Notes from Small Planets

by Nate Crowley

  — Adele Spunt, 42, Cook

  Interesting, but not advisable as a family destination. The kids loved it when we saw our first Hero, flying alongside the monorail from the spaceport and waving at us, but it got awkward when he started mouthing the name of a fast-food chain and miming eating a burger. Big disappointment on the second day – when we saw the Ram Raider try to rob a bullion van we thought we were in for a real spectacle, but the pursuing Heroes just gave up as soon as they were outside their sponsor’s territory, and she got away with the gold. The food’s pap too, and the prices are sky high, so don’t expect many great meals out.

  — Eugene Gruftoe, 28, Librarian

  Fashion

  While you risk getting sued for a life-ruining sum if you have the audacity to dress as an existing Hero (and bearing in mind costume redesigns, there are patents filed on thousands of outfits), the general Heroic aesthetic has permeated everyday fashion on Eroica to the extent that even the most buttoned-down professional will incorporate a cape or a pair of tall boots into their outfit. Try accenting a casual ensemble with a pair of light pauldrons to make it Heroic, or accessorise your evening attire with a gem-studded headpiece and a set of mighty gauntlets. At the end of the day, you have to find the look that’s right for you. There are clearly no IP restrictions on dressing as a Baddie,[14] but if you do so, prepare to accept that you’ve invited a maelstrom of comical yet painful mistaken-identity situations into your life.

  Entertainment

  Entertainment is a tricky subject in Eroica, as it’s hard for much to surpass the everyday life of the city in terms of thrills. Nearly every athletic pursuit conceivable has been rendered meaningless by the participation of Heroes, and sports without Heroes just seem boring here. Television is big, however, and still a recent enough innovation that people are amazed by it. Weekly high-budget documentaries about the recent activity of the Heroes command a huge audience who follow the regular spectacles[15] with the conviction of soap-opera addicts. Recently, advances in special effects have allowed for more fantastical programming, set in worlds where nobody has any powers at all. Called ‘normoes’ by their fans, these short dramas are seen as horror stories about what would happen to society if nobody was better than anyone else.

  1. WELCOME TO SPUME

  No destination has distilled the essence of high adventure quite like the nautical fantasy realm of Spume. With salt spray misting your face as you lean from the bowsprit of a galleon in full sail, it’s impossible not to feel a freedom as unconstrained as the endless waves. And indeed, there’s everything to play for here – just so long as you respect the Pirate’s Code.

  Why Spume?

  Sooner or later in any jaunt through the Worlds, you’ll hit water. And once you hit water, there’s every chance you’ll hit Spume. Because if you set sail from anywhere with the right sense of perfectly measured recklessness, these horizons will suck you in. Drive a boat like you’ve stolen it – or better yet, steal a boat – and you’ll end up here.[1] Nobody is sure why ‘theft, but wet’ is even a genre, let alone one so primal as to occupy this central space among the Worlds. Nevertheless, it is what it is, and Spume embodies it with breathtaking purity. An expanse of tropical archipelagos inhabited exclusively by Pirates, its deep, almost fastidious commitment to cliché has resulted in a destination that always hits the right notes.

  It can take some getting used to. The contradiction between the recklessly egalitarian ideals of the buccaneering lifestyle and the Byzantine regulations of the Pirate’s Code, which keep it viable, can be jarring at first.[2] But stick with it long enough to learn the rules and you’ll discover a way of life that – within a number of sensible parameters at least – has no limits.

  WHY MY HEART BELONGS TO SPUME

  by Sid Tidy, ship’s cook aboard the Gilded Gurnard

  What convinced me to stay in Spume weren’t the tropical weather, nor the gold: no, me hearty, it were the people. In me old job as a recruitment consultant, I were surrounded by complete bastards pretending to be reasonable people. Now, I be part of a crew o’ reasonable people who spend all day pretending to be complete bastards. Sure, ’tis not the easiest life, but every day brings surprises, and the shore leave be off the chain. Last week I went ashore for a few cold ones with the hearties, and ended up stealing a cannon off the Navy. Proper mental, we be. Mad lads. One word o’ warning, though: if ye come here, accept that ye may never go back. I still technically be on a stag weekend that started six years ago. I were going to go home, but Cap’n Beefshanks here needed a new cook, and I thought, Why not? Not sure what happened to the rest o’ the lads, now I comes to think of it. Mike be definitely a skeleton – he loves it – and I think Colin be a Captain now? That’s the thing about Spume – so long as ye be a good Pirate, ye can be anything here. So what are ye waiting for? Come aboard, shipmate!

