The stars were out in force, prickling like pins-and-needles across the cloudless sky, and the sea — lapping at the world gently as kittens’ tongues — mirrored them in its surface. Starlight twinkled.
It was a purple sort of night.
But it was the orange glows and the shuffling figures of the wharf that held Flotsam transfixed. Skies he had seen, storms and stillness and the thousand temperaments of weather he had seen, but doors; buildings spilling light from framed windows; ponies milling on the boardwalk and others headed to places unknown; it was these things that bludgeoned into his head an overwhelming sense of mystery and wonder.
He had been away from the world. All of a sudden, here it was. He didn't recognize it, which wasn’t so bad — too often, he hardly recognized himself.
Around them the silhouettes of other ships were moored and quiet, like great wingéd giants sleeping. If they slept, it was a wary sleep, with one eye cracked open, watchful of the newcomer to their midst.
The Mother, for her part, disdained their quiet scrutiny. Somehow, she devoured the space around her. She claimed it and watched for others to challenge it. The ship was proud and imperious with her battle-wounds.
Were she animate (and Flotsam was not entirely certain that, at some level, she wasn't) the ship would be, as it were, showboating.
All considerations aside, she certainly was alive with the sound of work. Hooves made a steady thunder on her decks, voices shouted and the air stirred around them. Flotsam’s reverie was not meant to survive a busy place like this.
“Oh!” he cried, half startled, half apologetic, shuffling out of the way as crew mares hurried about, grunting and coordinating, disgorging the ship of her belly’s cargo. Mares tossed and caught ropes, they tied and untied knots; boards were proficiently ripped up and others were laid down. Energy crackled through the crew, jumping in almost visible arcs from mare to mare.
Port! each jolt seemed to shout. Port! The excitement made the mares fast, powerful, eager and seemingly tireless in their work. Port! It spread like ships’ fire through them.
Flotsam felt the excitement spill over him, but it did not spark in him what it had in them. They knew what they wanted — to unleash themselves and run rabid and free through Rivaplút — and how to work towards that end.
This, after all, was their homecoming. He’d simply drifted along with the current.
Stealing a last glance of dark giants, lamp-lit docks and unnamed ponies on the quay, Flotsam ducked from sight again and slipped into the familiar world beneath decks.
Turning a corner, he bumped noses with Hop Scotch. Her expression was surprise, then delight. She swelled up with it. “It’ll be some riot tonight!” she declared, throwing a hoof around his head, and with the strength of the ecstatic, pulled his face to hers.
She kissed him wildly, pulling at his lips, licking at his lips, playfully poking her tongue’s way between them, pushing herself into him with the weight of her body behind her.
Then the mousy mare put a hoof to his chest — savoured a last biting, raking, lingering tasting of Flotsam’s lips — then pushed, finally breaking away from him with a pronounced Mwwwaah! Tilting her head back, her smile delightful and eyes lusty, she inhaled deeply as if to take into herself every last trace of the breath she’d stolen from Flotsam.
“Mm, yes.” She caught Flotsam’s eye like another might a snowflake: with their head tilted back and their tongue stretched out. She closed her eyes, and her mouth, and for a moment her smile was serene.
She let go of the breath she held in a slow, sensual sigh.
“You are a bad pony, Flotsam,” she said, but her tone was that of being incredibly pleased. “A very bad pony. The worst kind of tease.”
Before he could even think to speak, Hop Scotch shoved at his chest again and he staggered backwards.
His mouth tasted of hers. She’d wetted his lips. She gently tugged at his golden earring.
“I like this. Shame about the hat, though. Try not to keep it!” she finished, brushing past him and hurrying the way he had come. “Tonight this town is mine,” he heard her declare before rounding the corner.
Flotsam stood stock still. Seconds later, he started to tremble. Seconds more and he, too, began to nod agreeably. “Yeah,” he said to himself only. “Yeah. Okay.”
