Tide Soul

Swan Song (1)

Trevor Gilmore hadn't learned much in terms of seafaring experiences being different from air travel while on the mini-expedition, but one thing he knew to be exactly the same was breakfast. It was the third day of what had been explained to him as a three day journey, and they still hadn't sighted anything implying a payoff. 

Tempers were already beginning to flare, and Trevor suspected it might actually have been worse without someone as universally hated as Jones on-board. If anything, his smug certainty about his latest conjured location being the one they'd hit paydirt on, and his incessant whining about the accommodations unified everyone, to a man, under the banner of hating his guts. That morning, the complaint of choice was the food.

"Bacon? Again?" Jones complained loudly, his voice a high-pitched whine "I'm an exodist! I can't eat anything from a pig. They're sacred. You all know this and yet you continue to torment me?"

"Jones," Teo informed him, his tone polite but his eyes burning with rage "Abe slaves over a sweltering hot stove before most of us are even awake every morning, lovingly cooking us a delicious breakfast to get us through a day of searching for coordinates you probably shit the bed on figuring out. We're not getting scurvy because of your newest made-up fucking religion."

Trevor opened his mouth to point out that exodism was an actual religion, practiced farther out east in which pigs were, in fact, sacred animals. Of course, Jones was lying about his own involvement in the faith, as he'd been a practicing Vedanist, unable to eat beef, the previous day when it was served for dinner.

"It's not a made-up religion, you cretin" Jones snapped back, clearly offended "my people suffered for centuries because of their faith, and your bigotry is just another--"

"What's the God named in this religion, Jones?" Spanky asked, propping his chin up on his palm in mock-interest "Enlighten us. Convert us."

"Exodia, of course" Jones snorted derisively, as though he'd never heard such ignorance "Who gave you your schooling, Forscythe, a tree-frog?"

"Really?" Spanky asked, staring at him inscrutably "I could swear they called it Munius and the religion is called exodism because they call the hypothetical end of days exodia."

Jones looked at him in shock. He clearly thought he'd found a religion to claim he practiced that nobody on-board had even heard of. 

"Yeah, Jones!" Teo roared, banging his meaty fists on the table appreciatively "Where's your fucking God now, you lying prick?"

Jones glared at him resentfully, and returned quietly to his eggs. 

"That's right," Teo muttered darkly, nodding his approval "go eat that food, Jones. Sit there and be wrong some more. Bathe in it. Wash your mouth out with wrong, Jones. Wrong."

"So," Trevor asked Britton, attempting to change the subject "I'm guessing you haven't given mu--"

"WRONG!"

Trevor glanced over at Teo, who grinned broadly and nodded at him to continue.

"So I'm guessing you haven't give much consideration to that dream I told you about?" Trevor asked Britton, figuring he probably hadn't.

The curly-haired pirate shook his head, blankly. "We're sort of going all or nothing on this one" he explained reasonably "Something as small as a dream can't turn us around at this point."

"Why is it all or nothing?" Trevor asked, confused "I mean, the sea isn't exactly crowded. You can go back out again some other week and hunt this thing down, right?"

Britton shook his head again.

"That's the thing... We can't. Spanky and Teo are both basically running on zero heos, Abe is too but the way he cooks, he can easily find a job elsewhere. Jones is literally always one wrong word away from being thrown overboard, and as for me..."