What can I fix you with?

[Namira]

No further shooting.

Buffering.

Buffering.

Nothering.

'kay. They were prolly good.

Twonior hadn't got got and Junior was up and about talking as well so that was good. Could reel in the caution. A little. Weren't points for bravery here.

Stokes picked herself up and headed for the entrance, sliding just by Chris to take in the scene, one foot still partway inside the building.

Whew. Uh. Okay. Alright.

Her throat felt dry. She swallowed, and then again. Dead dude. Sure was a dead dude. Laying there. Dead.

Stokes'd watched a-fucking-lot of SOTF. Spent hours on hours finding the right footage and hours more editing it together to make her own stories and jokes. She'd never been a gorehound, trying to find the bloodiest possible shots, but like, yeah, sometimes blood could be a punchline. Even when it wasn't, she'd seen it a bunch, watched the seasons while they were happening, watched them back. Characters dying in Abridged was part of the fun, part of the show, part of the jokes. Was always gonna be, y'know? Couldn't SOTF without the deaths. Watch the show. Make the vids. Bounce between them both.

That was a dead dude. She'd seen a whole bunch of dead dudes. Heckled 'em. Laughed at 'em. Shed some tears. This one wasn't on the opposite side of a screen.

She'd lost track of the punchline someplace.

"Yeah. Get him outta here and come on in."

She needed to sit down.

She couldn't see the punchline here.

[Espi]

Kaya recoiled away as Gregory went past her, stepping back and leveling her gaze as he ran off into the night. She frowned, then turned to look back over at the others on the ship.

After a moment, Kaya knelt and hefted Eric's bags over her shoulder and shoved his little gun into her pocket. Then, with a quiet grunt, pushed Eric's body into the sea with a small splash, almost impossible to hear over the natural rocking of the waves. She stood back up, looked over her hands. After examining them briefly, she turned and returned to the group.

She grinned over at Bethan as she'd come closer to the other girl. "Uh-huh, yeah, pretty much." She walked over to Bethan and put a hand on her shoulder. "Yeah, it'll get taken care of, no worries." She glanced over at Chris and narrowed her eyes, drawing her lips back in a slight scowl. Then, it was gone, and she smiled back at Stokes and the others.

"Yeah, sorry about all that. Should be good now. Hopefully the gunshots'll scare off anyone else dumb enough to mess with us." She looked over at Stokes and smirked, shifting her shoulder to draw attention to the new bag she had brought in. "Oh, and I collected some plunder, if you'd like to trade for that?"

[Irina Ivanov]

Uh, okay what the hell, why was she glaring at him like that-

If, in that brief moment, Chris had said anything, it would have be stumbling literary garbage. Instead, it stayed as thoughtful garbage which was about the same as the other stuff he thought of anyways. It was a pretty reasonable response toseeing someone get murdered.

He wasn't sure how it felt, after it was as clear as a VHS tape that the situation had calmed down. Once Kaya stopped it with the daggers, and Chris felt the thrill bleed out. He didn't know much, really. He knew that he had walked outside slightly as well, shoes pinned to the wall, axe in hand half behind his legs and other behind the edge of the entrance. Actually, scratch that, half of him was in the shop. Was he maybe trying to get a closer look at it? To somehow protect Stokes? He didn't know, and he hated that.

This was real, all of it, besides those phantasmic cameras, those weren't. And in real life, Chris didn't walk outside when there was a gangster outside, he didn't have a bandanna because those things were a fashion disaster, and he didn't have this stupid look on his face.

"Yeah, well, we need something to trade with, that's the dead guy's one right?"

Chris also wanted to say something something responsibility or people coming back for their stuff. But his line faded, and he ended with just a nice big smile. Even he wasn't THAT dumb to add fuel to a defusing timebomb.

[Pippi]

Bethan winced just a little bit as Eric’s body rolled off the side of the jetty, because, like, ow, that was gonna leave a bruise she was totally sure! There was still a faint throbbing sensation in her knee from where she’d hit the deck earlier, so like, crumpling onto the ground and then being rolled off the side of the boardwalk? That was gonna make the poor guy really sore in the morning! And that wasn’t even taking into account the boat Kaya had pushed him onto! Even if there had been mats and tarpaulins and stuff laid down to cushion the blow, it was still a fair ways to fall!

