![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Planet Havana I
Edward has been dreaming lately.
Barely worth mentioning, for Edward's dream is never short of oddities. There was one time he dozed off and found himself at an energy station when a refueling tank collapsed down and split into millions of green slimy monsters. Quite a panic right there, when he couldn’t find a raygun with him as those sluggish bastards started to grow teeth and sped up climbing onto his legs. He was yelling and kicking before he finally snapped out of it. The terror in it must be the sort of thing you have to be there and experience in person to get it, because he couldn't see himself scream like that in real life. At least it was fun.
Some dreams are not fun at all. In the blink of an eye, he was back to his deckhand age and buried in puny ship maintenance duties. It was already a nightmare to untangle cables, though, in an actual nightmare, the cables turned alive, and they kept rolling and squirming before grew into a whirlpool. Edward remembered him standing at the edge of the glistening dark water, enchanted. It was ready to swallow him whole at any moment, and he wasn't sure if he was going to struggle.
Yes, Edward dreamt a lot, and curiously, they shared patterns.
Recent dreams are different.
Taking in the sensation of sand rubbing between toes and the squawks of seagulls, he landed on an empty beach. The seawater was in different shades of blue, brightly so, just like the oceans on Havana, if they were not contagious with carnivorous gas bacteria—a foolish idea to ever stick bare feet in it. Knowing the everlasting theme of his dreams, Edward was prepared to be consumed again. The ripples came over, touched his ankles, and retreated. He looked down, looking for his flesh in erosion. But his feet were still there. A flurry of wind came over to play with his hair, and the tousled strands started dancing on his nape, making him itchy.
It was almost real, and calm, a coexistence few and far between the waking intervals. Maybe this is the reason he keeps coming back to this particular dream. He hasn’t told anybody, but he has had trouble sleeping for some time since the fateful incident, and this dream takes over. It's like a retreat, a secret reserve in a place he had never found. Whenever he closes his eyes, he hears the seagull.
Edward sits up from his bunk in the middle of the night.
There should be no concept of night or day in space, for it's always dark outside, and it's always a working hour. But he has just emerged out of a tropical daze where he could flip over his palm to scoop up the sunlight. The Revenge is life conditioned, but not immune from the artificiality in lighting. He tells the ship to switch on the lamp. The light is sufficient and unemotional, like everything outside of the dream, bringing the view of his scarcely furnished cabin.
He hobbles to the sink. Staring at the reflection, he almost can't recognize the wearied, wrinkled image that stares back at him. The beard has grown back but turned silver. The eye sockets have deepened, and the eyes have turned clearer from their former bloodshot state. He scratches the nose, for it catches an unpleasant odor from the standard spacecraft sterilization.
It only takes so many times for a guy to start wondering. Edward is no fool. Humans are vulnerable to manipulations, and sometimes the crew members are overzealous in trying out unorthodox medicine.
He doesn't like people playing with his mind, even if they mean well.
Leaves the captain's cabin behind, he strides through the cushion-paddled, neutral-lighted corridors of the Revenge and steps into a lift where a brisk melody is playing in the background. "Med bay." He asks.
"Right-o, you go." The lift answers in Stede's voice that he hasn't bothered to ask the techs to change.
The hospitalization area is unoccupied, tonight and for a while. The ship's doctor is behind a mask, chopping ingredients and feeding them into a mixer that is making a blaring noise. His attention is drawn to Edward's moving lips after the hatch door is pushed to slide up and seal the area from the outside. Immediately, he starts to fumble with the buttons.
"Just a minute, captain!" From the shriek he's making, either he's guilty of one thing or another. Or a general fear in the presence of Edward. Edward crosses his arms and waits until the noise recedes.
"Sorry, sorry, you were saying?" Roach asks as he cleans up the dregs that splutter out of the conduit once the mixer's program stops prematurely.
"I asked," Edward steps closer, "the fuck are you doing messing up with my brain?"
Roach blinks, and the purplish dregs are free-flowing all over his gloved hands. "I don't get it."
There's an impulse in Edward to tear the doctor's mind apart so he can look up for the answer himself, instead of all this push and pull of accusation and refutation. Breath. He tells himself. Like the training. He can do this, holding a normal conversation to... acquire information.
"Do you happen to be in possession of devices for," He gestures vaguely around his head, "shamma shati?"
