It’s been ages since we’ve done a competition. I’ll donate $300 for the best entry in a microfiction comp to Medecins Sans Frontieres. The idea is to write a story in 300 words or less. Must be prose. No haikus! The theme is “The Postmodern Pirate Queen”. In your story, you must include the phrases “peg leg” and “time streams”. Steampunk is a suggested but not compulsory genre. That’s all!
Suggestions on judging and criteria solicited. And matching donations encouraged! You have til midnight on Saturday.
Portrait of the Queen by *Pirate-Queen on deviantART
Whast’s steampunk? Seriously.
It’s like cyberpunk only set in the 19th century. See Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
.
Postmodern Pirate Queen? How do you know about my fanatasy woman Kim.
Well, for starters a postmodern tale will need a colon, followed by a lengthier explanatory subtitle, and preferably and some square bracketing
eg ‘The Postmodern P[irate] Queen: Subaltern reflections on a state of alterity”
The closest I can get:
‘The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism’
“Call the crew to general quarters for action, please”,
Called the desperate captain to her executive officer.
“Aye, and brigadier, prepare the crew to repel boarders and issue weapons”,
Was her subaltern’s reply as she threw her hollow leg, and the weighted State Secrets within it, through the window into the flat grey sea below.
Alone in the monsoon sky, the Zeppelin whistled flatly, empty of fuel, its propellers shut square. They could only wait for the sound of the set brass alarm clock, and the convergence of time streams. They had reached the right latitude, but where were the Spanish battlecruisers?
Their enemy, contract-bound drug-servants of pan-Mongolian Fascists from the twenty-eighth century, were coming, and sought revenge.
“The Postmodern Pirate Queen: a 6-word nano-fiction approach
(or who needs 300 words in the days of sms-lit)”
Timestream ninja steals Cap’n Bruce’s peg-leg.
I, Steampunk, sweaty hero of the hot, Hell-clone-ridden Dystopic World, gazed through the tattered air-conditioning grill at the caged & luscious postmodern Pirate Queen, as ready to nibble on her titillating, unique peg leg as her erotically netted right leg…my body shivering to eruption streams in that humid tunnel, whilst my mind was lost in time streams of rapture & passion. Yum.
N’
Hey, I’ve never tried writing erotic fiction before…;) Might read it to my wife Sunday morning.
Good stuff Haiku Hoganius.
“contract-bound drug-servants of pan-Mongolian Fascists from the twenty-eighth century”
Helluva band name there Hoges.
Now touring with The 3rd Bermagui-Cobargo Volunteer Hashassin Corps, FDB.
Girl Genius is a hugely fun “gaslamp fantasy” set in the time when the industrial revolution erupted into a full-scale war between the rival mad scientists that rule Europe. And it has a dethroned pirate queen named Bangladesh DuPree.
There’s seven volumes available for your reading pleasure, with a new page every Mon, Wed and Friday.
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
The pirate queen carefully fitted his brass clockwork leg to his misshapen right stump, a legacy of crossing the time streams while battling the Sta Puft marshmallow man of Old New York. The elaborate key clicked gently as he wound the mechanism enough for a morning of flourishing across the poop deck. He much preferred the elaborate leg to the easier option of a peg leg, as the carefully sculpted brass outer shell of gastrocnemius and quadriceps were far more pleasing to the eye and touch. Not so pleasing was the sudden sight of ocean where the wall of his cabin had been. He studied the cannon ball and slowly splintering wood with a detachment that was post-modern. That one instant in time stretched to a languorous eternity as the cast iron ball gently arced across the cabin accompanied by thousands of lazily rotating splinters, before carefully impacting his beauty spotted visage, delicately removing his head from his shoulders and carrying it against the bulkhead. “My, that was unexpected” was the last thought that went through his mind, as the cannonball gently shattered his skull. The body twitched, then fell, it’s clockwork leg now flexing on the floor in a futile attempt to stand, until finally the clockwork mechanism slowly wound itself down again.
“Iron Man movie here! Good price, cheap!”
Ling fanned out the DVDs on an orange crate. Two teenagers approached, surly, sniffy.
