by A. J. Markam
Up above us, the Chickenhawk’s main sail had turned into a sheet of fire – and the pirate ship was bearing down on us like a black iceberg.
“Hold on!” Hark yelled.
I looked back at him. “What are you going to – ”
The engines on the side of the ship whirred, sputtered, and failed – just like the Millennium Falcon when it tried to jump to hyperspace in Empire and couldn’t.
I wanted to curse out the game developers for another cheap shot, but I couldn’t – I was too scared.
“Oh shit,” I groaned as the pirate ship loomed closer, taking up our entire field of vision. It was about to ram us head-on, and I had no doubt which ship would survive and which would shatter into matchsticks.
“Hold on, hold on – ” Hark yelled.
A high-pitched whine filled the air. The Chickenhawk’s engines revved back up, slow but getting exponentially quicker. Just as the pirate ship was about to plow into us, the engines delivered a blast of power, jolting us straight upwards on an express elevator of speed. The entire ship groaned and rattled as we rocketed up past the pirate ship’s deck and sails.
I caught sight of a small orange demon in the pirate ship’s crow’s nest, watching in amazement as we zipped over him and soared straight up into the sky.
“PUNCH IT!” Hark roared.
Wait – what?
I turned around in the lifeboat. “I thought we already punched i– ”
I gasped as Shewy swung a razor-sharp cutlass and sliced the main rope keeping the lifeboat in place.
There must have been some sort of spring-loaded propulsion device, because the lifeboat shot across the greased rails and catapulted out into space.
It was like a log flume amusement park ride from Hell – except no water, just a little wooden rowboat thrown off the Empire State Building.
I screamed in abject terror.
Stig held on to the wooden seat in front of me with his fingertips, shrieking as his legs flew up and flapped wildly in the air.
We plummeted straight down. The pirate ship, which five seconds before had been model-in-a-bottle size, was rapidly turning life-size again.
Suddenly there was a hissing sound, and something yellow erupted from the metal canister in the middle of the rowboat.
It was a 15-foot rubber balloon held in place by a rope harness. The balloon inflated in one second flat, and our wild freefall became a moderately-paced descent.
We probably would have been alright if we’d had another hundred feet to fall.
Unfortunately, we only had fifty.
The lifeboat crashed down through the rigging of the pirate ship, ripping through sails and rope.
There was a blur of guidelines whipping all around us, the krrrrrrrchhhh of torn canvas –
Then the lifeboat slammed down on the deck of the pirate ship with a bone-crunching CRASH.
The boat’s flimsy boards bowed out and splintered all around us, and Stig and I were left sitting in a pile of debris as our big yellow balloon floated away.
I watched it go. Far above it, the Century Chickenhawk was speeding away, now just a flaming miniature in the sky.
“Ow,” Stig said, his voice muffled by his face flattened into the wreckage.
I winced in pain, but gave thanks that the crash landing had only shaved off a quarter of my hit points.
Then I lowered my eyes back down to the pirate deck and saw a truly terrifying sight.
Thirty or so demon pirates had surrounded us, swords and knives at the ready.
“Oh shit,” I muttered.
Hark Silo had gotten us onboard the pirate ship, alright.
Although it looked like we were about to get tossed off any second now.
4
The biggest demon by far was a grey-colored brawler who looked sort of like Hellboy without the sawed-off horns. Ten feet tall, barrel chest, lantern jaw, glowing yellow eyes. He wore a pair of black pants, boots, and belt, but that was it. Well, except for the big-ass sword in his hand.
There was a short, squat, yellow demon that looked like Quasimodo and a lemon had a baby. It wore an eye patch and a striped red and white shirt along with flared britches.
The other pirates were every shape, size, and color of the rainbow.
The one thing they all had in common?
They all wore collars around their necks.
Five or six had smoking hands; they must have been the ones that had fired on the Chickenhawk.
