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Fors clutched her suitcase with both hands, shoulders hunched up while the spirit world passed by around them. Mr. World’s hand was warm and deceptively gentle on her shoulder even as he held her firmly to his side. She was pretty sure he was just keeping her safe from getting lost in the spirit world.
Of course he wouldn’t let her get lost, she meant far too much to him. Who else would he be able to bully into writing a book about him if he lost her?
She pressed her lips together into a firm line, counting silently in her head as they traveled to their next mystery destination. One heart beat, the world was a mess of color and uncertain shapes she fought not to focus on, the next, there was stable wood beneath her boots and the sound of waves all around, fresh sea air almost bewildering her Backlunder senses as she adjusted to not breathing in pollution. Eyes wide, she turned in place, scanning the horizon. They stood together on the docks of a sea side town, the sun bright in the sky, gulls wheeling overhead, some brave birds swooping down to steal bits of food from the unwary.
Before she could fully process everything, Mr. World’s hand slid from her shoulder to her back, pressing firmly between her shoulder blades. He propelled her a half-step forward, her knees bumping her travel suitcase, a surprised, indignant squeak spilling from her lips as he spoke, “Show her around.”
Regaining her balance, she glanced up. In front of her, she met a handsome face with wide, dark blue eyes and yellow hair that seemed charred at the ends. He stared at her and she stared back before whipping her head over her shoulder, hat threatening to fly right off her head as she looked toward Mr. World. She was just in time to see the colors around him intensifying, his figure fading from existence.
He was gone, and she was alone with the stranger.
“Dogshit!” the man shouted, shaking his fist at the space Mr. World had occupied only a moment before, “Always ordering me around! Gehrman Sparrow!” He turned then, finally seeming to register Fors, and his body froze, his face froze, his everything froze.
Slowly, his posture eased, the pair eying each other like stray cats meeting unexpectedly in an alley. The lady looked disoriented but nicely dressed in Loenese wear. Was this that madman’s girlfriend? Dogshit! Was Gehrman dumping his girlfriend on him to ‘show around’? What did that even mean? Who was crazy enough to court the mad adventurer? Was she crazy too? Was he about to be roped into being someone else’s servant again? Was she about to pull out a gun and start claiming bounties or something? He could not keep doing this!!
In the midst of Danitz catastrophizing to himself, Fors cleared her throat, “Um… Hello? Mr…?”
He paused. Wait. She didn’t know who he was? She didn’t know his name? That madman had dropped her in his lap without even telling her who he was?
“Danitz Dubois,” he provided.
“Mr. Dubois,” she said, a hand rising to straighten her hat, “…where are we?”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t.”
Danitz blinked.
The woman blinked.
She had pretty eyes. Kind of reminded him of the Captain. Of course, Captain was much prettier. That was not a bias, but an objective fact, as Edwina Edwards was the most beautiful woman in the world, as Danitz had once discussed at length in a ‘persuasive essay’ assignment which the Captain had graded a B- with an encouraging note.
“Bayam,” Danitz said, “in the Rorsted Archipelago.”
“Ah,” she said, pressing her hat down on her hair as she looked around again, before her gaze settled on Danitz, “Mr-“ she paused, “Mr. Sparrow is your friend?”
He stared at her. Was this a trick question? Was this a test? Was she going to tell Gehrman if he batmouthed him? Better to be safe than dead! “Something like that,” he agreed, “Gehrman said to show you around?”
She nodded quickly, “Yes, I think so!” She said, clutching her suitcase close. “Um. Where first?”
“Dogshit,” Danitz muttered under his breath, dragging a hand down his face, “The inn,” he said, decisive as he took the lead.
Normally, Danitz would be more than happy to show a pretty young lady around the town, but this was a pretty young lady who had been brought specifically and directly to him by Gehrman Fucking Sparrow and there was nothing he wanted less than to be saddled with more of that mad man’s problems. No matter how pretty they were.
She was probably at least half as crazy as Gehrman Sparrow was if she was friends-or-more with him. Dogshit! Of all the rotten luck! He’d been thinking of taking a vacation, shirking his work for a bit, and then catching up on the homework that the Captain kept sending his way.
It was so thoughtful of the Captain to continue his classes via correspondence instead of letting him get away without doing them. She was clearly thinking of him and his best interests, even in his absence.
He led the way through the town, away from the docks to a reputable place to stay. It was one Gehrman had favored for the attached restaurant and Danitz had favored for the laundry service. Danitz didn’t chat her up on the way as she trailed him into the hotel. When they arrived, he went striaght to the The lady, whose name he’d forgotten to ask, was standing at his side, a hand on her hat and the other clutching her suitcase as she peered towards the bar thoughtfully. Habitually, he booked a suite, pausing when he realized what he’d done. Dogshit, whatever, he’d take the servant’s room again.
