…poison the barrel and cause a little chaos.

So, it’s runaway or do what the mutton chopped man says; in other words, go out into the dark and be chased by the black mailing bastard and however many of his friends he can stand to ‘share’ you with, or go upstairs into a bedroom with a man who wants to **** you and hope you can get the drop on him, silently, despite his greater strength and experience of ****. The third option grows more and more enticing with each passing second.

You watch the man, dressed as a beleaguered barkeep, place the ale barrel near its nearly depleted brother and get out a hammer and chisel from his belt. He begins to break a hole in the lid of the barrel; either they have no taps on hand, or more likely an open top is mealy quicker to dunk into. You’d give him a minute until he’s done. A minute to think.

You turn back to the bar and the man talking beside you. Still talking, despite you not saying a word back to him or looking at him for over a minute. You glance your eyes back his way, taking in his neat hair and clean shaven face, his height, his muscles.

Why couldn’t he have been ugly, like the rest of them?

Seeing that he once again has the attention of his favourite audience, he begins a new topic.

“You know, I dived for clams as a lad. All around these parts. People said I was the best. Always knew where the pearl was.” With nothing better to do, you look into his dark grey eyes and listen to his story. “Funny thing about pearl diving, it’s good for the clam as well. You bring it out of its comfort. Its stuck fast at first, but if you slide something in, tease it, stroke it, it’ll open like a flower. As soon as it lets go and gives up its pearl, it becomes stronger. More able to enjoy life. You know what I mean?”

You have no clue what he means.

“Of course”, you lie. It seems like the right response. You’ve never been one for studying nature; people are complex enough.

He continues to look down at you, wearing an expression you’d guess is supposed to be seductive, leaning close and lowering his voice.

“I always loved going down for them. The sights, the smells, the taste, but most of all that release they feel, when even the most **** finally lie back and surrender to it.”

This guy must really like clams. The value of pearls dropped significantly when they were found to be so plentiful in the archipelago but people can still make a living off them.

“I...see.” You glance at the barrel and see that the big man with the hammer and chisel had finished working the top, holding the tools up to a cheer, like a hero pulling his sword from a dead beast. A large scrum follow, the inns drunkest, or most eager to get drunk, rush to dunk there tankards and pour the yellow liquid down their necks. Are you really going to jeopardise your mission just to kill a handful of these scum? Perhaps you chose to hastily.

“Would you like me to show you?” He puts his hand on your thigh and looks deeply into your eyes. Show you what? Pearl diving? Are you missing something? This is very much neither the time nor the place.

You gently pick and move his hand off your thigh, giving him a conciliatory smile,

“No thank you. Er, not tonight.”

He returns a sad smile,

“You’ll come around. Find me later.”

You don’t think so. You look at the back exit, it may be the better option.

The man behind the clam diver had watched the exchange with interest, or he had just been looking at your body. He chimes into the conversation, still forcing his presence on the silent woman.

“Ahhh, ya not sayin it right. Here, let me av a go. Gotta say it plane like.” He grabs a fist full of the woman’s red hair and pulls he off the table, pressing hard to keep himself inside her. The constant sight and sound of the poor woman plight had numbed you to it, but seeing her as she is turned towards you brings her miserable situation into stark relief. Empty eyes, containing life but no hope, no soul, stare blankly forward as he still grinds into her. Her tattered dress is pulled down at the front, revealing two big bruised breasts that shake with each vaginal invasion, and its length is covered with damp patches and not-so-mysterious stains.

In a heartbeat, he moves her around his friend, pushes her head forwards and lets it fall on you. You briefly see her blank face before it falls heavily on your breasts, her nose catching the single button of your jacket and pulling it down far enough to briefly show them one of you nipples. Her head then slides down to your crotch as he jostles her behind.

“Fancy a shag? I’ll eat yer pussy and fuck ya brains out?”

Your too shocked to respond and he laughs as he continues pounding her, pressing her face between your legs each time, poking her nose through trousers and hair. You quickly back away and stand out of your chair.

The clam loving pirate angrily berates his friend who just laughs and humps in response. He turns to you, apologies on his face and words forming in his mouth, but you cut him off.

“You say you don’t drink?”

