"The captain said no! Now sit back down before I keelhaul you like the scurvy dog you are!" came a high-pitched voice just out of Michael's view.
Michael looked back up in annoyance at his attacker before turning to Hammie. "All right, who the bloody hell just earned themselves an ass-whuppin?!
Hammie turned to see a smiling, petite woman waving to him in front of a seven-foot tall grimacing blue man. "Okay, not that I'm complaining, but who are you?
Jude would gravitate from the captain's closet to the first mate's room, the former for clothes the latter to compare his image in a mirror to a poster of himself on the first mate's wall. Doc was busy getting acquainted with the old captain's private liquor cabinet since Takashi had holed himself up in the kitchen, and if anyone who would have had the misfortune of being in there when he entered would have either escaped or been killed as part of Takashi's meditations. Luckily, the only things being butchered in there were fish and vegetables.
The rest of the ship had been scoured from top to bottom, with Hammie looking for materials to repair the ship and Michael looking for combustible items and things to shoot out of cannons. Neither were very picky. So the fact that the entire ship had basically been searched top to bottom and any remaining marines were now in a rowboat and almost out of sight made the origin of two strangers on the deck of the ship a mystery and a concern.
Standing in front was a petite young woman, whose height made her seem younger, but her chest betrayed her age. She stood waving hello with a goofy smile on her face with her pale green hair tied back in a bright yellow ribbon. She wore a simple but feminine green jacket over a striped tank-top, short shorts, and tennis shoes. "Oh, hi Cap'n. I'm Wendy Watterman."
Directly behind her, standing perfectly still and straight with finned, muscular arms folded, was a seven-foot tall blue-skinned man. His arm alone was about as thick as the girl's waist, and the rest of his body was just as ridiculously muscular. His black leather jacket had its sleeves ripped off in the most manly way possible, as if the sleeves had combusted just from the goliath flexing his muscles. One shoulder had a bandage wrapped around it. Not even his polka-dot swim trunks or flip-flops could detract from this epitome of masculinity. When one's eye finally scaled up the blue behemoth's body, they would look straight across the massive, sharp nose which bridged all the way up his forehead into two piercing yellow eyes which glared back in the ultimate 'what are you lookin' at' stare. His long, black hair was tied back in a ponytail around the sharp dorsal fin resembling a sword on his upper back.
"And this..." continued the petite girl, "...is Brody Martin. Nice to meet ya!" She bowed in respect as her every word dripped with a bubbly vigor not often found in the presence of a marauding pirate crew or a hulking fishman, both of which now stared each other off.
After a second, she elbowed the fishman behind her, who reluctantly unfolded his arms and did the same. "Same here, Cap."
"Okay..." Hammie was rendered almost as speechless as Michael, who started twitching, "Well, not to be rude, but how did the two of you get here? We didn't find anyone else aboard the ship."
"Though if ye like we can get ye a head start on the rest of 'em and shoot the both of ye out of a cannon."
"Down, Michael."
"Well, it's like this..." Wendy replied, "Brody and me were kind of on our raft when that big mean La Espada came over and destroyed it."
"La Espada?" Hammie scratched his head in confusion.
"Oh, sorry. La Espada is the local sea king. Kind of looks like a sword, cuts through the ocean like a knife through buttered roast chicken."
Hammie recalled not minutes ago the giant, near two-dimensional sea king with a metal sheen to its scales that near destroyed both ships. "Appropriate name...."
"Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, La Espada hit us head-on and we were sent flying!" Wendy flailed her arms in illustration, "When we finally fell back down, your ship broke our fall. So thanks a bunch for saving us! Cool story, huh?"
"Um, yeah, sure," Hammie wasn't sure he agreed, "If you ignore the part where we couldn't have saved you on purpose, or that this isn't our ship, or how on earth you would've survived the impact..."
"This isn't your ship?" Wendy's eyes sparkled as she looked around in eagerness, "So does this mean that you're, like, pirates or something?"
"Yer damn right, we're pirates ye dumb lass," Michael interjected, still thinking with the bump on his head. "Do ye know what happens when ye bonk a bloodthirsty pirate on 'is head? DO YE?"
"COOL!" Wendy started squealing with fan girl delight and poking her nose around the ship before even registering the rest of Michael's words. "Oh, sorry about the little tap on the head. I was kind of getting caught up in the whole 'tough pirate' bit. It's really fun!"
"FUN?! Listen ye lil'..." Before Michael could start pummeling the girl, the large blue Brody stepped between the two.
"Yo, keep your mitts to yourself unless you want a beatin' ya punk!"
"Oh, so the big, bad fishstick wants to throw down?" Even though Brody towered over Michael, the latter was already cracking his knuckles in preparation for a brawl. Wendy had to stand between them and Hammie had to grab Michael just to keep the two from brawling.
