Oh Hey! Your Art Is Really Cool And The Disco Au Is Hilarious!

Oh hey! Your art is really cool and the disco au is hilarious!

I randomly thought of something and figured I'd ask because I'm curious, but if it's an odd question feel free to ignore this ^^'

What's Stan and Ford's patents' opinions on them starting a band? I'd imagine Caryn might be supportive, but Filbrick? I'm thinking either he hates it because it's not "manly", or he begrudgingly accepts it because it's making them money. Meanwhile Caryn is buying all their merch and proudly telling everyone that 'why yes, those are my boys.'

Aww thank you !

In my version I dont think I'd have them get so famous that their parents would ever hear about what theyre doing, but if they did?

Caryn I'm sure would be happy to see her boys are okay and getting along.

Filbrick is a mysterious man so idk what he's thinking but I think it's fair to say he'd take advantage of the situation.

The Mystery and The Isosceles

Ch 3: Like a Drowned Rat

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"Let me out of here you jerks!" Mabel kicked hard at the metal bars confining her to the depths of the ship. They rattled, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—didn't bend under the force of a child's feet. They were rusted through with the dampness of the ship, but not enough to break. If she wanted out she'd have to bypass the lock.

There was that one boy who'd figured out how to pick the lock on the larder in the house they'd briefly been apprenticed at. Mabel had sweet talked him into showing her how to do it before she and Dipper ran away, but on the order of the officer the crewmen had confiscated her things. Her thin metal knitting needles were just out of reach, lying on a mossy barrel. If she could bend them they'd probably be enough to pick a lock as clunky as the one of the cell door. But her arms were too short.

She kicked at the door again and again, until her foot hurt and she was forced to stop. Her throat was raw and painful from yelling, and just maybe, a little bit of crying too. It felt like a large lump was rising in it. As if she'd tried to swallow a stone. Or maybe cough one up: One of the hundreds of stones all lying in her stomach, making her feel heavy and nauseous.

What was going to happen to Dipper out there?

Without warning, it felt as if the entire ship lurched.

A horrendous booming crash tore through the stagnant damp air, immediately followed by the sound of splintering wood and screaming men.

It was the loudest sound Mabel had ever heard. It sent her heart pounding out of her chest and made her hair stand on it's ends, the immediate contrast between solemn yet silent despair and loud confused terror. For just a second, silence fell as the ship swayed back into upright position: A hush of stunned disbelief grabbing hold of the vessel. Before another bang rippled through the planks and the sea outside. And then another, and another, and another.

Each pang was answered in bewildered shrieks and demands Mabel couldn't fully make out. Heavy footfalls pattered against the boards above her, and they rattled and shuddered with the noises. It felt as if the entire room was being batted around like a toy boat in a fast flowing stream. A toy boat that Mabel was trapped inside feeling suddenly very wary.

"Hey!" She was thrown against the bars as the room lurched. "Hey! Can anyone hear me!? What's going on!?"

She screamed at the top of her lungs, but received no reply except the still raging maelstrom of noise and movement. She could hear the ship buzzing with activity, she could feel the acute sense that something was very very wrong. But she couldn't  see . All she could see were the wooden walls outside her cell. Nobody answered her.

Mabel pulled at the door again, rattling the bars but still not budging them enough to allow her an exit. Her lungs were heaving with the effort as her breathing picked up it's speed. As it did so, another smell beyond the mold and damp moss began to make itself known to her. It wasn't one she'd smelled before, but it reminded her vaguely of charcoal. Like the smell of a newly extinguished candle but amplified by a thousand. She could still hear footsteps, but it sounded like they were travelling further from her. Ascending through the levels of the ship while she remained trapped below, unsure of what was going on but terrifyingly aware that it wasn't good.

Looking up towards the ceiling, hoping for the sight of shadows moving between the miniscule gaps in the planks, Mabel's attention was instead caught by something else: The small lamp suspended above her was leaning.

No. The lamp wasn't leaning.

The room was.

Almost in the exact same moment she made that startling discovery, her attention was ripped from what lay above her to the floor below. The bottoms of her tanned leather boots were soaking.

Mabel gasped as she realized she was suddenly standing in a small but alarmingly rapidly rising pool of water.

Recoiling on instinct to an edge of the cell that was not yet submerged, she watched the shimmering surface climb gradually higher along the wall. What had been just a few centimetres in depth was soon approaching her ankles. The tops of her feet were underwater, and that realization snapped her out of the temporary stupor panic had put her in.

She banged at the walls hopelessly, pulling at the bars with even more strength than she had mustered before.

"Help!" She screamed at the top of her lungs like a dying creature. She screamed even as her chest grew taut and her lungs burned in terror. "Is anyone there!?"

