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The Decline of Scottish Sea Power

Adventure No. 14:

(Part 2)

"Let Me Tell You About My Boat"

Michael, increasingly manic: Anyone can buy a boat... but a real captain knows his ship like it was a woman.

He smiles smugly.

Michael: And I've never gotten any complaints.

He gestures towards the faux steering wheel Dwight is standing behind.

Michael: Over here we have the, uh... the front part of the boat. The "pointy part."

His smile twitches lamely.

----

Schrute-ish eyes sailed over the black, brackish surf for any sign of the great, pallid corpse of the legendary beast his grandfather had told him of.

In his heart, Dwight had always known he was a hero. The circumstances of his life had proven that time and time again. But this was his chance to become more than a hero. This was his chance to become a... bigger hero.

"There's nothing out there."

Dwight turned to face his naysayer. "Der Gelbe Hai is out there, Oscar." he hissed. "The Schrute family has been hunting it for centuries."

Oscar looked at him seriously. "You've been hunting it for centuries?"

"Yes," Dwight said with absolute certainty.

Oscar licked his lip subtly before continuing. "In a lake that was built in 1924?"

Dwight was scoobied for a moment, but quickly recovered with a flawless retort. "Shut up!"

Oscar couldn't help but snicker.

"That Shark is out there!" Dwight insisted. "And I will be the one the find that Shark and I will the one to slay that Snark..."

Oscar smiled. "'Snark?'"

"I meant 'shark,'" Dwight floundered limply.

Oscar nodded. "Right."

----

Michael: This is the rear, uh, part of the ship... sort of the "butt" of the boat.

He cracks a forced smile.

Michael: It looks like Jim and Karen are out there right now... I wouldn't want to interrupt them...

Andy, rushing past: I'll take care of it, Cap'n.

Michael: No, wait...

Andy, raising an assuring hand: It's cool. I've got it.

----

Despite the circumstances, there was always something about being on a ship that Karen responded to on a very elemental level. Maybe it was the memories of her child, maybe it was genetic memory, but there was just something about the saltwater air that made her feel like all was right in the world.

She looked over at Jim and almost forgot for a moment that the vessel they were floating on had been seized by an untrained madman.

"So, the guy who used to own this boat..." Karen began coyly.

"Captain Jack?" Jim broke in.

"Yeah..." Karen replied, "was that his real name?" she asked.

Jim shrugged. "I don't know," he admitted. "I think maybe when your name is Jack you're kind of driven to become the captain of something."

Karen smiled, at that moment she was felt completely at peace for the first time in months.

So, of course, it was then that Andy wedged himself directly in between Jim and Karen. "Imagine the sexual diseases Captain Jack Sparrow would have had," he speculated.

"Um..." Jim replied for lack of anything else to say.

"I mean as a Seventeenth Century pirate based Keith Richards?" Andy laughed. "He'd be lucky if it didn't fall right off."

If there was one thing that Karen had been hoping to dynamite out of this almost entirely insoluble situation, it was a romantic moment or two with Jim.

Oddly enough, she didn't find conversations about venereal diseases conducive to creating such moments.

"Yeah," she said as if in a dream.

In a desperate attempt to drive Andy off this line of discussion and thus hopefully salvage the last remaining debris of the evening, Jim asked the question everyone in the office had been avoiding. "So, Andy... how did Anger Management go?"

A disquieting quiet settled on Andy for a moment. Karen looked at Jim with the blank wide eyes of hopeless terror. Jim wished he shot himself rather than broach the subject. "It changed the way I see the world, Tuna," he said with a warmth that just made Jim feel like their were there were large insects scuttling about just below his skin.

"Really?" he asked, not knowing why he had given Andy the opening to continue. Karen didn't seem to know, either.

Andy nodded. "Before I was just so bottled up and full of rage... but now I feel like I can really express myself..." He smiled like he was about to devour Jim whole. "...Like I can really say how I feel."

Jim nodded, wondering if he could swallow his own tongue to prevent himself from saying anything so wrong ever again.

Andy turned to face Karen. "I love you, Kare Bear."

All the work Jim had put into his relationship with Karen and now she was going to murder him.

Andy looked Jim square in the eye as if he were trying to decide whether or not to throw a punch. "I love you, Tuna."

"Thank you," Jim croaked, understandably concerned.

Andy flashed a row of glistening Hammerhead fangs and, with the same pent-up hostility that Andy always brought with him said "you too are really my best friends."

It was then that Jim realized Andy was going to kill everyone on the boat.

"Thanks, Andy," he said. "We like you, too."

----

Michael: This is the main dining area of the ship, or... as I like to call it... "the ballroom."

He snickers like a four year old.

Michael, still laughing: See, it's a "ballroom," because...

----

This whole trip had been an exercise in coping with nausea for Angela, in more ways than she cared to enumerate.

Feeling fresh another wave of the sickness cascading within her, she got up from her rickety table and slowly warbled her way across the spinning room, roughly shoving her way through the door.