"You don't wanna mess with me! I'm the baddest fish in the sea!" Hammie had never seen a fishman before, but Brody lived up to the tales he'd heard of them. They were known for inhuman strength and a savage, brutal ferocity only found in sea monsters, and Hammie didn't think that his newest passenger was an exception.
"Screw you, I'm a pirate! I eat fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!" While he was restraining Michael from being mauled at the hands of cannon-sized fishman arms, Hammie couldn't help but wonder whether Michael had this same reaction to everything that was larger than him. Luckily, it seemed Brody was easier to talk down than the flailing Michael.
"Now, now, Brody. We have to be nice to our hosts, even if one of them does look like he went bobbing for apples in a grease fire." Wendy gently patted Brody on the chest, and the effect was instantaneous as the fishman's muscles relaxed.
"Easy, Michael. Come on, what would you rather do, break both of your fists on that guy's face or waste ammunition on the open sea?" Michael slowly stopped flailing around, begrudgingly accepting the alternative.
"Fine..." After he was let got by Hammie, Michael went off below deck, "We'll finish this conversation later, fishy."
Hammie sighed in relief, even if the resulting explosions would probably tear apart what was left of the ship.
While Michael stormed off, Wendy sighed in relief and turned to face the captain. "Sorry about that. Brody's kind of... protective."
"But it was Michael-" Hammie was cut off before logic dare intrude.
"Anyway," Wendy interrupted back to her eagerness and energy from before, "So where are we headed, Cap?"
Hammie blinked in confusion. "We?"
"I think what the lady here is tryin' to say," Brody interrupted before Wendy could continue, "is if you would be so kind as to let us on as passengers until we get to a safe harbor, as opposed to having us swim or marooning us on the nearest desert island."
"Oh, well, sure, I guess." Hammie saw no reason not to let the two stay on board, nor did he have any reason to show unkindness. However, he had worse problems than his current passenger load being stuck on a severely damaged marine ship. "But as far as where we're headed to, I'm not exactly sure we're headed anywhere. This ship's in bad shape. I need supplies to make all the necessary repairs, and I'm not sure if we'll even make it to the next island. Hell, I'm not even sure where the nearest island is."
Wendy and Brody looked at each other in confusion. "Don't you have a navigator?"
"Neither my brother nor I know how to navigate a ship. Other than us, there's the Doc, Takashi's a homicidal cook, and Michael says he's a professional cannoneer," As if on cue, one of the cannons below exploded, and for a second Hammie was sure the ship had taken cannon fire from some unseen source. It only took a second to realize Michael had only started venting his frustrations with about twice the necessary gunpowder. "Though I'm pretty sure at this point he's just a sociopath."
"No worries! We can get you to the nearest island no problem!" Wendy quickly climbed up to the aft deck and stood facing the sails. "Ready, Brody!"
In response, Brody went to the steering wheel without even asking the captain first (a detail which gave Hammie some concern) and quickly spun the wheel. The quick turn sent Hammie rolling across the deck, almost throwing him off the ship. "You're going to break the ship in two!"
"Sorry, Cap. Probably shoulda warned ya first. Don't you worry, though, we know what we're doin'." Cupping a hand to his mouth, Brody yelled to Wendy. "Ready!"
Wendy started inhaling as much air as possible, huffing and puffing like she was the big bad wolf. When she absolutely couldn't take in any more air and her skin started to turn purple and blue, only then did she exhale, blowing out a large gust of wind with force not possible for even the strongest man to blow. Yet somehow the petite Wendy was exhaling enough wind to fill the sails of the marine ship. Hammie was jolted once again on the deck, this time from the sheer acceleration of the ship which now had the full force of the winds behind the sails. As Hammie collected himself and stood back up, he looked over the side of his ship to see even more chunks of it missing than before.
"Stop destroying the ship! I need a boat not a pile of driftwood!"
At that exact moment, another cannon with too much gunpowder exploded, only this time the shot broke a new hole in the hull, followed by the cheerful hollering of a celebrating Michael down below. Hammie could only sob in frustration.
Takashi would not have noticed the brief disturbance in his kitchen if it weren't for some of the ingredients and pots being jerked around the room. His own legs had subconsciously adjusted themselves and compensated to maintain their balance so that he would not be disturbed. That was the benefit to this form of meditation. One had to learn to cope with distraction, to block out all offending noise. This wasn't the absolute silence of a temple antechamber; this was a pirate ship, where the rancor of pirates and the explosion of gunpowder were common. Inside this room, however, was different. Mere hours ago this had been the sloppy kitchen of undernourished marines. Now it was his meditation chamber, and it was not to be disturbed by any outsiders. To do so was to tread on sacred ground. To tread on sacred ground was to invite death itself.