  Spume offers a wealth of simple pleasures, from sea views and accordion-heavy portside ambience to endless supplies of rum and seafood. And for those wanting to delve deeper into weirdness, it delivers in big, Pirate-sized spadefuls. There are sunken wrecks crusted with corals, city-sized leviathans, and skeletons you can have dinner with, if you can bear their company.[3] So, whether you fancy a laid-back cruise through turquoise shallows, hunting treasure on specks of paradise, or braving storms and black powder on a sloop full of deceptively sane madmen, there’s a Pirate’s life out there waiting for you.

  ‘Can’t Miss’ Experiences

  1 Battle a Kraken

  We all remember that moment of childhood disappointment when we realised the sea monsters drawn on old maps were just tall stories. Prepare to leave all that disappointment behind in Spume! The monsters here are real. The Seven Seas teem with leviathans, of which the famous Kraken are the undisputed showstoppers. A lengthy dispute over marine stewardship policy between Skeleton Pirates and normal Pirates has made Kraken hunting more of a hot-button topic in recent years,[4] but there’s still no shortage of ‘squidbuster’ fleets heading out from the major ports, and they’re always looking for fresh deckhands.

  2 Fight in a boarding action

  We’ve all had the daydream: swinging from a rope with a flintlock in your hand and a cutlass between your teeth, hollering the naughtiest words you know as you prepare to cause havoc on the enemy’s deck. On the seas of Spume, this isn’t a daydream: it’s a fairly ordinary start to the week. Ship-to-ship combat is almost oppressively frequent along the major trade routes, and is still a thrill to behold, even with the strict conduct for nautical confrontations set out by the Pirate’s Code.[5]

  3 Find buried treasure

  Until recently, searching for treasure among Spume’s island chains was a fruitless business, as all the good stuff had been dug up. Thanks to canny amendments to the Pirate’s Code by Captain Bartholomew Threelegs, however, the booty game is back in business. Each year, Captains are mandated to bury between 12 and 40 per cent of their loot and then leave a map in a bizarre place for their rivals to find.[6] If you’re in search of treasure, why not try organising a tour with one of the following many certified Guide Captains listed in the Port Remittance visitor directory?

  4 Go out on the lash

  Spume’s land-to-sea ratio means the average Pirate lives at sea for nine tenths of the year – and living on a boat can be as claustrophobic as it is stressful. As such, when a ship stops in port and the crew get a chance to stretch their peg legs, things get hectic. The world’s astonishing variety of rums – from molasses-heavy headache juice to ice-clear spirits fit for royalty – are consumed by the gallon, and the accordions ring out in cacophonic chorus. A night of shore leave on Spume is either impossible to forget or impossible to remember – but never anything in between.

  Region by Region

  Just 4 per cent of Spume’s surface is dry land, spread across the ocean like raisins scattered by a miserly baker. Between these specks of sand and rainforest is water – hundreds of millions of square miles of it – divided up into th
e Seven Seas.[7]

  1 The Yohos

  This idyllic archipelago, with its white-sand beaches untroubled by hurricanes or raids, is where Pirates go to relax, retire and raise families. The Pirate’s Code forbids all but the most lighthearted violence here, and limits cursing to mild blasphemy, plus meaningless exclamations like ‘Son of a Dutchman!’ and ‘Hornswoggle me Nutmegs!’. There’s still some rough and tumble – the kids have to learn their trade somehow – but all in all, it’s a cheerful place, suitable for travellers who like their rum watered down to child strength,[8] and who prefer to remember holidays with fridge magnets rather than scar tissue.