He turned to speak to the woman, just in time to noticed a familiar flash of blond hair across the room. Anderson. Dogshit. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to him. Danitz turned, “Let’s go upstairs-“ he started to say to the woman.
Waving his hand, the brightly grinning Anderson approached them, offering the lady a thoughtful glance before he turned back to his ‘friend’, “Did you finally start hiring yourself out as a professional maid, Danitz?”
“Dogshit! Shut your mouth! This is Gehrman’s woman, I’m showing her around.”
Anderson stopped dead in his tracks, a look of surprise wiping the grin off his face, “Gehrman’s woman?” he repeated, voice dropping to a hushed whisper. Too many heads were starting to turn their way.
Danitz wasn’t taking the hint, his voice still loud and complainative, “He ditched her on me without even warning her! He’s a shit boyfriend.”
“Mr. Gehrman’s your boyriend!?” the woman gasped.
The pair paused, both turning to stare at her incredulously. Her eyes were a touch wide as she looked at Danitz in clear awe.
‘Mr. World has a boyfriend? It’s no wonder he’d trust him to know his story best! I’ll be able to learn so much for my book-‘ her thoughts were interrupted.
“No! Gehrman’s your boyriend!” Danitz accused, pointing at her.
“Gehrman’s her boyriend?” Anderson was doubtful.
“Mr. Gehrman’s not my boyfriend!” She nearly shrieked, terror lighting her eyes at the mere thought.
Danitz looked panicked, “Gehrman’s your husband?” he tried.
“NO!” she shook her head emphatically.
Now, Danitz was just confused. He stared at her. She stared back at him. Anderson stared at them both and laughed. The other patrons of the fine establishment were disturbed but chose not to interrupt as Danitz and Anderson were known to be affiliated with the apparently boyfriend and girlfriendless man in question.
“Dogshit! Then what are you!?” Danitz demanded.
She froze, opened her mouth, then closed it, opened it again, thought better of it, and snapped it shut.
“She might be his pet fish,” Anderson mocked.
“Biographer!” She said at last, “I’m his biographer. I’m writing a book about him!”
Anderson laughed, “A book, about Gehrman? That’s why he left you with Danitz?”
“Obviously I’m the only one he could trust with this,” Danitz announced, puffing his chest out, “I just need to figure out what ‘show her around’ means.”
Throwing an arm around Danitz’s shoulders, Anderson was grinning ear to ear, “Obviously he wants you to tell her all about his adventures,” he said, “and nobody’s better to tell her all about him than you,” he pointed to Danitz, then to himself, “and me.”
Fors was peering bewteen the pair, clutching her suitcase, eyes narrowed, “Why are you two the best?”
“Because we’re obviously Gehrman Sparrow’s best friends,” Anderson proclaimed.
She was half-tempted to doubt his words, but why else would Mr. World drop her off with Mr. Dubois for her research expedition? Her fingers itched for a pen and she glanced at the bar, “Let’s get some alcohol and go up to the room,” she said, “do they sell cigarettes here? I’m all out.”
Anderson snapped his fingers, “I like her!” He announced, “What’s your name?”
She hesitated, tempted to give a fake name. But since she was publishing the book under her actual name and Mr. World knew where she lived (which was probably half a threat), she answered honestly, “Fors.”
"We’re going to be great friends, Miss Fors. Danitz and I are going to answer all your questions about Gehrman. In private, so he doesn’t shoot any of us later,” Anderson announced, reaching out and taking her suitcase from her hand as she blinked in surprise. “Danitz, get the lady her booze and cigarettes, we’re going up to your room.”
With a glance at Danitz, she allowed Anderson to take the suitcase from her and Danitz surrendered the key with a surly glare.
“Dogshit,” the pirate muttered, shoving his hands into his pockets and trudging towards the bar as Anderson led her upstairs.
✦· · ─ ·✦· ─ · ·✦
All settled in, a lit cigarette between Fors’s fingers as she breathed the smoke towards the open window, she watched the men seated across from her on the couch.
“So,” she said, the end of her pen tapping on the edge of the notebook open on the arm of her chair, “How did Gehrman’s adventures begin?”
Danitz leaned back on the couch, “Bansy Harbor,” he said, face scrunching up in an ugly manner, “never seen anything like it. Bastard’s crazy, he stuck his neck out for people he barely knew.” He shuddered, “that place was cursed. It was night, and raining, and there were flying heads with spines dragging along like tails!”
Familiar with Mr. World’s recounting of Bansy Harbor, it was fascinating to hear it from someone else’s perspective. Mr. World was always so cool and collected about things, but Mr. Danitz wore his emotions like an ugly sweater.