“That’s right”, he responds, slightly confused.

“You should.”

You turn and walk away, digging the poison vial out of your thigh strap.

Several large pirates retreat from the barrel as more begin to approach it. You grab an empty ale tankard from a nearby table, catching it along the way with the same hand that holds the poison vial. You keep it pressed between your palm and the heavy handle of the tankard, thumbing the stopper out of the small glass container, clear liquid getting its first taste of air. Whether in blood or in stomach, it’s guaranteed to kill within seconds or minutes depending on the dosage. You approach the barrel, dunking the tankard and tipping the whole vial into its yellow frothy contents.

“Hey! What the fuck!”

You look up at another pirate, a red and white wall of muscle, several hand spans taller than you. Confusion twists his face, then anger, then movement; his clenched fist slamming right into your cheek and throwing you to the floor with a single punch.

“What did you-“

He get cut off when an even bigger -far more drunk- yellow and red clad pirate behind him punches him in the side of the head with a wide windmill blow, sending him flying down into a nearby table. The giant of a man that had come to your rescue looks down at you with unfocused eyes.

“I got ya back Suzi! An’t no gods damn Wendigo trouser snake pullin bastard g-gon beat on our women!”

Your still slightly dazed, and his words give little extra clarity. You’re still on the floor when your attacker stagger back up to his feet. The blow he received was such a hard impact that you doubt you would ever fully recover from it; it seems his skull is thicker than your own.

“Ahhhhh! Ya fuckin retard! I’m tryin ta tell ya she was-“

Again he is cut off, and once again it was for the vast pirates punch, but this time it was bolstered by the metal tankard in his hand, used as a primitive knuckle duster. It flattens completely on the man’s face, spilling the dregs of its contents.

Evidently his skull wasn’t so thick. He collapses right next to you and you see from his face that the tankard wasn’t the only thing crushed in the impact.

Dead silence fills the room, and all eyes lock on to your situation. From your position on the floor you can see the two groups, red and white and red and yellow, all look at the swaying giant and the dead man at his feet. On the left you see a lone man wearing red and white, movement clear for the rooms stillness, stand up on his table. His eyes are wide with loss and rage, and he breaks the silence by voicing his displeasure.

“I’LL FUCKIN KILL YOU!!!!”

He dives across the room, quickly slamming into the wall of drunken yellow and red bodies that came to your aid, kicking, punching, screaming, and clawing. Like a rock dropped into a lake, the ripple of hostility shot out to all the patrons of the room, eliciting a reaction of pure chaos. Chairs, tankards, even a table all take to the air as if possessed by the sudden ****, crashing into people and hurling blood and splinters across the frenzied crowd.

You quickly crawl under a nearby table as the quiet din of the inn is replaced by a ferocious thunderstorm of screaming, breaking and pounding. You crawl, shuffling on hands and knees as fast as you can down the length of the table towards what you hope is one of the exits. You didn’t have much of a plan regarding the poison, but this was not really the outcome you were expecting! Well…not the part where you’re in the middle of it! A wave of the poisoned ale spreads across the floor from behind, the barrel turned or thrown over in the fight, soaking your hands and knees. The rage increases.

You make it to the end of your table only from someone to slam into it, sliding it back and exposing you, forcing you to dive forward underneath another table and continue your crawl as fast as you can. The table above you breaks in half as someone is slammed through it, the jagged wood only barely missing your feet as you continue to crawl away from the epicentre of the madness you created.

At the end of a table again -now only half the table it was- you see that you are near the large hole in the wall leading into the next building, where the red haired woman you saw when you came in was dragged off to. You would take it, but a yellow and red clad pirate fills it looking at the chaos with mouth agape. He dodges a thrown tankard as he sees you, yelling at you.

“What the fuck!?”

You quickly answer the question, **** for him get out of the way.

“They’ve turned on us! Get help!”

The look of horror turns to rage and he barrels off down the corridor, screaming your words to everybody in the building. You move to follow him down the holes corridor when a red and white clad pirate steps out of one of the rooms joining it, halting you in your tracks. Pulling up his trousers with one hand, he see’s you and the chaos behind you, finding the combination enough to charge in your direction.