There was no answer. If her earlier guess was correct, everyone else was already up on deck trying to escape the water rushing in themselves. They'd forgotten her below, and nobody was going to hear.

Nobody was coming for her.

The booms and the crashing noises had stopped, but water was still rushing in from all around. It was almost at her waist. The barrel her knitting needles were lying on was floating, but not towards her. She tried to reach anyways, stretching her arm out as far as it would go between the gaps until her shoulder caught and held her back. She was close enough that she could brush the wet wood with her fingertips. Pulling back, she threw herself bodily at the gap between the bars and this time managed to slap her palm against the barrel.

The touch sent it bobbing the opposite way.

"No, no, no!" She whined, watching escape float out of reach. "Come back!"

The water was almost past her shoulders. Was it just her, or were they sinking faster? Why was nobody stopping the leaking?

Had everyone already abandoned ship with her in it?

Abandoning the needles, she frantically looked around the room for any other option. There were more barrels of unknown items, a stool, some ropes and a small table floating freely. Nothing useful was within reach. She looked back up at the ceiling lamp, it's oil still burning unreached by the rising flood.

Her feet were off the ground, the water raising her up towards the ceiling. There was maybe a meter of air left above her. She was a strong swimmer, but that wouldn't help once the pocket of air became filled with water.

She reached for the dangling lantern as the water lifted her high enough to grab for it. Unsure of what else to do, she grabbed the metal part and threw it at the part of the wall that was still above water. She couldn't remember if it was an interior wall or an external one, but it seemed like the only half-decent idea her chaotic thoughts could arrive at. Dipper was the one who came up with clever plans, not her.

The glass shattered, covering the exposed wood in oil and igniting. Sparks flew in her eyes but she ducked her head underwater before her hair could catch on fire. As she gulped for air once she resurfaced, she instead began coughing and hacking as smoke spilled into her lungs.

Most of the brig was flooded, what little air remained was now filling with suffocating smoke, and she was trapped against the ceiling along with a burning wall. Her lungs screamed for air.

Bracing against the steel bars, she kicked at the weakened and burning wood sending another shower of sparks into her face. The heat burned but her clothes were too waterlogged to catch aflame. Dipping her boots below she kicked again and again, struggling for air.

The water finally rose over her head, putting out the fire, and a part of her was almost prepared to accept that that was it. But she refused. The salt water made her eyes burn as she tried to see through the dark and the blur. Her throat and lungs felt like they'd been seared. But she could make out the deep ugly scorch mark on the already rickety wood wall.

Throwing her entire weight into it, her foot broke through the damaged planks. Her leg was caught in the current and pulled outside, and she was stuck again: One leg outside the ship. The splintered wood dug into her thigh but she hardly noticed. Instead she hit and tore at the splintered edges, trying to widen the hole.

Finally, under the strain of the tugging current and her own desperate pulling, the wall began to splinter and crack. The hole broke wide open, and suddenly her entire body was pulled outside the ship. She cut her temple on the sharp planks and her hands ached but all she could think about was air. She needed air. Sunlight filtered through the water and she followed it upwards until her head finally broke the surface.

She breathed in a huge gulp, extinguishing the fire eating at the inside of her lungs. But her relief was premature. She now found herself floating unmoored in the endless expanse of the sea. Behind her, the merchant ship lay half submerged in the water, a battle still raging on deck. There was another ship behind it, one Mabel didn't recognize, and in front...

The Isosceles dwarfed her as she flailed in the water and fought against the current seeking to suck her below and smash her skull against it's keel. Her skirts were sodden and pulling her downwards into the abyssal sea and whatever lay below. She was a strong swimmer, stronger than Dipper at least. Their grandpa had taught them to swim at an early age and she'd taken to it like most other sports. But the waves and wet fabric and her own exhaustion were still overwhelming factors. Her head was dunked underwater again and again and she knew it wasn't long until it wouldn't let her up anymore.

Terrifying or not, the Isosceles was the only ship she could trust herself to reach before drowning claimed her.

The lowest of the ship's gun decks was almost at the waterline, it's cannon holes shut to stop it flooding. Dipper was right, it was a heavy ship.

Using the last reserves of her strength, Mabel managed to jank one of the holes open. She pulled herself up, squeezed into the narrow opening, and collapsed onto mercifully dry flooring inside.

She was anything but safe, but she could breathe .

She lay flat on her back behind one of the cannons, unable to do anything but savour the feeling of air flowing steadily into and out of her lungs.

Her every muscle felt like it was still held down by the weight of an ocean.

