Deadbeard, his pet Mimic, and stuff
The evening sun washed over the remains of a wrecked ship, it's timbers and crew slowly sinking into the murky waters for eternity. And, not two leagues distant, another ship sailed. Away from the wreck. Away from the death they had helped perpetuate.
For this was the ship of the dread pirate Deadbeard. He and his nautical crew had just completed one of their successful ship raids, and were now sailing away, treasure in tow. Part of which the crew was currently sharing among themselves. They had no idea what it was. It sure as heck wasn't ale, but who cared? It tasted darn good.
"Yo ho! Yo ho! A pirates life fer me!" The atrocious singing that drifted up from the deck belonged to none other than the captain of the ship, Deadbeard the pirate. The crewmembers in the general vicinity were forced to clap their hands over their ears or suffer excruciating pain from his mangling of the term "music". The large pirate, however, had no idea just how bad his singing was. Mainly because whenever someone tried to tell him that, a short, sharp conversation ensued.
A conversation, which, incidentally, generally ended with "No! I beg of you! Not my kidneys! For the love of Mars, stop stabbing my ARRRRGGGHHHhhhhh……" Life was funny that way. And thus, the terror of the seas continued with his flamboyant warbling, unaware that he was about two octaves from causing his first mate to commit suicide.
"Yo ho ho and a bottle of-" Pausing to peruse the drink he held in his hand for a moment, he continued. "Diet coca-cola…" And somewhere, the person who first thought up the words to that turned in his grave.
Meanwhile, his first mate stuffed several earplugs into his, well, ears. Turning to another pirate, he muttered. "The cap'n couldn't possibly be more irritating if he tried!"
"Pardon?" The pirate asked. "I can't hear a word you're saying, I've got earplugs stuck in here, y'see."
"Nevermind. Just… nevermind."
"What?"
A sword was drawn and stabbed through someone that night.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Deadbeard sniffed the air as he looked around the place. Yes, this island was a good place to plant all his treasure and keep them until they actually had some use for them. Which was about a couple centuries later, but hey, it was the standard, piratey thing to do. Right? Turning to his first mate, he said, "Gather the men."
"Excuse me a sec." His first mate yanked a pair of earplugs from his ear. "Right. You were saying?"
Deadbeard sighed. "Gather the men."
When they were all assembled, Deadbeard stepped up to a podium that had been mysteriously constructed out of a plot device™. Clearing his throat, he stared down at the sea of faces. Most of them were bored, and obviously wished they could be somewhere else. Oh, well. Sacrifices had to be made.
"Friends, pirates, countrymen," He began. "Lend me your ears!" He didn't get the chance to go any further before an ear was lobbed onto the stage. "Maddox, I am well aware of your gangrene problem, but let's not share it right now, okay? Anyways, we're going, like all typical clichéd group of pirates, to bury our treasures here, so we can go off on another shipping raid and pillage and plunder and WAKE UP!"
The group of pirates that had fallen asleep during the speech quickly jerked awake. Looking around, they noticed a rather pissed-off pirate leader looking at them. Settling back into a comfortable position, he listened to the rest of his (inanely boring) speech
I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say three men had seizures by the time Deadbeard finished talking. Then the men were forced to dig a big hole in the to bury the treasure, despite protests of the expiration date clearly showed that the treasure was to be consumed by the end of the year. But Deadbeard overrode the protests, and so the men dug. And dug. And dug some more. When they dug deep enough that five men drowned while trying to dig deeper, Deadbeard decided it was deep enough. Then they dumped all the treasure inside, and covered the hole back up.
Then Deadbeard stepped back up to the podium. "As per usual clichéd pirating schemes, I will now kill all of you to prevent the secret of the treasure from leaking out. Thanks for your time."
This was, as you may suspect, slightly detrimental in terms of morale for the pirates. Deadbeard raised his hand, prepared to cast Freeze Prism and bring frozen death raining down on the pirates when-
"Holy shit! What's that behind you?!"
"Huh?" Deadbeard turned around. The only thing that met his face was a blank wall. Turning back to the pirates, he was about to chew them out for making him waste his time when he realized that all the pirates had taken this convenient distraction to board the ship and sail away.
Leaving behind one very pissed pirate captain on Crossbones Isle.
"Fine! Leave me here! See if I care! Oh, wait… I DO care. ………………. Dammit."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Approximately three thousand years later…
Dank water dripped from the ceiling, coalescing into a large pool. On it, the wreck of an ancient ship was anchored. And currently, a strange, obtuse creature known to the world at large as a mimic was engaged in swabbing the deck. Suddenly, from the interior of the ship, a voice floated out, clearly annoyed.
