He's bored.
He doesn't mind school, the teachers are nice, it just feels kind of pointless.
It doesn't help that the math problems are always so easy, and that the other students read along so slowly in class. And things feel kind of uncomfortable, too. Not sure what's going on.
Oh well. time to relax with a game.
A couple months pass.
Today's different. One of the eighth graders announced that he— that she's a girl now. Some of the other students made fun of her, but other students suck, he knows that already.
The more important discovery today is that apparently you can just decide to be a girl!?!?
He's gonna have to think about that.
A few weeks more pass.
He's not sure how he feels about being a boy, but he's starting to think he doesn't like it.
He doesn't really do most of his homework, but passes the tests in class. He argues with his parents about it a lot. It's just so frustrating, what's it even for?
It can't really just be to "get into a good school," can it?
Eh. It doesn't matter for now, he'll get back to it later.
That night, he talks to his parents about not liking being a boy, and wondering if he might like being a girl better.
They're confused, at first. Then shocked. He's ten, where's this coming from? Where were the signs?
But eventually they decide it can't hurt anything to try, so they suggest trying it out at home. They'll buy a couple skirts, and try using feminine pronouns at home and letting her wear those around the house, and if she still likes it when her birthday comes around then they'll talk to the school for her, and talk about names.
Her parents noticed how much she seems to like being a girl at home, so for her eleventh birthday they sit down with her and go through a bunch of baby name books together. She seems drawn to uncommon names, eventually settling on Sable, but her parents want something a bit more normal as well, so they give her Valerie as a middle name.
The rest of her gifts are some cute shirts and skirts, and some hair ties. Her parents sure know how to stick to a theme.
Telling her classmates is not going well.
Between Claire calling her a gross freak, Michael calling her a faggot, Joseph pulling her skirt, and the other kids laughing at her, today's honestly pretty terrible. She's managing to hold in her tears for now, but she's really not sure why she's still putting up with school.
She cries herself to sleep that night.
Her mom tries to talk her out of transitioning at breakfast the next morning, asking why she's trying to do something that exposes her to so much abuse, especially in the deep south where they live.
Sable huffs that she doesn't see the point of anything if she doesn't get to be herself while doing it, and if she doesn't have nice people she's doing it for. She stomps back up to her room and skips school that day.
Three months later, the other students haven't gotten any better.
Sable skips school every few weeks, and she regularly has screaming arguments with her parents about the homework she hasn't done and her lack of motivation. They want her to just buckle down.
Things finally come to a head one day, and she tearfully demands to know what the point of it all is.
The answer of "get good grades, eventually get into a good college, graduate with a good degree, and get a well-paying job," does not improve her state of mind.
That... really is all pointless. It's just an endless cycle of pointless work to get pointless rewards in the company of people who hate you for trying to be yourself. It's never actually going to be worthwhile, never going to mean anything to anyone. Something breaks inside her.
She screams. She sobs. She storms back up to her room, cries to herself for hours.
Eventually, in the early afternoon, she leaves the house unnoticed, catches a streetcar, heads down to walk along the river.
In the distance, washed up on the bank of the river near a bend, is a large piece of what appears to be some kind of driftwood, human-made once, but now water-worn and old.
Huh. Driftwood's often pretty. And it's kind of melancholy. Fits her mood.
She hops down from the ledge to the riverbank proper to take a closer look.
As she gets closer, the driftwood resolves into something that looks like it was torn off of a sailing ship in the midst of a terrible accident. It's a piece of a wall from somewhere on the ship, likely belowdecks, and the piece of wall is mostly surrounding a large wooden door, warped slightly from the water soaking through the wood. It smells slightly of salt and the ocean.
When she gets close enough, she can see the words "Be Sure" roughly scratched into the top of the doorframe, looking as though graffitied by a sailor with a sharp knife.
Oh it's pretty. She wishes she had a camera.
She steps closer, running her fingers across the carving. Hm, does it still open? She tries the door.
It will take some pulling, but the door will open.
The ancient wood seems to be covering the mouth of a small cave, there's a worn pathway that Sable could easily fit through at her current size, and there's faint daylight coming out of the other end of it. The air smells strongly salty, with a hint of seaweed and fish on the breeze.
