421 - Quill and Ink

Charlotte Palmer has vanished in a strike of yellow lightning from the Eigendrake.

Aboard the ghost ship crewed by the Buccaneers of the Beyond, the lookout shouts down the news from the crow’s nest.

Others in the crew hesitate. But only for a moment. There’s still a job to do.

The Eigendrake uncoils itself from Cairo. The souls it planted in the citizens of the city, to live out their afterlives, are drawn back into it, and Egyptian citizens find themselves waking up.

“It follows!” shouts Zheng Yi Sao, the navigator. “Through the portal!”

The ghostly vessel turns, heading for the doorway between the physical and the spiritual that Charlotte’s sorcerous companions had opened for it before. The Eigendrake pursues, yellow lightning playing over its phantasmal serpentine shape.

The splash of an infinite ocean marks the ship’s return to the Sea of Thought - the astral expanse of dreams, nightmares, accomplishments, and imagination. Charlotte once thought of it only as the underworld, or the afterlife. It is more - far more - and the Buccaneers sail it like experts.

“It will follow us until it retrieves the souls we took,” concludes Haam, the chief pirate. “Nothing else matters more to it.”

He turns his attention to Bodark, Vermillion, and Manny, who’ve come aboard to help with the attack on the Eigendrake. “We will lead the beast on a chase. We will sail to the End of Everything. You must decide how–”

The roar of jet engines overhead - not a common phenomenon in the afterlife - distracts him from saying more.

The group look up to see Leah Snow’s Garuda flying overhead and alongside. Haam resumes his thought with a smile. “You must decide how to proceed. It seems your friends have use for you, however.”

The side hatch of the flying craft opens, and Equity leaps out. She drops to the deck of the pirate ship, and beckons to the undead trio. “C’mon. We have a lead. A really important one.”

Bodark, Vermillion, and Manny look at each other in curiosity and confusion. But they allow Equity to boost them off the deck and into Garuda.

Beneath them, Haam’s ship and the Eigendrake dwindle into the distance. Ahead of them looms the portal, and a return to the real world.


On the ground outside Cairo, the returning trio disembark and are immediately accosted by Maury Jones.

“Hey, V. Show me that card. The one with the symbol you showed to Charlotte. The one uh, the Timeless Tower symbol.”

The card and the symbol were revealed in “306 - The Dueling Duo”. It was also seen on towers in the middle of a destroyed Earth, in “405 - Attack on the Multiverse!” – Ed.

Vermillion pats down his coat, and produces the card in question.

Maury holds it up, then pulls out a table napkin and holds that up beside it. Someone has drawn a symbol on the napkin. It’s the very same symbol as on the card the vampire has carried since leaving Russia.

“We were contributing to the rescue work at Cairo, as people were coming out of their trances. One of the fire-fighters brought this to us,” Maury explains. “They said someone told him to bring it to us, but didn’t know who.”

“To be sure, a remarkable concurrence, but hardly a productive one, yes?” Vermillion asks in annoyance.

Manny perks up. “Show me that again, lass,” he prompts. Maury holds up the paired symbols again, and the flaming skull stares.

“Lay this paper across thy skin, as though a tattoo, would ye?” he asks after a few moments of inspection. Maury shrugs and complies.

Several more seconds of inspection follow.

Finally the skull spins up and about in excitement, leaving a fiery green trail behind. “Ahh! I remember! I had such a thing upon me own flesh! One of me many tattoos!”

“When did you get it?” Maury demands, journalist first and foremost. “What did it mean to you?”

Manny descends again, now more restrained. “Ah. Well. That be difficult to explain. I don’t properly remember.”

The others look at him, a combination of shock, disappointment, and frustration on their faces.

“Kinda an important thing to remember right now, dude,” Daph suggests.

Bodark voices a sudden insight. “Ah! You probably forget because you were drunk when you get tattoo. Eh?”

Manny pivots to look at the stocky werewolf. “Actually, yes, that be the most likely explanation.”