Stealing one last moment just to steady his breathing, Flotsam gathered up the scraps of his broken composure, roped them together and bound them tightly. He nodded his acceptance a few last times, took a breath and moved on. He was very tense.
He walked rigidly.
Harpoon eyed him critically when he at last did reach what served as the brig. “You get lost?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he said shakily, with a bite of snark thrown in. He shuffled himself past her and along the limited space of the room. “Sorry.”
Additional to themselves — and Gadfly, sheltering under her wings in the cell — the teenagers Parrot and Shanty stood to one side, their heads together in a now-interrupted conversation.
“Yeah, alright,” Harpoon said, sounding not so much convinced as simply indifferent. “There’s a lot of work Captain wants done. Done tonight. A start on some real repairs, sales, the works.” The usual unflappable tones of Harpoon were tinged with something else. She, too, chafed with the crew’s itch to get off the ship at long last.
Everypony knew that he knew nothing, not of repairs, sales, or ‘the works’. Hopefully, fewer knew how he felt, because right now, that meant he grappled with all-too cloying thoughts and fended off the twisted, giddy sensations shooting through his abdomen.
Hop Scotch had rattled his cage with her boldness. That wouldn’t have been too bad in its own right, if the last weeks hadn’t already put Flotsam in said cage, tied his hooves with silk and blindfolded him with velvet, locked the door, lit a stick of incense and whispered a safe word in his ear.
Flotsam’s rear leg started to twitch restlessly and, worse still, audibly. He imposed a sort of jaw-gritting, mental martial law to fight and quell the rebellious uprising. His ears flicked. His leg thrummed rebelliously as ever.
“So,” he asked carefully, trying to distance himself somewhat from his own thoughts, “what can I do?”
Harpoon gestured the bars of the cell. “Griffon guarding.” She raised her voice. “And it’s all three of you.” She raised her voice for everyone present. “You going to give them any trouble, griffon?”
Gadfly poked her beak out under a spread of dark feathers. She blinked. “Um, no?”
Everything waited on Harpoon’s consideration. After a moment’s thought, she simply said, “Good.” To the ponies, she added only a quick, stern glance and a stiff, approving nod. It maybe – just maybe – lingered an instant longer on Flotsam.
Harpoon left and the air cleared a bit.
There were three ponies and the griffon.
Parrot flicked her mane. She wriggled her body, working the muscles down her neck, through her body and out to the tips of her wings. She slumped down onto a crate and leaned back. Her tone was lax. “Easy stuff.”
She committed her attention to nibbling her feathers, creating a constant slew of strange little noises as she preened them.
Shanty shrugged, but Flotsam wasn’t minding either pony too much.
He noted small things, in quick succession. Gadfly was partially hidden, sheltered as she was under her own wings. She could have something hidden under that, not that he believed her to, for to his knowledge her cell had been provisioned with nothing, but he acknowledged the possibility. He briefly considered if it would have been possible for her to grab any sort of weapon or tool when her head had come through the wall.
Then it occurred to him: the wood itself. She’d burrowed her way — or more aptly — ripped and tore her way through it. There could be all sorts of sharp nasty splinters she’d squirrelled for herself in the meantime.
At the same time as his thoughts came by this, he had moved to the centre of the room, fixed the griffon and her cell in his gaze and flicked his attention over details. The bars and their fixings, the cell door and its lock... where was the key?
The clink-clink of Shanty tapping it in her boredom against the floor registered itself in his thoughts, against a backdrop of the various noises of the pegasus preening herself. The hole in the back wall was a liability, but — here Flotsam juggled some casual estimates — even providing the wall could be ripped to a Gadfly-accommodating size quickly, and taking even a sloppy response from them getting into the cell into account... no, it still wouldn’t favour Gadfly getting anywhere. Even if she did, she'd likely be swarmed and subdued pretty much instantly.
The griffon was low to the floor and hunched, like a dark circle of feathers with a beak poking out between stooped shoulders. It was only then Flotsam realized she was staring at him.
He did a pretty normal thing.
He stared back.