The rest carried weapons pointed in our general direction, but they weren’t particularly aggressive. If anything, they seemed a little shell-shocked by our arrival.
“You came!” a voice cried out happily. A voice I knew and loved.
The demons parted like the Red Sea to reveal the source.
Bound to the main mast of the ship was the most gorgeous woman imaginable, her skin a bright crimson. She had black wings folded on her back, two horns protruding from her lustrous black hair, and a tail that had somehow snuck its way out of the chains encircling her body.
Alaria.
My entire face lit up with joy.
Before I could stumble to my feet, though, another voice ripped through the air.
“Avast, you stinking landlubbers!”
The ranks of demons parted again, and a human woman stepped through.
A very hot human woman.
She stood almost six feet tall, and wore a silky white dress that was slit up the thighs all the way to her hips. The dress’s extremely deep V-neck reached down to her midriff, exposing breasts almost as big as Alaria’s. There was a black sash cinched tight around her thin waist, which made the dress hug her substantial curves even tighter. She wore a knotted bandanna around her forehead with a triangular flap of cloth that covered her left eye, like a more feminine version of an eye patch. Her gold hoop earrings were almost lost amongst her wild mane of dark brown hair, and she wore leather boots that came up to her knees. Her skin was tanned and flawless. She looked Mediterranean – Spanish or Greek, maybe.
You know in 200-year-old books where they say a woman looks handsome rather than beautiful? She was a good example. She was definitely scorching hot, but she had a slight angularity to her jaw and a hardness to her expression that couldn’t rightly be called beauty.
She was also a bit older. If Alaria looked like she was in her early twenties (although who knew how old she was in succubus years), this woman seemed like she might be pushing thirty. She was basically a crazy-hot MILF wearing porno pirate clothes – which I personally had no problem with.
Even better than her looks: she only had 50,000 hit points.
Now, that was still astronomically higher than my own – but after facing down a demon lord with a million hit points, Tarka was small potatoes.
I might just have a chance here.
“Welcome to the Revenge, you sons of whores,” she snarled.
Revenge.
Very apropos.
Definitely better than the Century Chickenhawk.
She looked up at the shredded sails and torn ropes in disgust, then fixed me with a murderous stare. “I’m gonna keelhaul the both of you for what you’ve done to my ship.”
Leaving aside the whole detail that keelhauling was where pirates used to drag people under a ship so they’d drown – and we were several thousand feet in the air, so I had no idea what the hell the punishment would be except a sort of poor man’s bungee jumping – I was surprised by two words in her sentence.
“‘My ship’? You’re the dread pirate Tarka?!”
She drew a razor-sharp cutlass from her side and held it right at my throat. “Aye, and don’t you forget it.”
Shit. I forgot I was dealing with pirates here. And not friendly Captain Jack Sparrow pirates, but murdering, thieving bastards of the seven seas.
Air.
Skies.
Whatever.
I was about to cast Soul Suck on her – and then pray I got resurrected somewhere other than Davy Jon
es’ Locker – when Alaria spoke up.
“Please, Tarka, no. He’s the master I told you about. The one who freed me.”
There were two distinct reactions to Alaria’s words.
One was the demons’, who all cast furtive glances at each other. Not overt surprise, exactly, but more along the lines of Did you hear that?!
At the opposite end of the spectrum was Tarka, who gave me a nasty grin. “Well, well –Ian the Scurvy Warlock, traitor to all humankind! Can’t keep a bad apple around to inspire mutiny, now can we?”
The tip of her sword pressed more insistently into my throat. I wondered if I could get off a Terrify spell before she decapitated me like that orc bartender had Dorp –
Dorp!
I’d forgotten all about him! He might be able to help me tip the scales – if he could terrify the entire crew with a vision of something awful. Maybe the ship going up in flames.
But would I have time to summon him?
Enter Stig to the rescue.
“Hey lady,” my imp piped up.
Tarka scowled down at him. “What?”