Maury sighs, and puts the napkin away. “Then what was the point of this…?”

“There be a way.” Manny brightens up. “We retrace the voyage of Cap’n Quill. Me soul be me memories, yes? I am not deaf to the things the mystics of this quest have said. I will regain me body and me ink at long last. Then we will see what we must see.”

He turns to Mini-Jason, who has been piloting the Garuda in Leah’s absence. “We need not sail as on ships of old. Thy flying wing will serve, yes?”

The young man grins. “Of course. And I get to hear more about this ‘Captain Quill’, right?”

“Of course!” The ghostly pirate’s voice is full of renewed gusto.

“Then let us board and depart,” Maury suggests. “Manny, you at least remember where this voyage started from, right?”

Manny pouts as much as a creature without lips can. “I be sorely wounded by thy doubt, lass.”

The journalist chuckles in return. “Tell you what. I’ll document that voyage more thoroughly this time. Tattoos are hardly the ideal way to write history.”

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Maury Jones is an accomplished people-watcher.

She shepherded the younger Ponies through their various hardships while in her mid-20’s. She built a - well, not thriving, but successful - career as a vlogger on YouTube out of guts, ambition, and a great radio voice. She’s pried secrets out of interviewees that wore literal and metaphorical masks.

Now, sitting in the Garuda with the others, she can tell that everyone here is doing their best to cover up from an increasing apprehension.

Mini-Jason - the tween version of Jason Quill from another universe who was somehow de-aged along with his entire team - is at the controls of the flying wing. His nanobots make up for the cybernetics Leah Snow used to supplement her piloting skill at the craft she invented. Now she’s gone.

Charlotte is gone. She was struck by the lightning of an Eigendrake as she was trying to steal souls from it, to lure it away from Cairo. She was wearing a suit that should have made her undetectable to the thing, yet it found a way to feel her out.

Other Charlottes are working on the problem of the Eigendrakes - the carriers and protectors of souls from some distant corner of the multiverse, come here to escape some inconceivably vast calamity. One of those Charlottes came here with a version of Harry Gale, “Harold the Fleet” from a world where magic stood in for superpowers. He’s gone too.

His Charlotte, and others, and Alycia-25 and people named Astra and Resister, are elsewhere. They’re doing what they can to sort this out in their own way.

Maury looks about the cabin.

The werewolf and the vampire who work at Charlotte’s cafe, Bodark and Vermillion, are in an animated argument in Russian. They’re gesturing elaborately at each other.

Daphne Palin, now going by the name “Equity”, is the priestess of a god of vengeance. She’s got some kind of tiny paperback she carries in the inner pocket of her jacket, and she’s reading it with easy familiarity. But she’s not at peace.

Manny the Skull, a literal skull wreathed in green flame, was - by his own possibly exaggerated account - once a sailor, swashbuckler, and scoundrel. He claims to have once had a particular symbol tattooed on his body, a symbol that matches one the group has been seeing over and over in their travels. Now they’re flying back to their home world, to retrace the voyage of a mysterious Captain Quill, in the hope of understanding what the symbol means. He’s floating about in the cabin, watching Mini-Jason operate the controls, watching how a craft is operated that’s centuries in advance of his.

Maury almost bursts out laughing, and harshly chokes it off before a sound gets out. How ridiculous this is. How improbable that any of this is going to bring Charlotte, or Leah, or Harold, back from wherever they got to - if they’re anywhere at all. What a slim thread upon which to hang one’s hopes.

Her aborted laugh would have been her own sign of desperation. Because come on. There’s no other source of hope right now.


Emmanuel had come to his first ship in chains, as the result of a deal with the court. Serve a sentence out in the gaol, or serve the Royal Navy at sea. It was no choice at all for an illiterate young man. At least on a boat, there might be some chance to swim for shore in some distant place where his name and crimes were unknown.