Parrot finished the one wing and twisting, caught the other and set to work on it. Shanty kept a tempo as she tapped the key, adding to her quiet, simple tune the odd clop of her free hoof and quiet puffs of breath.
Other than these things, it was stillness and silence, the muffled, distant thuds and voices of the crew at work, and the mostly-subdued restless leg of Flotsam. Those were the only sounds that remained.
Time passed. Flotsam reigned himself to stillness. Gadfly might have napped inside her self-made shelter and honestly, Flotsam wouldn't hold it against her in the slightest if such were the case.
Sleeping prisoners give guards less trouble.
Parrot’s voice was soft. “You thinking of staying with the MoM?”
Flotsam blinked and turned, his mouth half-framing a response when he realized he’d been more or less been forgotten about, left to stare at the griffon and think his thoughts.
Shanty had shuffled over to Parrot, so that she sat and leaned her back on the same crate the pegasus sat on and leaned from. There was another shuffle, and a freshly-preened, strikingly-green and striped wing had been stolen and repurposed into a back-cushion for the earth pony.
She said, “I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it. It’s hard to know, you know? I like being here, but, how long do you stay on a ship until you get stuck there?”
“Yeah.”
Flotsam was nominally watching the griffon, but his focus was on what he could catch in his periphery.
“You thinking of leaving?”
Parrot scoffed. “Nah, I’m good right where I am. And if I feel like going, I’ll just pack up and go.” She paused and hummed thoughtfully. “But I probably won’t.”
The conversation fell away. The wood of the ship creaked as it adjusted to different stresses and, even here in this deep gullet, the lapping of the waves against the ship kept true silence pushed back.
“What’s the city like?” Flotsam asked gently.
A moment passed and, perhaps due to discomfort, Parrot hopped down from her high perch to sit lower down. She and Shanty swapped shoulders as headrests and leaned back against each other.
Parrot popped the air with her tongue and her teeth. Then she hinged open her jaw and probed at them, until Flotsam was somewhere between disconcerted and affronted. Shanty’s tapping stopped and her eye turned to follow the jungle-green pegasus.
Then Parrot smacked her lips, twitched her wings, settled down more comfortably against Shanty and spoke. “It’s big. It’s stinking. But you can sell what you want and you can buy what you want." The teen rolled her head back and gave a short chuckle. “But I’ve never been. My first time, so I’m only repeating what I’ve been told.”
She gently ribbed the other teen, who quietly shoo’d away the motion. “You’d do a better job of it Shanty. Talking is your thing. Well?”
The earth pony shrugged indifferently. “You did alright, I guess. There’s usually more insults, when someone describes Rivaplút. Particularly from the locals.” She stared forwards in thoughtful quiet for a moment. “And, to be honest, a lot of them are completely valid. Which says not just something about the city, but about the people here, too.”
Her attention flicked to Flotsam. He said nothing, but hoped his attentive expression conveyed enough to have her keep speaking.
Perhaps, there was too much hunger in his expression. Or perhaps simply the music mare hadn’t brushed the memory of a lights-conjuring, nonsense-spouting, water-striding maniac mage under the proverbial rug as readily as some others had.
In either case, Shanty’s ears flicked back and her face turned to one of minor distaste.
“I just want to know,” Flotsam admitted to the room, but it didn’t work.
Well, as a matter of fact, it did.
Indirectly, through.
It was annoyance that incensed the young mare to pull away from Parrot and start pacing.
“Look,” she said, “Rivaplút is either the biggest town on the Coral Coast, or its only small city. Whatever way you want to think of it, you do that. Yes, it literally means ‘the river’s plot,’ probably because there’s the river, and we’re at the back end of it, and just because someone once named a thing once and it stuck didn’t mean it was a flattering name, but there’s also a story saying that it’s where Siren gave up her virginity and claimed her lovers’, so... choose your own adventure!”
Shanty huffed as she gathered steam.
“The further upriver you live,” she thrust her hooves forward, “or the higher uphill,” she parted them, “the better you are. That’s just a fact,” she spat.