She knew that he kiiiiiinda deserved it for, y’know, attacking them in the first place, but still, she really hoped he wouldn’t be too upset about it!

“Okey dokey!” Bethan cheerily replied to Kaya’s assertions, before following after her, trotting back up the entryway stairs of the shopé café. It was strange; she hadn’t really noticed the cold whilst she’d been outside, probably thanks to all the adrenaline and the blood pumping through her veins and everything happening around her distracting her from the night air sea breeze. But now that she was actually standing indoors, it was as though her body had just woken up, and realised ‘Oh dang, there sure is a sudden change in temperature here, I need to heat up!’

And so as the others were conversing, Bethan felt her teeth start to chatter, and she wrapped her arms around herself as her body started shivering. Gosh, she was sure that all of the Welsh side of her family would be shaking their heads in disappointment at this shameful reaction to just a wee bit of nippy weather! But, in her defence, normally when she was in Wales she wore way warmer clothing than her usual Miami-fit cybergoth gear.

“Y-Yeah! P-p-plundered goods, to tr-trade with! St-Stealing f-from the evil, g-g-give to the g-g-good!”

Hmmm. Turned out chattering teeth and knocking knees did not a very imposing Buccaneer make!

[Namira]

Stokes sat.

She knew what she had in her pocket to make this deal, but, weird thing here, couldn't really find the right words. Tongue-tied at the sell, great.

It wasn't a tongue twister. Didn't even come close. Just..

Alright, alright, no, no. Get your head in the game. Again. This was always gonna happen sooner or later and she was lucky with how this had gone down. Kaya had dealt with the problem and Stokes had stayed way out of the firing line, and now Kaya was coming to the table. She was buying in. Buy in was where it was at. This place was dead in the water without a bit of belief to go around.

So. Pull up your dungarees, Stokes, and act on the idea you've had all this time jeez fuck.

"As you can see, the merch is right here." Stokes gestured to her countertop assortment. "But, back to what I said before, I've got info, Buccaneer info. It's a lil' on the stale side so far as who was here, coupla announcements old at this point, buuuuuuut, I can tell you who two of your teammates are."

Stokes smiled. She imagined the glint a digital incarnation of herself would hold in that grin.

"Interested?"

[Espi]

Kaya smiled.

"Yeah. He's not gonna need it anymore, after all." She glanced over to Bethan, then back at the others, raising an eyebrow. "Eric seems like the sore loser kinda guy, but he can just deal with it."

Kaya adjusted the strap of the bag on her shoulder and looked Bethan up and down and frowned, then looked back at Stokes. "Alright, so much for a blanket or two and some of that nice teammate tea?"

She paused for a moment. "Oh yeah, I forgot something. One sec. Bethan, watch my stuff? I'll be right back!" Without waiting for a reply, she dropped Eric's bag on the floor next to Bethan's feet and trotted out of the boat once more. She made her way over to the former spot of Eric's body and crouched, picking up the small, oddly-shaped gun he'd been wielding. She stared down at it for a moment, then rose to her feet, turned around and walked back to the ship.

"Got you a present too, Bethan," Kaya called cheekily as she entered the boat for the third time today. She held out the Zip 22 to the other girl. "A good pirate's gotta have a...did they have blunderbusses? Whatever, close enough right?"

She looked back over at Stokes once more. "I'll need to check what exactly the plunder we got is, but we'll work something out, yeah?"

[Namira]

"Depends whatcha got. Food. First aid. Other supplies. I'll hear you."

[Irina Ivanov]

Chris walked back to the counter, making his damn hardest not to let anyone get behind him in the process. What? What else was he supposed to do? Turn his back on a bloody killer?

Well, she wasn't...exactly a killer, wasn't she? She had a face- no, obviously everyone has faces, because that's how people worked but like-....she just wasn't, okay? There was no way, because REAL killers were bad, and they get locked up because of that. And you don't see them walking around like that. Don't talk to them, and all. Plus, this wasn't even real at all, was it?