It was among his fellow sailors that he’d gotten his first taste of dignity. He worked hard to avoid the lash, and learned the ropes quickly. Yet the men with him were appreciative of his service, and said so. Praise was like a rich banquet to one who’d been starving his whole life.

His time aboard the HMS Bonadventure came to an end when the pirates attacked.

Fionn Ó Cuill was the Captain. He could be nothing less. Emmanuel couldn’t imagine the man ever being an ordinary sailor. He must have burst out of the ocean in a spray of foam, landing on the deck of his first boat fully formed, and taken command right then and there. He had a shock of blond hair, a thick and bushy beard of the same color, and skin that had been tanned by the sun but not hardened into leather by it. Among the English, he called himself the more palatable Finn Quill.

He was Irish and let nobody forget it. He hailed from the “rebel city” of Cork. He was full of tales tall and short, and said it was in his blood to be a bard - a spinner of legends. Yet here he was, on the deck of a ship, chancing his fate against the caprice of Neptune. God forgive such a sinner as he, for he’d have it no other way until he’d spun his own legend larger than any he’d told before, he would say with a wink.

Quill and his men took captives of some of the Bonadventure’s crew, and left the rest adrift in the ocean. Once away, he revealed three things.

First, that he’d known that every man jack he’d taken from the Crown’s warship had been forcibly impressed, rather than signing up of their own will. Second, he was short-handed and was willing to let his captives off at the next port, but that he’d take any man willing to sail of his own free will. Third, he’d acquired a map that pointed the way to untold riches and sights never beheld by living eyes. Moreover, he could demonstrate some slender fraction of the treasure he’d already acquired.

“Only I know the secrets of the map,” he’d said with a strange smile. “It was a gift to me from Henry Every, the arch-pirate. You lads may inspect it for yourselves to see as much. Any man who thinks to overthrow me had best consider his mates, because only under me will you see even a coin of what’s to come our way. Yet sail under my colors, and you’ll live like kings.”


Manny finds himself staring at Mini-Jason. Although he no longer has eyes, it still feels as though he does.

The kid catches the attention, and looks over. “Was this ‘Captain Quill’ really my ancestor, d’you think?” he asks, in an excited, uncertain voice.

“I be considerin’ that possibility just now, lad,” Manny admits. “The Cap’n was always keen on adventure. Ye have his name, and his hair. Not as much of it, but ye be young still. Perhaps ye have his spirit. I know not if his blood runs in thy veins. But take heart in that he’d have greeted ye as an equal.”

Mini-Jason shifts in the pilot’s seat. “Hey, can I ask you, y’know, more about this?”

Manny feels surprised at the sudden diffidence. Skinless, he can’t properly smile, but he nods his head - the skull, all that he has left. “Aye, lad, say on.”

The kid frowns. “Well. I - that is, my dad - he was a big influence in my life. The big influence. Him and Rusty, his bodyguard and partner. But I didn’t really have any other family. No uncles or aunts, really. Just government officials, superheroes, people my dad would consult with. I don’t even know about my grandparents, only that something happened to them when I was really young. So… so I guess…”

Manny can guess too. “Ye dream of family, having naught,” he says softly.

Jason looks over, his eyes scrunched up and his mouth turned into a puckered frown. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”

Manny pauses. “There be one other point of similarity. I be unlettered, but the Cap’n told many a story. Thy name be Jason?”

Mini-Jason grins. “That’s me, Jason Quill.”

Manny nods along. “Aye. Well, The Cap’n named his ship the Argo.”


Aboard the Argo, Emmanuel learned of his new duties. He would be a seaman. He would coil rope, tie knots, trim sails, swab decks, catch fish, stand lookout, extinguish fires - in short, see to the running of the ship.

There would be alcohol, and music, and rest periods. There would be no lash, no stern faces shouting obscenities, no punishments for failing to respect a far distant Crown or its emissaries here. There would be only the disapproval of the other men aboard ship, should he fail to perform.

That alone was motivation enough.


Bodark could use a cigarette. Somehow, he feels like it would be rude to smoke in this enclosed space, especially with a little kid flying the ship. And he’s running low. But he’s on edge.

