At sea, the sun woke much like a toddler; bristly and thrashing and all at once. The reflection of its rays on the water were stark and blinding, the type of overwhelming light that made Momo wish she died with sunglasses on – the cheap plastic ones you found discarded and half-broken by the beach. That would have been nice, and certainly more useful than her real funeral attire: a stained Fifth Harmony t-shirt, men’s boxers, and the jeans she forgot to strip off before passing out.

Luckily, the late pirates’ belongings provided their own solution to the sun problem. While they didn’t have sunglasses or sunscreen, they compensated by covering just about everything else the body had to display. Sitting at the bottom of the Captain’s clothing chest were a hat and a bandana, ruffled collar shirts, leather jerkins, and wide, ridiculous trousers that had the silhouette of Mom Jeans.

Momo grimaced. These were not made for someone with my body type. Or her clothing preferences. The captain had been a broad, sturdy man with a liking for audacious colors. Momo was a small, clumsy woman who didn’t like to stand out from the color palette of your average door. They weren’t exactly compatible enough to share closets.

Still, she had little other options. She reluctantly took the head coverings – the hat and the bandana – and left the rest of the outfit for someone with more torso and less shame.

Not that the hat was any less audacious than the rest of the garb. It was a proper pirate hat. The kind you’d see in those old swashbuckler movies: worn and patchy, with a wide brim that curved up on three sides. But instead of a skull and crossbones on its front, the cap was covered in live plant roots; purple and green leaves sprouted from the rim of it, dancing in the wind.

You have equipped [Captain Mandrake’s Tricorn]

* 3 CHA

* 4 STR

This item gives you the skill [Yar Har Har]: That’s pirate-speak for Get The Hell Of My Boat. If a rival ship tries to board, this skill can be activated to send a very loud and threatening message. Warning: Instruct other party members to cover their ears when performing it.

—

One thing Momo didn’t expect about sea travel – it was loud. She always pictured it as a quiet journey accompanied by the whisper of the tide, a time for reflective meditation about one’s life and struggles. No. It was nothing of the sort. It was a constant battle. Not with any one person, but with the wind. With the twisted whims of that terrible thing called weather.

And appeasing the weather took more than effort. It took know-how. For the first week, she spent most of her time learning the ropes, literally. Ribeye and Gita were the only sailors aboard, so they instructed the hundred children – and Momo – in daily, spirited sessions. As it turned out, quite annoyingly, only half of sailing a boat was technique and muscle memory, the rest was vocabulary.

For whatever reason, sailors decided to gatekeep the secrets of their profession behind a variety of ridiculous phrases like trim the main and jibe and tack and hoist the jib leeward.

Only one of those words was a lie.

Just kidding. None of them were.

“So what happened with your vehicle?” Momo asked Grimli, setting down her flashcards for the day. The inside of her mind was reverberating with sailor nonsense, and she needed a break.

“Ah, my – oh! I never did show you, did I?”

Grimli dug into his pocket and produced a small, golden ball of metal. It was no bigger than the pit of an avocado, sitting delicately in his hand. The more Momo looked at it, the more strongly it resembled her chancellor.

“I’m confused,” Momo muttered. “Did you exchange it for a bauble?”

He gave her an offended look.

“Exchange? My vra’ta is an exquisite, near priceless work of machinery. I would never exchange it for something as menial as human currency.”

“Your… what?” she blinked.

“Vra’ta,” he repeated, louder this time. Suddenly, the ball in his hand began to whirr, twirling quicker and quicker as it spun out and tripled in size. Like a machine that was carefully unpackaging its rib cage, long tendons of metal began to extend from its center, splintering out and turning into legs, arms, mechanical feet. Before long, a wolf-like creature of metal was standing before them on the deck, with hollow, concave eyes and a golden snout.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It then proceeded to start licking its paws, its copper tongue lapping at its wrists. It didn’t seem to mind the gaping, horned human staring at it nor the raging sea breeze.

“Oh my god,” Momo whispered. “It’s a mechanical puppy. Why didn’t you tell me you had a mechanical puppy?”

“Oh, dang nab it – Vra’ta, kushrag’va!”

The wolf whined, its ears flapping down in protest as it began to repackage itself. The process was the most elegantly designed metamorphosis that Momo could imagine – the dog’s hind legs folded in on its torso, then its front paws in on its wrists, until finally it was nothing more than a gold ball once more, ham-fisted between Grimli’s knuckles.

“That’s your vehicle?” Momo said, still gaping. “I thought it was like a… forklift? At least that’s how it looked up on the stage in Mole City.”