Honestly, this felt like a bullshit script, the quiet kid murders someone, everyone saw that coming! How was that entertaining and

"Y-you know, if-if you're going to be larping pirates like you did a bit ago, you pro-obs should get yourself a coat!. Unless you want to actually sound like you have a speech impediment."

While Chris was looking over the counter and trading with the not-killer, that foolish quip just slipped out, like the anxious, crazy conversation in his head grew so loud that others could hear it. People couldn't hear it, right? Maybe notice his dry, widened eyes, or the sweat he was shaking off, but that could mean anything!

Right, the trade. Chris leaned back on the wall, looking over the counter. All things considered, the counter looked pretty appealing, with Chris deliberately piling the supplies in a way that it piled up in droves while still being spread out. In fact, Stokes nearby could be masked if Chris looked from a dutch angle.

"So uh, Stokes? Are we going to be trading the med kit stuff yet, or nah?"

[Pippi]

Was… was Chris making fun of her?

Right now, he looked for all the world as though he hadn’t said a thing, almost totally oblivious to the world outside of the countertop in front of him, but he had absolutely totally been mirroring her chattering stuttering and calling her whole Buccaneer deal ‘LARPing’ in a way that didn’t sound entirely complimentary, and, like, okay, she was used to being made fun of, you know? She knew that the stuff she wore and the things she said and the way she acted, none of it was exactly, like, normal, and she wasn’t dumb, she could tell when people were trying to stifle their laughter around her, or when they made comments behind her back. She’d dealt with all that sorta stuff before! She wasn’t surprised at all that she was gonna have to deal with it again!

But just because she was used to it didn’t mean it wasn’t still totally rude and hurtful! She’d just gotten away from a super high-stakes, high-tension situation unscathed, and it had been cold and, like, totally nerve wracking, and so she had every right to be shivering right now!

She shot a look at Chris, which on Bethan’s face translated to a rather huffy pout, before Kaya returned - wow, Bethan had totally missed her popping out just now! - bearing gifts. There was something square and black and compact in her hand, something that was, apparently, a gun.

“Oh! Um, wow, thank you Kaya!” Bethan chirped, attention now on the… the ‘gun’. Yeah. Yeah this was…. This was uh…

Wow, this was definitely not a real gun at all, was it? Like, the thing was almost a perfect rectangle! It looked more like some ray beam emitter or laser gun from a single-take sci-fi B-movie, but there was a dinky little, uh, bullet hole thingy that looked like it had just been kinda tacked on there? Like whoever had designed it had realised that it looked like something outta Survivors In Space and tried desperately to salvage it. It was just so dinky and small and square, and Bethan had never thought she’d say this about a gun of all things, but it was kinda cute in how weird it looked? It totally didn’t match with the Buccaneer aesthetic at all, but- Oh! Oh, now that was an idea! She already had the cybergoth gear to kickstart things, and now with this ‘gun’, she was…. Bethan Gayle: Space Buccaneer!

Oh man, she really needed to get a cool tricorn hat with a neat feather in it, pronto!

She looked up, realising that she’d been kinda staring down at the gun for the past while, and piped up, offering Kaya and Stokes her two cents, heart and soul and, well, pretty much everything buoyed by this new gift.

“If you wanna like, take stuff from my bag then that’s totally fine by me! I think that info could be really handy, right Kaya? I mean, so that, uh, so that we can find our missing crewmates and get the Buccaneers back into shipshape condition!”

[Espi]

"No worries, Beth. I got a whole extra bag on me now, should be enough I think."

Kaya sat herself down a little out of the way and opened up Eric's bag. Sorting through, she set aside the empty bags--Cassini, Gus, Calla. The bottled water, crackers and bread, Life Savers and Gatorade--Kaya started snacking on the candy as she worked. Two brand name shirts and a pair of swim trunks, what looked to be Eric's team clothes--an orange crab. Kaya smirked. Two medical kits, a towel, some dried squid and seaweed, a shot of rum, the map and sextant, a flashlight...

"Oh, crap." Kaya grumbled as she picked up the second towel and spilled a pile of tiny steel caltrops across the floor. "Watch your step." she announced to anyone nearby before quickly gathering them up and wrapping them in the towel like a satchel.