  2 Doldrum

  In a realm where sail power is universal, Doldrum – that great patch of breezeless ocean at the centre of the map – is a place considered universally worthless. It sits there like a big patch of sick nobody wants to clear up, caked over with grumous scum and dotted with the bleached, creaking hulks of becalmed ships. Nevertheless, from the albatrosses who circle above to the slimy things that gather below the water to breed, it’s a top-tier destination for nature fans.[9]

  3 The Stormwracks

  In contrast to the Yohos, the Stormwracks are Spume on Hard Mode. These islands jut from the sea like rotten teeth, swathed in thorny jungle and brooding beneath the smoke of countless volcanoes. Their shores are encrusted with ramshackle port towns, where Captains take their crews to carouse, gamble and fight in the brief gaps between roaming the seas. While the Pirate’s Code still applies here, it’s definitely an adventure destination, where daylight robbery is considered a mandatory pursuit, and one grog too many can mean waking up naked, under indentured servitude to a glowering brute.[10]

  TALKING LIKE A PIRATE

  Pirates make talking the salt-stained patter of the high seas look easy, but remember they’ve had a lifetime of practice. It’s harder than it looks.[11] For newcomers, it’s best to start with the odd contemplative ‘arr’ if you really must get involved, before throwing in the odd ‘jimlad’ or ‘matey’. Intermediate learners may choose to start completely mangling all use of the verb ‘to be’, while experts can begin throwing whole phrases into conversation, such as these classics selected from the Landlubber’s Lexicon, a free pamphlet issued to tourists by the Council of Free Captains:

  SPLICE YON GURNARDS, ME JIMMY-LIVER, FOR I’LL GLUP A SACK O’ NECKBLIGHT AVAST YE!

  Do you want to go for a drink?

  BY YONDER WOUNDS O’ NEPTUNE, I’LL BE GUTSLIT AFORE I BLITHER YE TO OLD HEMPEN JACK!

  You can trust me.

  SALT-TACK, BILLY-CLOTHS AND CLEAVE ME GRUNIONS, FOR TO SEE WILY JOHN TAR ON THE SEA-DAD’S WATCH!

  Even the CFC don’t know what the fuck this means.

  4 Yonder

  The Sea of Yonder, and the windswept islands scattered across it, are the domain of the Skeleton Pirates:[12] walking, talking cadavers who have very literal trouble holding their drink. Thanks to their indifference to oxygen, the Boneys[13] live as much beneath the waves as on them, and conduct breathtaking aquatic tours from their capital in the drowned city of Thalassinor. Just don’t be fooled by their bony grins: your average Skeleton Pirate is obsessively political, extremely sincere and about as gifted with humour as they are with skincare techniques.[14]

  5 Map’s Edge

  The colossal viridian expanse of Map’s Edge dwarfs the other seas, encircling them like the fist of an angry blue giant. But despite its immensity, it’s astonishing to note that this sea contains almost nothing. No islands more interesting than little hillocks of sand and gull shit, and certainly no settlements. Apart from the odd lost Captain, nobody spends any time in Map’s Edge, and so it’s barely worth mentioning.[15]

  2. UNDERSTANDING SPUME

  A Brief History

  The true history of Spume is hard to piece together, since it’s not written down: paper and parchment are hard to come by in this watery place, and what little exists is usually reserved for making treasure maps. As such, the Pirates recount their history entirely through sea shanties, in which the details are almost entirely drowned out by repetitive refrains about heaving ho and lifting jugs of grog. After listening to thousands of hours of this nonsense, earthly historians have collected this sequence of best guesses as to the eras of Spume’s past.

  1 The Prepiratical Era

  Spume is occupied by a thriving maritime empire, which grows rich through harvesting Kraken on an industrial scale. But the strain of maintaining order over many distant islands takes its toll: sailors turn rogue, congregating in hidden ports and plundering trade at their leisure. These are the first Pirates, and before long they begin to outnumber the empire’s navies.

