Hello again. Hangovers suck, and being woken up with one by a cacophony of clashing cutlery is bad.
Just bad, I'm not going to write how it felt exactly, because then I'd have to remember how it felt, and I don't want that.
Anyway, after a late, and thankfully quiet, breakfast it was time we tried to figure out our next move. Onica wanted to raid the Iceni royal vaults. Claiming they most likely had some of our sorely missed tinglewood inside. Lena wanted to show us Fukai, and wreck the Imperial Palace while we were in the neighborhood.
Both of those sounded like magnificent options! I couldn't deny the allure relcaiming our tinglewood had, but Fukai sounded magical. And I'm always up for a little mayhem. Fen and Julius were also cool with whatever, and Onica admitted to wanting to personally deal with the people who had lied to and misled our little miss. Plus, Lena had the fleet we would be sailing to our destination.
So off to Fukai we went!
With Lena shifting the currents to carry us, and Fen filling the sails of every ship in the fleet, we moved amazingly fast! I was sitting on the pointing bit the sticks out in from of the ship. The sailors call it a bowsprit. I call it that pointy bit at the front of ships.
To each their own.
As I was sitting there, the rise and fall of the bow would periodically bring me extremely close to the waves. The water was bright and clear, and I could make out schools of fish swimming before us. The occasional solitary giant swept through the masses of fish, leaving cloudy water in its wake, and I spotted what looked like a mass of tentacles fighting a ball made of spears at one point.
We were heading past a small archipelago when trouble hit.
It was really cool, just sitting there. Relaxing, enjoying the unusual view. I was so relaxed in fact, that I nearly missed it when we smashed into the first sea-mine. The bulbous orb of metal and explosives threw me from my perch, and punched a massive hole in our hull. I managed to get airborne before hitting the waves, and Lena patched the hole with ice. As I headed back toward our busted ship when several others from our fleet found sea-mines of their very own.
Stolen novel; please report.
A series of explosions left the front runners of our fleets torn up. Lena hurriedly patched the holes with ice. She really has gotten much stronger since we got seperated. She could affect a much larger area with her Tingles, and her ice in particular was forming faster, more intricately, and colder than I recalled.
As we sorted ourselves out, a dozen good sized galleys came shuttling in our direction from the archipelago. Their dozens of long oars made them seem almost like hungy insects, scampering towards a carcass. They must have launched as soon as the heard the first explosion, because when they saw the thirty battleships that made up Lenas fleet they seemed quite surprised.
Watching their previously coordinated rowing turn into a chaotic mess gave a pretty good clue as to how they were reacting. Then Lena turned the water around and between them and us into ice. Which meant this sea battle had just become a brawl, on ice. Instantly, dozens of armed soldiers leapt from every ship in her fleet, and started rushing towards our would-be assailants.
Not ones to be left out of a fight, Julius, Fen, Onica, Lena, and I all leapt into the fray.
I'm not going to lie. That was the worst fight I have ever had. The sniveling wretches aboard the galleys all surrendered before we could slaughter them, and most of the people aboard were chained to the oars. Slaves, I guess. We freed them, gave them the galleys and the pirates, and carried on.
I wouldn't bet much on the pirates surviving their former captors. They didn't look very forgiving.
We lost some time there, and it was decided that a night assault on Fukai would be a bad idea. Ardiea seemed pretty certain of it, and what few fractured memories I had of night combat agreed with her. It's not like we were in any rush. So we decided to rest for the night a few hours from Fukai, and map out our assault plans.
Oh! Speaking of maps, Lena showed Ardiea that map of pirate treasure we got from Maranara, or whatever her name was we made queen of that place that one time. She managed to find a few landmarks she recognized, and pointed us in the right direction.
So once we get this revenge stuff handled, get out tinglewood back, and figure out how our tinglewood bubble got smashed, we can finally got get that treasure! I knew that going for pirate treasure would lead to adventure!
But that's for later. Right now its time to play cards with my friends, then head to bed. We had a lot of carnage to wreak tomorrow!
Goodnight.