The Legend of Magic Island | taejun + sookai

part 13: maps & ratlines

btw "ratlines" are pronounced "rattlins", the word looks kinda funny tho haha, ok anyway enjoy the chapter 

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The next morning...

"Right— But you can only say Go Fish if you don't have the matching card to make a pair," Yeonjun explained to Beomgyu who had a handful of cards.

"Wait what? I thought you say Go Fish every time," He mumbled, scratching his head. Yeonjun raised an eyebrow.

"No, that's why you have like twenty cards in your hand," Hueningkai scoffed, "Because you're not supposed to draw like twenty cards."

"Wait—" Beomgyu raised an eyebrow, "Then how the heck am I supposed to win? Am I winning or losing? What the heck?"

"Okay— No, basically to win you have to empty all the cards in your hand by matching it with another card,"

Yeonjun looked in his hand, then pulled out an ace of spades. He looked over at Beomgyu on his left and asked if he had any aces.

Unwillingly, the other took out an ace of diamonds and an ace of hearts, handing it to Yeonjun. They went around another time, Beomgyu slowly getting rid of his handful of cards and figuring out how to play like the rest of them.

"I think I won," Taehyun announced, then laid out all of his cards. Sure enough, all of his cards were paired up and he didn't have any extras left. Hueningkai looked at the cards blankly, then back at his hands.

"What in the—"

Taehyun laughed, looking over at Yeonjun.

"How the heck did you—" Yeonjun set his cards aside then looked at Taehyun's hand. There was no denying that he won.

"This game is rigged!" Beomgyu whined, crossing his arms across his chest, "I wanna do a rematch!"

Yeonjun snickered, collecting all of the cards again and reshuffled the deck.

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Once the weather was calmer, Captain Soobin sat down on the main deck with the rest of the crew. He carefully uncapped the glass bottle containing the map and laid it out so everyone could see.

"Alright, according to legend, Magic Island has five different parts to it," Captain Soobin began, "If we end up finding it, it might only be a fraction of the entire island."

"How big is the island anyway?" Beomgyu asked, resting his chin in the palm of his hand.

"I have no idea," The captain replied, looking at the map. He pointed to a mass of ocean that was on the map, circled in red ink.

"I do have a feeling it's somewhere in that area," He continued, "It can't be close to the other islands... otherwise we would've seen it already. Which is why I suspected it would be off to the side somewhere."

"But as I've mentioned before, it's just bare ocean," Taehyun chimed in, "If the island is underwater, then it's out of our reach."

"But there's no way it could be underwater," Hueningkai corrected, "Even if it was underwater, there's no way sailors would be able to tell and write a whole map of where it might be."

Yeonjun raised an eyebrow, leaning closer to the map attentively.

"I wonder if there's something... dangerous in the waters which prevented sailors from getting closer to it," He guessed, "That could be why it's only pictured as a bare ocean."