"Well, finally got that outta the way," huffed Ratchet. He was talking of course about having cranked the crunched-up CT-37 into the airship, and the mention of his words here have absolutely no ulterior reference to anything that you just read happening at Louie's. No sir, no ulterior reference at all. Anyway, among the handful of pirates who gathered to inspect What Thy Brat Hath Wrought was the bleary-eyed culprit himself. "Yer gonna pay for this one, wet-nose," Ratchet sneered at Kit.
"Yeah!" chimed in Mad Dog. "Look what you did to it!"
The group growled and muttered their contemptuous agreement. Kit scoffed at him. "You've crashed it worse yourself, lots of times." The group shrugged and muttered their agreement with that, too. Even Ratchet conceded that one.
The pirate planes that had landed at Louie's were still filing in, with one last group now descending on the lift into the hangar ― the group with the captain's tri-wing included. Don Karnage was out of his plane and jumped to the hangar floor before the lift even finished lowering all the way. "Where is he!" he bellowed.
While there was no question who the "he" was, the he in question had, somehow, pulled a miraculous disappearing act. He was just there a second ago. The pirates looked around, talking over one another, until they were shushed by a raise of the captain's finger. Karnage crept along slowly and lightly, like a silent hunter sniffing out his prey, shifting searching glances around. To say he looked livid would be understating. He searched in all directions, even crouching down to do a visual sweep under the planes, then after that got down on all fours as if he was a master tracker trying to pick up a trail. For a moment it looked like he was about to go full-on hounddog and start sniffing the floor.
"Uh, boss, you maybe want us to help look?" asked Will.
"Hush!" snapped the captain. "Shut up, don't move. This one… is mine." In his peripheral, he suddenly caught a glimpse of movement from a parked CT-37 ― a head ducking into a cockpit. A head with bear ears. "Ah ha!" he cried, and kicked a run up to full sprint toward the plane. Kit yelped and sprang out of the cockpit like an untethered Jack-in-the-box just before the captain, taking a swipe, was able to snag him.
"Wait!" pleaded Kit, making plenty sure to keep the plane between them as they circled around it. "Lemme explain!"
"Explain?!" Karnage reached over the plane to grab him, to no avail. "You better start praying, because I am about to knock your bear-shaped block off! Come here!"
"You're not yourself!" said Kit. "What am I sayin', you're too much like yourself! Captain, you gotta calm down."
"Calm, ha! Calm was before you decided to be pilot of the year!" Karnage suddenly changed direction in their circling, trying to catch the kid off guard; it didn't work.
"But I had to do it!" said Kit. The tail of the plane was now between them.
"I said NO!" roared the captain, and taking his cutlass with both hands and raising it high over his head, he slashed down with such intense fury that he cleaved the tail of the plane clean off.
"Holy cripes!" exclaimed Kit.
"Dammit, really? Another one?" griped Ratchet in the background.
Kit cried out and ran for it, and the chase was on. It was quite a spectacle for the other pirates, who stayed exactly where they stood as they technically hadn't been cleared from 'shut up, don't move.' Kit ran through the group, while Karnage had no qualms with knocking them over in pursuit. When the boy tried to get behind another plane, the captain leapt over it. They ran around the hangar, Kit yelping, Karnage cursing, and up a flight of stairs.
Now Kit was no stranger to the many detours and short cuts the Iron Vulture had in its nooks and crannies; after all, these things helped him steal a red glowing stone once upon a time, and that was a getaway he wasn't even half as invested in as he was now. With some quick thinking, there was always something around every turn: a chute to dive into, a chain to swing on, or maybe a railing to slide down. It was the latter that he tried, on a second flight of stairs, once he got to the top, and seeing the captain terribly winded trying to keep up at half pace, he thought he'd pull a surprise reversal and speed past Karnage on the railing.
It almost worked. Almost. He got snagged by the back of his sweater.
Exhausted and gulping for air, Karnage collapsed on the steps, using all of his existing strength to not let go of that sweater, and though while Kit had some hope that the captain had worn himself out, the snare he was caught in was more than enough to keep him from going anywhere. It was like being a fly caught in a web, waiting, made to wonder if the spider was going to devour it or not.
"Um, you're not really that mad, are you?" the fly ventured to ask.
Instantly, Karnage stopped panting… and started growling. Instant, rage-fueled rejuvenation.
"Oh, c'mon," said Kit. "I had to do it ― yipe!" He was yanked up and dragged on his heels, down a corridor where many of the crew's berths were located, including his. "W-wait a minute!" he pleaded. He got summarily thrown into his berth, the captain seething over him.
