Hell Hath No Fury - Book One

The First Meeting

AN: I am interrupting your reading to bring you this message: thank you for all the support. if you wanna join a discord to talk about this or just make friends check my profile for the link (in my conversations)

Ava was sitting next to Xyra, both of them a few feet behind Theo. The room held a massive circular table which the pirate captains crowded around. It didn't seem very comfortable, what with the paper and mugs scattered about everyone's space and the pirates bumping elbows. Each of the officers that the captain's invited to the meetings sat behind their captains, forming a ring around the edges of the room. They had nothing but their own books or pieces of wood provided a surface to write on. It was uncomfortable, to say the least. Ava's neck and back hurt from hunching over the notes to write legibly. The constant demand to be sitting up in a hard wooden chair with nothing in front of her to lean on made her sorer by the hour. Xyra didn't seem fazed by this so Ava thought it best to keep her mouth shut and avoid complaining.

They had been in the room for countless hours at that point. The sunlight seeping in through the windows had been long gone and some yawns could be seen from around the table. They had long been past the first item on the agenda, comparing notes as to the recent attacks. A surprising amount of pirates came forward with stories of being targeted. At first, the conversation lulled, only one or two captains spoke up as to the risks their crew had faced. After it was clear that there was something unspoken hanging in the air, Theo came forward with the admittance of what had happened to them.

Theo recounted with great detail what the Scorned Woman had encountered. She explained how they were baited into the Tuskeri's trap and then also how they encountered a ship flying a false distress signal. The room's energy shifted after that. Theo, a powerful pirate quite literally sitting with the biggest name in pirating, had admitted to being bested at least slightly. That confession opened up the room for more pirates to step forward with their stories. Over a third of the almost one hundred pirates there had mentioned some sort of run-in with something out of the ordinary. By the end of the discussion, they had narrowed down how their foe was attacking to four main tactics.

The first was fake distress signals, like the one they had encountered. A flag would be raised or a ship would be staged to look abandoned when it was just a trap to lure in pirates. The second way was more common around the southern continents where islands and small rock formations provided perfect cover for awaiting ships. Ambushes strategically set in known pirate looting routes seemed to be the most common of the four and from the looks of it, what had caused most of the missing pirate cases in the first place. The third was fairly straightforward and the tactic, that was mostly used in the North, was a simple chase. No hidden ambushes or plots. The faster ships were able to get away and those that weren't fast enough were not sitting at the table with them. The last tactic was contracting hits on crews. This one seemed to be only aimed at larger and more infamous pirating crews.

There was one topic of conversation that dominated the meeting for a while. One of the pirates who had narrowly escaped an ambush said they were fired upon by a volley of metal arrows. The confusion in the room was palpable and it quickly amassed as he showed what he was referring to. In his hand, he held a strange contraption, a long spout emerging from its handle. The man showed it off and claimed it to be what had only been a rumored invention before, the hand cannon. The contraption was passed around the room and even Theo couldn't keep the conversation from derailing to the implication of this new discovery. Uncilo had to call a break to get the pirates back on track.

It took a while to get through all of the retellings of the pirate's experience with being targets and Ava was thankful for the semi-frequent breaks Uncilo called. Her hand felt like it was going to fall off from the number of notes she was taking and by the first break, not even an hour in, she had to take Cooker up on her offer of drugs. They fell into an easy routine during the breaks. There was a room in the hallway outside the main meeting that was, for the most part, free of others. Xyra and Ava would inform Theo of the happenings of the room around them and Cooker was able to give Theo advice on how to navigate the conversation in the room. Cooker would then share her drugs and they would be off for another round of pirate debates. At first, only Ava partook but as the night grew longer, Xyra joined in. Notably, though, Theo did not allow herself to indulge.