"Sammā-sati, you mean?" Roach asks cautiously.
"Yep, that," Edward snaps his fingers, "did you use that on me?"
"Use what?"
"You know, the device, like a helmet." Edward cups his palms to fashion a globe, but Roach still looks genuinely lost in the disarray of clues. "You put that shit on, and pfff, you see a slideshow before your eyes, all 5D experience."
"Sounds fancy." Roach comments.
"And? Do you have it?" He looks around in the med bay. The room is an organized crime— organized but also a crime, for Roach has his own system, meaning anyone but he can figure out the logic behind cupboard categorization. The stuffed cabinets for aqueous solutions and medicaments, opaque chests for exotic herbs and ores, along with apprehensive-looking examing instruments—— so many candidates up for his grab to hide a helmet.
Roach scratches his chin. "I don't think I have. Doesn't sound very scientific to me. I have a standard for collection, you know..."
"That's beside the point!" Edward hears himself shout.
"Alright, alright, captain." Roach quickly sheds himself behind a giant net of drying spores before the budding outrage grows into a life-threatening turmoil. He pokes his head out, "Do you need this device? To... meditate?"
Edward feels uncomfortable. He is conscious of the reaction, but sometimes it is difficult just to keep an even tone. His crewmen are like a nest of vermins that have survived seasons of pesticides, running at the first sign of hostility. He has to keep reminding himself that they are not the same as his usual company, and he has a promise to keep.
He sighs. "No, sorry, come out now. I'm experiencing something strange. Someone is using that on me."
"Using on you," Roach still holds onto the net, but his guard is lowered for a bit, "You don't feel it when someone puts a helmet on you, captain?"
"I don't know. I was sleeping."
Roach is confused, "How can you look at the slideshow if you are sleeping?"
"I said I don't know! Sorry. Can't they project it straight into the mind now, like, a dream?"
"Ughh..." Roach stammers, "I-I think they should publish if they invent the thing. Do you mind me searching a little?"
Roach climbs out of the drying net, quickly hides himself behind the station, and taps the screen with two fingers.
Edward has no choice but to wait. "I thought the ship's full of trinkets like that."
That's the truth. The Revenge has been doing shit jobs at casing since the first day they sailed. No Energy Union conduits, no tax escorts, not even a colony ship. They seem to be attracted solely to private cruises and scientific expedition vessels, and their loots are limited to outlandish artifacts and worthless hallucinogens. They haven't improved much even since Edward started to take charge. He can tell himself that he hasn't been much invested, but the truth is, he isn't sure that the old him can straighten them up.
Roach raises his head from the screen. "You checked the inventory, captain?"
"Not yet. Where can I start?"
Roach shrugged, "I don't know. Let me ask if anyone knows."
As it turns out, no one is close to full acknowledgment of the inventory onboard, and no one is recording what they have hijacked and where they are stored. Most of their loot hasn't even left the crates in their hanger bay, and the crew would just pick up whatever interests them and leave the rest unattended. Roach swears he has done everything within a doctor's duty to collect and stock their medical supply, but the rest is "beyond his rank".
An all-hands meeting is in order, then.
Edward has been questioning himself a lot recently. Has it always been like that? Or just this particular team? He looks at the summoned crew members and ponders over it again. Most of them are wearing pajamas, for it's the sleeping hour for the planet dwellers and their former master has spoiled them with options. They all look confused in a sleepy haze when Edward throws the question, and a few even dare roll their eyes.
"Doesn't it sound like... psychedelic." Frenchie raises his arm and takes a skittish glance at Bottoms.
"I wouldn't dare trespass the realm of reality with such a crud method." Buttons rejects, "Unless, captain, do you start to take dosages again?"
"No, the visions are stable and not trippy at all." Edward brushes the idea off.
"Umm, could be a new drug." Buttons shuts his eyelids in counting, "But we don't have those. A shame."
"Do you guys remember the Union vessel we came across three months ago?" Oluwande suggests, "We emptied their lab, and I haven't figured out all the functions of their devices."
"It was a mining ship, dumb dumb. How can they develop dream-related devices?" Pete says.
"Hello? What do you mean miners don't deserve a therapeutic meditation?"
Roach stops the lovers' quarrel before it matures. "If it's therapeutic, I'd have it. That's why the captain came to me in the first place. But no, I don't even know about this thing."
