DAKIYA'S MIDDLE NAME IS SHEEV

Dakiya is hurled tumbling across the platform, her wounds steaming, her hair burning, her body crashing against the muffin store. The admiral saunters up, with a tiny cup of iced tea pinched between his pinkies. He sips from it, chuckling and shaking his head. "Ah, Dakiya, Dakiya, Dakiya. I salute you, I really do."

He applauds with just the tips of his index fingers. "I do confess, I haven't seen such a performance since fourteen-ninety-eight, when the Mad King Rigoth, in defiance of—"

The pirate king begins to scowl.

So, so, so wonderful, the scowl of the pirate king! Everything about the pirate king is perfect and beautiful.

The scowl of the pirate king eases, and Dakiya, feeble in the shadow of her smug enemy, pulls out a piece of parchment, and folds it into a paper airplane. "This," she croaks, "is the only chart I didn't burn. Go fetch."

She tosses it into the wind, and it skims out over the snouts of the velociraptors.

"I already told you," the admiral scoffs, "I don't need it, now that I have the pirate king."

She stares up at him with huge puppy-dog eyes, pouting, her lips trembling as though on the verge of tears.

The admiral resolutely looks away. "I will not go chasing after that map," he insists.

Dakiya switches to the tone of a person delivering a rational argument. "Do it."

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THE UTTERANCE OF THE PIRATE KING

The admiral hurtles away through the velociraptors, and Dakiya takes the chance to recover (and grow mysteriously stronger than ever) by contemplating her motives, her past, and all that she is fighting for. Honestly, she doesn't remember any of those things, but she's certain they are very inspiring, so she makes them up as best she can, imagining space battles raging across whirlpools and nebulas, and the Imperial Admiral destroying her home planet with a barrage of crimson plasma, and Ayavail, Hannet, and the pirate king swearing to take vengeance with her, as the four of them clasp hands atop a secret roof on the dark side of an outlaw moon.

Afire with wrath and inspiration, Dakiya surges to her feet, her wounds nullified in defiance of reason, and she roars at the returning admiral, "This is for Betazon III!" Then she activates the last and greatest of her four battle-powers, screaming, "PIRATE STOOOOORM!"

The sky darkens. An ominous booming like the drums of a thousand galleys vibrates through the shadowed air, and a sudden hurricane gale tears at the execution stage, setting the admiral's nightgown flapping as he leans against the wind. Dakiya is cackling with her arms spread grandly to either side, palms open to the sky. (With her hands bound behind her back). "Prepare yourself, you nightgown knave!" she howls into the wind. "None survive the power of my ultimate technique, the PIRATE STORM!"

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As she speaks, dark objects begin whooshing down from the sky and smashing through the stage like enormous hailstones, battering the admiral. He staggers to his knees, not only in pain, but also in awe, for every one of the projectiles that thunders down from the heavens and breaks against the ground is a full-grown pirate.

Thousands of howling buccaneers pour from the sky, flailing, crashing, splattering everywhere, dismembered eyepatches whizzing through the gloom to slash into the admiral's discombobulated face.

He waits for the attack to end, but it does not end.

It's permanent.

This is just how the city is, now.

Oh well.

By the time the admiral manages to regain his senses, Dakiya, the pirate king, Ayavail, and Hannet are all mounted on rearing mice, ready to gallop out of the square and make their escape. "You won't execute us today, nightgown-knave!" Dakiya shouts, "You'll have to come back tomorrow!"

The pirate king, bellowing with laughter, adds, "and our schedule's booked out to next Tuesday! We can't see you for a week!"

"Wait!' the admiral shouts.

The pirate king freezes, staring wildly at the admiral out of the backs of his (eyepatched) eyes. "What?"

The admiral ducks beneath a hurtling pirate and shouts, "Your constant weaseling is ignominious! Aren't you ashamed to run away? Aren't you embarrassed to be rescued by your own daughter?"

The answer of the pirate king begins with the rotation of his head upon his neck, and as it rotates, the breath heaves in through his nostrils, stirring the glorious hairs therein.

His lips begin to peel back, and his mouth literally opens.

The eyes of the spectators gape with anticipation as the pirate king's head completes its rotation (causing him to face directly toward the admiral). His tongue starts to position itself for the beginning of his utterance, and at the same instant (simultaneously) his breath (so recently heaved in) begins to flow outward, not through his nose this time (the hairs therein remain blissfully unstirred on this occasion) but through his windpipe, tickling into the laryngopharynx and gradually whispering upward toward the oropharynx itself.

It happens then. The vocal cords within his throat actually begin to vibrate, wobbling together so rapidly that they form a sound, and that sound, (in dexterous combination with the positioning of his tongue) formulates a speech.

The pirate king says (and this all happened in an instant, you understand) something so understandable (in the near future) because of the way his mouth had prepared the articulation.

You see, back when he had first begun to breathe in (if you'll forgive a brief flashback), the operations of his diaphragm had been simultaneous with another movement, higher within his immaculate body.

But for the sake of brevity, let us pass over the details, and skip to the utterance itself.

"Well," the pirate king had often said, on other occasions. But on this occasion he could not have said "well," because his lips had not been deployed in the way necessary for the pronunciation that word.

Instead, in a literal, nonfigurative sense, he had in fact positioned the tip of his tongue against his hard palate.

As the velociraptors all around gasp with suspense, and the admiral waits with bated breath, Dakiya and her friends (all three of them) are also breathing.

They inhale nitrogen and (critically) oxygen from the atmosphere into the inner chambers of their lungs, which then deploy individual molecules of the oxygen to individual erythrocytes (red blood cells), of which there are many (Dakiya has ten million times the usual number).

Isn't the universe fascinating? Just imagine—in a single milliliter of saline solution, refrigerated below room temperature, there is more coldness than there is in the entire sun, and the pirate king says "No."