Huh. That's.. not what should be behind this door. There should be the rocks of the riverbank, not a cave, and definitely not light and sea breeze. Oh she has to check this out.
Down into the cave she goes. It's even Sable-sized!
The tunnel is not short, but nor is it too long. The cave is nearly smooth, with dark rock, and somewhat but not perfectly round. The air continues to smell of brine as she makes her way through the passage, the sunlight at the other side getting brighter and brighter, the nuances of fish and seaweed and sunlight-on-sand growing stronger against the scent of salt.
Well. This definitely doesn't fit the normal rules of what she thought was possible, but she didn't like those rules very much anyway. She rushes faster through the cave, eager to see what's beyond.
She emerges from the other end of the tunnel about midway up a hill. The hill is rocky, with shrubs here and there, clinging to life as best they can. Beyond her, down the hill she can see where the hill flattens out into a sandy beach area and an ocean beyond, vast and wide and dark, the waves crashing onto the shore with a loud splash and the smell of seawater. Birds circle overhead, arguing with one another as they watch for something edible in the deep waters beyond.
Sable is very sure she's not in Kansas Louisiana anymore. There should not be an ocean less than a day's walk from New Orleans, and certainly not walking inland.
Hopefully this place is better than the meaningless garbage of school and grades.
She walks down the hill. It's pretty, here.
The hill gently flattens out into the beach. There are more plants as they get closer to the ground, though much of what she does see is lichen on the rocks when they're not slippery with seaweed.
The waves crashing onto the shore with regularity are tall. Definitely taller than she is, and they smell strongly of salt and seaweed.
It's low tide, and so there are some areas where the beach has not yet turned to sand, and there are small tide pools full of very small fish and little crabs, as well as some floating jellyfish and quite a few tentacled creatures, including squid and octopi.
"Octopi! And squid! Tentacles are so cool." She crouches down near a tide pool, grinning. "Hello, little sea creatures."
There are lots of small fish swimming around, nibbling at the plants growing against the rocks and the seaweed floating at the top of the pool. There's also a few shelled creatures, including some snails and hermit crabs, crawling around inside.
As she watches, a clump of rock up against the side of the pool snakes out a tentacle along the floor of the pool, grabs a sea snail, and pulls it close to it. The clump of rock becomes much more smooth and octopus-like as it uses another tentacle to pull the snail out of the shell, and move it into its mantle to eat. The fish near the previously nondescript clump of rock scatter, but are unable to leave the pool to escape -- but the octopus seems happy enough with its current meal.
"I'll leave you to your meal," she says as she stands with a smile. It's kinda tempting to see what it feels like to get hit with a wave bigger than she is, but she'd rather not get smashed against the rocks. She walks further along the shore. It's so calming to watch the waves.
For about 10 minutes worth of walking, the beach is more or less the same as it was before. Then, in the distance, she can see a green smudge of trees, growing up out of the water where the land meets the shore, and somewhat beyond the shore.
As she gets a bit closer she can see that they're strange-looking trees, with their leaves way up high and their trunks really more like branches, splitting apart and coming together almost like very thick roots before they meet the waterline. It's hard to see where one tree ends and another begins.
"Wow," she murmurs. Those trees look so different. She's never seen trees like this before. She keeps walking, examining them curiously as she goes, and then looking onward to what she'll find next along the shore.
Some part in the back of her mind has made a note of where the nearest fish-containing tide pool is, and where the trees are, in pursuit of dinner later if need be. Mostly, though, she keeps walking.
The closer she gets to them, the more she might notice that the smell of salt and fish is being cut through with another smell, somewhat reminiscent of rotten eggs. There is some kind of fruit on the trees, though. It's green, sprouting up out of a set of leaves almost like petals, about apple-sized. The fruits very well might be edible, but she'd need to try them and see.
Where the trees meet the shore the shore curves inwards, and if she peers past them she can see a small bay up against the large hill that she earlier climbed down. There's a big hole in the hill, essentially a cave, that the water is in. The trees and land around the bay protect it from the waves, and so the water is placid and clear.
"Oooh."
She heads toward the bay. She paid enough attention in school that she recognizes the smell of sulfur, and it doesn't really bother her. The bay, though, looks cool. She wants a closer look.
