A Fresh Start - POTC - Mavrick

[Peach]

A lonely gull sang his song the entire length of the port, the brassy sound ricocheted off of the new battlements and ghosted back out to the waiting waves. Since the downfall of the Governor and Lord Beckett’s imposed residency it had become crystal clear to all and sundry that the East India Trading Company were taking a more serious approach to keeping the inhabitants of Port Royal safe whilst lining their own pockets at the same time. The familiar salty tang of the harbor remained where the gull did not, and it disappeared into a low slung cloud as the sun’s first fingers touched the horizon for that day.

The repetitive knocking of the ship’s bow against the mooring post finally won out over Tia’s desire to sleep longer. The young woman roused herself from her narrow cot, re-lacing the ties on her simple cotton shirt as she climbed the ladder to the deck. The wind immediately caught her tousled black hair, whipping it harshly into her face before it flew away again and the woman swore as she bent to pull on the shoes she had left at the foot of the mast. As she straightened she raised a brown hand to shade her eyes from the blinding morning sunlight. Perhaps all that rum last night hadn’t been a good idea after all.

Unfortunately for Tia, there was a lot of work to be done. Until now, her no-good drunken lecherous father had been the Captain of the ship that she now inhabited. He had been left with Tia when her mother had passed away years ago and he had wasted no time in telling his only child that he wished she had been a boy before he proceeded to work her like one. He hadn’t counted on Tia’s quickness of mind and determination however and the girl learned fast until she was as good a pair of hands on deck as anyone else’s, only she didn’t get paid her share of the booty.

The late Captain hadn’t been too keen on paying anyone else their fair share of the loot either, and one night last week there had been a mutany on board the ship Tia had known as her home for the past 13 years. Her father had been mercilessly run through by the Bosun, the ship was plunged into confusion and Tia saw her window of opportunity open to reveal a patch of bright blue sky worth grabbing. Needless to say The Bonnie Bell was now her very own at last. All’s not well that doesn’t end well though, and before she could bring the ship to rest at Port Royal most of the crew had deserted, refusing to sail under the set of a woman. Those few that remained did so out of selfish greed, knowing that Tia would only pay them for this run if they saw it through. They had run with full purses last evening, and now Tia was left to deal with the aftermath. Deciding that it was now or never, the tall girl grabbed a nearby rope and swung herself across to the waiting jetty.

[Mavrick]

As would soon be discovered, Tia and Adrena would have more in common than most women who pass by one another on an off chance. Their histories were similar, and they both now had dilemmas that may well be far beyond their young years. The differences would be minor, such as Adrena’s father was loving, and a kind man who loved his ship and crew beyond all else. She would have been mixed up as a new born with her twin brother and taken onto the ship instead of being taken to her mother’s waiting bosom. And it would be too late to turn back when the underlying gender would be discovered.

She would spend her entire life on the Darling Wave, all nineteen and some odd years of it, under the watchful eye of her father. She would learn all the ins and outs of the ship, right down to the last grain of wood and learn all its strengths and weaknesses better than maybe even her father. She would be seen as equal amongst the lifers amongst the crew, and they would all share in their fair cut of booty.

Where the stories would begin to deviate, would be the recent past. Instead of a mutiny, there would be a battle, and when the last cannon had been fired and the last breath of wind had been forced into the sails, Adrena’s father would lie shot on the deck, and the crew would look to her teary amber eyes for their orders.

She had been moored in Port Royal’s deep harbour for almost a week now, the large Frigate that was the Darling Wave, bobbing harmlessly a few hundred meters from dock. Intensive repairs had begun, but were far from finished. They needed more parts and labour that could be found, spared or afforded, and the Wave was slowly taking on more water than could be pumped out by her faithful bilge rats.
Irritated, tired and overworked, Adrena had been up hours before Tia, hanging precariously over the side of the Wave in order to aid in the patch up of one of the seemingly hundreds of cannon holes in the hull. Too many of her crew had slipped off into oblivion, and she was left with less than a quarter of the capacity crew that had spent their lives on the ship just a week earlier. Recruiting had become pointless, and Adrena refused to pose as a male just to get a few extra hands. She didn’t need to prove herself to them, and she certainly didn’t need to degrade herself in order to get their attention.

The dockmaster gave a nod as she clambered up onto the dock, her worn down boots and torn pants aiding the fairly short woman in getting out of the boat and onto the dock without falling her narrow butt back into the boat, or over the side. She wore a shirt very similar in style to Tia’s (only brown from grime instead of its usual white) and they almost smashed into each other as the woman swung from her deck onto the dock.
Pulling her sun bleached brown locks out of her face and into a messy pony tail with a strip of leather, Adrena eyed the other woman almost suspiciously, before nodding a greeting of hello while still finishing putting her hair up. It was far too hot, and she was tempted to sheer the annoying locks off, or buy a hat to keep them out of her face… but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

[Peach]

Tia steadied herself as she came literally face to face with another sailor on the dock. Her chocolate brown eyes narrowed slightly in confusion as she took in the other girls’ appearance and sea-tethered gait. She was a sailor, no doubt about that, but which part of the hierarchy she was linked to was none of Tia’s concern for the moment. She nodded her head politely in return, ignoring the look of exasperation on the Harbourmaster’s face as he eyed her sloop with interest.