Stan was the first of the Mystery's crew to make landfall on the deck of the merchant ship the kid—Dipper—had indicated as the one his sister was stuck on. Lead by example and all that. But the others were right behind him, his second and first mate dropping down on either side. Good thing too, considering what they were up against.

The sun glinted off of the excessive gold decorating seemingly every available surface of the Isosceles. The merchant ship was caught in-between the two pirate crews, and suddenly a bunch of hodgepodge redhats running blindly every which way seemed like the least of their concerns. The deck leaned noticeably under his boots, and it struck Stan how uncharacteristic it was for Bill's men to indiscriminately fire.

You couldn't sell a sunken ship.

Not that that was much of a priority right now.

"Wendy, find the girl." He snapped to the left of him. She answered with a quick nod before freeing the axe from her belt and starting down the length of the ship.

Woe be anyone who got in her way.

The deck was a confused cacophonous battlefield as the three crews clashed with one another, but it was clear the merchants weren't much of a threat. Stan instead scanned the chaos for whichever men stood out from the uniformed ones. He recognised a fair few of Bill's crew, but the man himself was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, he was about to start carving a path through the chaos towards the woman he recognised as the highest present authority—Bill's first mate.

He was stopped dead in his tracks when he noticed a significantly shorter head of brown hair zip across deck.

"The hell do ya think you're doing!?" Stan tore off through the crowd as his heart shot into his mouth, barely managing to reach Dipper in time to intercept a sword whizzing through the air towards his head. The man, one of Bill's crew, recoiled in startled surprise as their swords collided with a metallic clang.

He looked even more surprised when Stan swept his legs aside, grabbed him by the front of the shirt, and threw him over the railing.

"I told ya to stay on board!" Stan roared at the young boy, grabbing his hand in the same motion and pulling him behind himself. Dipper made a loud noise of protest and tried to brainlessly push past even as Stan fended another two men away from them both.

"Let me go! I need to find Mabel!"

The child squirmed, and Stan resorted to picking him up bodily to stop him running off. With his one free hand, he kept fighting as best he could. He was old, but he knew what he was doing. You don't survive thirty years a pirate by being easy pickings.

His back was still going to hate him when this was over.

"No, Wendy is finding her." Stan punctuated his point with a lash of the sword at a man that stepped just a tad too close. The sailors seemed to have mostly scurried to hide in whatever nooks were free—Their sinking ship caught in the crossfire between the two warring pirate crews. He met the eyes of Bill's first mate through the pandemonium. He couldn't help himself, rage bloomed inside him into an explosion. He half shoved, half threw Dipper towards Soos with a shouted order to get him back to their own ship, before he started down towards the woman. Pushing men from both sides out of his way.

"Pyronica!" Steel clashed deafeningly as he engaged her. Her misaligned teeth gritted behind pink lips drawn taut in a scowl. "Where's your captain, huh? Hiding ?"

She was caught off guard for a second, stunned into silence, before her expression turned dark and stormy with outrage.

"From you ?" She huffed, returning blows. "Delusional old man!"

The crew were noticeably more disorganized than usual. They were never orderly . But they were obedient and—with their captain leading—efficient. The two crews were usually closely matched. None of Stan's men stood much of a chance against Bill himself, but then again, none of Bill's crew could take on Stan. Whenever they did fight, the two captains would usually be caught in a bloody back and forth as the rest fought amongst themselves. Stan had lost count of the injuries he'd suffered, but he'd always pay back in kind.

He was going to be the one to personally send Bill to the depths, even if the price was his own life.

Compared to her captain, Pyronica was child's play.

"Sir!" Wendy called above the clamor on deck.

"What!?" Stan shot back, not pausing the onslaught.

"The brig is flooded!"

He stopped, breathing heavily as he looked towards the girl. Her face was twisted into an expression of worry and guilt, and only then did Stan notice that she was drenched from her head to her boots.

"I tried to swim, but- I couldn't- I-"

She stammered, looking scared and small in her soaked clothes. Like the little girl she had been the first time he'd let her onboard.

Pyronica used Stan's distraction to flee, commanding the rest of Bill's crew to abandon ship before the vessel went under completely and make for the safety of the Isosceles.

It couldn't be.

They couldn't be too late.

It wasn't fair. If only they'd shown up just a little sooner- if only the Isosceles had attacked a few minutes later-...

The ship wouldn't be sinking if they hadn't been attacked.

It wouldn't be too late if they hadn't been attacked.

If Bill's ship hadn't attacked them.

Bill killed that girl.

Bill separated another pair of twins.

"Back to the Mystery!" Stan roared, fury and grief welling up inside him. It was ridiculous, he didn't even know this kid, he shouldn't be so upset.