"And it's not necessarily meant to be therapeutic, though." Frenchie inputs his consideration, "There's one time I mistook Jambolan juice for a flu infusion, but I still got better. Turns out I just lack vitamins."
This meeting is killing him, Edward sits silently behind the galley counter and begins to doubt none of these morons can brew up a complicated scheme against their superior. To this point, he should stop feeling embarrassed to reach out for help and start feeling embarrassed to assume they could come up with anything useful.
"What about the cargo list?" He asks his current first mate, "Do we have it?"
"Not really, though." Frenchie shrugs. "I tried, and I'm not bragging about locating every mystical glowing orb onboard. But the ship is huge, and we got so much stuff, so everybody does their part."
Apparently, Lucius puts a serious attitude in the ancient scroll registry, Oluwande is building up his lab, and Jim and Archie are collaborating on their weaponry refinery project. Nobody can pinpoint whose interests of the category a dream-casting device can fall into.
"We are all kind of experts in our own field," Frenchie explains, and he crouches he's ready to be thrown a shoe in the face——must have noticed the change in the atmosphere. "We do have a list... lists! Check this out: fibers, fungus, food..."
"I don't need fucking food," Edward says coldly.
"...Yes, just a process of elimination, captain."
Edward rubs his forehead. "And how much unlisted?"
"Well, about, " Frenchie takes a deep breath, "78%...? But we are working on it so hard..." He doesn't look like he can convince himself.
It makes Edward feel like a failure. Fail to solve a small problem, fail to make his underlings useful, fail to take hold of whatever the fuck is going on on his own ship, whether he got a vote in keeping it or not. He must have grown accustomed to taking it for granted, he knows.
"Fucking useless. I wish Izzy was still here." He says, and everyone stops talking.
[NOTE] I figure I can't write a damn thing in the historical setting because I'm illiterate in an engineering student way so why don't I move the scene to out space... so here's it. the post-canon setting space pirate AU where Izzy's kinda dead and Stede *vanishes for a reason I haven't come up with* and Ed is stuck with a bunch of loonies with a promise to look after them. Of course Izzy will come back because I didn't spend my teenage yrs watching kirk bring back dead firstmate slash wife spock for no reason...
Barely worth mentioning, for Edward's dream is never short of oddities. There was one time he dozed off and found himself at an energy station when a refueling tank collapsed down and split into millions of green slimy monsters. Quite a panic right there, when he couldn’t find a raygun with him as those sluggish bastards started to grow teeth and sped up climbing onto his legs. He was yelling and kicking before he finally snapped out of it. The terror in it must be the sort of thing you have to be there and experience in person to get it, because he couldn't see himself scream like that in real life. At least it was fun.
Some dreams are not fun at all. In the blink of an eye, he was back to his deckhand age and buried in puny ship maintenance duties. It was already a nightmare to untangle cables, though, in an actual nightmare, the cables turned alive, and they kept rolling and squirming before grew into a whirlpool. Edward remembered him standing at the edge of the glistening dark water, enchanted. It was ready to swallow him whole at any moment, and he wasn't sure if he was going to struggle.
Yes, Edward dreamt a lot, and curiously, they shared patterns.
Recent dreams are different.
Taking in the sensation of sand rubbing between toes and the squawks of seagulls, he landed on an empty beach. The seawater was in different shades of blue, brightly so, just like the oceans on Havana, if they were not contagious with carnivorous gas bacteria—a foolish idea to ever stick bare feet in it. Knowing the everlasting theme of his dreams, Edward was prepared to be consumed again. The ripples came over, touched his ankles, and retreated. He looked down, looking for his flesh in erosion. But his feet were still there. A flurry of wind came over to play with his hair, and the tousled strands started dancing on his nape, making him itchy.
It was almost real, and calm, a coexistence few and far between the waking intervals. Maybe this is the reason he keeps coming back to this particular dream. He hasn’t told anybody, but he has had trouble sleeping for some time since the fateful incident, and this dream takes over. It's like a retreat, a secret reserve in a place he had never found. Whenever he closes his eyes, he hears the seagull.
Edward sits up from his bunk in the middle of the night.
There should be no concept of night or day in space, for it's always dark outside, and it's always a working hour. But he has just emerged out of a tropical daze where he could flip over his palm to scoop up the sunlight. The Revenge is life conditioned, but not immune from the artificiality in lighting. He tells the ship to switch on the lamp. The light is sufficient and unemotional, like everything outside of the dream, bringing the view of his scarcely furnished cabin.