Stig looked up at her like a toddler might stare at an adult.
And then, like an infant overstuffed with milk, he opened his mouth and spewed a geyser of vomit all over her boots.
“BLEEEAAAGH!”
“YOU FILTHY BILGE RAT!” Tarka screamed.
She stepped away from the shower of goop – removing her sword from my neck.
That’s my Stig.
Tarka slashed her sword at him, but Stig teleported a few feet away in a puff of smoke.
Teleportation was one of the abilities he’d picked up a couple of levels ago – but it only worked in close-quarters combat.
Which was great for annoying the hell out of enemies like Tarka. She kept swinging at him, and he kept disappearing and reappearing. Poof!
He’d given me a few precious seconds, and I had to use them wisely.
Making a frontal assault on Tarka would be idiotic – she had 50,000 hit points, after all.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to make a frontal assault. Not when I had the ultimate mind-fuck machine.
I selected the square on my action bar mentally, and Dorp appeared beside me.
“Whoa,” he said enthusiastically, “is this what it was like when you stormed the throne room at – ”
“Shut up and hit her with her worst fear!” I yelled.
Dorp complied right away. He did this goofy move like James McAvoy playing Professor X in the newer X-Men movies, putting two fingers to his temple –
Suddenly there was a gurgling snarl behind me.
I turned around and nearly shat my pants.
There was a ten-foot-tall penis right behind me.
Actually, more like a giant penis snake.
Imagine a gigantic cobra with its hood flared out and hissing menacingly.
Now substitute that with a monstrous schlong, and you have the overall picture.
Instead of a cobra’s mouth with fangs, the little pee hole flapped open and closed and drooled a clear, gooey liquid.
I said it was ten feet tall, but that’s how high it reared up in the air. Most of its body was slithering along the deck, including a big ol’ hairy scrotum at the very end of its body. So if we measured tip to balls, it was probably a good thirty feet long.
I’m assuming Captain Tarka had a fear of wieners. Unless there was some sort of pink, veiny marsh monster I’d never run across in OtherWorld before.
Even though I wasn’t scared of penises (partially because I was the owner of one), seeing that thing basically scarred me for life.
Apparently she felt the same way, because she scrambled back and screamed at her crew, “KILL THAT BLOODY PRICK!”
The crew glanced around at each other in confusion.
The grey brawler spoke with a rumbling voice. “Are you calling the human a prick, or…?”
“And do you mean ‘bloody’ like ‘damned,’” another demon asked, “or ‘bloody’ like ‘covered in blood’?”
“THE GIANT DONG! KILL THE GIANT DONG!” Tarka shrieked.
The issue now clarified, her entire crew attacked at once.
Some threw fireballs. One blasted lightning. The gigantic grey guy conjured a spinning ball of granite between his hands, then shot it through the air like a cannonball.
The squat yellow demon opened its mouth and let loose a sonic scream so overpowering that it nearly burst my eardrums. I could literally see concentric rings of sound ripping through the air, blasting towards the giant schlong.
Unfortunately for them, the penis was an illusion. So all their attacks passed right through it – and bashed the ship behind it.
The forward mast took several direct hits, though the fireballs only charred its surface. The forecastle – the cabin-like structure led down to the lower decks – wasn’t so lucky, though. It blew apart into a pile of splinters.
As soon as the grey demon realized what was going on, he roared, “Stop!”
Captain Tarka, though, was still freaking out.
“NO,” she screamed, “KILL IT! KILL IT NOW!”
“It’s somehow able to evade our attacks!” the grey giant warned. “We can’t – ”
“KILL IT OR WALK THE PLANK!” Tarka howled.
The grey giant sighed, his shoulders heaving in obvious resignation – and then he pulled out his cutlass and shouted, “Charge!”
The entire crew surged towards the penis monster, blades slashing through the air.