“And the rest of us. We’re not all cutthroats, or beggars, or ponies of ill-repute walking the wharves, but everybody knows that everybody’s looking out for themselves first and foremost, and nobody has the time or effort to care what anybody else thinks of them, because who gives a damn what you think? You’re just as likely to leave again on the next tide — or they are — and pretty much nobody bothers to go haggling for more problems when they have plenty already.”
She paused just long enough to huff, like an engine changing gears. “Of course there’s vices.” So far, she had been speaking emphatically to the empty space in front of her, with Flotsam a happenstance, not-looking-you sort of audience, but now she called him out directly, eyes and pointed hoof and all, “...and more whoring than even you could shake your horny horn at. Addictions. Gambling. Rackets. The only reason I think there isn’t any single problem completely overrunning Rivaplút is because if any one problem started getting too big, it would annoy everyone else who’s a big fan of the others, and they’d gang up on it.”
Shanty snorted derisively. “Ganging up is a proud Rivaplút tradition, in case you didn’t realize. But...it's not all bad. Not at all. A lot of good people call it home...
She wasn’t done, despite her turn to momentary calm reflection. There was renewed vehemence rising in the pony. Flotsam wondered where it came from.
Where it was going, right now, was to him. It rode Shanty’s hoof and she pointed. He was surprised by the sudden annoyance he felt. She said, “A piece of advice? Don't insult it. You don't get to do that."
"What about you, huh, Flotsam?" She twisted the word; it wasn't a name the way she said it, just a word, draped like a worn rag over him, a description. "Do you think you're staying? Nearly drown and, what, that's a free ride?” Her expression flickered between unhappy uncertainty and downright bellicose, and the latter was winning two draws out of three. “Nearly drown and I'll get into any bed I want, too, huh?”
She huffed and muttered, “Like, what are you actually good for?
“Uh, magic?” offered Parrot.
“Yeah, magic and madness. No thanks.”
Parrot shrugged, her gesture offered only slight sympathy. It’s all yours. I don't really care.
Flotsam was dimly aware that, with nothing and noone having actually moved, the shape of things had changed. A moment ago, he'd been simply in the room as Shanty lectured. Now he was On The Spot.
Gadfly’s eyes gazed, her face intense and blank. The nap was ended. At least she wasn't going to be bored with her imprisonment. He ignored her, and, after a review of what he knew, felt a degree of understanding about Shanty’s simmering outburst.
It tempered his response, but, then again, weapons were also things one tempered. He took careful aim with his. A part of him, small, whispering, officially denied by his higher functions but nonetheless there took satisfaction in this.
“Is this about me, honestly about me, or someone else? Someone that likes me?” Shanty’s face, hurt and scared and thunderously sullen as only moody teens can truly manage said it all. The infatuation wasn't exactly hidden. Some days, the teen was more or less The Quartermaster’s shadow, carrying her torch all the while.
“You like Charming Booty? Yeah, she’s pretty great.” A wry smile and a flame-hued tail flashed across Flotsam's mind. His belly turned another loop. The image lingered.
It made him smile.
His next words took a bit of a run-up to say. He wasn't usually so rough, but things had a way of happening under duress. Even so, he navigated clear of the nastier waters.
“You like her? Get up and do something. Be seen. Be forward. I don't think Charming likes shy wallflowers. You think someone like her even notices them? I doubt it. I'm not her, but even I can see that. I'm not here to steal your crush. I don't wake up in the morning and think, ‘I wonder what Shanty's aspirations are and how can I spoil them today?’ You're right: magic, madness, no name, no memory, no direction... I got problems up to my neck-” the image of water, crashed through his imagination, of barely treading it and things disappearing into the distance; Flotsam barked with sudden laughter that was hard to contain, and as he slowly, fitfully drowned it, it took the rest of the sounds with it.
Flotsam refused to let himself feel bad, despite the inclination to. “Up to my neck,” he finished, his own dead laughter sitting uneasy in his ears.