After a couple of moments, Kaya arrayed all of Eric's possessions in front of her in a neat line before sitting back cross-legged and looking over at Stokes. "Hey, here's what a got." She grinned.

"What can I fix you with?"

[Namira]

"Hey, that's my line..."

Stokes considered.

Kaya seemed pretty open to all of this, probably because she'd just added more supplies to what was a slightly questionable abundance. She had to be a good scavenger, so it was kind of a shame that she had her own agenda, or else Stokes would have liked to suggest adding her to the team as a field agent type of deal. But, she was obv on the lookout for the rest of the Buccaneers, and while staying in the middle was great and all, if any group got too much of a deathball rolling, sooner or later, that team was gonna realise that their path to victory lay through eating up weaker contestants. Stokes setting that up for success meant paying for it down the line, where this whole scheme of hers actually finally unlocked its win condition.

So... information? Sure. Active allegiance? The other shoe was gonna drop eventually.

Stokes held up an acknowledging hand to Junior, that she'd heard him, then, after a little smile and a nod towards Bethan, focused on Kaya.

"How 'bout... how 'bout a medkit and some of the food that's gonna go bad sooner? Not doing you much good hauling around tons of extra meds and you're prolly not gonna be able to eat the rest fast enough for it to be worth carrying either."

[Pippi]

Huh, you know, now that Kaya had mentioned it, Bethan realised she really hadn’t eaten very much of her supplies at all! She’d only really been tearing of chunks of bread to chew on every now and then, and aside from that, she was down to just one bottle of Gatorade now; raspberry lemonade had never been her favourite flavour of anything, but it was the closest thing she had to a can of Monster right now!

As she watched Kaya sorting through Eric’s bag, though, she idly started doing the same, getting a proper look at the food - mostly snack-based, she was starting to realise - that she’d been given. Pretty much everything was kinda hit or miss, stuff that she’d eat if she had to but that she’d never really take as her first choice. One thing, though, did catch her eye, and so she fished one of the seaweed snack packets out and ripped it open, holding a small square of roasted seaweed between her fingers before she popped it into her mouth. It was… not entirely what she’d been expecting! A little saltier than she’d thought it might be, honestly, with an unexpected but not unpleasant hint of sesame.

But it had also served the purpose Bethan had been half-expecting, sorta-hoping it would; a rush of memories from back home, of eating laverbread with bacon and cockles and a stack of either buttered toast or fried bread on the side. She felt her heart lurch forwards, like it was trying to front flip right out of her chest. She missed it. Home, that is, home and her mum and her dad and the food they made and all the rest of her family and all of her friends who weren’t picked up for this thing. She would be home soon, she knew that! These games generally only took, like, a week or so to complete! And she knew that, like, they all had to be abducted without warning and stuff, she figured that was part of making it all feel so real and exciting and scary!

But, still. Just now, she’d felt this real, overwhelming desire to just run off and jump into the water or into the middle of one of the Danger Zones until her timer ran out and the producers came to pick her up. Just so that she could get a big big hug from her mum and dad as soon as she could.

She had this, like, weird feeling though, more of a serious hunch really, that if Lucille found out she’d done that, then she’d be really… maybe not, like, disappointed in her, maybe not even super truly upset at all, but it wasn’t the sort of thing Lucille would do, not in a million years, and she was so cool in such an effortless way, and, like, Bethan really wanted to do something that she would think was equally cool, and make her happy, and impress her and stuff!

She’d been thinking a lot about Lucille, particularly over the past few hours, if that wasn’t blindingly obvious. They’d been at… a point, recently, where Bethan really wasn’t sure what they were, as in them too together, whether they’d reached a finite point of no return, or if things were just on pause for a while, or if there was something more or something less than what she was hoping for or expecting or wishing, and maybe if she ran into Lucille she could answer some or all or none of these questions.

But most importantly, if she ran into Lucille, she’d be with Lucille. And that was kinda what Bethan wanted the most out of anything ever, right now.

“That sounds like a good deal to me! Right Kaya?” Bethan chimed in, smiling happily at her friend and her fellow star sailor of the sea. She slipped her weird little square plastic gun into the pocket of her hoody, then zipped her bag back up and sat cross legged on the floor, watching this trade deal go down.