The bay is visible now only because the slope of the hill has lessened significantly as she's walked around the edge of this island. She can go through the strange trees to get there (and deal with the sulfury smell), or she can try to clamber over some of the rocky hillside to go around the trees.
Clambering over the hillside would give her a better view, too. She heads toward the rocks, aiming to pause somewhere with a good view of the island as a whole.
At the top of the hillside is as good a place to look around as any, unless she'd like to go all the way to the top of the hill.
From what she can see of the island, the island is shaped somewhat like a misshapen circle, it's not all that large, perhaps an hour's walk to walk a full circuit of it, at least as far as she can see -- there might be more island on the other side of the hill, but the way things are shaped it's probably unlikely.
The only major disruption in the circular-ish shape of the island is the bay, which is another, smaller oval taken out of the island. The hill curves quite steeply down into the bay -- not a full cliff, but it doesn't look like it would be enjoyable to climb for someone who didn't enjoy that kind of hiking. The bay itself is nearly but not quite contained inside the island -- there's a small inlet to the rest of the ocean surrounding the island on all sides, flanked on either side by a sandbar with the unusual trees she'd seen before.
The bay itself is quite placid, with only the gentlest of ripples visible from her vantage point, though the water is dark despite the current sunlight.
At the side opposite to where Sable is currently standing, the waters of the bay lead to a round and large cave entrance. If there are other ways into whatever cave might be there, she can't see that from here.
The rest of island is rocky, with dots of green and gray and blue here and there to denote what little plantlife is able to grow here -- mostly lichen, but there are some occasional shrubs here and there.
There are no animals visible from this high up that she can see, though she knows that there are crabs and fish and cephalopods and jellyfish, among other things, in the tide pools.
It's a cute little island. She likes it. She wonders if there are more like it, out across the water.
Sable clambers down toward the bay — aiming for a smoother climb than the steep bit that overlooks the bay — and keeps her eye out for any sign of interesting wreckage, or civilization.
It's not too hard to climb down from where she is.
There's no sign of wreckage or civilization she can see here at the moment.
The inside of the bay has a beach much like the edge of the island does, with its own set of tide pools and creatures. The fish here are larger than their counterparts in the other tidepools and lazier, swimming slow circles around the boundary of their temporary fishtanks, nibbling on plant matter.
The waters of the bay are murky, once she's close enough to get a good look at them, full of silt and inky blackness. It's hard to tell if there's anything in there that might want to hurt her if she goes swimming.
She checks her pockets for her little folding pocketknife. (Skirts with pockets are such a good invention.) Yeah, she has her knife. Out it comes into her hand, and down into the water she goes. She won't be able to see well, between the murk and not wearing her glasses underwater, but it's still worth checking out.
Where she is, the water is shallow at first, but it deepens quickly, and it's not long before she'd need to be waist deep to be wading. The ground is loose underfoot, sand and mud kicking up almost immediately, and the deeper she goes, the more her feet almost feel like they're sliding under the sand and silt, getting dragged down by the mud into the depths of this admittedly small bay.
Getting stuck in the mud seems bad. Kind of scary actually. She yelps and tries to pull her feet free, and swim instead.
She's not deep enough to be stuck at the moment, and her feet pull free in a large cloud of mud, spreading through the already murky water.
As she swims out a little deeper she can see the shapes of fish and other sinuous creatures swimming about near the top of the water, flitting amongst the plants that grow floating in the bay. It's pretty peaceful here.
At least, until something long and slimy grabs her ankle and tries to pull her down and away from the shore.
Whatever is grabbing her ankle does not like being stabbed. It jerks away from her, nearly taking the knife that's been stabbed into it with it, but luckily Sable is gripping it well enough that it's not torn completely from her grasp.
Something big and shiny and dark breaks through the water, 20 feet or so away, looks around with a very large eye, sights on Sable, then dips back down into the water. If she looks closely, she might notice that the shape in the water is moving towards her.
Okay that is a recipe for a terrible experience. How about she books it back out of the water as fast as she possibly can? She does not expect this is the kinky friendly kind of tentacle monster. Flee!!!
Thankfully, she's close enough to shore that whatever the creature is, it can't follow her. A tentacle, leaking some kind of greenish-black liquid from where Sable stabbed it, reaches for her as she gets closer to shore, but misses. Several more tentacles join the search, and eventually the big eye comes up for another look. When it sights her, the tentacles withdraw, and the thing with its eye sinks beneath the surface of the bay.