“Got the Batman movie?”
“Next week. Today, Iron Man.”
They snorted. “Seen it. Boring.”
“Besides… when you gonna sell a Chinese superhero movie?”
“When you gonna make one, smartarse?” Ling shot back.
They took off. Who knows, she thought, maybe they will.
Things ain’t what they used to be for a media pirate queen, Ling mused. Youtube was killing her, cultural nationalism, the New Economy, forget it. Kids all wanted Cantopop: way too easy to lay your hands on, no glamor of forbidden fruit, and so no real profit. But nobody was paying her to pirate Queen and Steely Dan cassettes, like the old days. Hawking bootlegged “Aja” in Asia, she laughed. Kids today wouldn’t get the joke. Well, it had bought her the place in Kowloon; that wasn’t nothing.
“Got any country music? Any jazz?” The customer was older, discerning. The sort of Occident-ophile who in the old days would drop some serious bank. Ling dug through her CDs, came up with two labelled “Johnny Yuan” and “Peg Leg”.
The man squinted. “What’s that mean?” Ling squinted too. “Dammit.” She apologized: they should’ve read Johnny Cash and Peggy Lee. She made a note to find someone back at the warehouse, who could actually read and write English. Then again, she thought, in a few more years, maybe that would be irrelevant. Onward and upward.
While the customer handed over a few bills, Ling was lost in thought. Time streams in one era and out the other, she mused. Who had said a thing like that? Emerson? Chuang Tzu?
She couldn’t really remember.
The sky was the colour of a crystal ball attuned to a dead dimension. A column of greasy smoke rose up from the shattered carcass of Peg Leg’s ship. It drifted in the breeze over the Rogue Mistress, temporarily hiding the sickly-coloured sky. Maria de Tres Pistolas hardly noticed.
The long boat pulled alongside and the crew started hauling in the booty retrieved from the water; the surviving crew and passengers of the doomed ship now beginning to slip beneath the waves. For all of the day’s maneuvering and posturing the battle only required a single shot from Goreethmorug, the aft-mounted cannon. Peg Leg’s ship had been no match for them and their hellish rounds.
Goreeth detached and clattered down to the main deck. His -it’s? – last human eye scanned the loot. “A good haul, captain,” he said.
“No Bastable though,” Maria replied.
“No. Escaped through the time streams, most like.”
Maria looked out over the alien sea. There was no life in this sea. No life anywhere they’d been while they hunted. Perhaps she’d sent the last life on this world to the bottom. “These colours bore me. Take us somewhere else. Somewhere with…slavery.” She didn’t stay to watch Goreeth winnow through the captives, discarding the sick and injured over the side and saving one for the engines. She sought her cabin. Later, while drifting in an opium dream, she hardly felt anything when the Rogue Mistress’s diabolic engines powered up and tugged at her soul like a loose thread. A good haul and Bastable would turn up again. As a lover or as an enemy; it hardly mattered which.
Excellent. Keep them coming! Arrrrr!
She’d always liked dressing up, but the entertaining men bit was getting tiresome to say the least. It wasn’t just their incessant demands, or even their incessant demands, it was the sheer predictability of those demands that was beginning to get to her.
She longed for an unheard of request, a demand that was so unexpected that it completely threw her of balance, made her gasp for breath.
As it was men, or the men she encountered, were so predictable that this small measure of excitement was denied her.
Most of them were either obsessed with her missing leg, or wanted to ignore it all together, as though to notice the obvious might offend her.
Looking in the mirror as she waited for the next client, the next demand, she couldn’t help but think how beautiful she still was, how she could still put on a good show when she needed to, and how surely she deserved just a bit more excitement than this life was giving her.
Then the normal knock on the door, but instead of the usual suit or teenage boy, standing before her was a one legged pirate, complete with peg leg, eye patch and parrot. The first thing she noticed was that the parrot was stuffed. The second thing she noticed was that the beard was clearly fake.
Her heart sank.
“Hi dad, what are you doing here for christ’s sake?”
“It is not a peg leg it is a state of the art anthropomorphic intuitive logic pedal maneuverability supplementation device.”