“We can, like, share my tuna sandwich later if you want, and I don’t eat too many snackfoods so you can have all of mine!”

Honestly, Bethan would have traded away all of her food if Stokes had really wanted it - which, from what she knew about Stokes, she probably didn’t, which was good, because she still had to eat something! - because there was a chance, however slim, that her teammate information could be an even luckier break than it appeared on the surface. Because her teammates could, of course, contain someone like Lucille or like Virginia, someone that she could trust, someone that she could trust intimately, someone who would be absolutely perfect to join the Buccaneers.

For now, she stayed silent, sitting on the floor, biting a seaweed snack in half, crossing her fingers and hoping that this day of uncertainty and gunfire had a happy, hopeful ending.

((Bethan Gayle continued in Someone Who Needs Me))

[Espi]

"Sure."

Kaya stuffed the medkit as well as the sandwich and some of the other snacks into one of the excess duffle bags, stood back up, and thrust the bag out at her. "And I'll even throw in a free bag for good measure."

Her grin faltered a little as she glanced aside at Bethan on the floor, but she looked back at Stokes. "Alright, that's my end of the bargain. What do you got for us?"

She looked over her shoulder out into the darkness. "Oh, and uh, mind if we hang out for the night? We're quiet sleepers, promise."

((Kaya Robinson continued in There is No Name for This))

[Irina Ivanov]

Chris stood by, looking over the Buccaneer pirates trading, realigning the counter after Kaya gave the medkit, the food, etc. Normal shopping stuff! For the most part, he did his part pretty well as the fresh blood teenage security guard, and his axe stood behind the counter next to him as he stared out the entrance. Really, Chris REALLY didn't want to have to get a job, and if he did, then ideally he would be working at Starbucks then....(What was this store called anyways, Survival of the Richest of something?). Pay was kind of shit as well.

"Oh," Chris tried to frown, adding a sense of 'not-quite-happy' onto his smirk. "I mean, we're a trading store, not an inn, and a bag might not be enough to pay for your beauty sleep Zzz. "

Heh, sleeping already? What time was it, someth-

Night time, likely quite late into the night as well. Objectively the best time to sleep. Chris stared out into the visible sky from where he was, with an unreadable open mouth look to him.

How...long has it been? Most of all, why wasn't Chris tired at all? If anything, he supposed the sandman felt nearly....scary? Not even in a goofy haha I'm made of every beach-goer's nightmare form, but a sort of genuine dread fitting of his brother, the grim reaper. No, that was silly as hell. There was no way he was scared of some bodily function (Although he guessed bleeding was pretty close to creepy.)

He felt jittery, more so. The ground felt horrible to touch, as if he lay down, he would have to get back up immediately, if he stopped figetting, then he would have to start again over and over and over again, or if he stopped quietly humming then it was too quiet and he needed to talk to someone and

"Hehehe. Isn't it funny that,"

Chris stopped the chuckling, not out of realization that he might be over talking, but rather he didn't know what to say next. The disjointed words grew less and less connected until they stopped. He let himself grimace this time. When was he ever lost for words? He filled the unbearable, night-touched silence with a half-laugh, half-sentence again, turning his gaze to Stokes.

"Isn't it funny that we're basically acting out that....Heart of Life game in real life? And not even the good parts either, we're the useless shopkeepers! Hey, if we're going to be actors here, we could have at least been something cool like the mentor who dies at the end or something."

In his heart of hearts, Chris felt himself cringe at every word he said, a clingy, girly attempt to stave off weakness. But he felt obliged to keep up the act. If not for him, then for the sick audience's pleasure.

Since when did he care about what the camera thought of him? Chris didn't know, he didn't know anything at all, staring into the black hole of the metal eyes.

((Chris Tyrell continued elsewhere....))

[Namira]

"Done an' done.

"So, your teammates. Been a bit since I saw them, but Lucille and Sofia are both on your team. They swung by here on the first day, left together. Might be they're still together. Sure seemed that it was the plan, but you know. Plans change."

(Stokes elsewhere)