“We’re paid up well enough,” she advised him cooly, her Spanish accent thick on the morning fresh air. “You can check in your damn book, Jefe.” A quirk of her left brow indicated that if he wanted more than the three pieces of silver she had given his colleague the evening before when they had docked, then he would have to fight hard to get it. He flipped open the book, made a show of checking his records and the sniffed indignantly before he turned about and went back to his offices.

With another precursory glance at the other woman who was restraining her windswept hair, Tia set off along the creaking wood causeway towards the shore. She knew that finding a crew here in Port Royal with Lord Becketts’ men firmly lodged in every nook and cranny was going to be virtually impossible, but she had to try. She’d never be able to navigate The Lass with at least another person, and she’d never get a crew in Tortuga unless she could get there in the first place. Reasoning that there had to be at least one inn in the harbour district that housed sea dogs looking for adventure, Tia set off to find it.

[Mavrick]

Adrena would have been on her way as well, if it weren’t for the fact that Tia’s accent had sparked her interest. Her own mother had been Spanish, and Adrena’s olive complexion, golden brown hair and almost amber coloured eyes always reminded her father of that fact. As for an accent, it had been lost to the sea, since her father had been from the Americas and she had been raised around a crew hailing from every port imaginable. Needless to say, her grammar and lingual skills were hardly that of an aristocratic woman, and she cursed her father for not giving her lessons at times. But this was not one of those moments, she just wanted to know who this woman was, since it was like finding peal floating on the ocean current to meet another woman pirate, and she was quite sure that this woman was one as well.

She brushed past the still startled master, who became even more flustered as he was surely going to hit up Adrena for more fees. She jogged along the dock until she had caught up with Tia, and took stride alongside her as she spoke while shifting the leather belt that held her pistol and cutlass back to its proper position.
“Are ye from Spain?”

[Peach]

“Si,” replied Tia, turning her head towards the woman who had managed to catch up with her long purpose-driven strides. Eyeing the newcomer warily, Hernandez kept her pace along the docks until she skipped down the few worn steps that brought the pair onto solid land. The morning had progressed quite nicely, without the threat of the oppressive heat the Caribbean was known for. At least if she wasn’t able to find a crew straight away, thought Tia, she would be able to make some adjustments to the ship if this kind of weather held out.

“Tia Hernandez,” she announced in a matter of fact tone, stopping abruptly and holding out her hand to the other woman. The girl looked like she had her wits about her, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a friendly face when there were so many other unfriendly ones clamoring for prime position. She didn’t feel it necessary to introduce herself as Captain just yet, as there were a lot of things she wanted to change about The Bonnie Bell before she made her ownership evident. She also did want this potential new acquaintance getting the wrong idea if she had heard of her father, Julio Hernandez or Heartless Hernandez as he was more commonly known throughout the pirate sphere.

Assuming that the honey-haired newcomer would shake her hand as a matter of course and goodwill, Tia decided to cut to the chase. “I don’ suppose that there’s an inn around here worth seein’ the inside of?”

[Mavrick]

“There’s a couple ‘at don’t mind seein’ a woman drinkin’ instead o’ servin’, I’ll show ye.” Adrena motioned a calloused hand towards the town, a silent proposal for Tia to follow.
“I were born in Malaga,” she continued as the uneven cobblestoned ground met her feet. “But I spent me life on the Wave dat be moored out behind us. “ She was hesitant to give her full name, just as Tia had been hesitant in announcing her captaincy. The Darling Wave was a ship at least a hundred years old, and it had run in the Manis family for at least five generations. That meant if you said Wave and Manis in the same sentence, it most certainly meant you had affiliations with the ship.

And considering it was going to end up another addition to Port Royal’s artificial reef collection if she didn’t get supplies, she didn’t really want to admit that she owned it now.

“Me name’s Adrena, by th’ way.”

And just as the Wave had a history, so did the much smaller, but far more feared ship that Tia had hopped off of just minutes before, and Adrena was curious. She had seen the name, and knew that the Captain was feared more than the ship itself. But fortunately for Tia (for now), Adrena couldn’t remember the captain’s name, and therefore her blood connection with him.
“That was th’ Bonnie Bell ye be hoppin’ off of. I heard the Captain of that one be a hell beast at best. Whatcha be doin’ on that boat?”