He has been arguing with Vermillion for the better part of an hour. It’s mostly to pass the time. Neither man is committed to any position that sparks real opposition. Rather, when one brings up any point, the other seems compelled to counter it. At least he feels no self-consciousness when speaking Russian. That alone makes any conversation worthwhile, however fractious it becomes.

Finally he comes round to a point he’s been avoiding.

“Listen, my vampire friend. Charlotte Palmer needs our help, and we’re doing the right thing by going on this trip. Your card with its mysterious symbol. You never told her where you got it. Nor me. You act like this is a fool’s errand, but what else is there for us to do?”

Vermillion rolls his eyes as elaborately as it’s possible to do. “Perhaps we should be mindful of the business at hand. The Eigendrakes. What worlds are they shattering? What lives are they ruining?”

Bodark leans forward. “And what of Charlotte? You’ve no loyalty to her? She’s harsh, but she has been kind to us. She took us in when that hunter pursued us. She’s given us a place to be ourselves, and accepted us for who we are.”

Vermillion turns away suddenly. “Loyalty has never been my strength, nor my weakness,” he says in his typically ambiguous way. “I simply wonder if there are other paths we might walk.”

The werewolf sits back in his seat. “You’re lucky you have told us that it’s your vampire nature which forces you to lie so often. Otherwise I’d think that you are this arrogantly unhelpful on purpose.”


Bodark has stopped talking and is staring ahead, at the viewscreen of the Garuda.

Vermillion has given up trying, and now contends with his own thoughts.

I cannot be sincere. I cannot speak the truth. Undeath’s curse is not the loss of my life, but the loss of my heart’s voice.

He cannot tell this rough young Russian peasant what a pillar of strength he has been, nor what a comfort. He cannot say he’s found his company much more pleasant than he’d ever admit. He cannot say that he dreads losing him, the way Harold and Leah and Charlotte were lost. He cannot admit that he would scour the Earth to find him again.

He cannot say why he’s untroubled by Charlotte’s departure. He cannot brazenly lie about it - simply inverting the truth runs afoul of the supernatural compulsions that shackle him.

He knows Charlotte will be okay.

After all, she is the one who gave him the card.

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Yay, more Phase 3! And already Quill and Ink is promising to be an exciting adventure.

Looks like we’re in for dark times ahead… maybe!

Of course his name was Emmanuel. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I just always thought of him as Manny and never gave it a second thought.

The members of the Quill clan certainly know how to play the roguish hero. :laughing: Looking forward to learning more about Captain Ó Cuill and his treasure. :slight_smile:

Ah Manny, always the charmer. :laughing:

This bodes well.

Cue dramatic sting! An interesting revelation. I’m intrigued to find out how this happened. Time travel shenanigans, no doubt! After all, we’ve got a Timeless Tower to find.

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The sound of water gently lapping at a shore is the first thing Charlotte hears upon waking.

Overhead, she can see a sky full of brilliant stars. There are no sun and moon, but the night sky is enough to let her see clearly.

She’s lying on her back. Grass is beneath her. She puts her hands down, levers herself up into a sitting position, and looks around.

She sits beside a lake - or what might be a very placid sea. The beach is a mixture of rock and dirt. Here and there, she can see brooks feeding their water into the lake.

She turns to look in the other direction, to look upland and see the source of this water and what else might be here, and sees the Stag.

The Stag, she guesses, is just taller than a telephone pole’s height at its shoulders. Rather than a pair of symmetrical antlers, it has a single antler growing from the middle of its forehead, something like a unicorn’s. But that horn branches and spreads like a stag’s antlers. The branching reaches up and up, somehow, becoming fuzzy and impossible to view properly, until those branches become the stars in the sky. The Stag itself glows with the same light as the stars, making it clear that this impression is not accidental.

Charlotte rises to her feet, uncertain of what should happen next.