So when the door to the kitchen opened and a whistling melody entered the room, Takashi's eyes snapped open in anger, searching for the soon-to-be corpse.
"Don't mind me, I was just going to grab a bite to eat," Skipping across the room was the young Wendy. His hand steadied on the hilt of the sword, his eyes followed Wendy across the kitchen, waiting for the perfect moment to strike and end her life in one clean blow.
But before the execution could be carried out, Takashi had to confirm the intention behind the crime and that the small list of inalienable commandments was yet still posted on the kitchen door. "Did you not read that which was posted outside?"
"The sign about not disturbing something or other? Yeah, I saw it. Don't mind me though, I didn't know when dinner was so I'll just grab a sandwich or something." Wendy smiled as she picked two slices of bread and a little of whatever was available constructing something remotely edible.
The girl's fate was sealed. This would be an easy kill for Takashi, the only challenge of which would be the angle and strength behind the katana's slash for the cleanest kill. The girl's preoccupation with her last meal would give Takashi all the time in the world to perfect this strike and make the girl's demise a fruitful part of his meditation. He inched the sword out of its sheathe, preparing for the ritualistic kill.
"Ooh, are you the crew swordsman?" Wendy beamed in delight and the gleaming metal, "I heard that every pirate crew has their own swordsman in charge of dueling all the other swordsmen they come across." A man with less focus than Takashi would have groaned at her depiction of his duties and talents and quickly corrected her.
"Indeed, and you have interrupted my training," The girl's ignorance of her transgressions had only partially stalled her demise by catching Takashi off-guard. Normally at the sight of his sword the weak would run in terror only to be cut down from behind.
"That's so cool!" Wendy had finished preparing her meal, "Do you mind if I just sit in the corner and watch? I promise I'll be quiet, and I haven't been to a hibachi restaurant in forever."
Now Takashi was confounded by the girl's innocence as well as her praise. Rarely did someone untaught in the ways of the sword show such respect for its practices.
"Pleeease?" Her wide eyes sparkled with admiration.
Takashi's sword hand finally released its grip, "Very well, but you must stay out of the way and do not make any noise." Wendy grinned in delight and moved over to the far corner where she kneeled to politely enjoy her dinner and show.
His focus returned from the intruder, this time his sword's target centered on a trio of multicolored peppers. Focusing his center, concentrating on the target, adjusting the sword's angle so slightly that only a trained eye would notice the difference. Finally, his arm swung out in one quick clean movement, his sword merely a shining streak in the air as it followed. There was no resistance in the swing. In swordsmanship, this either meant missing the target or, in this case, as each of the peppers fell apart in half from the same angle, a perfect clean hit. Takashi ritualistically returned the sword to its sheathe just as the pepper halves fell apart again, this time into diced bits. A perfect blow.
"WOW! That was amazing!" Wendy who somehow managed to scarf down a large sandwich without so much as a crunch, clapped enthusiastically at the end of what she considered a wonderful trick, "Do you have any sort of cool swordsman title?"
Takashi found it difficult to punish someone so innocent yet respectful of the way of the sword, so instead he found himself answering her question. "I am known as the Iron Chef Takashi Nakamura."
"Cool! What else can you do with that sword?"
Takashi once again could not help but be obliged to answer her question on the meat for tonight's dinner.
A door swung open and the Doc, leaning on the door frame and the sledgehammer dubbed "Annie", which he was now using as a cane, stumbled over to where Michael was arranging cannons and gunpowder in some destructive version of dominoes.
"Thought ye were gonna go drink yerself to sleep for the rest of our lil' voyage."
"Meh, between the marines, the explosions, and the capsizing, I'll be content to remain conscious but wasted." His hammer thumped against the ground with each step as Doc limped over close to Michael and started speaking in hushed tones, "Besides, I wanted to ask you something."
"Shoot." The rumbling of a cannon Michael pulled across the room to the perfect angle briefly interrupted the conversation.
"What the hell are you pulling?" As he leaned in closer, quickly scanning the room for any of the others, Doc suddenly went from relaxed and wasted to frustrated and sober.
Michael only chuckled in response. "Ye'll have to be more specific. I do quite a bit around here of questionable morality and judgment."
"You know what I'm talking about. It's one thing for the lot of us to sign on to some amateur pirate crew for our kicks, but forcing some kid off the street without a mark against his name to take the title? Our careers with established pirate crews are short enough without making complete greenhorn strangers start up piracy."
"Oh, Doc, ye make it sound like the good Cap'n Hammie's fate was all our doin'."
"Well, we did get him arrested."
