AN: You know, I'd entirely forgotten how fun and easy this story is to write compared to some projects I could mention. Please enjoy this chapter about pirates.
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Chapter Thirteen
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The tribe had her surrounded practically the very moment she managed to perceive them.
One moment she was walking along a vast, empty expanse of absolute nothingness—then a blurry spot on the unhorizon appeared, and by the time she'd taken another step, she'd entered their territory. They swarmed.
Aline carefully moved one of the spearheads away from her face, only to find herself faced with another one. "Uhm," she enunciated.
"You're our enemy, ain't you?" one of the tribeswomen said. She, like the others, was draped in ragged garments of pages, all of them full of drawings of two or more people…engaged with one another.
"Looks like," said another.
"I hear they have an underdog now."
"You think this is her?" another said, scrunching her eyes. "But, first mate, I somehow thought underdogs were all boys…"
"Oh, that is so sexist," a fifth said. "And maybe ze is a boy. Have you asked zir gender identity? Have you? Huh?"
"I am seriously starting to regret we let you into this thing!" the fourth snapped. "When you said you were in our ship I didn't expect all this…social justice to come with it. What kind of crazy universe are you from?"
The fifth started to reply, fiddling with her glasses, when the unquestionable leader said, "Friends. Eyes on the prize."
All attention immediately returned to Aline. "Yes, Captain," several said in unison.
"So can we take her back to camp and boil her alive and eat her?" a new one said eagerly.
"No, bosun, that won't be necessary. I think we can just kill her."
"Wait!" Aline shrieked. "Why would I walk right into you if I thought you'd kill me?"
"Maybe you're stupid," said the cannibalistic one, helpfully.
"Or a spy," the first mate suggested.
"No! I legitimately ship…" Aline cast her eyes desperately around the shipper's clothing, and guessed. "Zutara. Yes. In fact, I met Zutara. That's right. What do you say to that?"
The shippers' eyes narrowed as one.
"We like Kataang," the captain hissed. "Oh, you are walking the plank so hard."
"Wait," said the shipper who had spoken fifth. "Hold on. I thought we were a racist 'tribe' stereotype. What's all this about captains and bosuns and plank walking?"
"What does it matter!" the captain snapped.
"Well, we can't very well make her walk the plank if there is no plank. I mean, that's just silly. Why don't we have a plank, anyway?"
"I…" The captain slowly raised a pontificating finger and then lowered it.
"Probably someone wasn't creative enough to think of the whole 'shipping' metaphor in advance," snorted the fifth shipper.
"Or it was recognized well in advance that it was a tired, stupid metaphor that doesn't bear repeating, cabin girl," sniffed the first mate.
"I can't very well be a cabin girl if we don't have an actual cabin on a boat,can I?" the cabin girl said testily, banging her spear on the unground. "Nor can we make the prisoner walk the plank!"
"Fine, then!" the captain snarled. "We're pirates now! There!"
And then they were pirates.
The ground beneath Aline's feat pitched and swayed. She stood on her tiptoes and saw over the heads of her captors that the vast flat nothing had turned to a vast, wavy nothing. She was on a boat.
The shippers around her were still dressed in ragged scraps of fanart, but cut more…piratey. A few had obtained hooks and eye patches. The eye patches looked particularly silly on the girls who wore glasses.
"Actually," the cabin girl said, furrowing her brow, "we don't really need to be pirates. We can just be any people with a boat. Like fishermen, or merchants, or naval officers, or—"
The captain clonked her over the head with the hilt of her cutlass. "We're pirates," she said flatly, adjusting her overlarge pirate hat.
"Aye-aye, cap'n," the cabin girl muttered acidly.
"Right then," the captain said crisply, turning back to Aline. "Now, little spy, you will walk off the plank, and to assist you, we will wave our weapons at you, which, you may see, are conveniently no longer spears, but good, notched cutlasses. That'll learn you for shipping the wrong thing."
