by G. R. Cooper
It hadn’t been Duncan’s first time on a boat - he’d been sailing on the Chesapeake Bay several times - but it was his first time at sea on such a small vessel. It had been exhilarating. The weather the first day, as they made their way out from the Carolina shore toward the Gulf Stream, had been perfect.
He’d sat on the bow, letting his feet dangle into the wake plowed up by the movement of the boat, enjoying the weather. After a time, he’d noticed that the slapping of the bow wave on the bottom of his foot felt different. Harder. He looked down and saw one of several dolphins, surfing along on the crest of the bow wake, nudging his foot with its snout. He made, for the first time in his life, meaningful eye contact with an undomesticated species. It was more impactful than he would have thought. He could not only see thinking and intelligence in the animal’s eyes, it seemed to Duncan that the dolphin was observing the same things in him. They just looked at each other for what felt like hours; it seemed that time stopped. After the initial shock wore off, he just smiled and watched the playful animals move through the water.
Once they’d left, he went to the stern of the ship and got the news - a storm was brewing and chasing them down. It would hit sometime around nightfall. The group began to work to batten down the boat, to make sure that everything was properly stowed for the rough seas rushing up from behind.
As night fell, Duncan had watched the front approach - a wall of dark that loomed out of the west. As the night grew darker, the front turned into an ill-defined mass that seemed to envelop them.
Then the gust front hit.
The yacht, which had felt plenty massive before, suddenly seemed tiny and insignificant as the swells pushed it further out to sea. The crew decided that the more experienced sailors would take the first watch, and that Duncan would handle the overnight watch; after the storm had blown through. Duncan descended into the boat and tried, fruitlessly, to sleep. To wait for his watch. As he lay there, he watched back and up to the helmsman sitting, strapped in, behind the large wheel as water broke from left, right and behind over the sides and stern to wash over the pilot. The little ship was pitched and tossed for hours.
Thankfully, Duncan had never been prone to seasickness, but he still got little rest until it was time for his watch, at about midnight.
He took over from the previous crewman and strapped himself in behind the wheel - though it was probably no longer necessary to tie himself down; the rage of the storm had blown through, leaving an eerily dark, but comparably calm night.
That night was one of the most memorable of his life.
As the rest of the crew, exhausted from battling the storm, slept below, Duncan alone manned the helm. He didn’t have to really follow any particular course - they would have to re-establish their location and re-plot their course to Norfolk the next day - and he was only really there to ensure that they didn’t hit any other shipping, which was an extremely unlikely possibility.
So, he sat, and watched the night.
The darkness, which he could feel roiling above him, was occasionally lit by stabs of light - some further, some closer - as lightning struck from the clouds to the surface below. It was scarily beautiful. He was at once enraptured by the sight, but worried that their mast - the only vertical mass for dozens of kilometers in every direction - would soon attract one of the explosive down-bursts. He could only hope that whoever owned the yacht had ensured that the ship had been electrically ‘caged’ and that if lightning did hit, it wouldn’t have to find its way through to the sea below via some non-conductive ship element like the hull - or Duncan.
He had shrugged off the concern, however - since there was nothing he could do about it, there was, he felt, no reason to worry about it - and just enjoyed the spectacle of the brilliant light show. At its peak, the storm seemed to flash, from some random direction and distance, every few seconds. It was more thrilling than any fireworks display he’d ever seen.
As the hours and the night wore on, the storm had moved ahead and the sea and skies had calmed. He had just begun to relax and enjoy the solitude of the night, to lean back and let himself really begin to take advantage of the calming of the sea, when he’d been startled out of his reverie by a sudden flash in the water, about two meters to his right.
Something splashed. Then again.
As visions of attacking sea monsters rose in his brain, he cinched his harness and peered into the darkness, trying to determine what was rising out of the thousand meter deep ocean below him. His fears conjured something huge, unnameable and terrifying that had risen up from the eight-thousand meter deep Puerto Rican Trench, worked its way up into the Gulf Stream and hungered. He began to picture Architeuthis - the giant squid - its eyes as large as manhole covers, its limbs long and strong enough to enwrap the entire ship and drag it, crushing it, below into the depths, while it fed on Duncan; pulling him, with two long, horned arms, into its beak-like gaping maw. Then he began to imagine something even worse, something that could feed on that nightmare, deep in the unknowable abyss directly beneath him.
That’s when it burst back through the surface, directly where he was watching, sending a flood of adrenaline into his horrified mind.
The dolphins had returned.
Duncan laughed.
The group approached a grizzled captain, standing at the helm of his ship. He looked up as the group approached and Snorri walked up the gangplank onto the moored vessel, a ship that looked to Wulfgar a bit like a caravel. It was twin masted, with a larger mast amidships and a smaller on the raised stern. About fifteen meters long - about as long as the much lower and sleeker yacht that he had sailed on to Norfolk - it was of the type that the great Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century had taken into the unknown on Earth.
The captain nodded at Snorri’s request to board, and the rest of the group followed him onto the ship. Wulfgar looked around. A small crew was busy about the chores of the ship; mopping, tarring, and one looked to be checking through the folded rigging. He looked back to the helm and went aft, joining Snorri and the captain in mid-negotiation.