"Mad? Me?!" said Karnage lividly. His snarling face leaned in close to the kid. "What I am going to do with you is so horribly horrible, so terribly terrifying, so ― so viciously vicious, that I haven't even dreamed of what it is yet! But until I do, if you take one step, just one step out of this room, so help me you belligerent brat, I will rip you into so many tiny pieces, stick them all inside tiny envelopes and mail you back to this room piece by piece, seventeenth-class postage, AND IT WILL HURT!"
Kit flinched at the verbal onslaught, and shrunk away toward his cot. The weight of this awful day had begun to crash down on him; Baloo's hurt, the captain's anger, how he was never going to make any of this right for either of them, and everything he ever did would make it all worse. But there was also a smoldering indignation, and halfway there, something deep down prompted him to face the captain. "I… I'm not sorry!" he said. "I asked you! Jeez, I practically begged you."
"I said no!" yelled the captain. "No, is a very simple word! It's the thing you do not do!"
"Baloo needed me!"
"I don't care what ― Baloo?! Forget Baloo! You don't fly!" He grabbed Kit by an ear and twisted, and did not let go. "What did I tell you would happen if you took my plane?!"
"Ow, ow! Okay!" yelped Kit.
"It takes one crash! One crash! One crash to kill you!" With an even harder twist, "You are hearing me?!"
"Yes! Gr, le'go!" Karnage did, and Kit pushed himself away, ear stinging like hell. "Gah, leave me alone!" He was quick to turn his back to Karnage, lest the captain see his sudden tears. "Your whole crew crashes planes," he sulked.
"Is not about the plane, and you are not my whole crew!" said Karnage. It was a way of putting it that gave them both a bit of pause. At that, the captain checked the doorway, suddenly concerned about any potential droppers of eaves around. There weren't any. "And they see this," he continued, in a heated but quieter tone. "They see me saying no, and you doing the not no. Then they want to see what I do about it. They want to see if Don Karnage is in charge." With a pointed claw in Kit's face, he added, "And you are going to find out how much in charge I am!"
Kit sat on his cot, back scooted until it was against the wall, and arms crossed. "So what," he muttered. "What're you gonna do, throw me off the ship again?"
Of all the quips and backtalk Kit had ever given Karnage (and let's be clear, that's about a novel's worth), none had ever quite knocked the captain speechless. That one did. Kit wasn't even looking at the captain, not until the quiet in the room became noticeable and curious. He saw in the captain that there was anger, sure, but there was something else ― shock, even a hint of hurt. But then more anger. Lots of anger, fierce and frothing. Kit realized, with a good amount of fear now for his own hide, that he didn't just cross a line; he wadded the line into a little ball, spit it out of a straw and shot it up the captain's nose.
"Why you…" Karnage raised his hand as to deliver a backhand blow to the kid's face that would be remembered for the rest of his life. "You LEETLE…!" Kit lunged for his pillow and, yelping, held it out like a shield; Karnage, meanwhile, had his arms flailing, for he was caught in fervent indecisiveness if he wanted to do backhand, forehand, or what to make this smack best count. He clenched his fists, shaking with fury, and grabbed the pillow and ripped it in half. Kit watched terror stricken as this was done in obvious effigy, and Karnage clenched half the pillow with his teeth and ripped the other half in half, then that half, then did all the same to the part that was in his teeth. The work had left the captain tired and panting, the room covered in a blizzard of cotton, and Kit with the point duly driven home (and feeling a bit lucky over the pillow's sacrifice).
"That, was nothing," snarled the captain. He stomped away to exit the room. "Wait and see what I do with you. Be afraid, be veeery afraid!"
"I didn't mean to say that," Kit said, meekly.
"You did." Karnage stopped at the doorway. He did not look back. "If you want to go play house again, you tell me now, and I take you back myself."
"You're not makin' it easy." Kit murmured.
"You did this, and this is what you get," said Karnage. "In this room you stay! And you better not be forgetting to be afraid!"
Karnage left, and Kit slid off his cot. "This room? For how long? Wait, you can't ground me! Pirates can't be grounded!" He went after the captain, but only as far as sticking his head out the door… the rest of him, he did not dare. Karnage even turned around and waited to see if there would be a foot stepping out. There wasn't.
Scoffing, Kit turned back to his cot, and swiped his foot over the scattered mess that used to be his pillow, kicking an imaginary can. In the storm of everything that happened today sweeping through his heart and mind, one event from that wrenching trip to Louie's suddenly, randomly, came to the forefront, and it made him wipe his forehead on his sleeve. "Ugh, he kissed me. Bleeech."