"And what happens to me if I go off the plank?" Aline said, eying the churning sea of nothing.
"Not sure, actually," the captain replied. "There's lots of theories. It'll be absolutely fascinating to find out."
As was proper, the shippers began waving their cutlasses at Aline, who stumbled towards the plank.
"Wait!" she shouted, barely a foot from the edge.
"What now?" the captain growled.
"What if…what if I told you a story?" Aline said wildly. "A really, really good Kataang story. With…kissing in it."
"Don't listen to her, captain," the cabin girl urged. "The Scheherazade Gambit is such a shitty, boring gambit, and it almost always works in one way or another."
The rest of the shippers shushed her. There was silence but for the howling winds of the sea, which had absolutely not been present before the captain decided that her ship was pirates. Almost the entire ship was sorely tempted.
"How many chapters?" the captain said suspiciously.
"As many as you like!" Aline squeaked.
"And it better be really well written," the first mate threatened.
"Absolutely!"
"Alright, then," the captain said, after a short commiseration with the rest of her ship. The shippers all settled down in a circle around the plank, cross-legged and intent. "You may begin."
Aline didn't hesitate. She reached deep into her hoodie pocket until her fingers brushed one of the Writer's Blocks she'd stolen, and instantly, a floodgate in her mind opened wider.
Aline began to speak…
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The next address wasn't even a fucking address. It was just 'North Pacific Gyre, Pacific Ocean, Earth," next to a longitude and latitude. How was D supposed to read longitude and latitude? She might be a spirit of imagination as old as humanity itself, but that didn't mean she knew everything. Before the falling-out, she'd been busy, and after that, it had only been a few centuries until computers had been invented and saved her from the necessity of ever having to figure it out for herself.
And D wasn't entirely sure what a gyre was, but she did have an inkling that on most Earths, it covered rather a lot of the Pacific Ocean.
Oh, well. She opened a plot hole and guessed.
She landed ass-first on garbage, and not water, as could have been reasonably expected.
She stood up, her boots crunching the debris. She looked around, hands on her hips.
As far as the eye could see, garbage.
No sign of Paul.
D stuck her hands in her pockets and began to walk.
The sun beat down. It was weird how she could actually feel it, in the realer words. D shrugged her coat off. She hadn't done that in a few decades. The feel of the sun on her skin was…weird. She didn't think she liked it.
It didn't occur to her once that she shouldn't be able to stand on an island of floating garbage.
As per the Coyote Principle, that was for the best.
A few hours later, she found him, perched on a small mountain of plastic bottles.
She climbed to the top and sat down next to him.
Atop the pile of human refuse, they watched the sunset.
He was smiling placidly, apparently oblivious to D's presence.
He had once been disgusting, covered in boils and pustules, riddled with gangrene and decay, hair falling out in clumps, a mouth half-full of black, rotten teeth. Not only did grass wither and die when he passed by, whole trees shuddered and shed their leaves en masse before bursting into flame. He'd carried every known disease, and again as many unknown diseases, on his person at all times. Sometimes in little bottles. Usually on his direct person.
Now he looked like an ordinary blondish young man in jeans and a white t-shirt. He didn't even have acne.
D suppressed a sob. "My god, but what's happened to us?"
Paul reached up and patted her on the shoulder. His touch didn't make her shudder in disgust, not even a little bit. And that was wrong.
"You know, the universe is ending," she told him unhappily.
Paul looked faintly concerned.
"I was going to suggest you join the strike team to stop it," she sighed. "Stupid of me."
Paul gave a vague smile.
D pulled her legs up and folded her arms on her knees. "But I guess I'm glad I got to see you, a last time. Even if we are just…shells, now."
Paul nodded slightly.
"This was a mistake." She stood and opened a sickly yellow plot hole. Paul regarded it with mild curiosity.
She put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, and jumped in.
She reappeared on a park bench, somewhere. This world had less reality in it than the last. A pleasant feeling of ephemeral vagueness settled over her, masking some of the sharpness in her chest.
