Midnight Recounts of a Drifter

Yes, I’ll just have water, as usual. Gratias. A-And no “natural flavorings” this time! ..Yes, I understand that it “brightens your night” when you drink it; I just need to keep tonight dim, let’s say. Thank you.

Hey there, strangers! Glad to see a familiar face around these parts. You’re not here for another story, are ya? About Yours Truly and his worldfaring shenanigans? I knew you just couldn’t stay away from this fountain of charisma!

..Questions? Alright, sure; shoot.

“Am I Yours Truly?” What-- What an absolutely stupid question. What could possibly lead somebody to make such a baseless accusation? I mean, that is just.. Really, really dumb. I already told you, it’s not me.

Alright, now cut it out with the dumb questions, I’ve got an idea and I don’t wanna lose it: Have I ever told you all about the time that I was lost at sea? Yes, that’s right, this is a story about me and not some nameless, psuedonym-hidden third person.

A long, long time ago-- maybe, like, five or six months actually-- I was the chantyman aboard a sailin’ ship called the “Jealous Lover”. The Jealous Lover was home to a real colorful cast-- No, I’m not going to sing for you. Please, save all questions until the end of my story. Now, the Jealous Lover was home to a real colorful cast of folk: You’ve got the fearless captain, Alexander Von Somethingorother-- didn’t really care enough to learn that last part; You’ve got the soft-stomached meathead Blocky, and you’ve got the designated drunkard, which we all just called Bottle, seeing as how you could always find him at the bottom of one. I thought it was cute, whatever. Of course, there were other scrawny, slack-jawed mouthbreathers wasting food and oxygen on the trip, but those were the only ones that really mattered.

No, I’m serious: I’m not gonna sing anything-- stop talking, please.

So, one beautiful, clear-skied day-- I believe it was the fourth day on one of the Lover’s voyages-- I’m telling my good friend Johnny about how whiskey is the life of man, right? The whole trip has been going swimmingly so far: Gentle breezes, warm air, semi-still waters. It was a really beautiful sight; I couldn’t possibly do it justice just talking like this. Anyways, I’m singing along with the crew, gazing out on the horizon, when suddenly, I notice that the semi-still waters are dropping the “semi-still” adjective. There were these irregular patterns in the waves in some circular shapes on the ship’s port side, all really closely bunched. Me, being the nautical and all-around genius that I am, immediately point out to Alexander that-- shock-horror! It’s a Charybdis. It’s actually a bunch of them, maybe three or four all in a neat little bunch.

Now, I’m not sure if you know this, but that’s not really supposed to happen. First time I’d seen anything like it. In fact, the only reason I even knew that they were Charybdis..es? Charybdi? Chary-- whatever, you get it, right? You get it. The only reason I knew it was.. those things is because almost as soon as we got within throwing distance of these things, some guy just floated on up to us from in-between them all. I mean, there was nothing significant about him-- he wasn’t some lost-to-the-ages God of the Sea, he wasn’t adorned in all the riches of the oceans-- he was just literally, some guy.

We’ll call him “Pa.” You’ll see why later.

So, seeing as how Pa was the only person who had even a vague clue of what was going on underwater, I felt like asking him a few questions. He says: “Hey!” I say: “Hi!” He says: “You boys want something to eat? We’ve got some really good seafood cooking down here!”

It was a family reunion. It— No, I’m serious! I swear by these words— It was just a bunch of fishfolk hanging out in the middle of the ocean, having what I assume was a grand old time. Yeah, I’d never in my life heard of or seen anything like it! I mean, I guess it would be something they do down there, since doing it on land is a no-go.

So, uh… I turn around and ask the crew: “Who’s hungry?” And all the hands go up-- Blocky puts up two hands, I remember that. Naturally, y’know? We have to ration food for a week-long voyage; not a lot of it to go around in-between thirty or so people because of that. So everybody says “yes”, I say yes to Pa, and Pa shouts “Yes” too for some reason-- I guess he was happy we wanted the food-- and he immediately shoots back down into the water. We’re all waiting for a long time, asking nothing but questions about what the hell is going on here, right? Pa shoots back up maybe ten minutes later-- Er, no; Pa doesn’t come back up. He sends his.. I assume daughters? Up to the surface with -- get this -- sample platters.

In that very moment, I remember punching myself in the leg as hard as possible; I refused to believe that I was.. was actually seeing this.

So these Mersharks are speeding towards the Lover with these hands full of food like waitresses, followed by a hefty, ominous-looking Kraken. Y’know how you can just look at people sometimes and just immediately know: “You have taken lives.” Y’know that? Yeah, she was just a not-good-looking character. I mean, she was admittedly very good-looking-- they all were, they’re monsters-- but, not, like, “Good” good-looking. Y’know?

Remember that for later. That’s a little something called “Foreshadowing.”

