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Before she was a pirate, she was an idol. Before that, a cheerleader. Before both of those things, she was a sister.
When she met the Foxy Pirates, she was a failed idol, making her wages as a waitress.
As the saying went, play with fire and get burned.
The problem, in hindsight, had been that she’d wanted the fame too much . She’d always been taught that, if you have a foothold, you climb higher. Porche thought she was simply better at finding footholds than other people. She found them in the faces of her fellow idols. Atop their heads. She used them to climb higher and higher, until she found herself standing at the very top of all of them, looking down upon the world.
(Or so she thought at the time, anyway. It wasn’t until she hit the seas that she realized how big the world really was.)
It didn’t last long in any case. Another saying: even monkeys fall from trees.
She met Foxy for the first time on a street corner, passing out fliers for a seedy cafe that she hadn’t worked for more than a week but was already considering quitting. He was exactly the kind of person that the owner had told her to target: middle-aged and suited, quiet and downcast. She should’ve tried to pull him in, but she didn’t. Couldn’t. When she saw people like him, her pride as both an idol and cheerleader demanded that she brighten their day, and all for the low cost of a single smile. Her boss didn’t appreciate it a lot, but you give what you get and she didn’t appreciate him much, either.
That was why, when Foxy invited her into the restaurant down the street in the middle of her shift, she went with him. It was why, when she told him her story and he invited her to come along with him, she didn’t have to think long on it.
“Sounds like you’d make a better pirate than waitress,” he said, giving her the first of many crooked smiles.
“I don’t want to be a pirate, I want to be an idol,” she told him, but the word dribbled from her mouth, each one full of thought as she turned the idea around in her head.
“I don’t see why you can’t be both.”
Porche had never considered piracy before, but it was true that there were some pirates that were practically celebrities. Back when she was younger, she remembered some of her classmates would hang pilfered wanted posters up on their walls, just as proudly as if it was a picture of a famous singer or actor.
And, if she branded herself as a pirate idol, no one could complain if she was a bit underhanded. It was in the name . Who could they blame but themselves if they trusted the words of a pirate?
Not two days days later, she was aboard the Foxy pirate ship, dropping all her luggage into the arms of a great, hulking fishman.
Getting used to the lifestyle was the hardest part. In the beginning, their ship was tiny, barely fit for sea and lacking any of the privacy she was used to on land. It took less time than expected to get her sea legs, but longer than expected to get used to the physical strain of managing a ship. The muscles she’d honed as an idol served her well. She still wore herself out daily, only to wake up sore the next morning.
And then there was the solitude.
With a small crew, they spent the weeks and months trapped together squabbling and making up, supporting one another like a family. But Porche wanted more. Foxy wanted more, too. They all did.
The problem was that, objectively, they were just not all that strong, and the more they lost the weaker they all felt. Even Foxy started losing motivation. He always had a tendency to get down on himself, but he always perked up just as quick. This was different. Instead of making a spectacle of himself, he stayed huddled in the captain’s quarters, shoulders hunched and face sagging.
One day, when she went up to check on him, he looked at her seriously and asked, “Do you think I should give up on being a pirate?”
It was something that she’d also spent a lot of time thinking about recently. She returned the question with the same one she always asked herself. “Do you want to stop being a pirate?”
He shook his head with wide, watery eyes. The way his lips trembled with the effort to keep in his sobs reminded her of a small child, of her brothers and the tiny fans that would come up to shake her hand after events.
So she reached forward to pat him on the head, giving him the biggest, cheeriest smile when he slowly looked up at her.
“Then don’t,” she said. “We’ll find our way eventually. We just have to keep our eyes open a little longer.”
Foxy gave a shaky laugh. “Yeah. You’re right.” His voice was thick but firm.
They tried their first Davy Back Fight not a week later.