where teenage girls really did not belong… where cowardly people who offered to knit sweaters for fish in exchange for their lives most definitely did not belong. As much as she had enjoyed the Flying Dutchman parts of the movie, right now she really wanted to be back on the surface, anywhere on the surface.

Well, not in the middle of Arctic waters or anything. She'd just freeze and drown and end up right back here again, only permanently. Bloody hell.

These kinds of thoughts preoccupied her for the rest of the lesson and right up until the point when they were told that since there were no provisions on the ghost ship and no way to cook food underwater, their only real menu option was to eat whatever they could catch, raw.

Though Abby had tried sushi before and found it okay but not thrilling, here there was not even any rice or avocado or wasabi to make the raw fish part palatable. The idea of eating anything with tentacles made her queasy and besides, it might offend the Kraken to see her chowing down on its relatives. Though she guessed crab or lobster wouldn't be that bad, the crabs she'd seen so far were tiny, and she didn't think she could actually take on a live lobster and win, not without her sword. Ditto for sea urchins, stingrays, sharks, and eels. Sea cucumbers? Probably not as edible as their landlocked namesakes. Shrimp? Too small to be worth the effort to catch. Oysters? She'd seen a couple among the barnacles on the ship, and oysters were sometimes eaten raw, weren't they? She'd never actually tried them, but people voluntarily ate them raw without wasabi, and unlike fish, there was the possible bonus of finding a pearl inside.

She headed off in search of oysters.