“It is made of wood and it has faces and other body parts carved into it.”
“Sure, but in a different time stream it would be a anthropomo . . . ”
“It’s a peg leg.”
“Look this is not a space opera, it is a thriller.”
“Ginny, Herminie here hides from the evil empire, steals their platinionium, and has an alien life form that sits on her shoulder and repeats every word that she says, its as sure as bluebeards beard was dyed a pirate story.”
“Feck it, my last seven scripts have all been pirate stories.”
“Look if you want to make it less like a pirate movie nick a few more scenes from mission impossible and a few less from Pirates of the Caribbean and drop that sequence where Herminie drinks all that space rum.”
“But that is the scene where she claims her place as a hard drinking type thing and takes charge of the ship.”
“Yep, straight out of the first Indy movie.”
“Everyones a critic”
“Herminie is powerful, sexy and smart. Use these attributes in her rise to power.”
“What?”
“Get her do something, something modern.”
“Like?”
“Write what you know, you have been volunteering down at the Prostitutes Collective haven’t you?”
“Well yeah, that’s where I got the template for Cho from, I amalgamated attributes from several women and . . . ”
“Yes, so what could Herminie do?”
“To be useful?”
“Yep.”
“What about organising a sex strike among the prostitutes of pirate embayment Zx887i?”
“Yes, like Lysistrata, nicking stuff off the ancients is much cooler than just rehashing old Hollywood blockbusters.”
I watch silently as she climbs. The dull yellow glow of the sulphur-laden sky reflecting on her steel peg-leg is mesmerising as Mik climbs aboard the flag ship. Insanity. Despite the bleak chances of a safe return, I have no choice but to follow her lead – she is our last hope. If anyone can break through the morass of petty squabbles that paralyse humanity’s ability to repair our crippled planet it is Mik.
The crew completes the last turns of the giant coil – I can feel the energy humming through the ship. The coil’s vibrations echo eras past when giant diesel turbines powered this vessel. Peak oil has long since passed, its foul legacy clearly evident in the heavy skies. Insanity.
We glide silently through the night. Mik is a postmodern pirate queen and this is her time. The eddies and fog streams swirling around cause me to reflect on the time streams that have brought us to this point. Climate, consumption, carbon, contracts for difference – each stream roiling out of control until clashing in the perfect storm which has become our world.
To the UCC (Uber-Conservative Coalition), Mik is just an uppity lesbian with a steel leg. To us she is a lightning rod, a catalyst, a beacon of sanity in this otherwise smog-bound insane dsytopian world.
Is it too late? Can we turn back the clouds that roil above us? The clouds. Insane. The acid rain begins to fall. The misguided attempts at climate control are spiraling out of control and the rains etch obscene patterns across the land. Sulphur. Insane.
We glide on. Our destination is within reach. The giant coil hums its tune of hope, only faintly interrupted by the dissonant chord of city noises from the gloom ahead. The last bastion of capitalism and UCC stronghold will fall. It must fall. All hail the pirate queen. Insanity.
The frozen room unwillingly awoke as time streamed in with the setting sun. A shutter had been thrown open.
Reluctantly the Pirate Queen reached for the dial, winding down gradually to lessen the shock of return, then unfastened the straps and removed the apparatus.
“Not sure that’s ‘ealthy y’maj” gruffed Kildare, eyes back and forth from the uncanny pale oval beauty of his mistress’ face to the dull gleam of the twin-domed brass helmet on the table. “They say bits of you get stuck there if you stay too long. Bits you might need.”
“Do they?” murmured Kimberella, more to herself than anyone. “Do they really?”
She knew better of course. Far from leaving anything behind, every day she came back with more, now so much more that she knew soon her solo trips must end. The volume was too much. That would mean another apparatus, and much time lost in training… who? Kildare would never do it, and she would never force him, but who else could she trust?
Since the raid in Cathay to obtain the apparatus, the crew had been reluctant to step forward for any dangerous jobs, but on the Black Swan very little other work came up. She smiled ruefully at the thought that a plan devised to boost morale had so damaged it. Well, to boost morale and to profit, naturally.
Satisfied his mistress was, at least for now, safe, Kildare grunted and shuffled back up on deck.
Kimberella moved to the low table under the open window, and inserted each index finger into small openings either side of a black metal box. A humming noise, then silence told her the transfer was complete. A second sound began, higher-pitched, as swirling colours spilt from the short tube protruding from the front of the box, and sounds from under the grille on top. Figures danced on the wall opposite, at first all too familiar, then before long she was seeing what had appeared only yesterday. Finally the new images arrived, fully three minutes worth. Her best haul so far from a single trip.
It would not be quick, nor easy, but soon she then all aboard would see it whole and finally learn what happens to Buffy.
EEEK!!!
“Kimberella moved to the low table under the open window, her peg leg knocking on the boards, and inserted…”
Gah! No point anyway, as Hovercraft (Zenger?) already used my gag.
The spume laced Bess’s cheeks as her doughty brig ploughed its churning furrows through a wine-dark sea. Her thoughts drifted again to the cottage in Little Worlington, the smuggler’s caves nearby, the leg of her peg dolly, Grannie’s face gnarled oak looming over a fire. Bess could smell the smoke; Gran allus knew Bess wasn’t fer a homely life.
And what of recent months? Carlos the marksman – Spanish bandit, prisoner now – glowered in anklets. He answered her glance with a contemptuous glare: how humiliating to have been taken prisoner by “una reina bandida”, a pirate queen. His bold demeanour told all that he thought he had nothing to lose but his chains, and a world to win. The cold fire of his gaze brought premonitions of graves unmarked.
There was “Antonio of Flags” (las banderas) – another Spanish dog, but comely and assuredly his eyes sparkled. Gems: Bess thought of gemstones and gold doubloons. And why was she now thinking of home and childhood again? Wretched heart: recently there’d been the time streams of tears burst forth at a familiar smell wafting by.
It was that accursed Colin of the Firth. The lads mocked him as Colon or Column or Colinder; they’d not seen him burst out of the lake in his wet, white blouse, blushing. It was his stories for Bess: he spoke of a far off hot land, bright parrots. Strange creatures. Gold aplenty. Stones change colour as you tilt ‘em. Sunny days. Forests give off perfumes. Best of all tiny parrots, small as a mouse – gemstone colours of emerald and sapphire, darting across fields. Living gems, they’d breed. People might keep as pets: money to be made. Bess thought he said “bargees”. Barges? No, it was “budgies”.
That might be a future, with Colin of Firth. Budgie smugglers.
***************
There are some brilliant entries here. Perhaps we should publish the LP steampunk Pirate Queen of the Time Streams anthology!
“At least it’s still Thursday”, she thought as she hobbled down the observation pier. This body was fun, but it wasn’t built for running. The pegleg had mechanical assists, but the joints were out of proportion. Shifting her centre of gravity around to compensate was easy enough, but she grimaced at the thought of how it looked.
Thursdays were her best day on average but today, meatbags had edited the timestream so she arrived in the ballroom after the heist, when it was swarming with the resident faction. A cute trick, but one that was only really effective within the local context and she was from waaaay outside the tex(t). Besides, this job was ordinary, a small gig to keep the frogs from the door. A local cut’n'paste on this scale was either desperation or incompetence. Metanarrative revisions were a likely consequence, which would attract serious reinterpretations from Major Powers and she wasn’t planning to be kitted up for that. Paging through the inventory, she wondered what she should take so she will be ready when she arrives….
She skidded to a halt, hopping slightly. “What I should take so I will be ready? Did I just cross a semantic boundary?” She sniffed the air before taking a deep lungful. Her face cracked into a smile and she moved to a door in the nearby wall. “Thursday, yes…” ‘Incompetence’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. They had left the relocated ballroom in a disjunctive continuity, with the future sitting in its immediate past. The chains of trust that established ownership were broken and her heist was now a legitimate salvage operation. The contents of this room were going to make her a very rich pirate queen indeed.
“Good morning campers” she said brightly to the confused crowd inside. “Due to temporal editing, the chains of ownership to your templates have been violated and you are now arbitrary signifiers. Your corpus and the body upon which it is inscribed are now the property of Dichotomy Paradox. Open your minds and prepare to be boarded.”
“Name?”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Current occupation?”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Ah yes of course. And I see here that you’ve filled out your application with a quill pen dipped in your own blood. That’s rather an impressive show of professional dedication, if a tad theatrical; but on the other hand it did earn you an interview, despite some, er, shortcomings on your resume.”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Yes yes, I understand. Well I’m going to begin the interview with a question we ask of all our applicants… Where do you see yourself, within this organization, five years from now?”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Mmm, I see. No interest in Vice President for Legal Affairs?”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Yes, I believe I understand your point of view. And, um, could you remove your peg leg from my throat now, kindly? I understand you feel strongly about piracy and so forth, but a gesture like this simply won’t affect the outcome of the interview. I believe there’s been a basic misunderstanding. You see, the position we’ve advertised for, is an ‘Irate Queen,’ not a ‘Pirate Queen.’ I’ll have to have a word with the lads down in Fact-Checking and Proofing. All the same, I don’t suppose you’ve any interest in being an Irate Queen? In some respects, it isn’t all that different from a…”
“Pirate Queen!”
“Precisely. Um, Janice? Would you be a dear, and ask Mr. Reynolds from Security to come up here, and, to bring his team along with him? Thanks, love. Anyway, Ms. uh…”
“Pi–
“Ms. Queen, thank you so much for dropping by to speak with me today. And, to avoid mistakes like this in future, please remember that The Times streams video classified adverts online, which can often clarify errors of spelling like this. If you have a high-speed connection of course. Well, thanks again! All right, Mr. Reynolds, you can use the taser now if you must.”
“Irate queen” oh oh oh
*falls off chair, howling*
Me too, Pav. Me too.
Heh!
And me!
Heh, and me, but for me it’s this:
I’ll c’n'p again: heh.
So should we do another microfiction comp with the theme being “John Greenfield”?
/runs away
No.
I’ll take that in a Rousseauian sense as the general will of The People, I think.
Yes.
The blue nanoVictorian ensemble moved smoothly down the gallery hall that led to the Australasia 3-Mile-High Sky Hotel’s banquet rooms. The young woman guiding it glanced through triple-reinforced panoramic windows at the swirling clouds – cyclone Kimberella was going to miss Cairns after all. Shame. She scanned the directory board:
The Time Streams Tour
from PIRATE QUEEN MUSIC
Press Conference & Interviews
2pm
Yes. Still there.
The boy-band was preparing for the round of interviews. Hours of the same dozen inane questions glossily regurgitated by interchangeable television “personalities” (it appeared Murdoch Media had cloned another job lot of Corens). Those lovely youths would be grateful for her interruption.
At first.
The snickersnee-bots scuttled out from under her skirts. 14 seconds: the screams began.
Five minutes later the woman in blue savoured the exsanguination of the final journalist. The bots had dispatched the Pirate Queen crew first, as per instructions and as efficiently as advertised. Gratifying.
A whirl of bots corralled the five young men in one corner. She strolled closer, and waited. A lean lad with sandy, almost-ginger hair stepped forward a few inches with a veneer of desperate suavity.
“It appears you want us for something. Might we know your name, please?”
A sense of style. Of occasion. She examined him. Ah yes, this one had the haunting countertenor.
What an elegantly formed throat, and how nicely it curved up to those charmingly just-protruding ears …
“Er, Ms?”
“Leg”. The Zombie Queen smiled awfully, displaying more rows of teeth than any music industry shark they had ever seen before. “But all my boys call me Peg.”
Heh!
tigtog, good stuff.
Less than 12 hours to go in the competition!
Excellent thread!
So… do we have a winner? Do we need a winner?
I don’t think we need one, Kim.
“Anyone but Ambi” would be my vote. There were some liddle ripper enties. cheers.
#12 H.P. Hovercraft
My vote is for #24 HP Handicraft
I’m with Rayedish, I vote #24.
(Who was it really?)