Lesson learned: do not go in the water. There are excessively grabby things there, and she does not want to be dinner.
She shudders a bit, then shakes her head and keeps walking the shore. What else is there to see on this island?
There's still the grove of trees that she's mostly been avoiding. There's also another one on the other side, but unless she wants to go swimming again, she's not going to be able to get to it without going the other way around the island.
Other than things she's seen before, there's nothing else particularly new or interesting that she can see from where she is.
Well. Might as well check out the grove while she's on this side of the island. Trees are neat to see, and maybe she can figure out what smells of sulfur.
The trees are just as strange-looking and bifurcating when she gets closer to them, though it is easier to see where one tree begins and another ends.
The smell, as it transpires, is mostly coming from the soil around the trees, from where the leaves and other bits of tree have fallen off and are decomposing, being eaten by a variety of bugs and very small crabs and other creatures Sable may have trouble identifying. There's also fish nibbling on the leaves and petals that have fallen into the water.
Being closer to the trees also allows her to see that the fruits of the trees are about fist sized, coming out of leafy protrusions in various locations on the plant, where it's clear that flowers used to be, and she can see the evidence of the flowers in the occasional pink or white petal that hasn't been devoured by animal life yet. The fruits look thick and hard, and almost furry, with a spike coming out of their middle.
Neat little wetland area. Reminds her of Louisiana a bit. She doesn't recognize those fruits at all though. No idea if they're edible. She vaguely remembers some kind of routine for testing whether they're edible from a class at summer camp once, but that takes time. Fish will be a trustworthy food sooner, she figures.
She starts back around the island the slow way. Might as well see the rest of it, just in case there are any interesting surprises on unexplored shores.
As she retraces her steps (more or less, since she's taking the long way around), she sees plenty of tide pools, but nothing new, that she hasn't seen before. The tide pools are starting to get washed over by the waves, though -- the tide is coming back in. It might be a good idea if she walked a little more inland.
Up the shore she goes, then. It only takes one attempted grabbing by a tentacled predator for her to learn her lesson about the water here. Since the tide is coming in, probably she should take advantage of one of the few remaining tide pools to snag a fish. She'll figure out cooking it when she gets back to the bay, probably. Also, does she see the door, on her way around?
The cave entrance she came out of is still there. Whether the door lies beyond it will require a short expedition.
The fish in these pools are pretty small, about the size of a finger. It may take several of them to be a meal. Also, she may need to determine how to make a fire, to cook said fish.
She kneels down by a pool, gathers the front of her skirt into her left hand, and uses her right to scoop a meal-sized number of fish in. Then on she walks. Once she's sure she's looped the whole shore, she'll check the cave to see if the door's there as a backup, in case she gets in over her head or something, and then either way she heads back to the bay to make her campfire there. If she spots some nice dry branches on the way, she grabs those too.
It's about a third away around the other side of the hill towards the other grove of trees that she spots it, when she's looking around for dry branches. Most of the way up the hill is something, made out of rickety wood. It's essentially destroyed, but it clearly wasn't washed up there in a storm -- it was put there, by someone, and time and weather has destroyed it. Whatever it was.
Oh that's interesting. She's so tempted to drop everything and explore the wooden mystery thing. What is it? But no, she should sort out a campfire first, before the fish she's collected go bad. She'll just make a (possibly temporary) campfire here to cook at so she can explore easily once she's fed. Okay, dry branches, where are you?
Further along the shoreline, and a little ways up the hill, she can see a bush that did not manage to thrive -- it's dead now, or nearly, but it grew to a reasonable size before it did. It won't make much of a fire on its own, but it might help to get one started.
There's not a ton of loose branches on this island, but there might be some near the trees. Those, being near to the shore, are probably soaked wet though.
A couple dried out shrubs will make enough fire to dry out some bigger branches from the trees, which will be enough to make a bigger fire that lasts longer. Okay. Maybe she should keep using this campfire longer than just this one meal, or maybe she should make a point to dry out an extra fire's worth of wood. Or something. She'll figure it out. Just get enough for a small fire, then as much as she can carry to dry out for later, and that'll do.
