The sound of water being displaced drew all of our attention to the back of the boat. The water had begun to roil, and the tongue that we had pulled from Quiver was suddenly thrashing again, whipping this way and that as if in pain.
“First Mate…” Hawthorn began. “Sam hurt one.”
“I saw it. I see it..” Her staticky voice rejoined. “I know.”
A moment later it was all hands on deck, save for First Mate and Selimy. Lucas stomped onto the deck with paint buckets filled with the foul coating we’d put on the bottom of the ship. Melody had a bunch of brooms, mops and fishing poles.
“Coat these in the paste and make sure none of the tongues touch you or any part of the boat not coated in Bitrex Paste.” He said, and began slathering the gunk all over a broom. The tongue behind us was still wriggling around in the water like a snake having a stroke. Worse, it seemed to be agitating the other tongues that surrounded it, that were all slowly beginning to move, questing about and agitating other tongues. Quiver grabbed Hawthorn and shoved him through the door to below decks, shutting it. Everyone else was imitating our engineer.
Lucas thrust the broom he’d covered in… what had he said? Bitrex Paste? Into my hand.
“Watch the tongues.” He said, and shoved me towards the back of the ship to stand alone, staring at the tongues.
The tongues were gaining on us. Not the original tongue, but the net of agitated lengths of mouth meat expanding in every direction, each tongue agitating more and more. Some of them were lashing out wildly in the air, definitely high enough that they might make it onto the deck.
“Can you do that electric thing again?” Quiver asked, a number of Bitrex coated brooms held in their tentacles.
“Maybe. But not too many more times. My taser takes a while to recharge, it stores the excess electricity my body generates. I generate a good bit more of it than a normal person thanks to my augments, but if I use too much I’ll start draining the electricity my body uses to keep my muscles functioning. It’s actually really bad for my body to over use it. It could induce a heart attack, seizures, all sorts of unpleasant things.” It usually made me queasy to think about this, but at the moment I just recognized the importance of not over using my taser, nothing but the logic of self preservation guiding me.
It took a while for the tendrils to actually make close enough to be a threat, long enough for everyone else to have their Bitrex coated cleaning implement in hand and ready to use. To be safe, and because we had enough time, Lucas slathered our arms in Bitrex as well.
“Don’t rely on that, though. They like flesh. They’ll still grab you if they tast it beneath the paste.”
The boat had sped up while we watched the tongues. Probably draining all of the fear we would be feeling. But make it to the boat they did. At first it seemed tentative, one of them slid up the side of the boat and tried to slip onto the deck. Elma hit it with her broom, like she was playing golf, and it flopped back into the water.
We were lucky. The tongues had no sense of purpose, no direction. They couldn’t have actually known where we were, they were just flopping about, reacting to whatever stimulus had made them leave the water in the first place. In other words, they weren’t actually trying to get on the boat. Some of them accidentally tied themselves into knots, others flailed uselessly in the air.
But they were everywhere. They rose up out of the water, quickly surrounding the boat, and it was as if we’d plunged below the sea, trying to push past a forest of fleshy seaweed.
Quiver was up front with their many brooms and mops, trying to keep the tongues from off the bow of the ship.
I slapped one of the tongues back over board and had to whirl around to poke another that was licking up and down the Bitrex coated railing. The air became hot, sticky. It was almost like whatever these tongues were attached to was breathing on us, but it couldn’t have been. At least, I hoped it wasn’t. But Honestly we couldn’t tell. The tongues were blocking our vision of even the water below. What if something was rising up out of the water?
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I was glad my emotions were being drained away.
I don’t know how long we fought off the tongues, but it felt like hours. My arm was beginning to wobble, and my breathing had become ragged. It was hard doing this with only one hand.
We had seconds to rest, if that, in between batting the tongues away. The others, save Melody, seemed to be faring better than I was. Thatch in particular seemed inexhaustible. I suppose being made of wood and crochet had its advantages, and he was using his mop like a baseball bat, smashing tongues away from the ship with as much force as he was able to muster. I’d tried that for a moment as well, but found it far too tiring, and I didn’t get as much distance with only one hand. Poking and pushing was easier.
