What Is This Setting?: Verse Blurb | Video Glance | Wtf Is Is This?

What is this setting?: verse blurb | video glance | wtf is is this?

Anne sat away from the noise and the thrill of the boardwalk, balanced on the bike at the far end of the parking lot. She tapped the cheap box of smokes against her hand even as she lit one—down to her last two, she’ll quit after this box—and pocketed the vanity lighter she’d stolen the same night as the bike and the jacket. No one fucked with her when she wore the stupid jacket. She should know, she experimented, leaving it in her pack in some towns and not in others. Hell!, even half an hour apart, she was left alone more wearing the jacket than not. James’ stupid biker club seemed to hold some notoriety after all, though this is the first Anne’s seeing of it.

Deep breath in, she’s a bright cherry glow alone in the dark. By the time she exhales, blowing smoke up into the night sky, she knows she isn’t alone. She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath in without the cigarette, wishing the bastard had waited ‘til she’d finished before showing up.

“So, believe it or not, I know a little bit about ye. James…was a stupid, mouthy bastard. He didn’t say everything, but he said enough.”

She’s glad, actually, and maybe even grateful when he doesn’t answer her idiot small talk. He’s a measured man; calm, collected, quiet. The stories never mention that. They mention him killing not just one men but several to join the devil’s crew, among other lurid tales of fires set and navymen cut down, but not his disquieting calm. Amongst the many eccentric pirates sailing these waters, that certainly makes Hands stand out. His approval is exciting, electric—and that makes it worse, somehow.

That makes it worse that he knows she’s with Jack. Like he knows like she does that Jack isn’t worth the spit it takes to say his name, that he’s a fraud taking credit for the work of others, that his are not works of genius but strokes of errant luck buoyed to the finish on the back of his truth-clouding arrogance. Anne stands up the straighter for it, crossing her arms and guarding her expression. She might not like the stupid arse anymore, but that doesn’t mean she’ll throw him to the sharks. He gave her her freedom back, a future, a berth: the least she can give him is a little loyalty in the face of a could-be assassin.

She’s grateful for the physical space Hands reestablishes, the distance she needs to regain her cool and remain cold to a man she’s so admired. “ Something like that, ” Anne agrees, speaking slowly. Jack had been impressed early on, had promised her a chance to run for an office aboard. That was two Articles ago, two chances to be more gone by in an unspoken, one-sides agreement to be “ of better service ” to Jack, to his planning. She isn’t dumb. She knows what’s going on.

But it’s like Jack’s even said before—who else is letting women sail aboard these waters?

“ I en’t a whore—not for cap’n and not for coin. Hope that don’t disappoint. But I en’t quite a sailor neither. ” She probably shouldn’t admit that to him, but…. Anne shrugs and turns her face away, towards the docks again, towards the sea. It’ll be too dark to see the water from this far away soon. “ Crew don’t like having a woman aboard. Waste daylight and energy checking shite I’d already seen to, me on Jack’s orders and them on their own suspicions. ” Anne huffs and looks back down the alley towards Hands. “ Eventually, the Cap’n stopped giving me sailing orders. So. ” Anne begins to count on her fingers, thumb first. “ I’m on his ship. I follow his rules. I earn my keep. But I en’t quite a sailor, no. ” Her hand falls to her side and she shrugs again.

There’s no chance at a career without Jack—not only has he said as much, but attempts to bond with his crew, as well as in taverns in ports, have driven the point home quite handily—but no chance at one with him, either. Anne’s lips twitch up into a sardonic smile despite her attempts to suppress it. It’s darkly humorous, in its way, and sharing her status as a non-sailor-entity has made her feel a bit bolder in sharing the truth.

“ I had a promising future as a lawyer ahead of me, once, ” she says, uncharacteristically candid about it. She laughs a little at the punchline before she even delivers it, angered and defeated by the truth of it all at once: “ And now I can’t even find work where I could steal it! ”

Fucking sad. Pathetic. A waste of potential only capable of blaming herself and fucking up in new and interesting ways. Anne laughs a little more, but it’s a humorless sound. It dies away and they exist for a moment or two in a reflective silence before Anne breaks back in.

“ You’re still with him, en’t ye? They he’s worse than the Devil hisself, twice as black and six times as cruel. And you’re a mate of Lucifer’s, not just his, and yer head can go all the way ‘round. ” Reverence and skepticism creep one behind the other through her tone as Anne watches the devil in the darkening alley, his glowing red tip brighter than the light of the now-absent sun. “ Is that right? ”

It’s hard to find a good place to be left the fuck alone in the Republic of Pirates. Luckily, Anne’s managed just that, squeezing into the small alley and following its blind turns until she’s come back out onto the tiny public outlook just at the hill above the docks. She’s joined a few minutes in by a man who knows well enough to mind his own fucking business and they stand in the amiable silence of two people ignoring each other as flashes of sunlight dazzle the water below. Before she can lean over and really let herself go enough to start figuring things out, though, four new strangers turn up. Four new strangers who don’t know well enough to mind their own fucking business, dumb enough to go sticking their noses where they aren’t welcome—sniffing for crumbs around the “captain’s strumpet” with ugly laughs and lingering leers.