With ****, you stand up and face the chaos. This was bad. It was also good, but still. Red, white and yellow were quickly being replaced with red, red, and red as the fight was getting progressively bloody.

Technically not your fault? At least you can share the blame with whatever grievances you ignited.

With no time to waste, you leap onto the end of the broken table and run across it, down onto the man slumped in its wreckage, then up the other side before aiming for the front door. Two men are engaged in a scrum, bodies locked in a grip and free hands punching each other’s stomach and face. You use their backs as a stepping stone to the next table, shoving them to the side and making them fall into another group. The punching intensifies. You halt your run as a man fly’s by in front of you before continuing, staying high above the crowd on the tables. A lantern fly’s by your head, missing you by a hairs breadth, before crashing against the opposite wall, spilling oil and flame. A man, covered in blood, rushed from the entrance towards you, reaching out to grab you and pull you into the screaming mass of people. You take a chance, a stupid **** chance, leaping forward and slamming your foot onto his nose, shattering it and sending his head backwards faster that his body can keep up with.

You roll as you hit the floor, not as some acrobat might, but something more akin to falling down the stairs instead. You get your feet under you without losing much momentum. Your eyes dart around as the insanity continues, ducking low and sprinting for the exit. Fights block your way. You see a club -that of the clam obsess man- rising and falling as he fails in his duty to keep order. You see a man being punched and kicked as he lies on the floor. Another man swings a chair; it explodes on the back of his opponent, its terrible craftsmanship finally betraying it. You squeeze around the periphery. From what little you can tell, the yellow and red crew is outnumbered, but are faring better as individual brawlers compared to the red and white crew. Likely, they often rely on the quick thinking of their absent captain to win, and you’ve never been happier to be on the side of brute savagery. You stick close to the groups of yellow until you finally leap out of the front door, staggering into the street unharmed, the recipient of only a dozen near misses.

You aren’t alone, but there is no one close; you see a man wearing yellow and white come out of an alley further down before running to the docks. From his clothes, he could even be the man from the hole. You sprint left, following the road and the street corner to the manors possible location. It shouldn’t be too hard to miss, unless clam man was lying. If you can get there before the chaos does then you could still pull this off!

Your heart pounds in your ears as you run down the street. Ahead you can see stone pillars where the road and village ends, with a more formal looking path beyond, bending about a tree lined corner. The sounds of the brawl, growing in size and spilling onto the streets, echoes out into the night and chases you, alerting three men wearing red and white, who come out from one of the buildings ahead to shout at you. You slow to a jog and then then a stop, looking for a way around them and their approaching confused and angry faces. You have no time to explain, and no answers to give that would not be met with suspicion or outright hostility. Looking about, only ruined or empty buildings line the side of the road between you and them, with the only promising alleyway leading off behind them.

Maybe it’s your chest heaving up and down as you catch your breath, or maybe it’s the colours you wear, perhaps even the sounds of a riot behind you, but they pick up the pace and start jogging, then running, towards you. There aren’t enough different groups on this island to make the participants of the inns riot a mystery. It also doesn’t take a genius to realise which side you and they are on. As they sprint for you, you run into a nearby derelict building, instincts taking you through its darkness as you hammer up its stairs to its second floor. Moon light shines through its once glassed windows, now gaping holes, and it peeks through gaps in the building’s roof as well, filling the room with pale bars of aggravated dust. One dimly glows on a ladder leading to the outside, and you dart up its steps as the sound of feet thunder on the stairs behind you. The trapdoor is stiff; you have to push and push, fearing that the ladder step will give way first, if not your back, but it squeals and gives and clatters open and you quickly climb onto the roof.

You slam the door shut behind you and you look about. Rotting beams stretch out before you, the middle of three connected buildings, all matched in dilapidation. You hop over several beams to the outer rim of the flat arena, careful of the dubious slats between that barely cover the room below, and you look out over town. Smoke rises from the inn several streets over and the sounds of continued **** and panic fill the air. The street below is empty but surprisingly far down and your footing is in very poor repair. Coming up here was definitely a mistake.

The trap door swings open and a big angry man climbs out of it, led by the proud beak of his hooked nose. You carefully hurry along the roofs edge, still trusting the thick wood of a single beam over the rotting lath and plaster of the rest of the roof. You spread your arms out to balance as you walk across to the roof of the adjoining building, but you can go no further.

