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Shipmaster Dave: Left in the darkness with no other options, Aemilia lowers herself to the deck and finds her way by feel under the hammocks to the edge of the hold, resigned to another night sleeping on the rough wooden planks, though this time without a knot on her head to help her rest.
Shipmaster Dave: "You didn't ask nicely," Aemilia hisses angrily but quietly at the pirate. She tries to kick him away with her foot, but the hammock swings wildly with her movement and her blow comes nowhere close to connecting. As the hammock swings up, she takes the opportunity to roll out on the opposite side than her attacker is standing so he'll have to grab her across it.
Shipmaster Dave: Feeling vulnerable under the gaze of the pirates, Aemilia reluctantly slips belowdecks. She is surprised to see the light of Xantrius' cantrip across the hold , but her eyes harden when she sees the red-haired healer holding court. Staying in the darkness outside the aura of light, she finds a hammock as far from the other press-ganged as possible and turns her back to wait for morning.
Up on deck in the evening air, Aemilia is in no hurry to retreat to the dark and smelly hold but feels vulnerable sitting by herself among strangers. She looks around the deck for a group of men, either talking or playing cards or dice, who don't seem too closed off to intrusion by an outsider.
She gasps and pulls away from him slightly, her fingers creeping up to tug his hand down to her waist, although once she's relocated it, she keeps her fingers tangled with his, intimately. "Jack, I... I'm sorry," she blushes in confusion. "Whatever was in that drink... it's gone to my head. I...." She glances around at the other people still on the deck self-consciously before looking up into his eyes to appeal to him. "I don't mean to be a tease. It's just, I know what it can be like below-decks." She rolls her shoulder to gesture to the rest of the crew in plain sight. "If they all get the idea that I'm... that I'm easy... well, I'm not armed, and you can't follow me around to protect me day and night. It's my first day, and I don't know who I can trust and who I can't. Give me a little time, Jack? And maybe," she smiles promisingly, "a little privacy?"
Aemilia laughs ruefully, letting her head drop onto his shoulder in fatigue. "Well, I guess I'm out of luck, Jack, because I don't know anything about being a sailor and I don't know a soul on this ship ... except you."
After Xantrius has finished his performance and gone below with Sevien, Aemilia keeps talking lightly to Jack, telling stories of growing up with her "sister" Aspexia and some of the places she's visited around Garund, making it all sound as glamorous as possible. When Shivikah moves away, she marks her whispered conversation with Master Scourge. Scooting closer to Jack, she whispers, "Your lady friend, she's a pet of the man with the lash? I'm afraid she's going to look to make things hard on me, and I've no way to defend myself."
Aemilia barely acknowledges the Mwangi woman and proceeds to pointedly ignore her existence as she chatters animatedly with the scrimshaw carver, laughing at Xantrius' performance and unnecessarily brushing against Jack's hand or leg on several occasions.
As Xantrius commands the attention of the crew, Aemilia looks around for Jack and his scrimshaw, sipping the fiery rum. If she finds him on deck, she takes note of whom he might be sitting with as she moves in his direction, hoping to make another 'friend' on board before retiring for the evening.
Aemilia looks bored by the keelhauling. Plugg has made such a point of it, he obviously hopes to impress the new recruits, either with his power or with his viciousness. He reminds Aemilia of some young Badawi men who had preened and made empty boasts for Aspexia's benefit in Katapesh, utterly unaware that, even had they intrigued her, her parents would as soon marry their only daughter to a Mwangi salt miner as to a Keleshite nomad, no matter how wealthy. The man is obviously a fool; the captain claims to be short-handed, and yet Plugg chooses to gratify his bloodthirst and kill an able sailor rather than shackle him or break him. Aroden's eye, they could at least keep him in the brig until making port to sell him to slavers and make a few coins off of him. When the fish stew is served around, she sniffs it and shudders. "Your handiwork?" she asks Xantrius dryly. She manages to choke down a few bites, solely because she hasn't eaten anything since the day before, and that had been only hardtack in the captain's cupboard. At least she could pick around the weevils in that; in this stew, they might well be cooked in with everything else, for all she could distinguish. "Belowdecks is dark, and it stinks of rotten fish and dirty sailors," she remarks to Sevien when he suggests going back down the stairs. "Go down there a while, and you'll be glad of the lights and the breeze up here." She sniffs at the rum as she did at the stew; this also seems to carry the potential of making her sick, but at least the rum ought to make her feel giddy for a little while first. "We'll see how much of a gentleman you really are when my head is swimming," she smirks at Xantrius.