He hobbles to the sink. Staring at the reflection, he almost can't recognize the wearied, wrinkled image that stares back at him. The beard has grown back but turned silver. The eye sockets have deepened, and the eyes have turned clearer from their former bloodshot state. He scratches the nose, for it catches an unpleasant odor from the standard spacecraft sterilization.
It only takes so many times for a guy to start wondering. Edward is no fool. Humans are vulnerable to manipulations, and sometimes the crew members are overzealous in trying out unorthodox medicine.
He doesn't like people playing with his mind, even if they mean well.
Leaves the captain's cabin behind, he strides through the cushion-paddled, neutral-lighted corridors of the Revenge and steps into a lift where a brisk melody is playing in the background. "Med bay." He asks.
"Right-o, you go." The lift answers in Stede's voice that he hasn't bothered to ask the techs to change.
The hospitalization area is unoccupied, tonight and for a while. The ship's doctor is behind a mask, chopping ingredients and feeding them into a mixer that is making a blaring noise. His attention is drawn to Edward's moving lips after the hatch door is pushed to slide up and seal the area from the outside. Immediately, he starts to fumble with the buttons.
"Just a minute, captain!" From the shriek he's making, either he's guilty of one thing or another. Or a general fear in the presence of Edward. Edward crosses his arms and waits until the noise recedes.
"Sorry, sorry, you were saying?" Roach asks as he cleans up the dregs that splutter out of the conduit once the mixer's program stops prematurely.
"I asked," Edward steps closer, "the fuck are you doing messing up with my brain?"
Roach blinks, and the purplish dregs are free-flowing all over his gloved hands. "I don't get it."
There's an impulse in Edward to tear the doctor's mind apart so he can look up for the answer himself, instead of all this push and pull of accusation and refutation. Breath. He tells himself. Like the training. He can do this, holding a normal conversation to... acquire information.
"Do you happen to be in possession of devices for," He gestures vaguely around his head, "shamma shati?"
"Sammā-sati, you mean?" Roach asks cautiously.
"Yep, that," Edward snaps his fingers, "did you use that on me?"
"Use what?"
"You know, the device, like a helmet." Edward cups his palms to fashion a globe, but Roach still looks genuinely lost in the disarray of clues. "You put that shit on, and pfff, you see a slideshow before your eyes, all 5D experience."
"Sounds fancy." Roach comments.
"And? Do you have it?" He looks around in the med bay. The room is an organized crime— organized but also a crime, for Roach has his own system, meaning anyone but he can figure out the logic behind cupboard categorization. The stuffed cabinets for aqueous solutions and medicaments, opaque chests for exotic herbs and ores, along with apprehensive-looking examing instruments—— so many candidates up for his grab to hide a helmet.
Roach scratches his chin. "I don't think I have. Doesn't sound very scientific to me. I have a standard for collection, you know..."
"That's beside the point!" Edward hears himself shout.
"Alright, alright, captain." Roach quickly sheds himself behind a giant net of drying spores before the budding outrage grows into a life-threatening turmoil. He pokes his head out, "Do you need this device? To... meditate?"
Edward feels uncomfortable. He is conscious of the reaction, but sometimes it is difficult just to keep an even tone. His crewmen are like a nest of vermins that have survived seasons of pesticides, running at the first sign of hostility. He has to keep reminding himself that they are not the same as his usual company, and he has a promise to keep.
He sighs. "No, sorry, come out now. I'm experiencing something strange. Someone is using that on me."
"Using on you," Roach still holds onto the net, but his guard is lowered for a bit, "You don't feel it when someone puts a helmet on you, captain?"
"I don't know. I was sleeping."
Roach is confused, "How can you look at the slideshow if you are sleeping?"
"I said I don't know! Sorry. Can't they project it straight into the mind now, like, a dream?"
"Ughh..." Roach stammers, "I-I think they should publish if they invent the thing. Do you mind me searching a little?"
Roach climbs out of the drying net, quickly hides himself behind the station, and taps the screen with two fingers.
Edward has no choice but to wait. "I thought the ship's full of trinkets like that."