Anyways, here comes the ‘sharks and Kraken; they hand.. Er, flipper us our food over the bow; we’re all eating it, thinking: “Aw, this ain’t so bad”; everybody’s having a good time. Well, our glorious captain, Von Whoevencares, he has the ingenious idea to drop anchor & just hang out with these people. Being the innocent, eager-to-please oaf that he is, does as he’s told and drops anchor.

That’s when disaster struck.

Now, anchors are made heavy, right? They’re big slabs of iron that’re supposed to “anchor” a boat in place over the water. Really big, really heavy. Why do I bring this up, you may ask? Well, you know what the plural of Charybdis are really known for? Pulling really heavy things into water-holes. Guess what happened? That’s right.

So, we’re absolutely blind to this on the surface— those girls from earlier went back for more food at this point— so we’ve got no clue what happened. It’s only until.. until Papa comes back from the floor to berate us over what we were blind to. And he reintroduces himself with what I believe to be the greatest string of words to ever grace my ears in all my years of life:

“You got your big thing in my little girl’s hole!”

Now, I’m not often the man to laugh in the face of somebody in visible, deep concern and distress. Often. And I’m afraid to say.. I just couldn’t keep a straight face at that. I did figure out what the issue was, though; turns out that, in actuality, the anchor got stuck in.. in his little girl’s hole. I tell the guy, Pa, I tell him: “Sorry about that; there’s not much we can do to aim the thing; she must’ve just pulled it in by accident.” All the truth. And he seemed very understanding of this. He apologized for his outburst, I apologized for the inconvenience, everything was peachy.

...Didn’t I order water earlier? Where is that?

Anyways, we found out pretty quickly that everything was, in fact, not peachy. While Pa on the surface gave us the OK, that damned Kraken from earlier snuck up from the surface starboard side with daggers in her eyes. Apparently, she took those ‘sharks from earlier and had the bright idea to ram the ship! It was incredibly rude and inconsiderate.

They struck against the hull of the Lover once, twice, “thrice?”— that’s such a weird word— struck I don’t know how many times; the crew was flying left and right, off the deck and into the water. We almost lost Blocky; it was very quickly turning into a terrible time. To make matters even worse, it turns out that Kraken was just using our unexpected arrival to her fancy little gathering to call even more of her girlfriends over to a big, wooden pot of fresh meat. Maybe you all don’t see anything wrong with that, but it seems like a really bad way to play Matchmaker, y’know? I mean, there’s got to be an easier way to get two people to know each other than throwing yourself into them while they’re at-- Sidetracked, sorry…

So this nautical assault has been going on for a while now, right? Half the team is gone; Alexander, if he hadn’t drowned on strike one, has up and vanished. Here’s the part where I’m the absolute coolest again: I muster up the balls to say: “We’ve gotta do something about this!” Very heroic, I know. And after I say “We’ve gotta do something about this”, we start doing something about this. And by that, I mean we all got into a big, weird conga line and started pulling on the anchor’s rope-- the thing that caused this whole fiasco. We merry few on the Jealous Lover aren’t strong enough to make things right with that anchor, so we think we’re dead meat. Little did we ourselves know, Pa himself went down to that ocean floor, reached into his little girl’s hole, and-- That’s not funny; it was very courageous of him! And he hoisted the thing out for us. Turns out he wasn’t as insignificant as he made himself look.

One little caviat, though: while we took all that sweet time trying to unclog poor little Charybdis, from my understanding, all of the volcanic gasses and air that she consistently expelled started build— expelled from her hole, yes. All of that started building up violently, and after a while just all came out at once with a “Pop!”

The anchor shot out of the water like a bullet.

Needless to say, the crew, the Kraken and her goons, I’m sure even Pa down at the source was surprised. The ship nearly takes flight with the thing, which actually sounds impossible now that I’m saying all of this out loud, what with how the anchor is a lot smaller than the boat itself— actually, I’m pretty sure it was some magic rope we used with the thing— anyways, the anchor goes zoom, and we go zoom with it. Needless to say, we didn’t die. Can’t speak for those other guys though; never went back for ‘em.

The strangest thing about it all? After the anchor fell back into the water— as it was built to do— we pretty much ended up where we were supposed to be. Either that, or the place came to us. It was specialize that, y’know? A very mobile, very cold, very.. obscured destination.

Now, why would I actually tell you where we were going? Then you’d be able to go and tell whether or not I’m lying about this! Not that I am, of course… Or am I? No, I’m not. Might’ve fudged a few of the details, but that’s the beauty of storytelling, right? They weren’t there to see how dumb you looked, so say you didn’t look dumb. Again— this is not to say that I did, in fact, look dumb; I must absolutely stress: I did not.

Ah, there you are! Call it a hunch, but I don’t think— thank you— I don’t think water should’ve taken this long to prepare.

…What, you’re all still here? Story’s over. It’s midnight; go back home. I promise I’ll still be here tomorrow.

Fill to me the parting glass.