She sat there for what felt like a long time, lost in millennia of worthless memories.
"We're all going to die," she said finally, to the hearing of none but the narration. She sighed and added, muttering, "And I should know."
And she did. She did.
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Aline spoke for hours, until her tongue was exhausted and her mouth was dry and parched. Her voice was crackling, barely above a whisper, but that only seemed to excite the shippers more. They were all leaning in, rapt, even the cabin girl.
They hadn't even let her leave the plank.
A part of her was tempted to end the story quickly, so she would be allowed to go and drink, even as she knew that water wasn't part of the Hub, and if she was thirsty, it was only because a storyteller speaking for hours ought to be thirsty. Or so she suspected. She had gotten the hang of this universe enough to at least guess.
But it was a small and inconsequential part. Most of Aline was in the thrall of the strange effects of the Writer's Blocks, and that part would never betray the story in the slightest way. And so she spoke.
Or rather, the story spoke through her.
Even if it was just a shipping fanfic about cartoon characters.
Which, Aline was thinking as her mouth told the story, was really kind of silly.
Midway through the buildup to the climactic finale, Aline was interrupted by canon fire.
The spell broke. Her fingers released the Writer's Block, and she was free to cough and breathe.
The piratical shippers leapt up in a chaos.
"No!" a few shrieked.
"Oh, god, I can't go to the Hanging Cliffs," one said, breathing erratically. "I can't, I'll never survive, oh god, oh god—"
"My spyglass!" the captain demanded.
"What do you need a spyglass for!" the cabin girl shrieked. "They're right there!"
The first mate paused to hit the cabin girl with the spyglass before handing it to the captain.
"Shit," the captain informed her crew, looking through it. "We're in for a fight."
"We know," the cabin girl muttered. "It's right there. The ship's name is written on the damn boat."
"What's going on?" Aline quavered hoarsely.
One of the pirates nearer her squinted in hatred and hissed, "Zutarians."
"What are you waiting for, bilge rats!" the captain was shouting. "Man the canons!"
"They're back at the trench," Aline barely prevented herself from saying as the cabin girl protested the use of the verb 'man' in a company made up entirely of women.
The other ship approached, broadside, still firing. The pirates on the other ship looked pretty much the same as the ones on this ship, hooting and hollering and shrieking threats—but would they be any kinder to Aline than the Kataangers? After all, she hadn't told them a story.
And then there was little time to think these things through, because a pitched sea battle was occurring and Aline hadn't the faintest idea how to survive one of those. She hit the deck.
Which was good, because if she hadn't, a cannonball would likely have rendered her midsection significantly emptier.
Aline whimpered and scooted away on her belly, hoping for a lifeboat.
But with all the flying sharp, explosive material in the air, there was no opportunity to lift her head and see what was going on. She moved forward using her elbows.
"When will you upstarts realize you already lost?" she heard the captain shout.
"When you delusionals realize we control most of the sea!" the fainter voice of the other ship's captain snarled back.
"We're not supposed to be fighting anymore!" one of the panicked shippers said. "There's a war on, don't you remember?"
"I will never collude with Zutarians," the captain announced, and fired a canon.
This is so stupid, Aline thought, sobbing slightly, and because her head was down and she was sobbing, she didn't realize that she had gotten underfoot of the helmswoman—
—who was too busy steering the ship to notice Aline—
—who was then tripped over by the helmswoman as the ship pitched suddenly—
—resulting in the helmswoman falling gracelessly while still desperately grabbing onto the steering wheel, which spun wildly—
—and since this was not a real sea battle, or a real-approaching sea battle, and was, in fact, a sea battle taking place in a realm of pure imagination, the ship behaved exactly as someone who knew nothing about ships would behave, and summarily veered sharply left, and crashed bow-first right into the port side of the S.S. Zutara.
Screaming ensued. The ships began to sink.
And that was how our hero singlehandedly won the three-way sea battle of the S. S. Zutara, the H.M.S. Kataang, and Aline.