She wasn't Ford.

It still hurt like hell, seeing the lost and horrified look on her brother's face as Stan swung back on board with Wendy shortly after him, the girl unable to even look them in the eyes.

These sort of things happen .

"Every man who's not on board in ten seconds is getting left behind! Follow that ship!" Stan ran to the bow of the ship, watching Bill's men frantically struggle to gain enough speed to escape. Their ship was formidable, practically a floating fort, but about as fast as one too under the weight of heavy cannons and decorative metal. The crew struggled uncoordinated under the command of a woman they neither respected nor feared as much as Bill. They would catch them. Stan muttered to himself, venom in his voice. "Let's sink this son of a bitch."

He swore he could see the terror in the eyes of Bill's first and second mates as they began to close the distance. It was with grim satisfaction he commanded his crew to prepare for battle.

But then something happened that took him by complete surprise.

Up on deck amongst the men and women, a child appeared, dragged up from inside the ship by a crew member. A small girl with long brown hair and—

And Dipper screamed.

Stan wasn't sure if it was relief or terror or a bit of both, but Dipper shouted for the girl at the top of his lungs. Loud enough for it to be heard over the water to the other ship, because Pyronica turned to stare at them as if her brain was rapidly trying to sort out her options. Suddenly she grabbed the girl out of the other man's hands, and Stan realized what she was going to do a second before she did it.

She threw the girl into the water.

Predicting the boys reaction before it could happen, he yelled for Soos to grab the kid and hold him back no matter what. The last thing they needed were two children overboard. Dipper kicked and screamed. Stan glared at the fleeing vessel one last time.

He then yelled an order to stop their pursuit.

Stan watched revenge slip through his fingers for the briefest of moments, before he shrugged his jacket off and dove from the bow into the warm sea.

The girl was staying afloat, but it was barely. By the time Stan reached her her face was underwater more often than it was above. In her panic, she apparently didn't notice him approach until he was already at her side. She made a startled noise and slipped below the waves.

He took a deep breath, and dove after. His eyesight was poor as it is, the saltwater didn't help. But as he felt around almost blindly his hand closed around what he first thought was seaweed but very quickly realised was long hair swaying with the current. Reaching towards it's roots, he found a head and shoulders. He grabbed the child under her arms and towed her back towards the surface.

She gasped and coughed up saltwater by the buckets, her face messy with snot and salt and her wet hair plastered to her red cheeks. The first gasp she managed to take transformed into a terrified sob, but he didn't let her slip below again.

"Ssh, ssh it's okay, Pumpkin. You're okay."

Her body was far heavier than he'd expected with her drenched clothes—this was exactly why Wendy wore pants. Soaking wet, one of those dresses weighed about as much as Soos—but he managed to keep his grip on her. Slowly swimming her back towards the ship. One of the lifeboats was already lowered to the water, ready to pull them up.

As the shivering child was finally deposited safely back on deck, her brother practically launched himself at her in a bone crushing hug. She looked scared and confused at the sight of the unfamiliar crew, but calmed at the closeness of her twin.

He considered briefly, looking back at the barely above water merchant ship, before cursing his own bleeding heart and stopping the crew member who was in the process of hoisting the lifeboat back up. Instead he cut the ropes and let it float off into the water below with a pointed look at the stranded sailors.

"Leave the lifeboat in the water. I'm feeling generous today."

As he walked towards the captain's cabin to change out of his sopping wet clothes Stan stopped to watch the speck on the horizon that was the Isosceles. His heart sank.

But then again, when his gaze turned to the two children sat on deck with Soos and Wendy, the girl looking like a drowned rat and the boy snotty nosed and crying from relief—he knew he could have never made any other choice.

They wouldn't be the first lost kids with nowhere to go to wind up on his ship.

Well. Looks like I'll be stuck on a train for the next few hours. Anyone got some pen and paper sketch ideas?

Trying to write some more pirate AU because I'm away from my drawing tablet and will be for a few days, and I think my favourite dumb plot point so far is the fact that Bill's ship is just... Too fucking heavy to properly function.

It caused them problems in the first chapter and it's gonna cause them problems in this chapter, but Bill is too much of a showoff to not have obnoxious amounts of gold literally everywhere and nobody else is brave enough to challenge him.

"Ah still remember what he said then to his crew: 'Tie them to the mast and burn the ship.'"

How about some lindworm (sorry if it’s misspelled) doodles? This idea is such and interesting one. Love your author Stan au and the pirate one you just started.

Stan then proceeds to insist on eating only the same stuff as Ford until he eventually gives himself food poisoning and forces Filbrick to surrender on the subject.