She casts her eyes significantly to where Sevien, his tattoo obscured with blood, has just risen unsteadily to his feet. "Your allies haven't proven very effective in their mutual protection pact thus far," she whispers back. "Still... far be it from me to refuse the advances of a gentleman." Empty words, she thinks bitterly as she moves to the keelhauling rope. The one from Cassomir is in the galley and the brute in the ropes all day; am I to trust in the ability of a woman and a man who cannot even finish his own work to help me? Better to form my own alliances.
Aemilia shrugs and moves to take hold of the rope without much enthusiasm. Her fingers have taken enough punishment from coarse ropes today, but with so many men pulling, she doesn't expect to have to apply much strength to the task.
Aemilia glances quickly aside at the whisper to see the young man with the cheekbones and the quick wit who was sent to the kitchens. Cassomir. She doesn't recognize the name, but the way he says it implies it's a place of some importance on the northern continent. With a quick look at Messrs Plugg and Scourge to make sure their attention is still on the Chelaxian tied to the mast, she cautiously sidles a bit closer and whispers back. "Aemilia Fullona, of Eleder." She surreptitiously offers him her fingers at the end of her nearer arm to clasp.
Aemilia bites her lip to stifle a surprised laugh. She certainly hadn't been expecting that. If he could bear the long and arduous process that acquiring that tattoo must have been, perhaps this 'artist' wasn't as weak as she had assumed. Having been raised in a good colonial home in Sargava, she knows enough to surmise that he must be from the decadent home country of Cheliax and has enough latent patriotic spirit to look forward to seeing the big Devil on his back struck by the lash. Still, for all that he's skinny, she can't deny that there's something impressive about his casual refusal to quail in the face of being beaten for the third time since morning....
Aemilia does her best to stay close to Scrimshaw Jack, the only soul on board who even knows her name. The pocket the bronze knife is hidden in is tempting, but at this point a possible ally is more valuable than a hidden weapon; she doesn't have the strength to kill a man in one blow, which is the only one she would get. She winces as the dwarf removes his shirt, even more convinved to do anything necessary to avoid punishment; scars like that would mark her forever as a slave and eliminate any chance of passing herself off as a lady. Her eyes rove over the assembled crew, counting the complement of women among them. Surely they don't strip down a woman in front of the whole ship to give her the lash....
Jack sits a little taller at Aemilia's comments. "He ain't never caught me yet. He ain't too bright, ol' Master Scourge. You do most o' the work, ye avoid most o' the whip. The work's pretty hard, don't get me wrong, but ye can usually squeeze in something else. I even made it down to the quarter master store o' Cut-Throat once and bought me this," he holds up the bronze knife, "from me winnings at cards." "Oh." Aemilia looks disappointed. "I could never buy anything. I don't have any coin ... or anything else, either to swap or to bet." She leans closer to Jack so he can feel her breath as she whispers, "Even these clothes aren't mine."
"Aemilia." She darts a glance toward Scourge to make sure he's still looking away before dropping one end of the rope and offering Jack her hand. If he takes it, she lets the clasp linger just a tad longer than strictly necessary for a greeting. With another nervous look over her shoulder at Scourge, she gets back to splicing. "How do you dare to do that on the open deck? Aren't you afraid he'll catch you? You must be terribly brave."