“Baile, you say?” spat the old, lean, leathern man.
Snorri nodded.
“A silver each,” he said, stuffing a pipe into his mouth and looking through the group, counting, “including the dog.”
“Done,” agreed Snorri, and handed him the clinking bag. The old man opened it, draining the coins into his cracked and aged hand, counting them as they dropped.
“This is too much,” he said finally. “There’s nine coins and five of you,” he raised one eyebrow and looked back to Snorri, “is the rest a gift?”
Snorri shook his head, turned and whistled.
The old captain let out a low growl as Prince, Doe, Tane and Bael came aboard. Wulfgar took the opportunity to really look at the two faerie princelings for the first time. Sons of the king and queen of the Aos Si, Wulfgar hadn’t really had a chance to talk to them after they’d been assigned to help with the quest - he hadn’t talked to either, in fact, since Bael had held a blade to Wulfgar’s throat. He still didn’t know much about the diminutive pair, but given how the Aos Si had managed to surprise and subdue the entire party spoke volumes about their abilities. In addition to being invaluable guides on this quest, Wulfgar was sure that their additional firepower would come in handy.
They came forward, ahead of the two rats, regally making their way toward the humans. Tane and Bael both looked upward at the group, defiantly, Bael resting his right hand on the pommel of the tiny sword that hung from his waist. Despite their size, their mere presence was, at least to Wulfgar, a little intimidating.
He looked back to the captain as the old man coughed, “I made my deal with you lot, nothing was said about transporting vermin.”
Wulfgar walked forward a step, leaned in above the captain, and said slowly, levelly, “Those vermin are my friends.”
“Intimidation Successful!”
“You have lost Reputation!”
The man raised his hands in supplication, “Fine, fine,” he raised one hand to Wulfgar’s chest and pointed at him, “as long as you take full responsibility for your,” he looked back to the second group and frowned, “friends.” He shoved his pipe back into his mouth and added, “And they’ll stay below. At least until we’re at sea. I’ll not have any other captains see me carrying those,” he paused, growling, “passengers.”
The captain moved forward, began to shout orders at the crew who leaped into action, preparing the ship to sail.
“Nicely done,” said Snorri to Wulfgar, “but I wouldn’t do that too often. You spend Reputation points like crazy when you do.”
“But I have no Reputation,” countered Wulfgar.
“Even worse. That means that your Reputation will sink into the negative.”
Rydra added, “You start with a blank slate, a tabula rasa, from which you can either go up or down. Do good, nice things, it goes up. Do bad, evil things, it goes down.” He shrugged, “You can either become famous or infamous. Through your actions.”
“Noted,” replied Wulfgar, “and thanks you two.”
The four humans lounged naked on the small ship’s foredeck, soaking in the sun and enjoying the feeling as the breeze pushed them through the outer harbor toward the opening under the arched lighthouse. Bear slept between Wulfgar and Lauren, who each leaned back onto either side of the dog; Wulfgar against his left shoulder, Lauren snuggled in on his right hip. Rydra lay out on his back in the middle of the deck, his arms behind his head, as he stared up into the sky.
Snorri sat with his back against the base of the bowsprit, where the spar first extended forward from the bow, his arms resting the short railing that stretched down either side of the ship to the stern. His thumbs tapped out according to an internal rhythm on the rails.
“I never would’ve thought,” he began, shaking his wind blown hair from his face, “that I would be sitting this close to a fully naked, attractive woman and not rise to the occasion,” he laughed lightly, “you know, on my own.”
“I’ll try not to take it as an insult,” chuckled Lauren, “but I’m in the same boat. No pun intended.”
After they had come to terms with the captain and crew preparations were begun for sailing, the party had gone belowdecks, to the open forward cabin where they’d sleep. As the rats and Aos Si made themselves comfortable - unhappy but willing to stay out of sight until the ship, the Piraeus, made open water - the humans had begun shedding their gear.
Once Lauren had removed and stored her plate armor, she’d been left in nothing more than a full length, padded suit that looked to Wulfgar like a quilted ski outfit, and began to strip that off as well.
“Going commando, are we?” asked Wulfgar.
“Might as well,” shrugged Lauren. “It’s a beautiful day and we have nothing better to do than to catch some rays.”
Wulfgar had to admit that he had been worried that his natural inclinations would, as Snorri put it, rise to the occasion, but while he appreciated the view, it really didn’t stir anything in him.
“Hormones,” said Snorri continuing his drumbeat on the railing, bringing Wulfgar back to the present, “we don’t have any hormones.”
“So there’s no sex?” asked Wulfgar, more than a little disappointed.
“Oh yeah, there is,” laughed Rydra, “lots and lots of it. But we have it because we want to want it, not just because we want it.”
“Because you want to want it? I don’t follow.”
“We have sex to fulfill a psychological need, not a physiological one. We have sex with someone we want to be with, we don’t get with someone just because we want to have sex.”
“So everyone just makes love? There’s no fucking?”