"Dude! We're outta Doritoes! I thought you were going to buy some more?"
The mimic sighed, and yelled towards the doorway of the cabin. "Get it your own dang self! I'm not your slave!"
"Do it, or I start singing."
The mimic rolled his eyes. "Two thousand years with a zombie pirate belting out dumb nautical shanties gets you used to the allegorical crap you call singing. Now shut up and let me wipe the deck in peace. Don't you have a Cerberus to annoy or something?"
Deadbeard merely sniffed in contempt before settling down on a creaking plank and pulling out a well-weathered copy of "The Silmarillion." After several minutes of perusing the contents of the book, he threw it down in disgust. "This is ridiculous!" He said. "No one who reads this crap will be able to understand it."
"Yep." The mimic said. "The exact same way that Feanor didn't understand that taking the Silmarils away from Valinor would eventually result in the destruction of life, and thus Melkor was always leading him-"
"Oh, shut up." Deadbeard muttered. "Why I chose to allow you to stay with me I'll never know."
"That was because I beat you in a chess game, remember?"
"Oh, yeah. Now I wish I hadn't." Deadbeard sighed. "How exactly were you able to checkmate me in three moves?"
"You'll never know. Unless you happen to be a Jupiter Adept. Which you aren't." The mimic finished swabbing the deck and sat back, wiping his brow. Or at least tried to. It ain't easy when your arm is shorter than the width of your head. "So… remind me." He started. "Exactly how did you get your name?"
"You have a problem with it?"
"Well, you don't have a beard, for one thing…"
"Oh, shut up."
"Neither are you dead…"
" I said shut up."
"And it's a blatant rip-off of Redbeard the pirate, whose name, apparently, had a purpose. Something about dipping it in the blood of his foes."
The mimic didn't get to continue his speech, for at that moment, a blinding flash of light filled the cavern. When the dazzling glare had faded away, three unfamiliar figures were standing on the stairs that led higher upwards, towards the entrance of the whole cave. After glancing around, the only female of the group sighed.
"Are you sure Cypher knows what he's doing?"
The oldest one of the group shrugged. "I dunno. Was the pill past it's expiry date?"
The younger male glanced around before saying, "Well, the rabbit hole looks pretty deep after all."
A second later, they disappeared again. Deadbeard blinked and tried to forget what he had just seen, for his sanity's sake. Didn't work too well. Dagnabbit.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Deadbeard lay back, staring at the ceiling. Raising his head, he noticed the mimic had been busy with tightening several ropes around the ship. "Why bother?" He asked. "It's an exercise in futility, trying to maintain a single ship for three thousand years."
"Would you rather the ship fell apart and we all took a swim?" The mimic countered rather testily. Finishing with his current task, he walked, or rather, waddled to the bridge. Peering up, he stared. "We've got company." He announced, a tad wearily.
A second later, a young bespectacled boy walked into the room, blinking in the dim light. Deadbeard, taking a moment to observe the kid from the shadows, noticed a faint scar on his forehead. After a few minutes, the boy turned to leave.
And was incinerated by a lightning bolt that flash-fried him in an instant.
"What?" The author asked. " I hate Harry Potter!"
Deadbeard merely shrugged before turning back to his nap.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The mimic leaned by one of the ship's walls, staring at the figure of Deadbeard. He was currently trying to tie up a pile of bricks, and wasn't having too much success at it. "Maybe if you let go of your sword." He suggested.
Deadbeard reacted to this suggestion with the same outrage that was normally reserved for someone discovering that they'd been played the sucker by the main villain for throughout the whole adventure, something that seemed to occur in every single RPG that came out on major consoles to date. After chasing the Mimic around the ship for the better part of an hour, the two of them collapsed, exhausted, on the ship's deck.
Just then, a strange clanging noise was heard. Sitting up, Deadbeard peered cautiously around. The ceiling suddenly shook, and a huge, flaming… thing, fell through a gap in it, currently engaged in a life or death battle with a man. On closer inspection, the man was old, and largely clothed in grey. After falling into the water, the two combatants starting stabbing, attacking, and generally beating the shit out of each other.
Then the big demon thing turned and ran up some stairs, while the old grey guy followed, yelling something that seemed vaguely like, "You got my hair wet! I am SO going to kill you, you little piece of-" Then followed a word that Deadbeard had never heard before.
