The ghost of a pirate captain. Laid to rest, Session 1.
She appears at sunset on the tranquil beach and walks it end to end, muttering, and cannot leave it. She is glowing and half-transparent, wears a pirate hat, carries a ghostly cutlass, and has a musket hole punched through her skull where one eye used to be.
When the parrots found her she did not know her own name. “So many, so many little feet. Where am I? Where could all my parts have gone? So tired. I just want to rest.”
Her body had been broken up and scattered across the island by the garrison. Each piece returned to her brought back a little more of her, and a little more of what she knew.
Her parts, and where they were:
- One arm — buried in the sand of the crab sandbar, wearing a hemp-and-shell bracelet inscribed with all my love to Maru. The bracelet alone gave her back her name.
- The other arm — lashed into the frame of the cage the redcoats built for Radford Carver at the old fort.
- Legs and pelvis — hung on the docks in an iron gibbet beneath a sign reading the fate of all pirates.
- The spine — under a broken mast on the floor of the sea cave.
- The skull — on a post at the mountaintop observation post, with the hole through the back of it.
The commander of the garrison shot her in the face because she was the last pirate who knew where the treasure was buried. He has been searching for it for a month. It was under the sand of the beach she has been pacing ever since.
With all her bones together she remembered her crew, pointed behind her into the bushes, said thank you for putting me at rest, and faded.
A ghost crab crawled out of her empty eye socket, around the back of her skull, and back inside.
Maru is someone else — the inscription is exact, not a slip for her own name. Whoever loved her enough to string that bracelet is unaccounted for, and she never said.
Name: Marley is canon. The printed adventure calls her Morley; Andrew renamed her at the table and the change stands.
Note: lifting any of the bones away again brings her straight back — confused, and increasingly upset about it. “Why do I keep waking up? This world is cruel.”