*Tap tap tap tap* A fast, constant rhythm was produced by the young man's long, stick-like, pale fingers, his keyboard illuminated only by the constant glow of his monitor which displayed his crowded internet browser.

The young man sat in his old chair within his small, unlit room hunched over as he stared at his sole monitor with fervour. Two agile clicks of his mouse and yet another tab were opened up, thirty tabs were already beginning to wage war against his CPU as his computer came to a standstill for several long seconds.

The man was not even slightly surprised by this but made a quick mental note to just open a few more before starting the next vital steps with a smile that seemed to be permanently plastered upon his pale, sleep-deprived face whilst he scoured his torrent sites finding the many games he wished to play.

Games were the only joy in his life, sad as it may be, he could never entertain himself with such things like work, holidays, friends or even women. No, in his 24 years of life most of it has been in front of a computer either playing video games or reading books online. He still lived with his loving parents who, luckily for him, didn't mind him living there, but, they were beginning to push for him to find work and pave his own way soon.

Though knowing his parents, the young man would certainly be able to easily delay getting a job for at least a year because why would he do work when he didn't need to?

Sure, he could enjoy an income and purchase things but to him, the money he would earn wouldn't be worth the time he would be putting in. No, he would much prefer to wage eternal wars against civilisations or kill hoards of starving undead or even sneak through the colossal cities stealing what little he could find in his games.

Today, he was doing one of his few chores; finding and downloading new or interesting games, he already had over thirty games in his tabs awaiting him so this unavoidable chore was already halfway done but just as he was about to start reviewing his tabs to weed out the good from the bad, he noticed a title he hadn't seen before, one that had been posted exactly 12 seconds ago and counting, a game with just one seeder and a file size of over 100gb.

Although his facial expression hadn't changed much at all, his eyes displayed an immense hunger, a hunger that no game, story or movie had ever been able to quell, it wasn't that far from how a zombie would stare at flesh.

The title that got his hopes up quite a bit more than it should have.

"No way..."

The title simply read " A Pirates Course".

*Sigh.*

He took a deep breath in before sighing. No matter how excited he gets, every time he has seen or heard of a pirate game that promised freedom to do what you want his hopes were always ruthlessly destroyed.

Countless memories flooded into his head of all of the times where his hopes have been even higher than they were now, just for them to come tumbling down and shattering into thousands of individual pieces and leaving him in a state of sorrow all day. Never has he ever played an actually good pirate game, well, actually he once played a decent pixel one but that was much too limited for what he actually desired...

Maybe it's not too bad to hope, it is over a hundred gigabytes, after all, not many games are higher than that except perhaps the game with the cogs and dog tags?

[A Pirates Course.]

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[The first true pirate game.]

Weird. That was all it had on its page, well, apart from two unusual animated Jolly Rogers and a torrent link it was devoid of all other essentials, not even a download button or a magnet link which was suspiciously strange, but, well, as fishy as it might be, what's the worst that can happen, a virus? Ha ha.

Perhaps this would be one of the few games that gain his stamp of approval and go into his list of games to buy... But, alas, that's a story for when this sole seeder feeds all that necessary data.

At least, that's what William had been expecting but what actually happened could have never been expected. The second his pasted the link into his torrent downloading software his speakers began playing a strange swishing sound, almost like the sound of waves fighting against the ship. Obviously seeing this as something that shouldn't be happening, William looked at his tabs expecting to see the sound icon on one of his tabs for an ad or something.

Nothing.

William sat there for a second thinking to himself how strange it was before laughing it off and once again setting his attention onto his torrent software to discover that instead of a download bar, the whole tab of the software had begun a counter.

5...6...7...

As it counted higher and higher the waves began to get more and more frequent, the sound of a storm began to seep through his speakers now and, although impossible, William thought he could feel a cool wind brushing against his cheeks.

21...22...23..

The previous entertained yet curious William was now pale with fright in his seat, shaking as he held onto his chair with his legs held beside him.

'It's not real, it's not real. Don't be stupid. Calm. Down.' William always thought of himself having a superior mind, he was quite cocky with the fact that he believed himself smarter than everyone although not in a math-ie kind of sense, but, a mental, logical kind of way.

With his quick thought process, his previously fear-ridden self was no more. He calmly placed his feet on the "floor" and sat himself up straight before giving himself a quick slap to the face to wake himself up from this strange hallucination that he was facing.

*Slap!*

As ruthless as the slap was, the next moment he felt his reality shatter.

It was real. It wasn't a hallucination. His feet were bathing inside of an angry ocean and that would... that would mean that the giant ship sailing towards him was real too. He felt his old office chair become wet, not from the ocean, but from his own pee. He was more scared now than any other moment in his life and he had uncontrollably lost control of his bladder. No one could blame him for this, but, still...

The menacingly huge, wooden ship sliced through the ocean like butter as it sailed directly towards William and his small chair. In the seconds before the ship crashed into him and plunged him into the depths, he found himself serenely calm. Not thinking of anything, except a single, short sentence...

'What the fuck.'