Suave and Cool Pirate Daughter

“Grab the moorings!” said this be-eye-patched pirate.

If Skott met this woman on the street in Boston he’d have easily thought she was human. Her incisors were small and unobtrusive, and her skin tone was a particularly light-green shade of tan. Why, her sharply defined facial features were strangely familiar.

“Storm slowed us down, but it still looks like we made it just in time,” said the pirate. “Why, it appears the college is near-flooded. Hey, landlubbers, where’s Grog? Surely he hasn’t graduated yet. We haven’t been gone that long.”

An orc in a mage’s robes hobbled down onto the damp stone of the college’s seawall.

“I’m coming,” said Grognar. “Awfully risky, piloting the ships through that storm. Those boats are college property, y’know?”

A sailor threw a thick pack of nautical charts bundled up in twine down to the pirate-lady. She, in turn, threw them to Grog.

“Charted the far rim. Got eighty nautical miles farther than before. Cartography school should be able to spend a month updating the official charts.”

The flood and storm surge had inundated the port. The port authority building was still underwater! Skott got the impression that these boats were supposed to stay well away from shore and bring their crews to the dock by smaller rowboats.

“I’ll bring it right to the school of cartography,” Grog said. “Thank you, Sara. Did you make it to the edge?”

“Aye.” Sara nodded. “It’s as the old stories say. Big waterfall, down to nothing.”

A murmur went out over the crowd assembled there at the dock.

Sara the pirate-looking lady scanned the crowd, then homed in on the tallest human.

“I recognize you from the history books,” Sara said. “Aye, that’s Skott of Omaha, isn’t it?”

Grog and Sara approached.

“You have it right,” said Grog.

Sara reached out and bear-hugged Skott, who found himself lifted up into the air. Despite Sara’s mostly-human frame, she definitely had an underlying musculature of orc-strength.

“This is, well,” Grog whispered into Sara’s ear.

“You’re our dad, right?” Sara put Skott down. “Yeah, kind of guessed. Everyone said I looked practically human already. Didn’t take much to do the math, yeah?”

Skott looked his final daughter up and down. The whole family was here, though Lamora and the brothers were up in the tower still. His eyes scanned the patch covering approximately half her face.

“What happened to your eye?!” Skott asked, fussing profusely.

Could Lamora have really sent one of their children out onto the high seas? How unsafe!

Sara’s face scrunched up. “Huh? Oh, you mean this?”

With a flourish, Sara raised the patch up into her airline. Another blue-green eye stared back. Much like Lucy, Sara definitely had some key facial features from her dad. The more human complexion made it obvious. If it were Sara who wandered through the portal, maybe don some Bruins merch rather than pirate gear, and they’d immediately be considered just a normal father-daughter duo if they walked down the street.

“It’s so I can see belowdecks,” Sara said. “Now, I have relief supplies in the ship. Should be more than enough to keep the college stocked until the roads clear. Now, hey, where’s my mother?”

Sara sauntered off through the crowd to a hero’s welcome. Other sailors began to offload supplies onto the makeshift dockside. As Skott watched Sara leave, he couldn’t help but notice that Lucy appeared amidst the crowd, looking a little dour.

+++

Lamora was, as usual, busy with the political situation. The surprise return of supply-bearing ships helped avert a potential disaster.

That night, though, the family gathered for a meal. This was no stately dinner. The family was to have a small private meal purely amongst themselves.

No servants attended to the private banquet. Indeed, even the relatively stately dinners Lamora had to participate in along the route of her diplomatic tour. It was a definite change over that elvan banquet Skott had been invited to long ago.

After a brief, abortive attempt by Lucy to get Skott and Lamora to sit right next to each other, the logistics of the room and table won out. The parents would sit on either end of an oblong oval-shaped table. Sethset and Skottson sat on either end of Lamora, then Sara got a wide area of the table to herself. Lucy and Grog then sat at either end of Skott.

“So, Sara,” Skott said. “If I understand it, you were on an extended expedition across the sea?”
Food was a typical orc-feast heavy on meats and particularly viscous drinks. Sara poured out some more sweat-mead before continuing.

“Uh-huh.” Sara downed the mead. “Went to the very edge of the world.”

Skott leaned in. “Wait, the end of the world?”

“Yep.” Sara took a bite out of a big leg of some kind of dire-cow. “Found the waterfalls at the edge of the world. Currents made the existence of the edge fairly obvious for years. But we now have cartographic proof.”

Well, that proved something Skott suspected for some time. Aeirun was not, in fact, accessible from elsewhere in his quotidian universe of round planets and believable physics. The existence of magic clued him in, of course, but it was good to have confirmation. This was true, interdimensional travel.

“Well, this puts a damper on our foreign outreach,” Lamora said over a plate of some kind of particularly hardy vegetable. “There’s no further land to entreat to.”

“Just a few elvan settlements out along the banks,” Sara confirmed.

Grog had stopped eating his own meal—a bit of sirloin with a strange leafy green growing out of it—and pondered the implications.

“Hmmm. We should establish an outpost from the geology and hydrology schools,” he said eventually. “I fear the falls could erode the world away entirely, in time.”

That was a long-term threat. Nothing was going to erode Aeirun to dust on this night. The group began to eat, settling in as a family. Sara regaled the group with tales of the far-off lands and waterfall at the end of the world she’d encountered on her extended naval expedition. All the while, Lucy looked on with that same dour expression on her face.