After the two of them had disappeared, Deadbeard still sat there, blinking stupidly. "I need a vacation." He muttered to himself.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"You seem to have tolerance issues. Did you have a troubled childhood?"
"That was about three thousand years ago, dumbkopf. I think I'd have forgotten my childhood by now."
"Then what's with the rag you carry with you to sleep every night?"
"Hey! Don't you go around calling blankie a rag!"
"Blankie?"
"It's MINE! My own! My pre-"
"You finish that line and I'll beat you into a bloody pulp."
"But-"
"Twice."
Deadbeard sat back with a disgruntled sigh. The mimic, however, remained standing, eyes glancing back and forth. "I hear someone coming."
"Impossible." Deadbeard scoffed. "I spent five hundred years creating the trapfest that is Crossbones Isle. To think that any mortal could possibly outwit the multiple puzzles, and to defeat the guardians at the doors, it quite simply-"
"Those were the easiest puzzles in my entire life!" A voice floated down from the stairs.
"Yeah." A second voice replied. "I wonder who'd made such an easy maze."
The mimic raised his eyebrow. "You were saying?"
"Ah, shuddap."
The voices were definitely coming closer now. One of them piped up, sounding slightly harried.
"I think this is a bad idea. We should be searching for She-, um, Saturos and Mernadi. They could be at Venus Lighthouse by now!"
"C'mon, the only reason you want to hurry up is so you can find that God Child girl, right? You've got a crush on her!"
"I do not!"
"Sure, and that photo that you stare at every night's just your master Hammet, huh?"
"You've been spying on me?!"
"Hehehehehe…"
Then, four people emerged from the stairs, staring around, weapons at the ready. From Deadbeard's vantage point, he observed a young blond and a tall redhead arguing with each other. The boy with sapphire eyes, ostensibly the leader of the group, was glancing around warily, sword at the ready. Behind him, a female with gentle eyes and tumbling mass of blue hair raised her rod, keeping a vigilant watch.
"Ooh, travelers!" The mimic remarked. "Why don't you introduce yourself?"
"Fine." Stepping to the bridge that connected the ship to the stairs, he raised his sword, perfectly vertical, in front of him. The four humans immediately got into a fighting stance, various weapons brought up, ready to face the new foe that awaited them.
"Avast, me hearties!" Deadbeard roared. He reserved his piratical speech for strangers, and these youngsters definitely counted as such. "Shiver me timbers, and keelhaul me… uh, dammit, what was that line again?" As you might guess, considering he hadn't seen another living thing other than the mimic for three millennia, he was slightly rusty in the piratey speech area.
The leader of the group, the one with the sapphire eyes, lowered his sword, looking a bit confused. "Um… who are you?"
Deadbeard sighed. Man, he sucked as a villain. He couldn't even intimidate teenagers anymore. Dang. "I'm, uh, Deadbeard. And I'm the captain of this ship. What are you landlubbers here for?"
Isaac shrugged. "Dunno. We rode this weird pink sandstorm here. And when we found this place, we decided to go in. Lot's of scary monsters, and stuff."
Deadbeard rolled his eyes. Great. These humans had also killed his exotic animal collection. "Look, if you've got no further business here, would you mind leaving?"
"Actually," The redhead began. "According to this guide I bought in Tolbi, we're supposed to beat you up and get a weird vest thingGAHHHHH!!!" He was interrupted by an icy comet that landed on his head, knocking him out.
"I SAID, would you mind leaving?" Deadbeard asked, none too gently. The leader rolled his eyes.
"Fine. I think Ivan wants us to go back to finding that Sheba, too." Raising his hand, he cast Retreat and disappeared.
Deadbeard walked over to his usual spot on the deck and flopped down. 'Well, that was weird."
"I agree."
"Hey, I'm bored."
"Whoop-dee doo. What do you expect me to do about it?"
"Well, we're still outta Doritoes…"
"Fine, I'll go buy them. But only if you come with me. Deal?"
"Deal. Let's go."
"Oh, and let's grab that new handheld entertainment thingamajiggy too."
"What was it called? The Game Boy Advance?"
"Yeah, that one. And let's grab Megaman Battle Network."
"Yeah, I heard the game rocks."
"You know what would be funny?"
"What?"
"If they made a game of us, and showed stuff happening around Crossbones Isle."
"That's dumb."
"Yeah, guess it wasn't exactly a bright idea…"
And the two… living things left the cavern, secretly wondering about what life had in store for them.
Probably something involving hockey sticks and lots of paint.
Whatever.