  2 The Curse

  Ruined cities – perhaps relics of a drowned civilisation – are discovered on the seafloor, and a vast quantity of gold is found within. It turns out to be … haunted.[16], [17] Those who take it are stricken by an awful curse: they become animated skeletons, immortal and unable to satiate their hunger or thirst. The social disruption caused by the sudden influx of miserable skeletons is the last straw for the empire: mass mutinies spread, all government collapses, and soon only Pirates – and Skeleton Pirates – remain.

  3 The Golden Age of Piracy

  For generations true anarchy reigns, as Pirates rob other Pirates in a global feeding frenzy. It’s so action-packed, nobody bothers to write anything down at all.

  4 The Silver Age of Piracy

  The Golden Age proves not to be sustainable. With piracy so lucrative, fewer and fewer people bother to engage in building ships, refining gunpowder or farming food. Scurvy becomes a crippling pandemic, and timber becomes almost as valuable as gold itself.

  5 The Bronze Age of Piracy

  After a drawn-out nadir of economic auto-cannibalism, civilisation on Spume flatlines. Ships become vanishingly rare – most pirates sail on sprawling rafts constructed from detritus, and fight with spears and clubs rather than cannons and flintlocks. Starvation and disease are rife, and some crews become entirely feral, drifting the seas like swarms of flotsam-borne rats.

  PARANTHROPUS PEIRATES

  Back in the Prepiratical Era, Pirates were declared hostes humani generis – ‘enemies of all humanity’ – by the empire they preyed upon. The Pirates thought this was quite cool, however, and adopted the descriptor themselves. But what sense did it make in the Golden Age of Piracy, when human civilisation had been entirely replaced by Pirates? To the Pirates, it was simple: if they had been declared ‘enemies’ of humanity before, then surely they had become non-human by definition. And with humanity now functionally extinct (since everyone had become a Pirate), buccaneering anthropologist Professarr Andronicus Skinner named Pirates a new species – Paranthropus Peirates – in a taxonomic ruling that no biologist has yet dared to challenge.

  6 The Council of Free Captains

  Realising that life on Spume is on the edge of a precipice, the last reasonable mariners form the Council of Free Captains (CFC) and declare a ceasefire across the Seven Seas. They hold a summit with the Captains of the Skeleton Pirates, who have become fierce isolationists, and agree a set of ground rules for the conduction of piracy: the Pirate’s Code. Under the Code, crews must split their time between thievery and the meaningful creation of resources, and observe strict guidelines as to which circumstances are suitable for behaving with lawless abandon.

  Oooooh, I’ll tell ye the tale of the birth o’ the Code

  Heave to, my boys, heave to!

  The good word that governs the barnacle road

  Drink up, my boys, drink up!

  ’Twas old Captain Dolan who first wrote it up

  Ohhhhh, raise the capstan!

  Told us how much to brew, and how much to sup

  Ohhhhh, weigh anchor!

  — True History of the Pirate’s Code, lines 1–8 out of 534,120

  Spume today

  After a marathon recovery, Spume is currently in what the CFC calls the Platinum Age of Piracy: the delicate sustai
nability policy enshrined in the Code has been honoured, and while resource scarcity is still a concern, the increasingly efficient and responsible nature of Kraken-hunting and the development of an undersea salvage industry by the Skeleton Pirates are making life more comfortable all the time. Now, with the advent of tourism, fresh gold – always the most treasured resource in a world of Pirates – is finally entering the economy. And while there was an initial period of awkwardness while the CFC figured out the rules for robbing visitors, these have now been formalised and are no longer the cause of any diplomatic crises. With the Seven Seas returning a greater bounty every year, and the trustworthy, hooked hand of the CFC at society’s moral tiller, now is the perfect time to visit Spume.[18]

  DAYLIGHT ROBBERY?

  Building a utopia from the gristle-strewn mayhem of a society founded entirely on violent crime is no mean feat, but the Pirate’s Code proves it can be done. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking the crime has stopped – it’s just been rationalised. So while you’ll definitely be robbed during your time on Spume, you can avoid a lot of pain by knowing how it works: