The Sea Retreat bar.

It took a while for the bachelorette party to find their feet again. The combination of booze and a group of women who hadn't found their sea legs yet had turned out to be a dangerous one. Every time one of them tried to get up, they found themselves knocked off of their feet soon after and came tumbling down. Eventually Melody and Emma were able to climb to their feet and actually stay there, giving them the opportunity to help the others stand up, with plenty of patience.

The six trashed women stumbled down the hallways of the ship, babbling about old time and singing songs that were popular in their college days at the top of their lungs. Every once in a while, Mariah would quiet them down with an obnoxious, drunken "Shhh!", but the volume would climb back up again in minutes anyway. Lucky for them, this sort of noise was nothing that the guests of the SS Awesome Excelsior were unused to after their long stay on the ship.

The Sea Resort bar was the main one on the ship, and it was part of the top deck so that its patrons could enjoy the ocean view as they descended into drunkenness and incoherence. Since the main deck was several flights of stairs up from where the bachelorette party was staying, it took them most of a half hour to actually make their way there. To them, it seemed like the trip had only been a few minutes, but they also had no idea how drunk they had actually gotten off of Charlotte's alleged 'tequila' shots.

The music was loud and the lights were low at the Sea Resort. Large, faux-Greek pillars held up the canopy, and the floor was made up of light-up glass panels that flashed green, pink, and blue on random occasions. To a sober mind, it might seem very tacky and fake, but to a drunk, it looked like the height of luxury.

"OhmyGod," Samantha gasped as she lurched into the bar. "This looks amazing!" She ran across the floor, dancing between the panels as they lit up, cackling to herself like a child with a new toy. "I want to stay here forever!"

"Well, that isn't the plan!" Charlotte yelled. Despite her volume, she was probably holding her liquor the best of the girls, since she had actually had absinthe before and was still partying on most weekends. A PhD was hard work, after all, and she needed to cut loose sometimes. Her control meant that she wouldn't be tolerating much deviation from her plan, though.

"Then what's the plan?" Brooke slurred, the second-least drunk out of the six.

"Duh," Charlotte said. "More shots!" She lead the way across the dance floor and up to the bar, where two cruise employees were waiting to take their orders.

There was a man and a woman. The man was much taller than the woman, with long black curls and scruffy facial hair on his bronzed face. The woman was blonde and busty-- the classic bartending combination. Both had 'cruise ship employee' smiles plastered across their faces, though the man's seemed slightly more authentic than his coworkers.

"You ladies look like you've been having fun," he said. There was a hint of some kind of a Latin accent on his tongue."Can I get you anything to drink?"

"You're cute," Charlotte said, leaning over the bar so that her cleavage was staring the man right in the face. "And we would like something to drink, thank you very much. Six shots of vodka, please." Better to avoid having the girls drink any more tequila until they were too drunk to tell the difference between it and the food-coloured 'tequila' that she had gotten them drunk with earlier.

"Thank you. You're all very beautiful," Miguel said. His eyes flicked across the room to each of the members of the bachelorette party, enjoying the view without a hint of shame. He filled the six shot glasses with a swift swipe across the bar, the vodka bottle held upside down in his hand.

The girls each drank, even Mariah. All traces of her earlier hesitation had disappeared, and now she was just as enthusiastic as everyone else. The shots kept coming, and the ladies only got more and more drunk, into the late hours of the night.