The Stag seems to be watching her. She cannot imagine such a being having any feeling of uncertainty. Is it waiting for something? For her?

If so, there’s no reason for her to be rude.

She approaches, and watches its enormous shaggy head droop down to keep her in its line of sight.

“I don’t know if you can understand or respond. Nevertheless, please permit me to introduce myself. My name is Charlotte Palmer. I don’t know where I am, or how I was brought here. I mean no harm. I simply wish to orient myself, and find my way back to my friends and associates.”

The Stag bobs its head slightly. Charlotte isn’t sure whether to take this as acknowledgement or simply a natural gesture. But it also turns, slow as a glacier, mindful to not trample her in the process, and begins walking upland. Charlotte follows.


She finds Harold the Fleet and Leah Snow tending crops on a patch of land.

Nearby there is a circular area with a fire-pit in the middle. Beyond it are a trio of buildings - a barn, a shed, and a modest house.

The pair see the approach of the Stag first, then look down and spot her as well. They abandon their tasks and rush toward her.

They don’t hug her - quite - but do come as close to it as Charlotte seems comfortable. Leah grins, and Harold looks relieved.

“I’m so glad you’re both okay,” Charlotte says, without even a greeting - she too feels the rush of strong emotion at seeing comrades thought lost. But her present situation prompts her to ask an immediate followup. “Where is this place?”

Leah gestures up at the celestial creature accompanying Charlotte. “The Time Stag here seems to be in charge, but we don’t know if we can communicate with him or not, even now. Aside from that… it ain’t reality, that’s for sure.”

In demonstration, she holds up her arms. Charlotte remembers seeing her cybernetic augmentations before, when she was piloting the Garuda - she was physically plugged into the vehicle. Now, there’s nothing but healthy human flesh. Or what looks to be it.

“I have no access to magic, no great speed here,” Harold adds. “Yet I feel no difference. It is the sensation of astral projection, but there is no corpus left behind and no silver cord anchoring me.”

Charlotte tilts her head. “The Time Stag? Who gave it this name?”

Leah points, and Charlotte looks along the line of perspective she creates. Across the lake, she can now see a promontory. An old stone tower rises from it.

“The Archetype,” Leah explains. “She’s got us working the ol’ farmland over here, but she should be visiting later.”

The woman gestures up at the Stag. “‘Time Stag’ makes sense though. That one uni-antler thing. Branches off into infinity, you know? Like timelines. Every choice a branch.”

“Who is the Archetype?” asks Charlotte, now full of curiosity.

“I think she’s you,” Harold says with a shrug and a wry smile.


Manny is telling the story of the Captain’s map.

“Maps be the keys to success in my day. Ye map the hazards and the opportunities ye find, and thus have ye advantage over others not familiar with the waters. Where the wind is becalmed and ships may not sail. Where the sea be too strong, or the storms be too great, and one’s sails will not survive. Where fresh water and fruit may be found. Ye have no idea how shocking this ‘GPS’ and ‘Google Earth’ be to one such as I.”

“De la Cosa sailed with Columbus and Balboa in their pillaging of the New World. His map be completed around 1500. Caudrelier and Pigafetta sailed under Magellan. They wrote their own account, which was seized by Pope Clement VIII and placed in the Vatican’s secret archives. Pigafetta had fought at the side of the Knights of Rhodes against the Barbary pirates, and knew their secrets too.”

“Henry Every, arch-pirate, granted the Cap’n a map seized from the Grand Mughal vessels - they be an empire that occupied that land today called India. That map contained many secrets, but lacked many keys to its deciphering. Secrets of sailing safely upon seas most serious, ye see.”

“The Cap’n came into possession of both these maps, and others of similar standing. His great scheme was to pretend there be only one map, and to create many false ones besides. The Cap’n was many things, and smithing and crafting of cunning things was one of his many talents. He concocted an oversized scroll case which contained these maps, true and false, and would divulge different maps depending on the arrangement of tiny mechanisms upon the case. Thus could he deceive anyone who thought to steal into his quarters and take a glimpse of the map.”

