Chapter 95: Any Boat in a Storm

The headcrab matron’s body stiffened as all the joy an excitement drained from her expression. Both from the human and the crab laying eggs in the corner of the room.

Her hand shifted slightly on the desk.

“Before you do anything rash,” Will said, raising his hand. “I’ve got my entire Party waiting outside the brothel for me to return unharmed and without a passenger. They have instructions to raise a shitstorm if anything other than that happens.”

“William Oh…” She said, seemingly tasting his name. “It seems like your legend wasn’t as overblown as I’d thought. What do you want?” she asked, seemingly relaxing.

“Both of you stand where I can see you,” Will said, motioning for the crab to join the human at the desk. Once they were both in front of him, Will spoke. “I want Two things. First, I want your support. I want privileged status in The Flotilla. I know you’re on the city council, so I want you to endorse me should the need arise. Take my side in legal disputes, funnel lucrative contracts towards those who align themselves with me. That sort of thing.”

“Easy enough,” She agreed readily. “You do understand that once I endorse you, it is in your best interest to ensure we aren’t discovered, lest my favor become a lead weight around your neck?”

“I understand,” Will said, nodding. “The second thing I want is for you to not target certain people.”

“Oh?”

“In the coming months and years, there will be a flow of people following me up to my Stronghold.  Naturally they’ll stop in The Flotilla to wait out the acclimation period before their bus moves on. I want you to leave people allied with me alone.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Will said, spreading his palms as if to say ‘easy, right?’

“This seems less like blackmail and more like a proper business arrangement.” The matron said, both the crab and her puppet assuming contemplative poses as they digested Will’s requests.

“All this intrigue, the blackmail…was just to get my foot in the door.” Will said with a shrug. “To be taken seriously.”

“I would’ve preferred a letter.” She groused.

“A letter doesn’t have the same flair as a dramatic infiltration, and Loth says my penmanship is atrocious.” Will said with a shrug.

She studied him for a moment, head cocked, studying him with inhuman focus, and Will felt the Charge running through her Body as she activated an Ability, causing Will to tense.

“You have six Party members surrounding the Last Chance Inn. Loth the saboteur, June the scout, Reggie the tank, Mason the nuker, Alicia the artillery, and Brianna the Tangled. Brianna has middling Focus at best, and like us, is one soul in multiple bodies. Her offshoots are currently acting as bodyguards for each of your other Party members. I could dominate your Tangled footsoldiers and turn them against your core group, bringing them to me. Only Loth and Mason have enough Focus to resist my control at close range.”

Well that’s horrifying. Not only does she have mind-reading and mind-control, but the range is high and doesn’t require line-of-sight. I wonder if that’s a side-effect of being fully mature?

“But you’re not going to do that.” Will said.

“Why’s that?” she asked, seeming to gain interest as Will spoke, leaning forward eagerly.

“Because if you’re reading our minds, you should know that Alicia can stop your heart from where she’s watching our conversation, Loth doesn’t have any Tangled offshoot beside her, and even if she did, they wouldn’t win. She will get away and bring the Flotilla down on your head.”

Not to mention the other guy I’m not going to think of by name.

She twitched at that thought, seemingly trying to determine if Will was mind-bluffing.

“Face it. The risk of exposing your entire operation or dying if one thing goes wrong is higher than just working with me.” Will said.

“…You’re not wrong. Let’s talk terms.” The crab matriarch said, clasping her hands together.

What followed next was an exercise in weaponized boredom, as the specifics of an alliance between crab and Will had so many rules, caviats, and if-thens, that Will found himself thinking he might’ve actually preferred a fight to the death.

The gist of it was the same, though: Anyone allied with Will was off-limits. Will would protect the crab-people’s secrecy and freedoms, as long as they didn’t use that promise to put him in a compromising position, and in return, they would become a voting block that supported him politically.

Milo popped his head in, seemingly wondering what was taking so long, eyes widening when he saw Will without his hat, head crabless.

The matron made a swift gesture at him and Milo ducked his head back out of the room, nodding.

She reached under her desk and brought out an inkwell that radiated the energy of a Relic.

“Let’s make it official,” she said, beginning to carefully ink a Contract.

Will held up his hand. “Let’s bring in Mason. We need someone you can’t control proofreading the paper.”

Will was definitely not bringing in Loth, as she was one of their last lines of defense, should things go sour, and having a Nuker start a fight on board the matriarch’s ship was a great way to not have a ship anymore.

A few minutes later, Mason entered, pulling up a seat beside Will and scanning through the document as it was written.

After a few more hours, Will stumbled out of the brothel with Mason at midnight, more exhausted than he thought he’d be, the stress of riding the razor’s edge of the situation devolving into a life-or-death fight fading away and taking all of his energy with it.

Will spat out the seaweed he’d forgotten he’d been chewing, running his hand over his scalp. The sweat that had been beading up on his brow had dried into a crust, similar to sea spray.

Muse in the window.

Nail through foot.

Sick soup.

Choking on stolen peanut butter.

Nothing changed even as he followed Ghoul’s mind control resistance technique. His thoughts and feeling fluctuated violently, and nothing changed, suggesting he wasn’t under the matriarch’s control…Probably.

“That was fun,” Mason said with an optimistic shrug as they met up with the rest of the party. “Who should we blackmail next?”

“Well, there’s a couple of rich runaways eloping on the other side of town…” Loth began.

“No, that would just be rude,” Will said, shaking his head.

“When is blackmail ever polite?” Travis asked from where he was sitting half a dozen feet away from them.

“Don’t speak, you’re supposed to remain unnoticed.” June said.

Travis blew a raspberry before returning to his shaved blueberry ice.