A thought popped sideways into his head, and it was welcome. The current train of them had pushed through some rough places. “You're a storyteller, how about you tell us about Siren? She’s supposed to be...charming. How would she have charmed Charming?”
Shanty stood stiffly. Her face smouldered with a furious blush. She was Holding A Grudge, it seemed. Jealousy did ugly things.
“Your a jerkass, a psychotic jerkass. You want to see Rivaplút, just...go and see it! Leave me alone,” she said and stormed off, or tried to, but really it was just her squalling.
That left two.
Parrot shuffled herself comfortable. “That was kind of rough.”
There was a moment. The pegasus industriously nibbled at what Flotsam thought of as her wing’s elbow. She spat little feathers on the floor and shrugged. “Had it coming, if you ask me.”
“Me? Or her?”
“Oh? Uh, yeah, her, definitely. She’s afraid of making a move for the Que Em and hates that everything else in the world keeps, you know, moving before she's ready. Like I said: had it coming.” Parrot scrunched her face, fighting a battle of lips and tongue against the little shreds of down caught in her teeth. She smacked and slurped loudly.
“Good job standing up to an emotional and insecure teenager, by the way. Patches help cut your teeth, yeah? Did she need a stool, or did you stoop?”
Parrot laughed. Gadfly wiggled with a low chortle. Flotsam surprised himself with a chuckle. "Stoop, definitely. And that filly has it together as good as anyone else. She wouldn't have tantrummed.
“Well, yeah, I suppose. Like, Flotsam, I'm out of the jungle. We're a little different. I know that. So, speaking as someone who's coming from the outside, and, to be honest, just doesn't care all that much for pony drama: you're kind of a pushover and sweaty ‘zip nuts, these are annoying!” The Pegasus scraped at her teeth, but it was a losing battle against the downy fluff caught in them.
It was down, but it wasn't out.
Parrot thumped her hooves on deck. “Okay, toothpick anywhere? Looking... Looking... Ahah!”
If Flotsam defaulted to a bewildered state so often, it was only because it was so often — too often — perfectly justified a response.
Parrot flurried into motion. There was a rush of air and suddenly his head was kinked forwards. Her other hoof kept a firm grip on his horn, which she navigated promptly to her mouth.
Flotsam fixed his eyes resolutely to the middle distance, which in this instance also happened to be the floor. “Um.” He could feel the griffons questioning eyes on him.
A second later, he could feel the unpleasant motions, and the evil chalkboard scraping. Parrot made an unintelligible gnyah gnyah sort of sound just above the tips of his upright-standing ears.
Then it was over, with Parrot spitting something wet, green and formerly downy to the floor with great satisfaction.
She grinned innocently and tongued her teeth. “Mm, yeah, way better, thanks! Also for not stabbing my brain...kind of gritty, actually, and tastes, I ‘unno, like tin, I guess? Still better than trying my luck with beaky here, am I right? You’d try me in a heartbeat!”
Flotsam tried to approach the moment from a number of angles, then resigned himself to the facts that this had indeed happened and he was a ways away from understanding it.
Like, at all.
“Didn’t you used to be, uh, meek?” Even as he said it, that very quality flashed into her features.
Parrot shrugged, with a hint of unexpected fluster. “Well, where I'm from...” she surmised weakly. “You know... But, yeah. You. Push over, proved it, stand up for yourself, congratulations, and the, uh, esseter-ra, what’s the word?
“What?”
“You know-” Parrot gestured lazy circles with her hoof, “the one you say where you mean, ‘there's more, but I'm not going to point it all out?’ ”
A grey talon flicked up through the feathers of Gadfly. “You mean, like, ‘et cetera?’ Means ‘and so on,’ I think?”
“Yeah! That's the one!” Parrot shot her hoof through the bars. Carefully, looking back and forth between that and Parrot's smile, the griffon slowly extended her talon and gingerly touched tip to hoof before retreating again into her shroud of feathers, carefully scanning the pony for any sign of reaction.