“That must have been terrifying,” she said, letting her wild imagination conjure up a ghastly floating skull, dragging a spine along behind it.
Danitz puffed his chest out, “Nah, between me and Gehrman, they didn’t stand a chance! That was the first time I saw him in action, and I knew it then that he was going to be a legend.”
“Liar,” Anderson laughed, “you probably hid behind him, squealing like a little girl!”
“Dogshit! Shut your face, you weren’t even there!”
“I didn’t have to be there to know you, Danitz. You were probably clinging to his coat tails begging not to be left behind.”
Fors was taking notes, pen flying across the page, half writing down what they were saying, half capturing their dynamic in written form for later brainstorming. These two were supposedly Mr. World’s best friends? They bickered like it was their job to disagree.
“How did you resolve the issue?” Fors asked, pen pausing over the page.
“Fire,” Danitz replied, cracking his knuckles as he boasted, “would have been hopeless without me, but I saved the day and Gehrman got everyone out of there.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how it went,” Anderson drawled.
“Shut up! You don’t know dogshit,” Danitz grumbled.
‘These two really are Mr. World’s best friends? People he spends a lot of time around? But they were so relaxed! So… not like Mr. World!’ Fascinated, Fors watched the pair’s back and forth as if she were studying. She tapped her lower lip with her pen. “Was that the moment you became good friends?” She prompted.
Danitz shook his head, “No.”
Anderson also shook his head, “I didn’t meet him until later.”
“When did you first feel like Gehrman had become your good friend?”
Danitz scowled at Anderson, who flashed him a thumbs up and a grin, before clapping Danitz on the back and speaking for him, “I think it was the time Gehrman saved his life.”
“Stop talkin’!” Danitz growled, “How do you even know about-“
“Ah-hah! See, he admits it!” Anderson clapped his hand on Danitz’s back again, “I heard the whole thing, happened from Steel Maveti’s gang, right?”
Danitz gaped at him, “How do you know-“
“I beat Gehrman at cards,” Anderson said, as if that explained everything. Danitz and Fors exachanged a glance. It didn’t explain anything.
“So, the second Gehrman lets Danitz take off on his own, Danitz ran afoul of Steel Maveti’s crew and went crawling back to Gehrman with a gaping hole in his chest, spilling all his secrets to himw hen he was on the verge of death!”
Danitz grabbed a pillow off the couch and proceeded to try to shove it into Anderson’s face. However, as a more experienced Hunter, Anderson fended him off, grinning ear-to-ear, “Once Danitz was done spilling his guts - figuratively and literally! - Gehrman moved his wound to the arm!”
Fors gasped, interrupting, “He can do that for people?”
“He sure can, didn’t even leave a scar on Danitz’s chest to brag about. Think he kept mangling that arm every time Danitz got hurt badly though, didn’t he?”
Danitz growled and shoved the pillow harder until Anderson pressed his palm against it, igniting the thing. With a shout, Danitz doused the flames and tossed the pillow, “Dogshit fucker, they’re gonna charge me for that!”
“Then don’t try to murder people when they’re speaking to biographers.”
Fors was writing furiously in her notebook, taking notes about Gehrman’s abilities. She also glanced between Danitz and Anderson, writing a single question in the margins, ‘Sexual tension?’
Taking a deep breath and fighting back the urge to seethe at Anderson, Danitz picked the story back up, “After that, Gehrman and I took out Steel Maveti and his gang together. He’s pretty good about splitting the loot, very fair about it. But then, then,” Danitz sighed , “my bounty started climbing after that.”
“And he started clinging to Gehrman even more,” Anderson added.
“SHUT IT!” Danitz demanded, red-faced as he reached for one of the booze bottles on the table between them and Fors, “It became inconvenient to travel alone once the bounty got too high. Besides, me’n Gehrman make a great team.”
Anderson made a non-commital sound.
Brushing past the pair’s disagreements, Fors looked up from her notes, “What else did he do that got a lot of attention? Something notable and really ‘Gehrman’?”
“There’s that time he took on Admiral Tracy and lived to tell the tale,” Anderson suggested.
“Admiral Tracy?” Fors asked, scraping through her memory for any details she could pull up on her.
Anderson and Danitz talked over each other, each giving her a different angle of the deatils and building the picture up.
Danitz began, “She’s a demoness of the sea-“
“They call her the Sick Girl-“ Anderson cut in.
“Her whole crew’s obsessed with her-“ Danitz added.
“Which isn’t uncommon-“ Anderson was laughing.
“Dogshit!” Danitz scowled, “Shut your face! Anyways, she was one of THE pirate admirals! And Gehrman was just Gehrman.”