She does manage to find some branches floating in the bay or near the ocean shoreline, once she makes it closer to the unusual trees. They are, more or less, mostly soaked through, though some have landed on the sandbar and are only a little wet.
The tide is definitely coming in now, though. There's not going to be a sandbar left for much longer.
Yep. Time to get the salvageable branches and then skedaddle up past the high tide line to set up her campfire. Definitely want to make sure she's well clear of the oncoming tide.
It doesn't take too long to get a fire going. She shaves some little chips and flakes off the dry bush branches, gets 'em down really fine, then sparks with her striker to get them lit. Blow, add more, blow, add bigger things, blow, etc. Eventually she's got an actual proper fire going.
At that point, she spikes all the fish onto the ends of a couple particularly straight-looking sticks that she sharpens the ends of (these can be wet, it's even better if they are), and she'll roast some tiny fish over the fire. Shouldn't take long. Probably when the scales are kinda charred then the insides are cooked, especially if she holds 'em a bit high.
They certainly seem to be cooked, as far as she knows. They taste like unseasoned fish. There's a lot of small bones which get in the way of eating them, but they do taste like food, at least.
Wooo. Okay. Okay. She knows how to feed herself out here. That's progress. Next stop, exploring the weird wooden thing. Up the hill she goes to take a look.
It looks to be a very old wooden hut, built as best as it could be out of random pieces of driftwood, nails, and some straw and sticks. It wasn't put together very well, which is why it collapsed at some point in time.
Huh. If it's fixable, it could be a pretty great head start toward shelter? She's never done anything this big before though, so that might be a challenge.
She spends the next several minutes looking the structure over, trying to see if there are easy spots to fix it by reusing nails and using a rock in place of a hammer. This may be troublesome, however, on account of the fact that she's twelve.
Being twelve would certainly make it difficult to reconstruct with tools she finds herself. However, one of the first thing she notices when looking it over and moving parts of it around is a skeleton, clearly human, wearing the threads of clothing, on the rotten wooden floor of what remains of the hut. It's crushed underneath the roof and walls of the hut. It's unclear whether or not they were already dead when the walls came down, or if the walls coming down was what killed him.
That's... very very concerning. She's maybe not going to stay in there for shelter. If all else fails, the cave she came through would make pretty solid shelter, and probably lots more stable.
She'll finish searching it, though. Might be stuff to use. Or learn.
And having the skeleton around is kind of a fun kind of creepy, just suggestive of danger is all.
When she moves more things out of the way, she'll find that there's another cave entrance hidden under the place where the skeleton was lying down. There's a rusted latch that might imply how the occupant of this hut used to access the cave underneath the hut.
Okay that looks like a pretty interesting reason why this previous person would've set up their shelter here. Sorry, skelefriend, you're gonna have to get out of the way. She's way too curious about what's down in this cave.
The passageway is very dark, and when she rounds a corner and then another, and suddenly, everything is pitch black.
Or is it? Without the light of the outdoors, she can see the faint, faint light of something glowing on the damp ceiling and walls -- some lichen, growing and glowing, ever-so-faintly.
Okay. She'll give it a moment, take some time for her eyes to adjust. Maybe they'll adjust enough that she'll be able to see in the lichen's glow, maybe not. Only way to find out is to wait, look around, and don't move until she's sure one way or another.
Her eyes adjust.
It's still very very dark in there, but she can see faint outlines or rocks and the passage forward, the greenish light reflecting off of the facets of the roughly worn rock facets along the way.
She sure wishes she had a flashlight. She also wishes she knew how to make workable torches. Instead, she'll just she'll explore down the passage very slowly and carefully, making as much use of the faint light as she can.
The passage curves gently rightwards and downwards, the feeling of wet getting stronger and the prevalence of the glowing lichen increasing the deeper she goes.
And then she rounds a corner and there's suddenly there's a glow of reflected sunlight as reflected off of not-quite-still water, lighting up a medium sized cavern, complete with stalactites covered in lichen, stalagmites jutting up out of the floor, a cave exit where the sunlight is peeking through, and tied to the rocks near where Sable emerged from the passage, a sailing ship.
Her sleek hull is weathered, most of the paint long since peeled off. Her sails hang limp, rigged fore-and-aft to her two masts, dotted with holes and rips. Her lines are tattered and frayed with age. Rusted cannons are just visible inside her flanks. Fading letters at the stern identify her as Maya. A beautifully-carved figurehead decorates the bow, though her expression is one of terror.