“ Fuck off, ” Anne warns them once, hoarse. One makes a crude joke about fucking but not off. He’s on the ground before the others even have a chance to get a proper laugh in, clutching his gut from the unexpected blow.

If Anne killed every man she fought in this damned port, it’d be half corpses before noon. She fights like the hellcat she is, but never once do her hands touch the sword or the knife on her belt, except to keep other hands off them. She doesn’t grab the knife in her boot, nor the one hidden away in her trousers; she fights with surprising honor in that way. In the ways in which she utilizes literal tooth and nail, actual blows below the belt, feinting and thrusting and letting the broad little idiots use their own momentum against themselves, however, she certainly fights dirty. The one she got in the gut staggers back up just as she fells another with a hard knee to the groin, though he finds himself dazed and in his back almost as quickly as she can grab him.

That’s when the first stranger who arrived decided to step in. Anne hadn’t thought twice about him, wouldn’t have blamed him at all for staying all the way out, for watching, for leaving, whatever he did—this is one of the roughest ports on some of the toughest waters in the world, no one stuck their neck out for anyone else without the certainty of a payoff for it—but here he was.

The man in the ground, clutching his jewels, doesn’t stop sobbing when the first stranger whistles, but otherwise, all eyes find a way to his face. The stranger repeats a familiar phrase—a refrain echoed everywhere in the Republic—but this time, the braggarts listen. The standing two help their fallen companion, one under each arm; their thrown companion gets to his feet on his own, clearly still winded. He glares, and she spits, straight into his eye. She watches their retreating backs as they limp away in shame, only bending to fetch her hat (snatched off in the scuffle) when they began to take the first turn.

This is going to be a problem.

On the one hand, she’s glad to be spared the rest of the fight, having come all the way here for some peace and goddamned quiet to begin with. On the other…not finishing the fight means there’ll be a story now of Rackham’s whore needing someone else to save her. Something that will no doubt spawn a repeat incident in the near future. Anne sighs and brushes the hat off, donning it again without flourish.

“ I appreciate the sentiment, ” she quips, eyeing the man as she does so, “ but I had that under control. ”

Strong nose and jaw. Salt and pepper hair and beard. A short bastard, but no less imposing for it, with dark, piercing eyes and two tattoos Anne knows immediately: the x and the swallow. Eyes so pale a green they seemed almost colorless narrowed to sharp shards of sea glass. She knew of someone, didn’t she?, fitting this description. The details are hazy, but—yes, yes, she knows this man. Shit. The knowledge of that crashes over her like a wave and leaves her struck dumb, almost staggering back with the force of it: Israel Hands. Second to none other than than the devil himself, Blackbeard. Legends she has long stood in awe of, even to the point of chasing sad shadows of their presence—Anne is breathless, and a little star struck, and fighting her every impulse so it won’t show.

Shit. Leave it to her and her thorny, idiot tongue to lash out at the wrong person. Anne winces and belatedly adds, “ …sir. ” But it sounds sour and forced even to her ears. Christ alive. Anne slams her eyes shut in frustration and tries again, although gratitude sounds clunky on her tongue.

“ That is to say—thank you, Mr. Hands, sir. ” And? Surely there’s more to say in this moment than just that, but nothing comes to mind that it isn’t completely idiotic, and Anne refuses to look any more the idiot than she already must. If only she could have stopped her idiot tongue in time. “ I didn’t realize ye were in port. ”

Small talk. Dear God. May the earth open its mouth and swallow her whole before she has to face the consequences of trying to make small talk with Israel Hands.

@starlightintheirwake ⚓️

Anne sat with her back to the damp rock wall of the grotto, her boots pressed against a different, smaller rock lodged in place at the edge of the water. The grotto smelled of wet and wood, a sort of mildew not entirely unpleasant to smell but certainly not a place to spend hours in, like she was now. Lost. Looking through the water not to its dark depths but to a time long past. The bottle she nursed has long since slipped through her fingers, much emptier now than when it had entered the grotto.

She didn’t stir even when her privacy was intruded upon, though she heard the rattle of the bottle moving on their entrance. (If she laid down here and died, would anyone even notice?)

“Fuck off, I’m busy.”

Anne’s eyes widen slightly in panic, but she’s quick to cover that by the time he’s all the way turned ‘round. She’d meant the shot to skate over, not through, the bastard! She gets her shit back together when his gun comes out. In her costume of twice-stolen raider valor, she’d hoped no one would be dumb enough to fuck with someone flying the Jolly Roger on their back, but she’d have to be naive to be caught unprepared for that.

