Chapter 28 - Don’t stop us now

“Give us our captain back”, said a professional-looking woman. She looked to be a fairly young human adult with glasses and straight brown hair, and was apparently Seras’s quartermaster.

“No”, wheezed Victor as he sat down pitifully.

“Why not?”, said the woman. Her name was apparently Grace - a typical human name that was one of those old traditions passed down the generations.

“Because she tried to kill us. Give us your treasure”, said Silk curtly. Since Henry was recovering from his own wounds, she took the job of bandaging up Victor’s arm in a cast and making sure it set correctly.

“What makes you think we have any?”, countered Grace. She scribbled some legal gobbledygook onto the parchment on the table between them, the uneven wood making the writing somewhat deformed.

“You are a bunch of pirates. Of course you have treasure.”, Silk snorted.

“We steal food, booze, and other amenities from trading ships, like all pirates do. Unless you want some rare spices or illegal pharmaceuticals, I don’t think you are going to be interested in anything.”, responded Grace.

Henry, thankfully, was too busy being unconscious in the medical section of the ship to hear about the possible alcohol acquisition.

“Show us where you keep your valuables, and we take what we want. Then your captain gets to live.”

Grace thought for a moment, then nodded and said one final thing: “you know, sometimes I think you are more piratelike than us.”.

With that, she showed them the ship’s “vault”. Similar to how Grace had described it, there were no gold trinkets or crystal baubles. There were, however, weapons. Most of them were useless, but bundo picked out a kitchen knife that hummed oddly for himself. Near the back of the room were a couple of odd ones - a cup made out of a skull oozing blood out of the eye sockets, a six sided die, and a map. Upon confirming that the first two were cursed or useless respectively, Victor snatched the map and looked over it.

His eyes widened as he silently handed the map over to Levi, then Silk. Bundo was off swinging his kitchen knife and making wooshing noises and as a result did not notice the hubbub.

“I think we’ll be taking this”, said levi. With that, they walked back the way the came out of the enormous ship, snapped the gangplank in half, and started their engine. As they were leaving, Selas’s unconscious body was hurled at enormous speeds at the mast of the enemy ship, damaging it and leaving her imapled body flopping on the ground unceremoniously.

Grace sighed and went to work organizing everyone so they could sail once more.

***

“Haha! Diamonds! I rule!”, shouted Victor bombastically. Everyone else at the hexagonal table winced somewhat, with the board having equally hexagonal tiles. Instead of the usual dinner fare, they instead decided to play their favorite board game: Cavern Crafters.

“Remind me how the rules of this newfangled game go again?”, whispered henry to bundo. Bundo piped up from his high chair to explain the rules.

“Basically, Friend Henry, the goal of the game is to survive for as long as possible. You have these magnetic polygons you can stick to each other that you can draw randomly based on what you mine via a dice roll, and can attach these to one another on the board. You can then use these mineral tokens you obtain to get better tools, weapons and armor to improve survival against monsters and other players.”

Suddenly, with catlike reflexes, one of the structures that was on the board was swiped down by Levi, whose figurine had placed a red and black block near the foundation of one of Victor’s massive towers.

“Oh come on! Really?!” complained Victor. “I spent so much time getting that stuff.”

“This always happens”, said Silk as she moved her figurine into monster territory. The mountainous region had several skeletons and armored statuettes that were knocked off due to Silk’s character build. “Victor builds some dumb machine that exploits the scoring system and gets all the mineral tokens in the set so no one else can have them, I kill any monsters that spawn, and Levi tries to survive and wait for one of us to kill ourselves.”

Bundo’s figurine was off near the center of the board planting some crops, with every “harvest” granting bundo some more tokens on his side of the board. Just then, Silk’s figurine was placed directly next to his and bumped against his lightly. Bundo scribbled some numbers on his sheet, sighed, and took his character off the board.

“I’m guessing silk killed you?”, assumed Henry.

Bundo nodded. The only times he won was when everyone else died of starvation after they ran out of edible food. The elf’s playstyle was more focused on gathering rare ingredients and plant tokens to make healing items than getting minerals or optimizing combat.

Victor’s figurine, upon seeing what had happened, waddled over to a pool of lava and was pushed in by it’s owner, with all of the tokens going into the discard pile. Upon seeing this, Silk’s face darkened.

“Really? Now I can’t get any ores and minerals. What is wrong with you?”, she inquired.

Victor shrugged and went off to his room. Now, it was only Silk and Levi left. Just as they started to make their next moves, a massive thump resounded as the entire ship shook. Everyone but Victor immediately went out to the deck to see what caused it.

“What the heck is that?”, said henry.