Yeah, I’m another one voting for the Irate Queen.
my vote, fwiw, is for the boy band and the zombie queen.
Anyone else?
#24 HP Handicraft. No questions.
I liked “Irate Queen”
Better late than never.
“See you in Hell, Pirate Queen” he snarled in my ear as he shoved me roughly up the wooden stairs to the gallows. His peg leg made a thumping sound on the wood and I risked a small smile. I was pleased with that bit of work. Work hardened hands held me fast as the noose was placed around my neck and I heard the trapdoor release ratchet home. Suddenly the floor under my feet gave way and I …
… time slipped back into my chair at HQ. “Save it” I snapped to my crew who cowered before me. “Ssssorry Qqqqqueenie” Balthazar spluttered “we could see it happening but the time slip wouldn’t work and we thought we’d lost you”.
“No matter” I replied, not letting them see how shaken I was. “Two weeks as a Pirate Queen, then facing your own death on the gallows, some people will pay a lot of money for that experience. Let’s get it on the market immediately.”
“Geez Queenie, you don’t half smell” quipped Peter. He withered before my gaze. “I can’t believe a computer geek is giving me advice on personal hygiene” I replied. “Perhaps you’d like to spend two weeks as a Pirate Queen and see how many opportunities for washing you would take as the only woman on a ship with a dozen horny pirates?” He scurried off to get me a towel and I reached for my first real cup of coffee in two weeks. Bliss.
Wow, excellent late entry from Mindy! Cool!
my vote:
Best entry, #13 gilmae. The editors of “Metal-Hurlant” are applauding, somewhere.
Best surprise twist: tie between FDB and Mindy.
Dr. Cat: “#24. (Who was it really?)”
Really just a riff on John Cleese and/or the Two Ronnies, I guess. The opening gag was stolen from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. (”Shropshire Slasher,” a lot funnier in the original, I’m afraid…) Fun thread, excellent stuff from lots of people… Great idea, Kim! I’ll add an additional 50% donation to Kim’s original donation, if someone will write one more, that does a kind of postmodern deconstruction of the phrase “Arrrr”…
– j_p_z, practicing handicrafts on the deck of the hovercraft…
Why are pirates pirates? Because they “Arrrr”
The pirate queen strode the deck, Danny the Cutthroat’s pegleg in her hand. “that will teach him to try to reaaarrrange my hair.” She said to her second mate.
“Fetch me a bodkin of the best aaarrrr . . . ale”.
“Certainly my queen. Are you feeling well, you seem to have caught Danny the Cutthroat’s cold.”
“I’m fine, aarrr. And if you whisper any thing of your suspicions, I’ll be onto my third mate for the day. But you had better bring me some whisky and lemon as well.”
“As you wish.”
“And quit yer prissy aarr aarr aarr manners quick smart”
“Certainly my aarr queen.”
arrrr j-p-z, yew awld devil, you; arrrr, hev a drink of foinest rum sirrrr, arrrr; yer a champ boi gen’ral acclamation, arrrrrrr; hats off to ee
#24, mostly because I hate #12 for beating me to the gag.
Nice work Japez!
“What’s this place then? Who are ye?”
“Me? I’m just a manifestation of your unresolved feelings for your father. The anthropomorphisation of your bitterness over his withholding of approval and your regret at not talking to him before his death.” The man in the white linen clothes paused, started to smirk and then burst into laughter. “Ha! No, I’m just fucking with you. It doesn’t matter when you come from in the time streams, it’s always funny.”
He pointed at the ocean. “See this. It’s not really water. And this? It’s not sand. That thing you’re keeping between you and I isn’t a tree either. And I’m not a man.”
“Yer not? Ye look…”
“Looks? Look at you, eh? Look like a Man, but really you’re a fucking animal. Rape and murder and all the evils inbetween.”
“Oh god!”
“No,” the man in white linen said with a wide smile. “But close. Of course, you look a little less human anyway, don’t you. Missing an eye, a hand, your teeth, and an ear. Have you never noticed how these things happen right after your little acts of inhumanity?”
“What happened to me? We was chasing a merchantman las’ I recall.”