Rydra bellowed, a deep laughter Wulfgar wouldn’t have expected from such a small man, “Oh, yeah, man, there’s plenty of fucking. I could show you a true dungeon where anything goes. But, yeah, it’s usually more about intimacy than physical release.”
“Dungeon, eh?” asked Snorri.
“I doubt you’d be interested,” snorted Rydra.
“Why?”
“I’m not suggesting that I would presume to try to guess your particular kink, but the dungeon I’m referring to is a men’s club.”
“What?” asked Snorri, who thought for a moment, then asked, “You’re gay?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why didn’t you resurrect as a woman then?”
“Oh jeez,” muttered Lauren as Rydra rose onto his elbow and looked back at Snorri, smiling.
“Because,” he said slowly, enunciating every word, “I am not a woman.”
Snorri raised his hands, “I wasn’t saying that there’s anything wrong with being gay …” he began.
“Some of my best friends …” muttered Wulfgar, laughing.
Rydra nodded, “I know.”
“It’s just,” Snorri continued, “why wouldn’t you be a woman if you could? Then you could have all the men that you wanted.”
“I know,” repeated Rydra, “it’s not that you lack sympathy for gays, you just lack empathy.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You have the ability to feel sorry for the problems that we go through, but you don’t have the ability to put yourself in our place. If you did, you’d understand that I don’t feel, in any way, broken. I don’t need to be fixed.”
“I was just saying,” said Snorri, “that if you wanted to have sex with men, you could get a lot more as a woman, that’s all. There’s this one player I know, and she’s taken it as sort of a hobby to be with as many men, players and NPC’s, as she can,” he laughed, “and some of us as many times as we want!”
Rydra nodded, “Maybe, but I like myself just the way I am, and that was a very long, very hard road I had to travel in my life, and, frankly, I’m not willing to throw all of that work away just to increase the pool of my possible partners,” he then winked at Wulfgar and Lauren, “besides, that nymph player you mentioned? That sounds just like what a repressed gay man would do; resurrect as a gorgeous woman and screw as many men as he could.” He smiled, then leaned back onto the deck and put his hands behind his head.
“See, that’s just what I’m …” began Snorri, then halted, “Wait, what?”
“Oh yeah, I’d bet your little friend really is a man.”
“No way,” said Snorri, shaking his head, “no way. I’d know.”
“If you say so,” said Rydra softly, smiling into the sky.
“I’d know.”
“Why would it matter?” asked Lauren, scratching Bear’s chest, “you just said that was exactly what Rydra should do.”
“I’d know,” repeated Snorri, as if he was trying to convince himself.
“Empathy is a bitch, ain’t it?” laughed Rydra quietly.
“Anyway,” said Snorri, “the difference is that we don’t have all those hormones and chemicals screwing us up, Wulfgar.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“For me,” shrugged Snorri, “it’s overall great. No more medicines needed to keep me from going batshit,” he laughed. “No more Olanzapine, no more Haloperidol, no more Prozac. No more need to feel like I’ve been drugged into submission just to keep me from feeling like I was losing it.”
“Bipolar?” asked Rydra.
“Yeah. It was like my emotions were on a roller coaster. Sometimes I’d be so up I felt like I could do anything. I had so much energy that people thought I was coked out of my gourd, other times depression that was like a weight. Literally, it made me feel like I was looking at everything through a dirty fish eye lens.”
The rest just waited, listening silently, for him to continue.
After a few moments he said, “And everyone always tried to be so helpful, but they didn’t understand. I had one girl, really nice but clueless, who tried to empathize,” he smiled toward Rydra who gave him a thumbs up, “by saying that she understood because her dog died and she wa
s depressed for a long time.”
He laughed quietly.
“Feeling bad when your dog dies is sadness. If she had been depressed, her dog dying wouldn’t have made any difference in how she felt. Getting a new puppy wouldn’t have made a difference in how she felt. She would have just been,” he shrugged, “blah. Depression isn’t feeling bad, depression is feeling nothing. Wanting nothing. You just want the entire universe to just go away and leave you alone. Death isn’t enough, man, you just want to cease to exist.”
They waited a few more moments for him to continue, when he didn’t Wulfgar spoke up.
“And now?”
“And now it’s great! I’m happy when I’m supposed to be, and sad when I’m supposed to be. And when I’m happy, it doesn’t feel like I’m on a backwards speeding bicycle just trying to keep everything under control and on course, and when I’m sad it doesn’t feel like I just want to curl up and go to sleep, forever.”
He shrugged, “Which is probably what I did.”
“Did?” asked Lauren quietly.
“Yeah,” Snorri answered, “I was off my meds, my last time under the helmet. It would happen sometimes, I’d either think I could hack it or I’d just get so sick of feeling level and bored that I’d take a chance. I remember my last Omegaverse mission was with some buds, attacking an Arn outpost. One of my friends threw a grenade, it landed too close to me and it killed me. I remember freaking out, losing my shit, then nothing.”
He raised one eyebrow and stretched back, looking into the sky, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I just ripped off the helmet and killed myself. At least, I hope that’s what happened.”