Chapter 1: (tentative) Play It
Prologue
All I remembered from the night before was a blur of waking up in a twisting hammock on a trading ship bound for somewhere i could not rem ember being caught in a sudden maelstrom of lightning and tossing sea before the vessel was struck and split nearly in two before being ripped apart by waves. i remember viewing the world in brief flashes of blue and white light from the deck near the mainmast before being blinded, concussed, singed a little, and thrown out into the world. i floated on my back for the most part, when i was not being thrown at pieces of the breaking down vessel, unable to move as i recovered my senses.
Finally, when i could see the world around me through more than a salt-blurred haze, i found myself floating among appearing and disappearing whirls from the massive suface displacement caused by the lightning striking all around. i could feel the energy in the water with every explosive contact like a brief flash of needles across every inch of me touching water, which honestly helped to stimulate my senses as i kicked carefully toward whatever part of the ship or its cargo was floating nearby and better than i was. by the time i actually bumped into something blindly between flashes, i was nearing the distant regions of the storm our ship had sailed into where the displacement whirlpools were at their most frequent and could just barely see that i was hanging onto a portion of one of the inner decks of the ship between the kichens at the back of the ship and the cargo deck midship.
The outer hull was one of the upper portion run through with ropes for all sorts of purposes that i held onto for dear life while the twenty-by-twenty-foot section of broken walled hull bobbed and dipped dangerously in the whirls. after several minutes of sickening spinning and churning while the structure was tossed about in the slowly dying lightning storm, i finally made it passed the outer whirls in one piece despite having lost a few areas of my makeshift liferaft. There were loose ropes that had either been torn or no longer held their cargo drifting out around the edges of the midship wall i clung to while drifting almost leisurely into safely calm seas, leading me to wonder what might still remain from the trade ship that was now sinking into the abyss, but i had been so tired that all i could manage to do was find a balanced place to lie atop the triangular sections of wall and sleep.
Scalding heat on the back of my entire body and the side of my face was what i awoke to that morning, blinking blearily against blinding bright clear blue skies to see that i was still adrift on an ocean of grayish green saltwater and had been asleep in the sun for so long that the skin of my arms and certainly the face i could not see had become a dark red with tiny water bumps around and over many of my hair follicles amd blistering pores. My mouth was dry and parched after having hung open in my sleep, allowing what little hydration i had once had to drool out into the sun, but i was more than grateful to be alive at the time and took my time in actually getting up before making my way down to the edge of the walls hanging in the water where most of the ropes were drifting along behind my raft. picking up and pulling on several of the ropes, i find that many were still secured to the inside of the cargo hold wall until i finally manage to tug a loose one away from the raft and draw its near thirty feet of length up to me where it ended in a large brass ring that had once been pegged into the ship wall for securing cargo excpet that the long arm of the peg had been curled by both the storm and my pulling for the lower two of four ridged, almost barbed- inches of vaguely green patenaed brass.
Nearly every inch of my body ached with randomly appearing dull throbs in my muscle and bones and even in my skin on top of the slight pinpricks of popping blisters as i moved, so it was no surprise when not only did it take over five full minutes of struggling to straighten the brass peg and force it as deep into the treated maple of the raft as i could by hand while constantly stopping to straighten the peg until getting passed the curvature where i could roughly screw the peg another inch or so into the wood and i was so exhausted that i actually had to lie on my side for a few moments or minutes. Untying and retying the rope from the brass ring once i had enough energy to work my slightly swollen and vaguely bruised fingers, i make sure it is as secure as i could manage with a hitched noose while keeping as much length as i could before taking another rest. Holding my breath to plunge my head upside down in the water after tying the other end of the rope about my waist and legs and hanging out over the splintered wood at the edge of the raft, i blow air through my nose slowly to keep the salty water from rushing in and look around to see that i actually had several inner dividing walls from the cargo hold attached to my midship wall raft with numerous ropes not only drifting about like pale yellow seaweed but also still securing a combination of busted and whole crates and barrels and even a large wooden container that takes almost a dozen people to move secured to the front end of the raft helping keep the upper end bouyant.