"Oh," she said quietly, clinging to a mast to keep her feet as the H.M.S. Kataang splintered and broke, "shit."
The crew, panicking, was realizing that the ship could not be saved, and as such their options were now to: 1. abandon ship, and 2. take revenge on the responsible party.
Twelve pairs of murderous eyes turned on Aline.
The edge of the ship was all the way over there, but the main mast was right here. Aline climbed for her life.
The enraged pirates followed her up. Her one advantage was that, in their furious resolve to get to Aline, they frenzied, stepping on and knocking back each other as they climbed.
Sobbing, panicking, the adrenaline giving her the core strength to climb she never could have attained in ordinary life, Aline made it to the crow's nest.
And there she was trapped.
The pirates were still coming.
She tugged at hanks of her hair and tried desperately to think as the ship sank further, pitching on its side, an effect which she did not care for at all.
What did she have in her pockets?
The Writer's Blocks.
What else?
She felt sure there was something that could have helped her…but she couldn't remember it quite at the moment.
She had nothing but the Writer's Blocks, then. She had to use them.
The fastest of the pirates were halfway up.
She snatched one up, wheeled her arm back, and threw it downwards with all her might.
It left an inky trail of blackness as it descended. When it landed, the effect was immediate. A hole of darkness opened up in the universe and rapidly expanded. The shippers didn't even have time to exclaim in surprise as their ship was eaten up underneath them, and they fell into the darkness. The hole expanded, swallowing the whole ship, and the other ship, its crew lost to oblivion. It ate a little bit of sea, and stopped, encountering nothing new in those directions to destroy.
And then it started to move upwards.
Clinging to a disembodied—disenshipped?—mast, white nothing above, black, expanding nothing below, Aline considered her life choices.
But not for very long.
She scooted up the remaining distance of the mast, until she was clutching the very top, considering the inky blackness coming for her.
Oh, well, she thought.
The blackness ate the last thing in the vicinity, the mast, and Aline had nothing left to hold, and so, fell.
She closed her eyes and descended almost gracefully into the maw.
And then landed, graceless and unharmed, on the white unground of an unidentified, unremarkable section of Hub.
Aline rubbed the bridge of her nose. "This shit again," she muttered.
Suddenly, something fell out of nothing and hit the unground, rolling a few feet before collapsing with a soft clink. It was a large, distinctly piratey compass. It must have survived the nothing. Aline wondered if she'd been the only survivor of the Block. She didn't like the idea that she'd consigned dozens of realish people to nonbeing.
She was distracted from her dawning guilt when the compass suddenly grew little legs and sped off away from her.
Instinctively, she dived and grabbed it. The way things happened here, the damn thing probably pointed to some new and horrible attraction of the Hub, but at least a compass would point somewhere, and it wasn't getting away from her.
Startlingly, the compass squeaked, "Lemme go!"
"No," Aline said stubbornly, gripping the compass tighter as it squirmed.
"I need to get outta here!" the compass said, waving its little legs about.
Aline paled. "Why? Is something coming?"
"No!" the compass wailed. "That's the problem! There's nothing happening here at all!"
"I'm something!" Aline protested.
"Whatever! Let me go!"
"Why are you in such a hurry?" she demanded. "What's your problem?"
"I'm the Narrative Direction!" the compass squealed. "I need to get the story going before the plot meanders away into a bunch of stupid sidequests! I've been imprisoned for the last couple of chapters and I'm late!"
Oh, I see, Aline thought. This is a dumb Alice in Wonderland reference.
"This joke doesn't make sense, you know," she groused. "I'm already down the rabbit hole!"
The compass just squealed louder.
"Wait," she said, "Did you say narrative direction? You're going to where things are happening?"
"Yes! Yes! But I can't do that until you let me go!"
Aline let it go. It scampered away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake, and Aline, on gawky long teenage legs, bounded after it.
It was time for this nonsense to end.