Saga Of The European King

“Sssh!” said the King. It was dark and the Adventure Friends could not see him or his face but he put his wooden finger to his soft, luscious lips anyway. For the effect.

His Adventure Friends had been talking again. Talking was against the rules of being sneaky. They were all hiding out in the munitions hold, where no one was supposed to be. If anyone heard talking going on in there, they might get curious and then they'd -really- be in for it. So they had to be shushed. They shushed up. Till the next one!

The Adventure Team had been sneaking from megacanoe to megacanoe in Oranje's armada for a couple of months, causing all kinds of fun mischief, making a lot of stuffy United Statesian captains and officers look like fools and inflicting just enough minor damage to flow the fleet down but not enough arose suspicions and goad Oranje into strip-searching every megacanoe in her armada to find the source of the problem.

It was delicate work. They'd flush a cherry bomb down a toilet here, hypnotise or poison a few cattle there, make a few prank calls to the captain at breakfast, put lemon juice in the milk and itching powder in the laundry at dinnertime. Roxy Tripfoot, invisible as the raw form of love, could set off the fire alarms whenever she wanted. Cajun, sneaking around the bison decks in his skinwalker suit, could feed the livestock a potion that would make them low and moo and make a fuss all night, keeping everyone up. David encountered no problem or resistance at all by walking right up to the cabin boy and, covered in dream-root confusion, carefully hid some prickly needles in the poor wretch's most secret places. The King, who could hide in plain sight with his disguise, could perform any number of tiny sabotages - break a ship's cat o' nine tails, toss an oar overboard, mess with the thermostat, call in a bomb threat or put laxative in the peyote. Colonel Glowfist could work wonders without ever sticking his thick old neckchin out – he made some spells from scratch that would attract barnacles to land on the hull of whichever megacanoe he happened to be on. Over weeks, the layers of barnacles would build up so deep that the megacanoe would slow down and have to be cleaned and it was a real hassle. Weather wasn't really Colonel Glowfist's thing, but he could conjure up the occasional breeze to vex the navigators. The crew of United Statesians was pretty sure that the fleet was haunted. The King loved these rumours and fed them with Cajun's spooky orb-guns and by sending David out to do confusing things like filling the washbasins with bison blood and send Astrid and Roxy out to the kitchens at night to bang the doors and stack the crockery up into tall stacks. This always scares people.

The cumulative effect was enormous. Morale among the crew dropped. People started sassing and backchatting their superior officers. Jobs got left undone and people stopped showing up for work, preferring instead to hang around outside, smoking and talking loudly about how much they hate the place. The megacanoes fell out of formation and the fleet's speed dropped right down to some stupid speed you would laugh at. They lost months of travel time and Oranje became maximum furious. She keehauled men by the half-dozen, whipped almost everyone raw and disciplined the crew so hard that they couldn't tell each other apart any more. And that was before the King's coup de grace.

He had Roxy, who was beautiful and spicy, dress up like a mermaid and armed her with Cajun's microwave gun that could project sounds and voices directly into people's heads. It was designed to make people go crazy but the King had a slightly different use for it in mind.

I don't think it would shock you if I tell you that mermaids were never real, not even in Medieval days. That whole myth got kicked off by mariners getting fresh and loose with dugongs and then lying about it later to their friends. Instead of being honest and saying that they'd swam into the ocean and boffed a tubby seal, they told everyone that they'd been seduced by a beautiful fish-lady who sang their favourite pop songs and only wanted some NSA fun because her husband was away on a business trip. Thing was, since most people who went to sea ended up boffing a dugong at some point in their careers and inevitably told the usual lies about mermaids afterwards, everyone thought that mermaids were, in fact, real, and that they had just never met any because they were too busy shamefully sticking it to a dugong or two. So what happened was that all sailors were really keen to see a mermaid, real or not, as soon as possible. And when something that looked like an actual, flesh-and-blood, not-a-dugong, breasts-and-everything mermaid showed up in front of the megacanoe armada and sang sweetly and softly into the ear of each and every sailor and soldier on board, things got kind of crazy. Every man thought that she was singing just for him. And keep in mind that a few of the cabin boys had been spiked, so there was a lot more desperation about than usual. The decks were rushed by lovesick crewmen who bickered and bit and shoved and fell overboard and grabbed for the ships wheel. Roxy kept on singing through Cajun's amazing microwave gun and, one by one, the megacanoes turned towards her and the submerged, jaggedy rocks she was sitting on.

Oranje lost two megacanoes that day. They burst open like ripe piñatas on those jaggedy rocks just as Roxy dived away, retrieved her invisibility cloak and inventory from a little cranny she'd stuffed it in and then the King snuck her back on board the fleet in all the commotion. With her selenic breasts no longer visible and her song since ceased, the brave crew of Oranje's vessel sheepishly returned to their senses, retrieved the men who had been thrown overboard, evacuated their punctured megacanoes and then desolately watched them sink. They were in so much trouble.

The King's work was done after that. No one had died in the crash so overcrowding and sudden shortage of food and supplies did the work of any further pranks in slowing down the armada. Besides that, Oranje's new, deadly security and disciplinary measures made any further pranking quite impossible. The King was pleased with himself and with his Adventure Friends. He told them this ever so quietly as they huddled together in the darkness of the munitions hold for months and months. He'd tell them and then they'd say, “Thank you,” and “No problem,” and “Nearly dinnertime?” and he'd put his wooden finger to his soft, luscious lips, even though they could not see him or his face in the dark and go,
“Sssh!”

End Of Chapter 86