Bringing my head back up out of the water to refill my aching lungs with salty air, i sit back on the wooden raft and give my ropes a quick check before mentally preparing myself for the task i was about to undertake next by lowering my body over the edge of the raft into the water and hanging on to the splintered wood to keep from being dragged out by the slight wake of the raft. The icy cold water brought with it a blessed relief from the sunburn spotting my entire body through my ragged clothes, and the wake from the raft was not so strong that it reached more than a few inches below the surface behind the raft, so it was with only a little hesitation that i drew in a deep breath and braved the salty sting of water in my eyes once again while pushing myself down into the shadowy raft. The first thing i did after finding my way along the bottom of the raft by the many flowing ropes was look for trapped air, releasing a few bubbles of my own to follow their progress to a corner of the innermost wall near the back of the ramp where there was actually enough space without my weight to pass air on the sides of a splintered beam.
Taking the time to let my eyes tear up and wash away the salt while prizing free a new length of rope from nearby, i let my lungs get used to the cramped feeling of being underwater while tying this new line to the broken beam so that i could find my way back to air while under the raft. Keeping the loose end of the air line wrapped loosely around my wrist once my eyes had stopped stinging, i put them back in the salt and take a few moments to adjust to the dim lighting under the raft and gauge the best place to traverse the next section of wall before i am under the middle of the raft in unknown territory. Expanding my lungs with several deep, rapid breaths before holding one final breath, i dive down into the raft once again near the closest and longest section of wall that i use the broken boards from to slowly pull myself up toward the center where most of the ropes and the broken containers attached to them were coming from.
Light was even harder to come by here than in the last section because the beams and boards were relatively whole here and allowed the raft to float as well as it did, but instinct told me that the first thing i needed to do all over again was find air and that meant climbing and kicking up the wall for a few yards before breaking the surface near the next wall where it meets the more bouyant next portion. Thin beams of sunlight made their way between the boards of the disproportioned outer hull i had rode out the night on, filtering down into the water mosftly filled and blocked by ropes attached to broken bits of floating wood and ruined goods that hung near the surface. But there was still enough light to see by above the water to be paralyzed with shock and fear at the sight of a grown man floating just under the surface ensnared by almost a dozen different ropes about his arms and neck and torso.
It took me a long time of just staring at the pale, unmoving body and breathing deeply before i was able to assess the situation by examining the corpse's clothes and blessedly booted feet that i reached out and grabbed to pull his body closer. Careful not to follow the dead crewman's example by falling prey to the tangle of ropes, i quickly untie and remove the dead man's soggy leather boots and thick woolen socks to put on my own blistered and stinging bare feet before patting over the man's pockets. Forgoing emptying his pockets when i find a small knife still sheathed at the man's belt in favor of removing both of our pants entirely, i leave him his linen undershorts and keep my own after putting on his pants and cinching the belt from his noticeably larger girth.
Trading my own linen sleeping shirt for his thicker canvas sleeves, i start to draw the man's knife to cut him free of the ropes when i am suddenly very aware of how empty my stomach was when it rumbles and shocks me nearly to the point of loosening my grip on the knife. I was still far from starving, which is what made it easy to sheathe and buckle the knife once again, but the thought of food itself kept me from freeing the man's body to send adrift or sink to the unfathomable depths below. Tearing off the legs of my old linen pants that i then tear into even more strips of fabric, i end up using the knife to stab holes in the remaining shorts and lace the legs carefully closed while leaving the waist open to act as a bag for anything that i might find after ripping the sleeves from my old shirt to tear in spirals for making straps to my bag. Simply tearing my old shirt all of the way open after strapping my shorts satchel over my shoulder, i twist it up and lace it through the waist of the shorts for a drawstring before sheathing the knife and tying myself a new air line to take with me through the mesh of superficial ropes and down into the sunken and partially bouyant containers the ship had once been carrying.
