[Private Video] Seeking Sea Captains, Monday, Week 18

[pepperspray]

[Privacy is less a concern than staying out of the way of the thronging hospital crowds, but both play their part to have Pepper making this call from the quiet of her apartment. It's come together nicely, she feels, with a backdrop of her couch and some heavy drapes, hung in anticipation of winter's chill.

Mug of tea, hair neat and tidy, no sudden attacks of tooth-spinach, she appears on Captain Silene's communicator with a look of abstractly businesslike hope.]

Captain? This is Pepper Potts. I'd asked our traders to bring you one of these, so I hope it's made its way to you.

Comments

[outer_npcs]

[Silene's quarters are more utilitarian - the slice visible is all bolted-down wood, nothing that might tumble and shatter in high seas, though the fabric of the bedding looks rich in both colour and texture.

The captain grins, the flash of white teeth looking almost predatory.]

It's lovely to see you again, Miss Potts. Even if it is a touch disconcerting to have my ass start ringing.

[pepperspray]

Just be careful that you don't accidentally place a call at the wrong moment, if that's where you're keeping it.

[Small talk may take time, but, in Pepper's experience, it's always better to build ties around more than pure business. She dimples slightly, taking the predatory cast in reasonably good stride at the remove.]

There's a long tradition on my world of accidental calls made at embarrassing moments. Fortunately, this one's quite intentional.

[Sobering smoothly, she lifts her mug of tea into the camera's field of view and warms her hands on it.]

We're experiencing an outbreak of a disease here. It appears to have been spread by a small nest of bandits, who themselves caught it from a trader from the south. I was wondering if you'd heard any news on that front.

[outer_npcs]

Ah.

[It's quiet, and a little sad.]

There was a ship in the harbor while your friends were still afield, stricken by sickness. It wasn't allowed to dock; they fired it just four days after it set anchor. Not one of the crew survived.

[pepperspray]

Jesus...

[The blasphemy may be without context, but the tone of quiet shock needs no translation between cultures. Pepper shakes her head slightly, fingers tightening around the mug.]

Was that enough to keep the sickness from the town? And is it a known disease? We have our doctors here trying to identify it, but... the equipment isn't what one of them is used to.

[As Pepper has been reminded. Repeatedly. Irritatingly.]

[outer_npcs]

No. A caravan came through with a dying man, not two days before your messengers arrived. I kept my own people confined to the ship, but others were not so wise. I've seen smoke on the horizon the past three nights. It is not just your city, or the port - south of the wastes and east of the grey, they're burning bodies.

[She scrubs a hand over her face.]

It's no disease I know, but what I heard of the symptoms - it sounds similar to the sickness that took the Isle of Bones when my grandmother was a girl.

[pepperspray]

[There's a rustle, and Pepper's image shifts, temporarily obscuring the screen with a close-up of her sweater, before she settles back with a notebook in hand and a grimly intent expression.]

I'll take any information you have to give about that. I have people here with a lot of raw talent, but they lack the local knowledge and the infrastructure they're used to having.

[outer_npcs]

It was nearly eighty years ago.

[There's a note of warning in Silene's voice.]

The illness started, apparently, with a pair of miners who ventured down past a blockage in one of the caverns that riddled the island. Within a month, the number of survivors left numbered less than two score, and almost all of those were people wise enough to flee before the ships stopped taking them. The deaths were so many by the end that the bodies were left to rot, and by the time anyone dared lay foot on the island, the beasts had littered the streets with the bones of the unburied. That's when the island's name changed, and it's been considered cursed ever since.

[pepperspray]

That sounds like a curse with a very sharp reason behind it.

[Unreasonably chilled, Pepper tugs the folds of her sweater a little more closely about herself.]

Thank you. Do you know the location of the island? Is it near to the Southern City, or wherever it was that this current plague seems to have come from?

[outer_npcs]

I do. Any captain on the southern seas could tell you, if only because most of us avoid it if we have any other choice.

[She pauses, and the view from the camera skews wildly toward the ceiling as she sets the communicator down. There's a rustling of paper, and when she returns several moments later and picks the communicator up again, it is to show an old and weathered map.]

There. If the crew that caught it headed straight for a smuggler's cove, it is possible they might have spread it inland. The island's far enough out that the first few afflicted would be showing ill before they made landfall, and any half-legitimate port would refuse them access until the illness had run its course.

[pepperspray]

Hold on a moment... there.

[A small camera noise transmits as Pepper captures a screenshot of that map, lips pursed in mild concentration.]

Thank you. And from a smuggler's cove to the sort of trader that would have dealings with bandits... I can see a path. Yes.

If we can safely isolate the disease organism, do you know of any labs or manufacturing facilities still active? I know the antibiotics, at least, have to come from somewhere current.

[outer_npcs]

Hmm. Few of any scale, and fewer that would deal with you direct. Those resources are incredibly difficult to come by.

[pepperspray]

And not likely to be available when all that's offered in return is vague plans.

[Pepper's tone is businesslike but with an edge of wry understanding.]

Thank you, Captain. I think I have a very long to-do list all of a sudden.

[outer_npcs]

Alas, no. Survival is a very mercenary business.

I wish you luck. It would be a shame to lose such an interesting associate this early on.