“It wasn’t a merchantman, it was a privateer sent out by John Company. As soon as your ship came alongside they fired a broadside. A sliver of wood about so long embedded itself in your left shin.”
“I’m dead?”
“Not yet. Sooner or later though.” He seemed to go a bit vague and then refocused. “Your friends are about to do something. I’m easy with it and I imagine it will only give you more opportunity to become mine. Aloha…peg leg.”
“Wha…,” but the beach and the man disappeared in a white hot flash. “Arrrrrr!”
A woman in a white linen shirt sprayed with gore smirked at him from behind a dripping cutlass. “Easy, boyo.”
Ideally, perhaps, this thread should go on indefinitely through the time streams rather than have some Irate Queen stomp on it with her peg leg…
A little too late as inspiration only just passed by but what the heck.
She stood before the assembled motely crue. Casting a baleful gaze over them it was all she could do to supress her disgust. If this was the best that she could find then she would need to make the ship shape ship mates.
“Errr…look…err…Miss Pirate” said one of the new crew. He was holding a electic guitar. “I’m not sure what we are doing here. One minute we were on our tour bus, laughing at Tommy Lee and next thing you know we find ourselves in the middle of the ocean on what appears to be a pirate ship.”
The Pirate Queen sighed and made a mental note that he would be the first to walk the plank if he played another hackneyed metal riff and got her name wrong again. “Look how many times do I have to explain this. You got caught up in temporal disturbance creating a rift between our two time streams. You ended up here. God knows where my crew went.”
The four newly assembled crew just looked on bewilderd. “No use worrying how you got here now” the Pirate Queen said sternly. “I need a crew and your it.”
“So what do we do know” asked Vince.
“You learn about pirating. Are we ready!”
The four muttered”I guess so.” “OK” “Do we get groupies?” “Anyone asked our manager about this.”
“Right. First lesson is…Creating synergy and brand awareness with our customers.”
“The typical pirate customer is likely to be a Spanish galleon. Market research has shown that there is significant consumer recognition of the jolly roger and…” She was interrupted by one of the band members again.
“I though you were a pirate queen. You sound like a marketing executive.”
The Pirate Queen dropped her eyes, they softened a moment with memory then hardened with the awareness of reality. “Yes. I was a marketing executive. In another life. But was before the time stream and this is now. Not much difference really. So, anyway the jolly roger as a brand has…”
…meanwhile, in another time stream, before a heaving mass of sweating patrons in a club four scruffy, some may say scurvy ridden men prepare to take the stage. All four a wearing garb not unlike that of your typical pirates. The drummer even has a peg leg.
“I be havin’ nay idee why we be here”
“It be th’ wanniond time stream”
“Aye. So what do we say t’ all this swabbies”
“I beleive th’ traditional greetin’ be “Arrrr Cleveland! Be ye ready t’ rock!”
Fuck, just discovered this thread. This kinda arty farty pastiche for a good cause is meat and drink for my blog metier. Are entries still open for extraordinary efforts? And where are the stories about global roving healers in steam-filled M. Ballons? Verne meets Pasteur?
See 54!
arrrrrr one o’ things oi loik ‘ere, izz -
there ain’t been no “cutlass-and-paste”
arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Hey! I should get points for just keeping it short for once…;)
To be honest I was taking the piss a bit based on the GAZE convo in a previous thread. Sawwy Kim.
I’ll take it more seriously next time. I give to that worthy charity anyway.
My beloved enjoyed it on Sunday morn tho…:)
OK, I dug 13, 11, 17, 12, 24, 33, 47, 16, 5, 18, 21, 23, 15…not particularly in that order tho…but close.
Great effort all. Plenty of decent, talented writers/authors here…some…most…waiting to be discovered i imagine.
I really don’t want to adjudicate on a winner, and I’ve popped the dosh in to MSF for the donation! I’m wondering if it may be fun, though, to do that interesting internetty fiction thing and take one starter 300 words, and get others to continue the story… open source steampunk!
So I’ll ponder!
But any input/suggestions are most welcome!
http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2008/07/26/weird-tales-writing-contest/