They kept going back and forth for a while, regaling Fors with tales of Tracy’s misdeeds and reputation. In the end, Fors made a sound of understanding, “She sounds evil! How did Gehrman get to her through her obsessed crew? How did he manage to get to face her and survive?”
“He dressed up as a woman,” Danitz was half-whispering, “put on her face and her hair and acted just like her. If I didn’t know what was going on, I wouldn’t have noticed he wasn’t a woman.”
Fors tried to imagine taciturn Mr. World wearing someone’s face and a wig, pulling on a dress. Not that a dress would look particularly bad on him. He certainly had the figure to pull some fashions off but-
‘No! No! What am I thinking? Stop thinking about Mr. World in a dress! Do you want to become a Beyonder characteristic? Do you want him to come for you next? Absoloutely do not think of Mr. World in a dress! I’m sorry, Mr. World, I promise! Mr. Fool, protect me!’ Fors apologized and cried in her heart.
While she was having her panic over thinking Mr. World could pull off a dress, Danitz was continuing, “Her name was Helene and she was Tracy’s lady, but she’d run off because she didn’t want to be Tracy’s lady. So Gehrman, acting like he belonged there, pretended to be Helene and turned himself in, got taken right to her. Even Tracy didn’t realize it wasn’t her until the trap sprung, so far’s I know.”
Fors moved to quickly pivot the conversation further away from the dangerous topic. There was no way she could have Mr. World dress up as a woman in her book about Gehrman! Not if she wanted to live to see the next sunrise!
“SO!” She turned away from Danitz, eyes a bit wide as she looked at Anderson, silently praying for him to save her from the topic, “You said you met Gehrman later. How did you two first meet?”
Anderson placed a hand over his heart and sighed, “In a dream.”
‘That sounds romantic… wait! NOPE. DANGER. ABORT.’ Fors’s expression went blank. Her lips curled into a smile that was uglier than crying. “Oh. That’s nice.”
He grinned broadly, with too many teeth. “He was on his way to find mermaids of all things,” he went on, “sailing on The Future with the Admiral of Stars herself. A pirate hunter, friends with a pirate! Of course, there’s also Edwina, so maybe he just has a thing for lady pirates.”
“Dogshit! He tried to hunt Tracy!” Danitz interjected.
Anderson tut-tutted, “Ah, so he tells us. But he did show up in the guise of her lover, how are we to know she-“
Danitz shoved a second pillow against Anderson’s face. Anderson held a hand up, a ball of fire threateningly springing to life in his palm before Danitz, not wanting to be charged for a second pillow, threw it across the room to safety.
“What was your strongest impression of Gehrman after you met him?” Fors asked, cutting through the tomfoolery and trying to pull things back onto track.
“Taciturn,” Anderson reported, “good in a fight. Handles himself well. Fun to tease, if you’re wiling to risk your life, and only scared of one thing.”
As one, Danitz and Fors gaped in disbelief at Anderson.
“Dogshit!”
“Mr. Gehrman is scared of something!?”
They both sounded equally incredulous and doubtful.
Anderson was grinning a broad grin, folding his arms behind his head, one leg crossing over the other, “One thing,” he said, nodding his head as if imparting sacred knowledge. “Do you know what?”
“Yes!”
“NO!”
Danitz suspected Anderson was full of shit, but he desperately wanted to know.
Fors, however, was terrified of knowing what scared Mr. World. If it horrified the strongest member of the Tarot Club, she wanted no part in it. No sir.
“The most terrifying person in all the seas,” Anderson intoned, “the scourge of pirates, non-pirates, and life itself. The incorrigible, depraved madman who makes Gehrman Sparrow look like a kind, sane young lady by comparison.
Rising her notebook up in front of her face, Fors hid behind the cover, peering over the top at Anderson who had paused dramatically, drinking up Fors and Danitz’s postures.
“His evils are uncountable. His sins immeasurable. His genius knows no bounds. He’s replaced blood with alcohol, forced bulls to produce milk, made plants and inanimate objects produce milk. He has a weird obsession with dairy. With a bounty of 7,000 pounds on his head, his name is Frank Lee.”
“Dogshit! Him? Gehrman’s scared of him?”
“Wh-why hasn’t Gehrman t-turned him in for the bounty if he’s so evil?” Fors asked, still hiding behind her notebook.
“Because,” Anderson intoned, head tilting back, lips curving into a smirk, “Gehrman’s nothing if not intelligent. He knows he can’t beat this evil. So he faced his fear head on. He became the man’s good friend. I hear they’re pen pals now.”
‘How cunning, but dangerous! Oh, Mr. Fool, please protect Mr. World from Frank Lee!’ Fors lowered her notebook, eyes wide in awe. “What else do you know about Gehrman Sparrow?” She asked, unable to take her eyes off Anderson.
The hunter smirked and continued to spin tales for her long into the night.