If the damn thing had actually existed, it would’ve been absolutely horrific – like fifty ginsu knives slicing through a kielbasa. My own junk was shrinking in sympathetic terror just thinking about it.
Thank God it was an illusion.
The pirates jabbed and slashed. The quarter-chub serpent reared its big, pink head in the air, then darted in and snapped at individual pirates, forcing them back.
Which gave me a little time to work my own sinister magic.
I hit Tarka with Doomsday and Darkfire. She screamed and glowered at me, but she was too busy running from the Colossus of Rhodes’ weiner to return fire.
Then one of the pirates made a decision that, to all his shipmates, probably appeared to be suicide: he rushed right at the penis, screaming and waving his sword.
Of course, his stupidity turned out to be brilliant, because he ran right through the damn thing without any ill effects.
The entire crew gasped. They’d thought I had conjured up some hell-worm from the deepest depths of the abyss – when in reality, all they were getting was a giant 3D cocktease.
Maybe a poor choice of words there on my part.
I knew we needed to press our advantage before they could figure out what was going on.
“Hit her with something else!” I yelled at Dorp, who did his James McAvoy/Professor X thing again.
There was a grotesque slurping sound, and something crawled over the railing of the ship.
If the giant penis snake hadn’t been bad enough, here was something to make me swear off porn forever.
It was an eight-foot-tall cock monster – sort of like a giant Koosh ball, but instead of little springy fronds, every surface of its body was composed of penises. Penises for fingers. Penises for toes. Thousands of penises covering its body like porcupine quills – some more erect than others. The only thing on its body not covered with semi-erect members was the giant eyeball in the center of its head, which rolled around and found Tarka.
The monster lumbered across the deck, literally stepping on its own dicks. Plural.
“AAAAAH!” Tarka screamed. “KILL IT, KILL IT, KILL IT!”
The crew immediately switched targets – but this time they were far more aggressive out of the gate. They ran towards the cock monster, cutlasses swinging –
And disappeared right through it.
Great.
“It’s… it’s not real?!” Tarka said, shocked –
And as soon as she realized
that, the cock monster faded from view.
At least I was spared the sight of a thousand dongs burping up a Bellagio-esque fountain of white goo.
But despite its lack of staying power (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week), the cock monster served its purpose.
Unencumbered by being forced to defend myself, I’d hit Tarka with so many Doomsday, Darkfire, and Soul Suck spells that she was down to 20,000 hit points.
Victory was, if not imminent, at least within view –
And then she won the fight without casting a single spell.
She retreated behind the mast where Alaria was chained and put her sword right under Alaria’s chin.
“Stop what you’re doing, you blasted warlock, or I’ll slit your devil wench’s throat!”
Shit.
It was the exact same thing Malfurik had done to me back in Abaddon. He had forced me to choose between myself and the woman I loved. Which meant there wasn’t really any choice at all.
However, Malfurik had fixed it so that if Alaria died, she couldn’t come back and I would lose her forever.
Was that still the case? I wasn’t sure.
Probably something we should look into when we weren’t surrounded by pirates.
Last time, though, I had prevailed with a little trick up my sleeve.
Maybe it would work again.
Hoping against hope, I whipped the Scepter off my back and yelled, “I call upon thee, Chalastia, to come to my aid!”
Then I slammed the ivory rod down onto the wooden deck with a resounding CRACK!
Aaaand…
Nothing.
Tarka and her mystified pirate crew all stood around waiting.
“Was something supposed to happen?” Tarka asked.
“That was just a one-time thing, honey,” Alaria said in a sweetly mocking voice.
“I knew that,” I said defensively – and I did. I was just hoping that maybe there was a glitch and the game had given me an extra turn, or that maybe the game had lied to me and I could actually use the scepter multiple times.
No such luck.
And Tarka’s sword was still at Alaria’s throat.
“Stand down, you scurvy dog!” the pirate captain yelled. “Or your lady will have a second pair of lips you can stick your foul manhood into!”