The skull utters a low cunning chuckle. “Such as myself, which is how I know of these things.”

“His genius let him see the correspondences between these maps - to decipher the connections. That this mysterious symbol be this island, that strange text be this landmark, and so forth. Thus did he learn many secrets. We are now bound for the first of these.”

The Garuda is flying along the coast of Spain. They pass by the island of Gaztelugatxe, connected to the mainland by a beautiful stone bridge and topped by an ancient church.

Manny grows excited. “There it be! There it be. It still stands. God bless it. Had I a heart, it would be warmed.”

Mini-Jason tilts the Garuda slightly, circling the site from the air, and the others look out to study it.

Manny resumes his thread of narrative. “The site we be visiting be two days–”

Jason laughs. “We’re fifteen minutes away, buddy.”

The old pirate turns, somehow managing to look surprised and pleased despite being merely a skull.


Charlotte kneels beside Leah and Harold. Her hands make the motions, assisted by the simple farming tools at hand. Dig a trench, plant a seed, cover the seed, water the soil. Move to the next piece of the plot.

“What are we planting here?” she asks.

“Dunno,” Leah says. “Universes. Timelines. Probably something super significant. Sure the hell ain’t regular crops.”

“How do you know that?” Charlotte asks curiously.

“We plant crops in the morning. They grow quickly enough to be harvested by nightfall.” Harold points toward the barn. Indeed, Charlotte can see the signs of previous harvests stacked up on pallets inside.

She turns back to Harold. “Wait. Morning? Night? How can you tell?”

“We noticed different things and put 'em together,” Leah explains. “My thing was that weather vane there.”

Charlotte looks. Atop the house, there is indeed a weather vane - a rooster hammered out of sheet metal, twisting and turning as the wind’s directions change. Beneath it are cardinal directions, similarly worked from metal. North, south, east, and west.

Leah grins. “I feel like a right fool for missing the other half.”

Harold swells with pride, and points down. In spite of the starry night filling the skies above, Charlotte realizes that the trio are casting shadows, and looks sharply up at Harold.

“The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, yes?” he says with a smile. “In my world, magic is a potent force, able to twist mundane reality by the wizard’s will, but its luminaries walk the same paths as in your existence. I watched our shadows change and vanish.”

“Inconsistent… yet familiar,” muses Charlotte aloud. “Like the field here. This way of farming is the way it was done in my time.”

My time. The phrase somehow pushes at her thoughts, and she reflects aloud as she works.

“This was the way of it, for my people. My family, our neighbors. Our ancestors. Later, I learned that the peoples who lived in America before the white settlers had a complex and harmonious system of managing the land. They used animals, rain, even fire to sculpt the land and make it flourish. To us, farming was a form of dominance. Land was wealth. Crops were as much a product as a way to eat and live.”

“And then…” She turns the next phrase over and over in her mind. “Then I died. And woke up in a new era. And learned how much of what I thought I knew was mistaken. Or ignorant. The willful ignorance of people who wanted to use the land, or the simple lack of knowledge that science and progress would amend.”

“I was shaped by my time. Given memories that still control my thinking. Then shown how much I did not know. I struggled to learn. Now, I am in a new place, and must learn anew once again. Are my memories of the 21st century now equally a hindrance, if this is where we will live our lives?”

Leah pats Charlotte on the shoulder gently, then returns to her own work. “We’re gonna make it home. Everyone deserves to be home. Whatever ‘home’ means to them.”


The Garuda has flown west along the Spanish coast. Finally Mini-Jason spots the landmark Manny called out, and banks toward it.

At first the skull seems disappointed. “The Roman lighthouse be no more, I see,” he mutters.

Jason checks the Garuda’s onboard map. Although they’re literally in a different universe than where the craft originated, not everything will have changed. “Faro de Cabo de Lastres. Lighthouse of Cape Lastres,” he announces.

