“Where did you get this…?” Azor asked, turning the pistol over in his hand.

“It’s from her birth parents! Anyway, w-where’s Pitch?” Lucy asked.

“Somewhere…” he replied absently. “Can you use it?” he asked Dreadlilocks.

“Um…not really,” she answered. “…Can you?”

Azor raised his arm and fired three shots into the air. They darted upwards like shooting stars, vanishing harmlessly into the night sky.

“…You need magic to operate items like these,” he said. “They’re very rare, and very dangerous…if you can’t use it, I suggest you destroy it. There is no point in carrying a weapon that will only become effective when it is taken from you.”

“I know…I mean, I guess so,” said Dreadli. “But it’s…kind of like a special treasure to me. Like Lucy said, it’s from my parents, and I’ve had it all my life and I’d really like to keep it. Please…may I have it back?”

Reluctantly, Azor placed it in her waiting hands. “…Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.

~~

After that, the trio swapped stories regarding how they’d gotten to where they were. Azor told about leaving Pitch to rest on the beach, and Lucy explained that they had mistaken Azor for a phantasm, to which he took more than a little offense.

“We don’t look anything alike,” he spat. “You must be blind…”

“B-but you do look a little alike! Besides, it’s hard to see in the dark…” Lucy protested.

“Never mind about that,” said Dreadli. “Tell him about the Navigator.”

At Dreadli’s suggestion, Lucy started their story over a little further back in time: when they first awakened in that mysterious tropical locale, they found themselves much closer to civilization than Pitch and Azor had. In fact, they woke up right in the middle of the little seaside town, surrounded by its curious inhabitants.

They ended up telling the people about their quest to reach the moon, and one— the old woman who invited them to stay with her— suggested they speak to someone called the Navigator.

The Navigator lived out on the cape, by a mystical lighthouse that had burned for a thousand years. They said he held all sorts of knowledge about traveling on the seas, and was more than willing to help those who came to see him…but very few did, on account of his strangely disfigured body.

“Th-they say he looks like a sea monster, like a giant fish,” Lucy explained. “With big eyes and lots of teeth. And he d-doesn’t have any arms, but he has feet. And a tail…!”

“I just hope he’s still there,” said Dreadli. “They say sometimes he leaves for months at a time, helping lost sailors and things like that…I don’t know how they can all stay away from him just because he looks scary. He sounds so nice.”

“I think he sounds like a fool,” said Azor. “’Nice’ monsters don’t tend to live very long.”

“But you’re a nice monster. At least, to us.”

“And look where it’s gotten me. If I’d just killed the three of you when I found you, I wouldn’t be suffering through all this now…”

“You’ve had plenty of chances to kill us since then, but you n-never took them,” said Lucy. “Why don’t you just admit that y-you like us and we’re your friends?”

“I would rather be hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

The three walked through the jungle and back to the beach, where they found Pitch sleeping peacefully in the sand. She slept so deeply they found it difficult to wake her, and at Lucy’s insistence Azor carried her back to the seaside village.

It took most of the night, but at long last the four of them were reunited, and ready to begin the last leg of their journey.