And Anne isn’t fucking naive.

“It’s for none of yer fucking business. My own fuckin job.” He’s got a point: she’s got no more time than he does to dawdle. Maybe she could grab it off him. Probably she’d end up bit and worse, since a knife would be of no use in persuasion if a bullet wasn’t one at all. She licks chapped lips and considers her options. If this wasn’t such a personal fucking matter, she might’ve left it at just that. (Sorry, ghoul got yer package. I know, sad. ‘S’why I make everyone sign the contract relieving me of liability if the cost of retrieval is not commiserate with the payout of the job. Next!) As things stand….

“I got two thousand caps in a sack and know where t’find more.” She does and she doesn’t. “It’s a sentimental sort a’ payout, ye know how it goes.”

@hollywoodbountyman | ⚓️

The warning shot sails just over the ghoul’s right shoulder, less than a foot from his head.

Those chem-chugging fucks might not have taught Anne much in the scheme of things, but they did teach her one thing: theatrics go a long way in the Wasteland. If you act like a crazy fucking lunatic who’ll do anything to get what you want, most people would you let get whatever it is you’re after a lot easier.

She can only hope that ghouls are people, too. Otherwise she’s just wasted a bullet. Anne cocks the hammer of the gun again but doesn’t take her eyes off the ghoul who had his back to her.

“Sorry, ugly. That just so happens to be my property you’ve got there,” it isn’t, but it is what she’s come all this way to get, and in that way it is her property, “and I won’t be letting you get any further with it than that.”

Anne considers the question with more seriousness than perhaps is deserved: it’s a clear come-on, and even though she doesn’t rise to the bait, she’s still feeling dangerous.

“It’d be none of my fuckin business if ye was, frankly,” Anne answers honestly, shrugging, and adds, “but aye. Prob’ly hers.”

Anne fingers the broken half-glass on the table and considers it before nodding, as if having made a decision. “Aye. Tint cunt like ye, might bleed out—and then I got a corpse t’deal with. So. Glass t’her face, knee t’the big fucker’s nose—this is assuming I get on the table, mind—maybe a boot t’yers.” Not the girl, one of the dodgier looking bastards with her; he clearly doesn’t appreciate being called on, like she gives a rat’s ass. “Don’t fancy my chances if ye’ve got knives, but it’d take a real mad bastard t’start shooting in here. Everyone here’s got a fucking gun and more lint in their heads than sense.”

She’s made a good show of hiding it, but Anne hadn’t been expecting that voice out of that body: the big eyes, the cutesy curls, the fact that she all but needed a high chair at the goddamned table—but she had a voice as rough and hard as a fucking brick, if not worse. Anne feels a bit dazed by it, like it’d hit her in the back of the head and left her stunned. Gotham really does take ‘em fucking young—here sits some mobster’s brat, to guess from her company, but instead of spoilt she sounds days away from taking to chain smoking.

Anne shrugs again, unbothered and probably starting to feel the effects of the last few drinks. “Why, whose face would ye recommend? And don’t say mine—‘cording to ye, I’m the one using the glass.”

@babydxhl sorry not sorry 🤷

Even in a city full of psychopaths, Anne somehow manages to stand out. At least right now there’s a fair reason for it: no one sits or idles at her booth, despite the place being jam-packed. And it’s not because of the blood or the broken glass, but because of the way Anne had calmly reached up and smashed a man’s face into the table, causing the blood and the broken glass. His weak moans have long since faded, having been dragged out halfway to unconsciousness by the security Anne’s surprised to learn is actually here.

The problem with standing out is that she isn’t supposed to do that yet. Her job was to work her way inside of the Iceberg Lounge, scope the place out, and find a new friend for Jack. Someone suitable to their cause—tough, unfucked with, and looking to raise a little hell. Jack’s exact words had been to find “the craziest, best-known psycho in town” and arrange a meeting for him. Anne…was reconsidering things now. Quite a lot of things. Including Jack.

She’s knows the feeling of eyes on her because they so seldom are. Even when she’d been dolling out the what-for for the fuck-nut who’d copped a feel, people hadn’t looked; acts of violence were common here, even if the woman engaging in them was not. (Truthfully, she had been mistaken for another femme fatale altogether from the back, and so most people looked pointedly anywhere else to avoid the ire of the woman she wasn’t.)

Anne looks up and meets those eyes head-on, her expression dispassionate and uninterested, though her look becomes somewhat pinched at the brow as she takes a look—a real look—at the person staring back her.

Christ Almighty, but Gotham takes ‘em young! She takes another swig directly from the whisky bottle before thumping it back down on the table.

“I’d offer ye a glass, but half of it’s stuck in some arsehole’s face. Aren’t ye a bit young t’be fuckin about in a place like this?”

-slides the dash my last nickel- would you consider shipping with me?