"Um, excuse me!" Kelly kwerked. Evidently she was the one Angela had just shoved.

"You were in my way," Angela said, knowing that justified everything. "You were blocking the door."

Kelly wrinkled her nose angrily. "You couldn't have squeezed past me?"

"No," she coldly, fighting back the sickness, "I couldn't have."

Kelly recoiled. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means there a millions of women suffering from bulimia in the world..." Angela smiled "...maybe you should think about joining them."

As Kelly ran off sobbing, Angela took a moment to bask in her triumph.

Then she tumbled off to be violently ill for the next forty-five minutes.

Across the room, Pam was proudly attempting to garner any interest whatsoever in her latest finished illustration. "It's Dwight's shark," she explained.

"Oh," Ryan hummed. It wasn't that he was anti-social, there were just times he wanted to be left alone.

"I only had two shades of yellow, so I had to mix in some light browns and grays," she continued, knowing he wasn't listening. "I think it worked, though."

"Absolutely," he agreed without looking. Really, he supposed that was what he was looking for in a woman: someone who would know when he needed to be left alone.

"Ryan!" Kelly cried as she threw herself at him, "you won't believe what Angela just said to me!"

Pam was preparing to disappear to somewhere very far away when she felt herself being tapped on the shoulder.

She turned to face her boss. "Pamcakes, can I speak to you in private?"

That fact that she agreed proved that she had been out to sea too long.

----

Michael: This is where we drive the ship, so... of course this is the perfect place to go when you want to be left alone, because it is always empty.

Pam: Wait... what?

----

Michael stared out the window wistfully.

He'd been doing that almost exclusively seen he'd called Pam into the room fifteen minutes ago and she was getting a bored.

"Did you want something, Michael?" she said finally.

Michael nodded without moving anything below his chin. "I was just... thinking," he said pompously.

"Oh, okay," Pam said as she got up to leave.

Michael held his hand out to indicate she should stay. "Wouldn't it be great to stay out here forever, Pam?" he said in a tone that made her even more uneasy.

"Well..." she tried to think of the most diplomatic way of phrasing her obvious problems with this idea. "It's not really practical." Seeing the hurt expression on his face, she struggled to regroup. "I mean... we're going to run out of food soon, Michael."

Michael looked at her like she was an idiot. "We're floating on food, Pam."

"This isn't a fishing boat, Michael," she pointed out, "we don't have that kind of equipment."

Like most injections of sanity into his life, Michael reacted to his statement with hostility. "Well, I hope your proud of that attitude, Pam, because you just killed your whole crew."

Pam opened her mouth to say something, but simply couldn't decide on what.

----

Michael: This door leads downstairs to the engine room... or whatever.

He indicates a door that does indeed seem like it could lead to an engine room.

Michael: I haven't been down there myself, but Kevin and a few of the warehouse guys are down there keeping this ship afloat.

----

"So, we're trying to get a poker game going on down here," Darryl whispered from the doorway, "and we need one more guy. You in?"

Barring one significant victory, Toby did not consider himself much of a gambler. Of course, on deck the only way to pass an evening open to him was to be the subject of Michael's unjustified and increasing hatred. "Yeah... sure," he said with his usual reluctance.

"Cool," Darryl nodded. Then, after a thought added "But if Mike asks, you were in the Navy."

Toby considered this for a second. "Can I be a Seal?"

Darryl smiled, there was just something he liked about Toby.

----

Michael walked slowly across the sleepy nightworld of his vessel, closing the distance between himself and Dwight, who still stood sentry over the pointy part of the boat.

"Hey, Dwight," he said quietly.

"Yes, Michael?" Dwight shouted with such vigorous loyalty that Michael had to signal him to take it down a few notches.

"How..." Michael struggled for a moment with the words "How long do you think we can survive on the food we have?" he asked as casually as possible. "I mean, it's not that we can't go back to the land, it's just..."

Dwight smiled with broad determination. "You don't have to worry about that, Michael."

For a precious moment, relief washed over Michael like the waves crashing on the rocks. "Really?"

Dwight nodded. "Once I catch Der Gelbe Hai, there'll be enough meat to feed us for months."

Michael collapsed into himself as though he were trapped in some invisible trash compactor. For a moment he had to remind himself of how much worse it would be if he ever went back on the land.

"Hey, Duke," Andy sang as he draped an arm a bit too tightly around Michael's neck, "I know we've had our problems, but I want you to know that I love you more than anyone else in the world."

Michael had never felt less comfortable in his life.

"I couldn't say that on the shore," Andy joked jockishly, "it would mean I was a butt-pirate."

Michael was more than a little grateful when the ship suddenly sherked violently to one side and he was able to slip out of Andy's embrace.

Jim slowly rushed up to his commanding officer. "Hey Michael, I think we hit something," he said with a distinct lack of urgency.

"Der Gelbe Hai!" Dwight shouted as he ran towards the source of the impact.