Behind you, the three men are on the roof and moving more gingerly, placing their greater weight onto the rotting wood with far greater care. They each pick a beam and give slow chase to you, knowing that you are cornered. Looking at the next building along, you see the gap between them is jumpable but the building is just a shell; thin wood, unable to support any weight, surrounds a building that no longer has a roof or second floor, just a long drop down. There’s a single beam jutting out of the front of the building you’re on, used in the past as purchase for a street wide washing line or perhaps as a pulley point to bring up heavy objects. Either way it is the plank that you find yourself steadily backing onto as the three men advance.

A second sun rises behind you as the inn burns in earnest. Flickering yellow lights stabs into the street and the sky, drowning out the moon and stars with an angry radiance.

“What’s happenin love? Your lot finally start somthin they can’t finish?” The smallest of them speaks in a mocking tone and you look back. The light reflects off their drawn blades; primitive things, sharpened to a point and pulled from wherever they were hidden. You continue down the beam until you have no beam left.

The biggest and angriest of them licks his lips as he looks at you.

“Told ya, didn’t I? Got no bloody respect. Looks like Rolands lot’s gonna get wats commin to em! Startin with you, princess.”

You look down again. Doing so is another mistake. You judge the height such that a good landing would only be a pair of broken legs, while a bad one would be a painful ****. Considering what these men are likely to do to you if you’re immobile, maybe **** is the good landing.

The artificial sun behind you goes from a genital morning rise to a violent zenith, the whole building exploding in a huge roaring fireball. The ground shakes and the rickety building sways, sending you falling off the edge.

It’s a split second moment of flying arms and panicked cries as you fall, before your flailing manages to grab the beam, holding on with mere fingertips. Heart pounding and wide eyed you cling on for dear life. The three regain their footing, though one had stepped on the old slat and gone though, causing him to curse violently as he clambers back up. They come to your beam and look down at you, your legs kicking for the wooden wall, for the beam, for anything, looking for purchase enough to prevent your fall. Merciless mirth spreads across their faces, chuckling at your predicament, and the ringleader begins to advance again, stepping far enough down the beam to reach your fingers.

“Get the fuck down now! Roland’s lot have turned on us or something! All hands for battle!”

You look behind you, into the street below, looking for the source of the female shout. Before you can see who gave the order, your eyes catch sight of something beautiful: a metal hook attached to the underneath of the beam by rope and a metal ring! It’s the kind used for pulley rope and the lifting of heavy objects, and while worn, short, and old, it’s thick. The fingertips of your left hand give out and you grab the hook, your right hand following soon after.

The hook-nosed ringleader shouts down into the street.

“Aww come on Sharpe! I wanna see how this ends!”

From your new vantage point on the hook, you can look up and see the faces of the men, while below you can see the woman in the street a few floors down. She has long grey hair but doesn’t seem very old, and her most distinguishing feature is the absence of one, namely her left eye. It wasn’t lost in the riot, or recently at all, as it looks quite healed with time. She shouts back up with a commanding voice.

“Put it back in ya kecks! She ain’t goin nowhere! DOWN! NOW!”

The men start to rush off the roof and you hear them make their way through the innards of the building.

Your heart is hammering, made worse by the barest look about you. Falling is still not an option, not from this height. With the men gone you will probably be able to climb back up the hook rope and onto the roof, provided you’re not hanging long enough to drain your strength. The inn, as well as several of the building around it, are now ablaze, yet it can’t have been more than a minute or two since the fire started. Evidently they were giving out the cheap stuff, leaving plenty of barrels of hard spirits below, or a year’s supply of lantern oil. A dry couple of days, a warm night, spirits, possibly even distilleries, coupled with a spark, all make for a bright show indeed. Then again, if sin is flammable then that would explain the inns explosion tenfold as well. You hope those poor girls made it out. You have **** but to assume they did.

The three men appear below and get barked at by the woman.

“Get to the bloody ship and tell the others! I’m off to warn the captain!”