Manny offers his story in a soft, reverent tone. “The story the Cap’n told is of a pirate ship, laden with treasure cruelly taken. A lad of only fifteen climbed the outside of the old Roman edifice in the dark and the rain. He fought with the fareros - the lighthouse keepers - and extinguished the flame. Deprived of their beacon, the pirates foundered on the rocks. They dragged their treasure to a cave for concealment, but were slaughtered to a man by Spanish soldiers as they tried to flee cross country. As for the lad - he fell from the tower to his death.”

Daph tilts her head, then speaks up. “It was for revenge,” she says, sounding uncertain and yet convinced she must speak. “The pirates had killed his family. He had nothing left. He knew what he was doing. He couldn’t do anything else, but he did that much.”

She looks around the cabin awkwardly and taps the side of her head with a finger. “Data dump from ol’ Vengy McRevengeface. He loves this shit.”

Bodark nods approvingly. “Do what is in your reach, then die. Young man is hero. Will drink to him.”

Maury speaks up next. “Sonder. It’s a word that means the realization that everyone you meet has an inner life as rich and vivid as yours. It’s easy for us to think of ‘the tide of history’ and just chalk it up to kings and nations doing their thing while the faceless masses toil away in the background. But everyone has a life. Everyone’s got hopes and dreams and feelings. And then… those lives just sort of… go away. Nobody remembers them. Maybe nobody could remember them. Too many stories, too much detail…”

Daph replies, more sad than surprised at her own god-given knowledge. “It’s frustrating. The power I have is for revenge. Despite the Eigendrakes destroying so much, taking so much, you know… They’re just trying to preserve those stories. They’re doing what they can to keep those old lives from being lost. But, you know, even if it’s forgotten, things like revenge matter to people. We just can’t let a story go until it ends, even if it ends badly.”

Her mouth twists into a slanted grimace. “Makes me wonder what I can do to contribute on a mission like this, yannow? Is it enough to just remember?”

Manny smiles. “The Cap’n thought the same.” He turns back to the viewscreen, where Mini-Jason is lowering the Garuda to a secret cave, well screened by the rocky cliffs of the Spanish coast.

The team navigates through a narrow passage. Maury’s wheelchair, gifted to her by Otto and the other Newmans, is able to transform into a full-body exoskeleton and let her move through even the most difficult segments of the cave system. She leads the way, with the lights on board the exo-suit illuminating the path.

There are twists and turns and multiple routes to choose from, but Manny steers the group from his centuries-old memories. And in time they reach an interior chamber. Graffiti in multiple languages has been carved into the walls. There are a few coins, hinting at what must have once been a great treasure. There is a cross, planted in the fashion of a memorial or headstone, but without a grave to accompany it.

Maury leans down, and the cameras on the exo-suit track her head movements to capture what she’s looking at. She reads an inscription carved into the cross.

“Carlos. Whose ascent to Heaven brought devils to hell.”

She looks back at Manny for an explanation.

“The lad who did the deed,” the skull says quietly. “Cap’n gave him a memorial here. Took what treasure there was. Some to his crew, to keep 'em happy. Much to the village the lad hailed from.”

He looks about the cavern, and floats closer to a coin resting in the dust. And as his head tilts, the others can see a spectral hand reach out from where Manny’s body would be, and take hold of a phantom replica of the coin.

“Tis only one doubloon, Cap’n,” he says aloud, speaking to nobody. “A token of remembrance.”

Silence, and then:

“Aye aye cap’n. Then… a remembrance of another kind.”

The ghostly hand sets the coin gently down, matching its current place on the cave floor.

Manny rises, and presents a newly formed shoulder for inspection. Thereon is a tattoo of a coin, with a symbolic flame in the center of it. “Thus did I resolve to remember through ink. I’d take naught but memories out of this place, and pay Charon’s obol to let the brave lad pass his way through the afterlife.”

He looks down at his newly regained arm. “Perhaps that be what a ghost is meant for. The forgotten demanding the living remember them.”

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