“One of its many forms,” Grimli corrected, frowning as he pocketed the sphere. He didn’t seem to like the attention it was garnering from the hundred-so thieving children on the deck. “Get back to work kids, nothing to see here!”

“So is puppy its main form?” Momo asked quietly as Grimli tugged her towards a more discreet area of the deck. It was the lookout point at the tip of the vessel, the rare place where you could dangle your feet just above the mist.

“There is no puppy form, your highness,” he bristled. Momo frowned. “But yes, that was Vra’ta’s main form, the Wolf of Alloy. It’s his attack formation.”

Momo’s eyes widened. So he’s like a transformer from Transformers.

“Just how many forms does the ball have?”

Grimli seemed to relax now that he was farther from the prying eyes of children. He took in a deep breath and sat down, extending his legs over the edge of the boat.

“Vra’ta has four forms,” he said quietly, like it was a secret. “Attack, Defense, Transport, and… another one. That one doesn’t have a good translation to common tongue.”

That just made Momo even more curious, but he cut her off before she could talk again.

“Transport is the one you saw on the stage.”

Momo quirked her head, confused. “No offense, but it didn’t look like the most practical means of transportation. It looked like it could lift a small cow, but that’s about it.”

Grimli harrumphed, crossing his arms as the tide splashed over his leggings. “You didn’t see anything yet. That thing can go at lightning speeds while carrying a cow. Or better yet – a small family of cows.”

Momo thought back to the small family of cows at Valerica’s old farm. She wondered how they were doing since their caretaker’s promotion. She frowned. The thought pulled at her like a drowning current. It made her want to stand up.

“Well, I can’t wait to see just how many cows it can carry,” she said, pulling herself up by the lookout pole and gandering out at the massive, turbulent expanse of blue. “Whenever it is we get there.”

—

It was their fourteenth day at sea when a new passenger arrived on deck.

It is important to note that this passenger was not Vivienne, who had been there the entire time. Momo convinced Kami to release her from her bindings by day two, which the woman gratefully reacted to by spitting on the group of them, then stowing herself away in a cabin to sulk.

Momo didn’t blame her.

Losing your faith and your sister all in one afternoon had a certain sting to it. Momo had lost her entire family and all of her McDonalds App points in one evening, too. And that had left her traumatized enough to become a necromancer.

Anyways – no. This visitor was not Vivienne, nor her charming sister. The new passenger arrived on a dark and stormy night; only every night on the Revenge was dark and stormy, so it was, by all accounts, a very normal afternoon. Momo had briefly taken over the wheel from Kasula, whose shoulder was starting to strain from the constant back-and-forth that was piloting a ship with a hundred children crew members.

It was just about time for her to hand over the reins again that Momo saw the dark mist proliferating just above the sail. It was not the normal color of mist, not white or puffy or see-through. But dark and remarkably purple. It made the back of Momo’s head thump unpleasantly, as if she was being pulled towards something. Like a fish to a squirming bait worm.

“That’s Nether,” she realized, just as the mist burst.

A figure shot down from it, fast and sharp, like an angel falling from heaven.

The children reacted as children do (and very often as adults to, sometimes more so than children) – by running and screaming and crying. The sail whipped wildly, uncontrolled, and the ship began to bow down towards the current. Momo groaned as she threw all her strength into turning the wheel the opposite direction, pulling uselessly against the wind.

“Grimli!” she screamed. “Calm them down!”

The dwarf pulled out his mandolin, but the boat’s back-and-forth thrashing took him off his feet, and soon enough he was sailing into the wooden seats, yowling in pain. The children only got more frenzied, and Kami and the rest emerged from the underbelly in confusion.

“What’s going on?” Gita yelled. “Ribeye – control your children!”

“My children? These aren’t my bloodline, these aren’t even my responsibility!”

Momo took in a shallow breath and activated [Nether Cultivator].

Just as she suspected, the mist was not mist at all. It was flickering, twitching bursts of Nether. The Nether wasn’t unstable, per se, but it was obviously not native to this realm. Momo had noticed the same phenomenon with the cloud grunts. Nether, the material of the universe, was always around, no matter where you went, but one could tell – with enough practice – when it was some place it wasn’t meant to be, quite like one could tell apart two identical twins if you were to ask them who was older.

As Ribeye and Gita settled the children, the Nether storm began to recede. The figure, shrouded in darkness, didn’t bother to address anyone, but instead stalked carefully and purposefully up to Momo, and put its hand on the wheel.

When it did, the boat stopped moving. Everything stopped moving. The air, the currents.

“Momo,” the figure greeted, two canines peeking out of a broad, sinister smile. “Oh how I’ve missed you, dear.”