“Nice,” said the pegasus. She seemed content.
“Anytime?” hazarded the griffon.
Since Flotsam could remember that, during the battle with the griffons, Parrot had tried — really tried — to pry one's head off with the ship's wheel, he decided to just leave it there.
Gadfly, most likely, had thought the very the same thing.
Maybe this was what they called honour among thieves, Flotsam considered. Or, to take Shanty's slant on things into account: camaraderie among psychotic jerkasses.
“Oh.” Parrot blinked and checked her sides. “Did Shanty take the key with her, do you know? I better go get that! If The Harpie sees her out there, or, you know, me, out there, chasing her, neither of us being here...”
Parrot's face scrunched as she made for the door. “Shanty!” she stage-hissed, clinging to the door frame. “Shan-teeee!”
There was no answering call. Parrot grinned. Or maybe grimaced. “I'll just be real quick, yeah?”
She scurried away. That left one.
Quietness returned, cautiously as nose-twitching mice.
Slowly, Gadfly unfolded. Her wings brushed their stiffness loose. She stretched as only someone part-feline could, all legs and sudden back-end rises.
Her tail wriggled. What yoga calls a ‘downwards facing dog’ was really proving more of an ‘upwards pointed pussy-cat.’ Gadfly groaned, sighed and slumped, folding again and resuming an approximate of her shelter-of-wings posture.
“What? She asked. Her expression was impassive. It did not suggest coyness.
Flotsam blinked. He hadn't looked for anything concealed, hadn't even thought to, in all that time of...what had it really been? Twenty seconds? Thirty? It'd felt longer.
Not that he hadn't been looking. He’d been distracted, was all. Flotsam, head in hoof, shook it wearily. He took his professionalism, heaped his proverbial hooves full with the stuff and simply let it all go. He pulled himself to the wall and let himself lean back, hoof over his eyes, just until his head cleared.
A minute passed. Maybe two. Flotsam flicked idly at his ring. He tried, unthinking, to itch his horn, but met only the unpleasant grittiness of the nullifier, and quickly retreated from it. He tried magic, just on the off chance... but no, nothing.
He shifted on his hip. It didn't alleviate the discomfort of slouching on bare wood, but at least helped shuffle it around.
Gadfly rustled quietly. Flotsam inched his hoof and cracked an eye. The griffon had put herself right up against the bars. They furrowed her wings. Her head was hunkered low, hidden from Flotsam's vantage.
“I want to go home,” Gadfly said, quiet enough that Flotsam did not believe he’d been meant to hear.
He went with it nonetheless. He felt the griffon startle – just slightly – when he went to her, so that they sat back to back, against the same bars. They barely touched; just feather tips really. Mostly it was the cold bite of iron.
“You and me both,” he said softly. The two others returned, prodded by Parrot’s insistence. Flotsam afforded their quizzical looks the slimmest of dismissive nods. There was a fleeting moment regarding Shanty, but with any luck Parrot had had a quiet word before ushering her back. She didn't say anything, and for the moment, that was probably best.
As it was, Flotsam could not be bothered any further; he expected they realized this. He settled into his chosen, uncomfortable seat, focusing on the slight, soft brushes of contact between griffon and pony.
In a while, Patches would bring the quiet guards sandwiches, bought en masse from a wharf-walking peddler with a hot tray. Flotsam made sure that Gadfly got the same the rest did.
Nobody questioned him on it.
Parrot, licking scraps from her teeth, eyed the unicorn and his tool with considered mischief. Flotsam met level with her eyes. He didn't smile in the slightest, he very simply mouthed the word ‘no’, and Parrot smartly never-ever tried to take his horn for a toothpick again.
...okay, he did smile, just a little.
Maybe a little more than little, even. Regardless, the five — for Patches had took to Flotsam like a scarf to a neck; they kept one another warm —settled in, peacefully, quietly, into the long and timeless night, while busyness happened all around them and tinted stars shone down on all of it.
Tomorrow would be another day.