HoloPirates: A Tale of Adventure

Different world

    I can't remember exactly how I woke up, but I knew that I had a massive headache. That's all I knew. My brain throbbed hard, feeling like it was beating itself against my skull. I groaned, then moved my lips around, and I felt a grainy, sandy feeling that was all over my face, lips and body. I spit out the sand, then picked my head up, and in that moment, a bunch of sounds hit my ears at the same time. The squawking of seagulls, the rush of the waves on the beach, and the sounds of a bustling port city. There were the sounds of hammers, chatter, drunken yelling, and the sizzling of meat. I lifted my head, then opened my eyes, and what I saw was insane. It was a pure, blue sky, and I was laying on a large, volcanic island, with nice, sandy beaches and a massive tree line that led up to the slopes of a towering volcano. The very top of the volcano had smoke, fire, and ash billowing from it, and lava flowed down the crests in the side of the gigantic mountain. When I looked to my left, I saw a very large medieval-looking port city, with tons of houses, a small fortress on the very far side, and a dozen or so wooden, old-style sailing ships in the water, with large masts that towered over the waters and sails that could catch massive amounts of wind. A bell rang in the distance, several times, and so I slowly moved my body to the point where I was kind of sitting up, but I looked more like a praying mantis with broken legs. I put my hands on the ground, and suddenly, I heard a rustling that came from my left side. I turned and looked, and there was the Storyteller, just sitting up in the sand, in the weirdest outfit I had ever seen. It looked just like a pirate's outfit, with the brown, button-studded clothing that dominated his physique and the papery look that dominated his clothing. He wore a black captains hat, and I looked at him with a bewildered look on my face.
    "You look ridiculous."
    "Maybe, but we gotta fit in yes?" He said. "And have you looked at yourself?"
    I looked down at my clothes, and I saw that I, too, was dressed in that pirate clothing, although mine was primarily black, while he was mostly brown. I sat there on the sand, then looked over at the town that was nestled against the shore, with piers and docks that housed and held the boats, ready to launch at any given moment when they needed to.
     All over the harbor, there were people just loading the ships with tons of crates, barrels, and boxes, some of the people even carrying crates of those old-style cannonballs, loading them on the ships via the ramps that led up the side of them.
    I looked at all of them, then turned back to the Storyteller.
    "Where is the island we have to go to?"
    "The other side of the world." He said, pointing in the direction of the town. "We have to get a ship and sail off in that direction."
    "Wait, that's gonna take forever!" I said. "There's like...continents."
    "Not here there isn't." He said in reply. "The entire world is just one, gigantic archipelago."
    "Archi-what?"
    "An Archipelago." He said. "A chain of islands, but this entire world is an archipelago, with lots of small islands and a few really big ones."
    He looked around at the island, then at the volcano, which was spitting and billowing smoke and fire into the sky, then he sighed and looked back down at me.
    "So what do we do?" He asked.
    "Wait, why are you asking me? This was your idea!"
    "That YOU accepted." He reminded me. "So I can help, but this is your responsibility to get us around in this world."
    I looked at the town, but when I looked back at the StoryTeller, I saw something glinting in the sand.
    "What is that?"
    He looked, and it caught his eyes.
    "It's a glint."
    I gave him a dumb look, then opened my mouth to speak again.
    "I know it's a glint dude. I mean what is it that's glinting."
    I walked over to it, my leathery boots grinding into the sand and digging down, giving me the foothold that I needed to get over to the glinting object. When I got to the line of water that hit the beach, I saw that a small golden coin was nestled into the rocks, just sitting there, taking the force of the rushing waves of the pure, crystalline water as it crashed against the shore. As the waves would hit the rocky sands, they would break into a thousand little bits of sea foam that would fly against the sand and rocks of the beach. I reached down, then picked the coin out of the sand, then turned it over in my palm, rubbing it with my thumb. It was a pretty plain golden coin, but on the back, there was the coolest thing that I had ever seen. Engraved on the back was a large ship fighting a big, toothy, eel-like sea monster, with the monster, turned to the ship, baring its teeth. But the coolest part was that the engraved image moved, the waves curling over each other and carrying the ship along with them. As I watched, the ship fired a cannonball at the monster, hitting it directly in the face. The monster roared back, and it lashed the ship with its tail. The image would then repeat, going through the sequence again.
    I looked up at the Storyteller, and he was looking at the town, at the docks, and the plumes of smoke coming from the chimneys.
    "Should we head into town?"
    "I suppose so." He said. "It's a decent place to start.