A pale pine crate with much of one side and two corners busted away contained enough air to float only a few yards under the rope surface while carrying and dragging what looked like expensive furs, a cracked barrel exchanged wine for water closer to the next wall where it was caught in a cargo net, not far from the barrel another cargo net contained a combination of splintered containers and ruined fruit, but by then it was time to haul myself back up for air. After another brief rush of breaths through my aching lungs, i made my way first to the relatively unfettered cargo net containing the booze cask to disnetangle and send it adrift before prizing the net from its few remaining brass anchors and returning to the surface for a quick breath of air followed by another dive to the cargo net of fruit that i comb over thoroughly in search of anything whole and with a protective rind or skin that i stuff into either my satchel shorts or wrap up in my cargo net over the course of several more breaths. Cinching the drawstring of my satchel closed after filling it with loads of floating nuts from the inside of partial crates, i return to the surface after a brief stop for the crate of furs that i more or less sit on while floating and hanging from a cargo peg set in the wood raft above the surface.
Relaxing into the rope to which i clung for control over the crate that only just barely supported my weight after careful removal of its contents with an exchange of air, i considered simply stopping here and tying or weaving myself somewhere to actually rest and relax while drifting but knew that i still had work to do even after cracking open a few of the nuts that had floated free during my searching and giving my stomach something to gripe about. Diving once more into the dim water of the raft, i keep my eyes open for any other containers that might hold anything of use while lightly kicking and swimming across the small portion of cargo area to the wall from which i had acquired my own net to clamber around the thin dividing wall of the cargo hold where i could examine the much brighter front area of the raft where the massive freight container helped keep the raft afloat while making my way up to the surface behind the container. The busted floor of the cargo hold keeping the freight ensnared in its own massive cargo net under the wall of the ship gave me a great view of the ocean ahead after making my way around the carefully sealed wooden box to see what looked like either a large chain of islands several days ahead of my current position and pace or a small chain of islands only a day or so away from me.
Either way, now were as good a time as any to finally take a break and eat, i make my way back through the underside of my raft in only two breaths by pulling myself from far below the raft back to my original anchor peg where i carefully manage myself and my haul up into the shallows of the raft carefully over the splintered wood. Laying the large, thick furs out on the raft for something cool and soft to lay on, in the growing shade of the raised front end of the raft, i shrug off and loosen the waistband of my satchel to take out a handful of the smaller nuts in my collection before tightening it closed again and picking a small, bruise free melon to stab and cut a large hole into the end of. The nuts that floated were dry and safe from the saltwater, but it was with no small amount of hesitation that i tested the cored portion of shiny wet fruit to find that its thick rind had also protected it from the salt that had surrounded it.
Eating the rest of the test cut slowly as i get closer to the rind, i quickly set to stabbing and mashing up the inside of the fruit after finding it completely safe to eat and drink while stopping every few moments to crack open and chew on a couple of nuts and take a few sips from the fruit. Lying back on my bed of furs after tucking the edges into the splintered boards around me to secure them in place, i slowly, almost casually, drink and chew my way through the rest of the strange melon while watching the almost cloudless sky overhead. Before i knew it, exhaustion was making it impossible to finish my melon or keep my eyes open and i quickly drifted off to sleep.
What felt like only a few hours later, a hard wind was chilling my clothes and i back into wakefulness to find that the sky had darkened from midmorning to early evening and fear that the presence of the wind steering me off course drove me to scramble up the incline of the raft. what i saw was both reassuring and terrifying at the same time, for the massive chain of small and large islands was now filling what had once been a vast horizon of ocean with all forms of lowland and mountainous tropical topography centered around one massive volcanoe that must have towered over a mile into the air. The island i was drifting toward was at the very point of the chain, a comparatively small island that was one giant crescent moon reaching roughly three miles from one point of its open bay to the other with a massive slate rise climbing backward at angles toward the inland isles near the center of the lime white sandy beaches.