She sets off up the street, confirming the direction of the manor, while the angry man who promised to ‘start with you’ picks up a nearby rock and hurls it instead. Even with both eyes in his head he manages to miss, the rock hitting the wooden wall next to you, punching through the weak rotten slats. He spits on the ground and they jog off towards the docks.

You watch them disappear from your sight, quickly being swallowed by the corner and the rising smoke in a matter of second. After, you turn your head to the woman. She jogs down the street towards the gateposts before stopping, seeing or hearing something in a nearby building. She walks up to it and picks something up, giving it a few test swings like a club; it’s a likely a long, thick plank of wood, and it evidently passes her test, causing her to turn and continue her course.

You start climbing up the hook when you see a new form come out of the building behind her. It’s all happening quite a distance away (and you’re really in no position to get distracted) but you briefly make out the black mutton chops on the side of his face and near cry out to warn her as he stabs something into her back. His hand covers her mouth as he drags her back into the darkness of the building.

Your climbing paused during the attack but you **** it to resume when it’s over. Several innocent people could have died already tonight, and from her red white colours you doubt she was one of them. You shudder briefly, remembering what he wanted to do to you. She may not be dead yet, but she could certainly be wishing she was.

The climb up is arduous and requires every ounce of your strength. You’re not strong, but you are light, so your able to manage in the end. Before long you are back on the roof and quickly crossing it along the beams to the trapdoor. The whole building seems more rickety than before, likely weakened by the blast of the inn, and wasting no time, you run downstairs and out the front door, into the now deserted street. Smoke begins to settle, moving up like a **** mist. You continue up, quickly leaving it as you towards the manors location. If the one eyed woman was going to warn her captain then you may as well finish the job. You smile; your warning may be a bit different though.

You slow down outside the house the woman was pulled into, not wanting the sound of footsteps to draw out another ambush. As you approach, you hear noises from inside; muffled cry’s, the scrape of boots on wood, and the voice of a one sided conversation.

“-real peace o puss afore your boys chased er off. A cunts a cunt but gods yer ugly!”

As you walk by the open door, you start to hear a familiar sound; the slapping grunts that filled the inn during your brief stay. The poor woman. You continue on to the manor, returning to a run when you’re far enough away.

Sprinting up a fine looking gravelled path, a large building comes into view as you pass the trees. It’s clearly a manor, but you don’t have time to give it a proper evaluation as your run takes you up to it at speed. Only the fact that the path joins the buildings far side, splitting as it nears, and it takes only a moment to choose the wider path leading to the front door.

It ends in an alcove marring the front of the building, containing a large old door and an equally large man in red and white standing before it. He looks at you with wide eyes, an axe in one hand, and you panic for a moment, thinking him like the others. That changes with his words.

“What’s going on? What was with that bang?” It’s clear his concern is more clueless than colour based. You silently thank him for confirming no one else had delivered the news.

Rushing past him and hoping that your obvious urgency would bypass the need for any passwords or secret handshakes or whatever else you don’t know about, you breathlessly say,

“Tell you later,” in an effort to appease him, passing through the front door with ease.

Your breath saws through your lungs as you enter the buildings main foyer. Hands on your knees, you see it’s worn opulence bathed in genital yellow light from the nearby lanterns; small tame flames that must long to join the raging chaos outside. A group of five richly dressed men stand at the base of a grand set of stairs that spill down from a landing into the centre of the room. Two rooms are on either side of the ground floor, dark, leading into the mansion proper, while various crates line the sides of the foyer, some of which sit in the centre with the men. They all look at you like you’re their salvation; a beacon of knowledge knowing all about the noise and distant lights that paint their faces with worry.

Your mind makes some quick calculations. If these men, wearing the gold and silks of merchants, are here, then they are probably here to meet with Captain Wendigo. If they are at the bottom of the stairs then she’ll likely be at the top of them, more or less. You can’t be sure of either and they look eager to talk; a brief stop would tell you all you want to know, in exchange for a few well-placed lies.

However, the ripple you started at the inn could reach the front door at any second, and you can’t think of a single soul on the islands who would have less authority than you; you could lose control of this situation very quickly. Time is definitely a luxury at this point; you can’t even stop to catch your breath.

You could go with your gut and run upstairs blindly, hoping for the best, or mine the men for information as quick as you can, acting with a bit more clarity.