That's the truth. The Revenge has been doing shit jobs at casing since the first day they sailed. No Energy Union conduits, no tax escorts, not even a colony ship. They seem to be attracted solely to private cruises and scientific expedition vessels, and their loots are limited to outlandish artifacts and worthless hallucinogens. They haven't improved much even since Edward started to take charge. He can tell himself that he hasn't been much invested, but the truth is, he isn't sure that the old him can straighten them up.
Roach raises his head from the screen. "You checked the inventory, captain?"
"Not yet. Where can I start?"
Roach shrugged, "I don't know. Let me ask if anyone knows."
As it turns out, no one is close to full acknowledgment of the inventory onboard, and no one is recording what they have hijacked and where they are stored. Most of their loot hasn't even left the crates in their hanger bay, and the crew would just pick up whatever interests them and leave the rest unattended. Roach swears he has done everything within a doctor's duty to collect and stock their medical supply, but the rest is "beyond his rank".
An all-hands meeting is in order, then.
Edward has been questioning himself a lot recently. Has it always been like that? Or just this particular team? He looks at the summoned crew members and ponders over it again. Most of them are wearing pajamas, for it's the sleeping hour for the planet dwellers and their former master has spoiled them with options. They all look confused in a sleepy haze when Edward throws the question, and a few even dare roll their eyes.
"Doesn't it sound like... psychedelic." Frenchie raises his arm and takes a skittish glance at Bottoms.
"I wouldn't dare trespass the realm of reality with such a crud method." Buttons rejects, "Unless, captain, do you start to take dosages again?"
"No, the visions are stable and not trippy at all." Edward brushes the idea off.
"Umm, could be a new drug." Buttons shuts his eyelids in counting, "But we don't have those. A shame."
"Do you guys remember the Union vessel we came across three months ago?" Oluwande suggests, "We emptied their lab, and I haven't figured out all the functions of their devices."
"It was a mining ship, dumb dumb. How can they develop dream-related devices?" Pete says.
"Hello? What do you mean miners don't deserve a therapeutic meditation?"
Roach stops the lovers' quarrel before it matures. "If it's therapeutic, I'd have it. That's why the captain came to me in the first place. But no, I don't even know about this thing."
"And it's not necessarily meant to be therapeutic, though." Frenchie inputs his consideration, "There's one time I mistook Jambolan juice for a flu infusion, but I still got better. Turns out I just lack vitamins."
This meeting is killing him, Edward sits silently behind the galley counter and begins to doubt none of these morons can brew up a complicated scheme against their superior. To this point, he should stop feeling embarrassed to reach out for help and start feeling embarrassed to assume they could come up with anything useful.
"What about the cargo list?" He asks his current first mate, "Do we have it?"
"Not really, though." Frenchie shrugs. "I tried, and I'm not bragging about locating every mystical glowing orb onboard. But the ship is huge, and we got so much stuff, so everybody does their part."
Apparently, Lucius puts a serious attitude in the ancient scroll registry, Oluwande is building up his lab, and Jim and Archie are collaborating on their weaponry refinery project. Nobody can pinpoint whose interests of the category a dream-casting device can fall into.
"We are all kind of experts in our own field," Frenchie explains, and he crouches he's ready to be thrown a shoe in the face——must have noticed the change in the atmosphere. "We do have a list... lists! Check this out: fibers, fungus, food..."
"I don't need fucking food," Edward says coldly.
"...Yes, just a process of elimination, captain."
Edward rubs his forehead. "And how much unlisted?"
"Well, about, " Frenchie takes a deep breath, "78%...? But we are working on it so hard..." He doesn't look like he can convince himself.
It makes Edward feel like a failure. Fail to solve a small problem, fail to make his underlings useful, fail to take hold of whatever the fuck is going on on his own ship, whether he got a vote in keeping it or not. He must have grown accustomed to taking it for granted, he knows.
"Fucking useless. I wish Izzy was still here." He says, and everyone stops talking.
[NOTE] I figure I can't write a damn thing in the historical setting because I'm illiterate in an engineering student way so why don't I move the scene to out space... so here's it. the post-canon setting space pirate AU where Izzy's kinda dead and Stede *vanishes for a reason I haven't come up with* and Ed is stuck with a bunch of loonies with a promise to look after them. Of course Izzy will come back because I didn't spend my teenage yrs watching kirk bring back dead firstmate slash wife spock for no reason...