Time Continued to tick away, and my energy was slowly wasting away but so too, it seemed, were the tongues. Not that they got tired. But it seemed we’d been in the thick of them when I’d accidentally set them off. Soon I could see gaps in the tongues, blue water and clouds far away, and more tongues, undisturbed in the water. There was nothing below us rising to the surface, thank goodness. Soon there were only a few left, sticking out of the water like strands of stray hair. We knocked them back into the water when they strayed too close, but for the most part they flailed uselessly on the base of the boat, or off on their own in the water.
When they finally stopped I had a chance to check my watch, instead of keeping my eyes peeled for any tongue that looked like it might be heading towards the deck of the ship. Three hours had passed, roughly. My shoulders slumped and I sat down heavily on the floor.
Elma and Melody joined me on the floor, while Lucas rushed off back below decks. Quiver slinked towards us from the front of the ship, their tendrils drooping, some of them still dragging the Bitrex coated brooms and mops, smearing the substance along the deck.
“I didn’t like that.” Quiver said.
“Yea.” I agreed, and then, suddenly, the ship stopped moving.
Like a boulder dropped on me from a very high place I let loose a shout that tore through my chest and was loud enough that I thought my lungs would rupture. Fear had crashed back down around me, and with it exhaustion, relief and a host of little jumbled emotions, that made up the other larger emotions, that I’d never really noticed before.
Elma started laughing uncontrollably, her fist pounding on the deck of the ship over and over again as she tried to contain her mirth. Melody, who was lying down already, just shut her eyes and seemed to go to sleep. Quiver started crying.
“Thank you, Sam!” They sniffled, “You saved my life!”
The main engine rumbled to life, and the ship lurched forwards again.
“That was terrible.” I said, trembling. My body was playing catch up, it seemed. I was cycling through all of the emotions I should have felt throughout that near disaster so fast it felt like I was having a panic attack. Maybe I was.
“That was a good one, Sam!” Elma said in between convulsions of laughter. “I’ve never heard someone scream like that, so matter of fact! You sat there for a second looking dumb, screamed, and then stopped like your job was finished!”
“I was positive we were going to die.” Melody said, “Absolutely positive.”
“I’m so sorry everyone!” Quiver said, their tendrils pulled tight around their body so only their face stuck out. “It’s my fault! I-I touched the tongues!”
“Don’t be stupid.” I said a little more harshly than I’d intended. “It was that frog man thing.”
“There was a man living in the Sea of Tongues?” Elma asked,
“Not a man. More frog. Or… I don’t know what it was. But it was trying to sink the Befuddled. It kept pressing tongues to the base of the ship, but the Bitrex kept them from sticking. It didn’t seem terribly smart, but when Quiver went to get rid of it it stuck a tongue to their tendril.”
“That’s something else we have to watch out for on the way back. Great.” Melody said, “Ah, I fucking hate the Ocean sometimes.”
“You guys have never seen one of these before?”
“Nope.” Elma said, “But there are plenty of things on the ocean we’ve never seen. It’s a big place. And the Sea of Tongues is what some people call ‘The Sanity Line’. As you might guess, that means this is the place the ocean gets weird.”
“‘Get’s weird’.” I laughed bitterly.
When we finally left the tongues behind, First Mate came out from her spot in the bridge.
“Nice work. All of you, get some rest. We should have relatively smooth sailing, at least long enough for you to get some decent shut eye. Emotion Fatigue is a bitch.”
Melody stank badly of sweat and her hair was stuck to her head, while Lucas looked the same, if marginally better. Elma had dark green bags under her eyes and her legs wobbled, and Quiver was literally wilting. I was sure I didn’t look better. Yea. I don’t think anyone of us would complain about taking a rest. I noticed, however, that while First Mate’s uniform was immaculate as ever, and they weren’t sweat slicked like the rest of the humans, her eyes were baggy and her stiff backed posture slouched just a little. Had she slept last night? Or had she been in the bridge the entire time?
I considered asking, but the others were already heading to the doors below decks like a swarm of zombies, and after a moment of hesitation I elected to join them.
I collapsed into bed and realized I should have showered first, when my sweaty face stuck to my pillow, but I was too exhausted to get up.
“Fuck it.” I muttered, and didn’t move. I stayed awake for a short time imagining all the things that could’ve gone wrong today, but my exhaustion overpowered my fear and soon I was unconscious.