“I like to think our blackmail was plenty polite.” Will said, musing. “but they don’t strike me as the ‘hidden danger’ that Reese was talking about.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, first of all, they’re not fish.”

Travis groaned.

“Second and more importantly, they’re only a hazard to inebriates who can’t get their life on track. They’re not violently expansionist, merely opportunistic, and it’s in their best interest for there to be a large population of inebriates for them to use as hosts.”

“And what is necessary for inebriates to exist in large numbers?” Will asked.

Alicia and Mason frowned, while June nodded, seemingly following along.

“A big enough city with enough stability to allow them to exist while contributing nothing.” Loth answered for the entire Party’s benefit.

“Exactly. The crabs like The Flotilla being big and healthy enough to hide in. They’re a live-and-let-live type parasite. Even the people with crabs attached to their heads seem to be doing better than they were before.”

“So what you’re saying is…we should kill Reese.” Loth finished.

Will gave Loth a noogie, grinding his knuckle into the squirming genius’s skull.

“Not yet. Let’s keep looking for signs of Reese’s fish-people. We only checked three places, and blackmailing the crabs was just a target of opportunity.”

“Well, then where do you think-“

BOOOM!

The eight of them flinched in place as a flash of light pierced the dark, followed by an explosion so close on its heels that the two were nearly indistinguishable. Will was glad to know that his shriek was entirely drowned out by the explosion.

“What was that!?” Will demanded.

“Lightning.” Loth replied.

“Lightning can come from the SKY!?” Will demanded. He’d only ever heard of it being shot from people’s fingertips.

The tower is so damned unnatural sometimes.

Will looked up and saw roiling clouds backlight by the light of the moon, sweeping over them. The flags on the ships above them were snapped tight by the wind. They were only afforded a bit of protection by being in the center of a forest of ships.

Under his feet, Will could feel the wooden walkway begin to lift and sway as the normally calm ocean beneath them began to swell ominously high.

“BACK TO THE SHIMMER!” Will shouted, his voice melding with Loth’s as the eight of them began sprinting toward their dock, Will leading the pack.

He leapt onto a pier at a sprint and nearly went down as the pier began sliding under him. It was unmoored from the ship beside it, simply floating free on its pontoons in between the two vessels.

Will helped the others not lose their balance as they jumped over, falling behind to make sure nobody fell off the free-floating pier on pontoons.

“What’s going on!?”

“It’s called a Scramble!” Loth said, raising her voice above the sudden winds assaulting the sails above them. “When a nasty storm shows up it makes the waves get high, so the boats unmoor to prevent-“

CRASH!

A wave lifted a smaller ship, shifted it, then dropped it down on a larger one, crushing a large portion of the larger ship’s side.

“That!” Loth said.

“Scramble!”

“Scramble!”

Now that she mentioned it, Will heard the word ‘Scramble’ rising above the wind, echoing with a thousand voices.

Will ran.

The Flotilla was a big place though, and even minutes later, they were only a small way through The Flotilla. The waves were becoming gargantuan, and boats were starting to get few and far between as they drifted away from each other to give each other the space they needed to ride out the storm safely.

“Can you fly us home?” Will asked Loth.

“Not in this wind!”

Her bugs could carry a ridiculous amount, but they weren’t the strongest fliers, and the winds were outrageous.

Around them, they saw hundreds of civilians climbing onto nearby ships from their boardwalks, in order to not be stranded on the pier.

Their own length of unmoored pier was at least fifty feet away from any vessel and had no less than two dozen individuals on it, including Will’s Party.

A mountainous wave grabbed the pier and lifted it high into the air, tilting it nearly ninety degrees as it slipped off the top of the swell.

Everyone on board was at least level 25 though, and they clung to the boards with fingers stronger than the wood it was composed of.

Still, don’t know how long we can keep this up, Will thought, his breath nearly knocked out of him as the wave let go of their footing and gravity slammed them back down to the ground.

“Over here!” A voice shouted from an oversized vessel, bobbing wildly, shining a light down at their pier as it sailed past. “JUMP!”

“Go!” Will said, pointing.

He stayed behind on the pier and used his Phantom Hand to give his Party members and others the boost they needed to make the jump to the nearby ship.

Finally, Will was alone on the pier as the ship began drifting out of reach.

“What are you doing boy!? Grow a pair and jump while you still can!” The voice called.

“Grow a pair, who the Abyss does he think I am…” Will muttered to himself, standing and rolling his shoulders before running across the gulf between himself and the oversized ship, sprinting up the side of a wave before catching on and climbing up the netting on the side, hoisting himself up the side.

The first thing Will noticed was how finely sanded the wood of the ship’s railing felt under his hand. They’d been docked about a week now, and he’d rarely experienced wood this pleasant on the skin.

The next thing was the ostentatious gilding that covered the showy figurehead..

The showy figurehead depicting Granesh wrestling a snake. Will’s gaze travelled back along the floating Church of Granesh, eyes narrowing as he took in the place he’d only intended to break into on the way out of the Flotilla.

Oh, godsdamnit, Will thought sourly as the priesthood of Granesh clustered around him, checking his body for injuries.

Must not recognize me yet.

“If you could do that the whole time, why didn’t you help the others make it across the gap?” An aged priest asked, poking Will in the ribs, his nose wrinkling as if he smelled something bad.

“Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Have some faith, priest.” Will said, brushing the man’s hand aside and turning away before the man could get a good look at his face.

“Wait a minute…” The priest said, his eyes narrowing as he leaned in closer, obviously trying to see through the darkness to make out the detail’s of Will’s face.

We may have to take the ship, Will thought, his hand nearing his weapon.

“SKYSHARKS!” a voice shouted, and as one, all the ship’s lights were pointed upward, revealing the triangle-toothed maws emerging from the cloud coral above.