Date: September 19, 2026
Attendance: Barnabas, Chubs, Kiwi, Lucky Joe, Pierre Snaggletooth, Radford “Bull” Carver, Lee Raggedy Carter, Red Shirt, Senna the Whisperer, Eugene Munks
The crew came to the island chasing a treasure map taken from pirates the British had evicted. Fearing the garrison’s menagerie, they caged their five parrots aboard ship, left Lloyd the swabbie and his old hound to watch them, and rowed ashore. Several days later they had not returned.
The parrots bought the hound’s help with a cabinet of dried sausages; he lifted the keys off Lloyd’s belt while the old man swept. Barnabas flung a pot of boiling stew in Lloyd’s face, the pistol went into the roof, and all five birds went out through the hole. In the captain’s cabin Kiwi found a rough chart of the island — a longboat, three possible landings, and a question mark.
On a sandbar carpeted in crabs they bought passage from the King Crab with a sausage and pulled a skeletal arm out of the sand, wearing a shell bracelet inscribed with all my love to Maru. Chubs then ate one of the king’s children, and they left as enemies.
At sunset on the tranquil beach they found the crew’s longboat, two sets of footprints, and a glowing woman pacing the sand who did not know her own name. Chubs sang to her; the bracelet gave her back Marley. She asked them to find the rest of her, and named four places: a fort, a cave, the highest point, and the docks. They ran the crab gauntlet a second time to bring her the arm.
From the barracks Lucky Joe learned a pirate would hang at dawn. At the fort they found Radford Carver caged beside a half-built gallows. Pierre snipped the clapper from the alarm bell and carried it down; Bull broke his padlock with it and walked out through the portcullis while Chubs sang on the rum barrel, Kiwi lifted a guard’s keys, and Lucky Joe played barker. The cage frame gave up Marley’s other arm; Bull carried it into the jungle to wait.
Six fruit bats in the coconut palms traded the location of their cave for the idea of dropping crabs on rocks. At the docks the legs and pelvis hung in a gibbet under a sign reading the fate of all pirates, guarded by a rat named Sebastian, who — once airlifted, protesting — picked the lock on Lee Raggedy Carter’s cell in the village. Lee took the jailer’s cutlass, spared his life, cut out his tongue and locked him in his own cell. The jailer talked first: the commander had been hunting the buried treasure for a month, and had shot the last pirate who knew where it was, in the face.
Senna came through the tavern window in a spray of coins and cards with a flintlock at her head. Lee killed the man holding it; Senna blew the head off another; Chubs melted a third’s face to the skull; Kiwi and Barnabas lifted the bones from the gibbet. Running for the jungle, a musket fired from the mountaintop and Lucky Joe was killed. In the cave, Red Shirt felt a weight lift and began to wonder whether he had ever really had a bird.
They took the mountaintop for him. Two snipers had Eugene Munks chained by the leg with his face painted, making him dance. The tent burned, both men died, and Marley’s skull came off the post. In the sea cave they found Red with a thousand silver he could not stop stacking, and her spine under a broken mast.
On the beach they laid every bone at her feet. She remembered her crew, and that they had buried their treasure right on this very beach — and pointed into the bushes behind her, where the garrison had been searching for a month and never thought to look. She thanked them and faded.
Under sand-covered planks: two chests of cut emeralds, rubies and diamonds worth some five thousand silver, and four cases of rum. They made the longboat with footsteps still coming through the jungle behind them.
They drank the first bottle for Lucky Joe.