Aemilia tries to find a patch of shade from the masts and sails to sit in as she works at splicing the ropes. It's a tedious job and rough on the skin, but the callouses she earned on her last ship ought to keep her fingers from bleeding too badly. It certainly appears to be less strenuous than scrubbing the deck; she glances across the ship at Sevien and Lysandra whispering as they work with no evidence of sympathy. As her fingers master the repetitive motions of the task, her eyes have more time to roam. They increasingly settle on the young man with the piece of ivory -- and the knife. As the sun drifts across the sky and the ship cuts through the sea, she takes the opportunity to follow a patch of shade a little nearer the crewman ostensibly mending the sail. When Master Scourge has just moved away enough for him to retrieve his project from beneath the billows of canvas, she smiles at him promisingly. "Well met, sailor. What are you carving there? Present for a girl in port?"
Aemilia looks up at the rigging, her face going grim and pale, but she moves past the complaining poet without hesitation. Looking for special treatment, are you? she wonders. Make your appeal to the redhead, then; she might have a soft spot for the scholarly type. Even if Mr. Plugg's proclivities lie that way, I don't think you'd care to awaken his tender sympathies. She takes a deep breath and swallows hard as she grabs hold of the rigging. A few months ago, the rough rope would have torn at her soft skin, but long days with a mop and a bucket had calloused her hands. There were no doubt some people who would view a broken neck from a fall as a swift and merciful fate compared to being torn by the lash, but Aemilia hoped to avoid both, especially now that Mr. Plugg had the poet to toy with.
Aemilia is starting to think that staying out of trouble is going to be easier than she thought, between the belligerent men challenging the pirates and the handsome one too foolish to keep his head down and mouth shut. She glances across to take the measure of the other two who are staying quiet and cowed: a woman, and a pretty one, looking as frightened as Aspexia had been when the pirates took the vessel, and a pale, fragile-looking man, the artist-type, perhaps a poet, the type Aspexia would sigh over and moon about the depths of his soul. Neither one of them look any more fit for hard labor than she does, although she has already gained calloused hands and tanned skin from the time she spent working on her last ship. 'Short-handed': It must be so, if they are desperate enough to press such unlikely crewmen.
Feeling the eyes of the peg-legged man on her, Aemilia shudders a little and puts as much space between them as she unobtrusively can. Better the dwarf than that one.... So there are women on this ship, she eyes the red-head and the halfling warily. The crew of the last ship had thought it bad luck to have women on board. Not hostages who they thought would bring a large ransom, of course; those were always lucky. They'd gotten rid of her at last, and she'd brought at least three of them some coin, she supposed. When the captain found out who'd stolen his keys and his captive, he'd have it back in blood; if the three who'd sold her were smart, they'd be plotting against each other before they drank their profits, figuring out who to pin the crime on and leave with a slit throat and planted evidence. It amused her briefly to imagine the human getting one over on both the dwarf and the half-orc, but he wasn't clever enough for all that. Pity; he was her favorite of the three, in the sense that he was the one she'd take the least pleasure in seeing dead.
A troublemaker, Aemilia notes of the half-breed. Useful, for now, to keep the lash occupied elsewhere, but if he can't be broken, they'll put the lot of us on half-rations until we can 'convince' him to cooperate -- or to stop breathing to take the heat off the rest of us. She waits for some of the others as she approaches the stairs, trying not to be the first one up; the pale and slender man seems eager to take that position. She falls in behind him to climb the stairs. The captain's cupboard, she remembers, and the three pirates with the key. We were in Port Peril.... She glances down to see if she's wearing the same clothes she was thrown in the cupboard in. Gods, let it have been the human and not the dwarf....
Grown used to such rude awakenings, Aemilia's body responds before her mind is awake, pushing her to rise to her feet. Don't know him. Where are the stairs? They've moved. Wrong ship. What's going on? Trying to remember what might have happened since her last memories on another pirate ship makes her head throb. She stumbles toward the stairs before the other man can get to his feet; let the whip find someone else as the last up. Obedience first, revenge later. She glances at the man who woke her appraisingly. Those gold teeth will sell for a handful of coin. |