Doc of course referred to his, Michael's and Takashi's first meeting with Hammie and Jude. Back on the last island, the three of them had been intercepted in a bar by an entire platoon of marines. The resulting explosions ended up hurling the three pirates on top of two bystanders, who in the confusion were arrested with the pirates. The commanding officer at the time, a rat-faced captain, could care less about the false arrests and, blinded with rage, would have sent the lot of them to prison for life or even executed them right there. Some quick thinking and one quicker jailbreak later, one in which Hammie and Jude had no choice but to participate in, and the five of them were sailing away in the first vessel they could find: a pitiful little trading schooner whose owner was screaming obscenities from the dock as he watched his ship sail off into the distance.
"Aye, and we also got him back out in prison. Ye surely know as well as I do that the poor kid would have rotted for crimes he didn't commit."
"So that justifies forcing him to be a pirate captain? We could have just taken him hostage or, hell, just let the two of them go. They could sort the rest out and not get arrested again. Instead, they both have breaking out of jail, resisting arrest, stealing a vessel, attacking a marine ship (during parlay I might add), and finally stealing said marine ship."
"There were extenuatin' circumstances," Michael shrugged his shoulders in response, "It was unavoidable."
"And now two kids barely old enough to drink are going to rot in prison for the rest of their lives once the marines catch them." Several veins on Doc's forehead bulged in frustration. As heated as his words were, Doc kept his voice low and hushed.
Michael clutched his chest in feigned emotional agony. "Yer words sting me, they really do, Doc," Michael finally paused in his pyrotechnics setup to approach Doc and draped an arm around Doc's shoulder, managing to be simultaneously completely comforting and sarcastic at the same time, "How little faith could ye have in yer shipmate who stuck with ye through thick and thin all these years even when the ship we sailed on and the crew we sailed with changed with the tides? Ol' Mikey has bigger plans in mind."
Even though Doc knew that these insights of Micheal's never ended well, he knew there would be little to nothing he could do to stop it. "All right I'm listening."
"Well Takashi, you and I have had rather unfortunate luck with employers as of late. We used to be feared pirates on the Grand Line. The marines feared us and other pirates respected us. But then it seems we kept getting stuck on pirate crews for which we were overqualified."
"You mean how we were in some way responsible for either sinking the ship in question or getting the rest of the crew slaughtered or captured, or how about the time you slept with one of the captain's daughters and cheated on her with the other."
"Details, details," Michael's hand mimicked his dismissive attitude, "The point being is that somehow we found ourselves scraping lower and lower in the barrel until we somehow got from the Grand Line to the North Blue Sea."
"Yea, so?"
"So? We could barely find pirates of any real comparable caliber to ours on the Grand Line, and here we are stuck in a calmer, gentler, more peaceful sea." The words calmer, gentler, and peaceful were spat out with such a venomous hatred as if Michael was uttering a curse. "On top of that, our names have become curses to other pirates, what with our reputation for causin' mischief an' all, so anyone worth their salt won't hire us, and anyone not worth their salt ain't gonna get us back to the Grand Line anyway. What real chance do we have of finding some illustrious pirate crew not only to fit our standards, but to get us back into the Grand Line?
"So I figure, if we can't find someone to employ us, why not make our own Cap'n?" At this point Michael started getting more animated, excited at this prospect of his. The fact that Michael actually believed what he was saying to be a good idea only served to horrify Doc more, "Start from scratch, toughen him up, get him goin' on the path to piracy as much as we can. After all, with as many captains as we've been under, who better to cultivate a truly great pirate captain than the three of us?"
"Michael," Doc's face was no longer red from anger. Instead he just wore a sad frown as he looked on with pity. "We've known each for a long time. So believe me when I say this is truly the dumbest idea you've ever had," Swiveling Michael around to face him, Doc stared eye-to-eye with Michael, "Ever."
"Oh, screw you. Ye know I'm a bloody genius."
"No. You're not. You're an idiot and this proves it. That kid will never make it to the Grand Line. Hell, he could barely get from one island to the next."
"All right then, put yer money where yer mouth is."
Doc cocked one eyebrow. "A bet?"
"Ye betcher ass. If Hammie can get us to the Grand Line in anythin' short of a pine box, ye owe me 10 rounds of drinks."
Doc folded his arms as he leaned on his walking stick/sledgehammer in thought, but the answer was clear as he could hardly resist the possibility of free booze. "Fine. I say that whatever boat he's on will sink before we can get to the Grand Line."
"Deal." With that, Michael lit the fuse on one of the cannons and both Doc and Takashi ran to the other side of the room behind some barrels for cover, as the firing cannon set off a chain reaction producing the kind of results you'd expect from launching fireworks into indoor barrels of gunpowder.
"I hate you," Doc grumbled, while Michael grinned widely in response.
To Be Continued