Though not exceptionally large, a noticeable wake was being produced from around the reef barricaded bay of my destination, the various colors and random structures of which could be seen in shaded form through the vaguely parting waters approaching what could only be described as a drifting chain of islands. From the rate at which i was drifting and the spread of the leading wake of the bay, i was going to float in along the inner left curvature of the bay if my raft was capable of making it over the wall, terraces and parapets included, of randomly strewn organic structuring. If not, i would be forced to abandon the raft and its possible future supplies to the ocean.
Quickly gathering my belongings in the cargo net and rolling them up, i anchor the net to a piece of wood in the shallows and tie myself back onto my anchor line before climbing back into the water and crawling along the underside of the raft to the middle section where i stop only a few times for air while searching about for loose brass pegs, all of the rope that i could tie and wind together into a heavy spool around my arm that i tie together and to my waist before simply grabbing the highest floating crate of nuts that i could get to and making my way slowly back to the surface. i lost an unfair amount of my nuts along the way because of the crate's bouyancy, but the rest of the haul was worth it because the few pounds that remained all floated about the surface of the crate once we were topside once again. Working my brass rings into my cargo net around the crate that i carefully positioned to wear at my back, i work my arms through the rest of the net to wear my sixty pounds of soggy belongings while crawling up to the top end of the raft to watch my progress anxiously.
An hour passed as i waited to approach the island, the shadow of the volcano already looming forward over the bay as the sun stretched low in the sky on the other side of the islands, but when i did it was a very rough handshake with the opening wake that spun the raft around slowly at first and then grew faster as we traveled deeper in and along the wake at ever changing angles until i finally came within a few hundred feet of the barrier reef and the wake gentled with the filtered flow of water going into the reef itself. Although the raft never made it to the reef wall, i was still forced to abandon it near the very end of the cresent point just a few dozen yards shy of the waveswept reef that stretched for over twenty yards into the bay from the opening of the points. Clambering down over the front of the raft caught in the shallows by it inner walls and cargo, i debate giving the hunk of ship another comb over with a net pack that had lost twenty pound with the drying of my rope coil and crate and think better of it after surveying the pitted and hilly grasslands of my island stretching back from the small mountain or mesa on the beach and starting my way inland along the bay.
The lime stone sand beach was strewn and stained with brownish gray slate dust and gravel as i neared my goal destination on already tiring legs some thirty-odd minutes later in the waning twilight, but for the last thousand or so feet to the mountain itself the beach was blanketed in jaggedly broken gravel and flats of dense slate rocks that only grew larger and more precarious until i was picking my way among boulders at least half of my own six feet in height and found a large portion of slate flat that was weathered and beaten oblong over a hundred feet from the mesa and decided to set up base at least two feet above the rest of the boulders and over five feet off of the beach itself. Taking a few moments to admire the steadily appearing pinpricks of light in the darkening sky overhead after carefully shrugging my backpack off and down on the boulder, i free and core one of my few remaining melons from the cargo net and to quickly test and start eating.
Stopping after crushing up and drinking the inside of the top of the melon, i leave the melon to sit before climbing down from my camp-to-be and combing the ground nearby for boulders large enough to both lift as well as flat and even enough to stack. Lining the edge of my camp boulder with much smaller slate rocks, i climb back up and lay out my largest furs in a large half circle around which i start making a half circle of broad flat slabs of slate on which i stack taller and smaller pieces of boulders until i can just barely slide their foundation slabs inward after pulling the furs away. Sitting in my two-foot high semi-circle wall with my knife and furs and an unraveling length of rope, i poke holes in the edges of the furs where they had once overlapped and carefully, almost loosely, lace the furs together into a round sheet that i simply drape over the top of the semi-circle to measure before pulling it aside to fold the rest of my furs into fitting portions that i line the floor of my tent with before once again draping the sheet over the slate wall to be secured by only a few large, thin slabs of slate along the top. Enjoying a large dinner of nuts from my satchel shorts to empty the rest into my crate of nuts, i wash it all down with the remains of my melon before finally crawling into bed out of the bright light of twin half moons in the sky overhead.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
zaijutsu
zaijutsu I had originally written this on wordpad and I'm lazy, so it's pretty sloppy
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