Don Karnage was a pirate who had had his fair share of lousy days. Having his hopes and dreams of raiding Cape Suzette come crashing down was foremost, but there were plenty of other lousy days too, like coming this close to getting his hands on Captain Juan Toomany's treasure and ending up digging himself out of a pit, empty-handed… or his genius plan to ransom out that Vandersnoot kid and only ending up being made a fool of… or getting a giant squid dropped on him (the smell lasted for days)... and let's not forget about the sheer amount of work it took to snaggle two giant mirrors and place them in the Twin Spires in the most brilliant plane-catching scheme ever, only to have to see those big, beautiful mirrors get shattered. Come to think of it… there was an alarming trend to his lousy days, as many seemed to have in common the involvement of a certain insolent urchin. Today, as the fates would have it, was no exception.
The only good thing about it was that the day was, mercifully, over. The hour was late, and most of the crew had retired to grog and games of poker and dice. Karnage retreated to his cabin, leaving this lousy day behind him with a heavy slam of the iron door. Before undressing, he gave himself a head-to-toe look in his full-length mirror, as was customary to coo over before he turned in, but even though all things considered he thought he was looking pretty sharp, it didn't make him feel any better. His cutlass got unceremoniously dropped on the floor, his boots kicked off, and his coat thrown into the corner.
Once he slid into his cool, silk sheets, and his head against his pillows, he found he still had a lot of grumbling to spend. Although he was exhausted, he was too irritated and restless to be sleepy. He had been looking forward to this day for weeks, to start the grand adventure, where everything seemed new and exciting ― not that he would admit it, especially now, but it was having that insolent urchin back that made him feel that way. But now… the audacity of what that boy did to ruin this fabulous day kept him awake as wasted time ticked along. What bugged him just as much as what the boy did was what the boy said… you throw someone off your ship ONCE and they never let you forget it. He really would have liked to have just slept, he wasn't even in the mood to dream up the creative punishment the boy so richly deserved (wait for some coffee in the morning, then he'd see to that part). At length, he decided to put on a record, which led to a second thought of finding out if there was anything good on the radio.
Listening to the radio on the Iron Vulture was always a bit of a gamble in terms of whether you were going to get anything, let alone get anything interesting. It depended where the airship was and what signals were floating around out there. Karnage found, somewhat expectedly, that there was a whole lot of static as he turned the knob. But then, there were some voices in the static, and as fate would have it, a very distinct word was spoken ― 'pirate.'
He was quick to zero in on that particular frequency. It was a news broadcast. The reporter was saying,
'… met with skepticism, but it now stands confirmed, just like from the comic books, that Winger City has its own crime fighting hero-in-disguise. While law enforcement reports that the city jail is full and crime is at an…' The signal grew faint and faded out.
"Winger City," Karnage muttered disdainfully, as it was now officially the one place on earth the boy wasn't going to get treated to see, not anymore. It was also pretty disappointing that the mention of 'pirate' only involved more of that idiot do-gooder playing dress-up (and why hadn't anyone blasted this guy yet? How boring).
He was just about to turn the knob when the signal came in again,
'... is the so-called Corsair Crusader, who appeared before members of the press today to issue a warning to all criminals at large. Wearing an extravagant and colorful costume that in its authentic detail would rival any swashbuckling picture from Starrywood, the mysterious hero had particular words for the skyway bandit Don Karnage…' And here, as you might imagine, is where Karnage suddenly became interested. Actually, his fur was bristling… who were they calling bandit? Pirate, pirate, pirate! There was another moment of faint static, and then the report continued, '... daring the loathsome aerial scourge to try his hand at Winger City, and to, quote, 'Come see what a real pirate can do.'
Was that a challenge? A challenge?! Seriously?! Karnage could hardly believe his own eardrums. Not even the peasants in Cape Suzette hiding behind their cliff guns were nutty enough to goad him into an attack.
The reporter then added, 'As for Karnage and his villainous gang, there have been no reports of air pirate sightings since last month. Could they be hiding from a more fierce foe found in the Corsair Crusader?'
Karnage turned the radio off… with is fist. Of course there hadn't been any sightings, his ship was broken! Now it was fixed, and in no time the whole world was about to find out just how very un-hiding he was being. But… now some insignificant simpleton was all over the airwaves calling him out. If he didn't do anything about it, the whole world would think he was a coward.
Looks like it was about time to pay Winger City a visit after all.