A worn, rickety gangplank bridges the gap between the deck and the shore.
Oh.
Sable's never seen a ship like this before, but her heart skips a beat. A chill runs over her body, and her breath catches in her throat.
She finds herself walking closer, even before she makes the decision.
This ship is beautiful, and she needs care, and she needs repairs, and most of all she needs a crew. Sable just knows somehow, deep in her bones, that ships need crews and need love.
She's never considered life on a ship, but the image of leaning over the railing as the waves rush past suddenly captivates her.
She walks carefully up the gangplank, crosses the deck, and rests her hands on the foremast.
"You're all alone, aren't you? No crew left," she murmurs, tears welling up in her eyes. "That person up there, in the hut, were they the last one? I wonder what happened. They clearly cared about you, if they were guarding you to the—", she sniffles, "—the end like that."
The ship creaks faintly, probably from the pressure of the tide pushing her against the rocks.
Sable leans against the mast. She liked sailing at summer camp. She'll probably like it here. She nods to herself, sniffles again, and speaks. "I'll be your crew. If you'll have me. I'll patch your sails, if I can find the cloth, and I'll replace your lines, and we'll sail to a shipyard, so they can help you with the things I can't do."
The old ship seems to settle somehow, the wooden sound softer than a creak, closer to a rustle, like old tension relaxing after holding out for ages.
Sable nods to herself. Okay, first thing to do is see what she's got to work with. She starts carefully exploring the ship, running her fingertips gently along the ancient wood whenever she can.
The top deck has little to find, nothing more than a steering wheel that presumably controls the rudder, a small boat with oars ready to be placed in the water if need be, and plenty of rigging that leads up the masts, though climbing those may seem a bit of a dangerous endeavour. There is a wide rope ladder leading belowdecks that seems in good enough shape for her to climb down it, though, if she so chooses.
Hmm. Down she goes then. She really wishes she had a flashlight, but oh well. She'll cope — mostly by going slowly.
There's a little bit of light from the cannon portholes one deck down, which is enough for her to see that the rope ladder descends even further than one deck, though the deck below her has no such cannons and is actually mostly below waterline, and so it is even darker there. This deck, at least what she can see from the ladder, is at least partly used for cannon-related storage: plies of heavy metal balls lay in piles against the sides of the ship, and there are sealed barrels that very well might contain gunpowder, though they could also contain any matter of other things.
There are several sailcloth curtains segmenting this deck, though the sailcloth is frayed and it's not hard for sable to see further barrels and cannonballs through the holes, along with some hammocks that are barely holding together in the sections.
She'll have to check the barrels. Any and all decks below this will just be way too dark to explore unless something on this deck turns into a light source. Can the barrels be opened safely, without damaging the ability to reseal them?
As it transpires, some of the barrels are already open! None of the sealed barrels can be opened easily in any way that Sable can determine unless she's very familiar with how barrels work, but there are in fact a number of already opened barrels on this deck.
Most are empty, some smelling of old fish or salt in a very different manner than the sea, and none in fact seem to have gunpowder in them, but one is half-full of a very dark substance that looks viscous and extremely sticky.
Sable pauses at the barrel of sticky, tilting her head. "Huh."
Sticky stuff? On a ship? Maybe some kind of... finish or sealant or something? What would they use...
"Tar!"
Tar is made from oil and it burns she can make torches! Assuming torches can just be a wad of rags on the end of a stick and dipped in tar. Maybe soaked? She'll figure it out.
Okay, back up the stairs, go get a stick, then hurry back down and tear or cut a big strip off one of the most frayed bits of hanging sailcloth.
Now does she tie and dip or dip then tie? If she dips first then there's tar — fuel — all through the wrap, but that'll make tying messier? She doesn't wanna get tar on her hands. Maybe if she dips the middle and leaves the ends out she can just hold onto those? That's worth a try.
Into the tar goes the strip, then it gets wrapped around the end of the stick, back and forth, starting at the middle. Finally she ties it off, and holds it over the barrel for a bit to drip away any excess tar.
The tar is very sticky, and she ends up with it on her hands and anywhere else she puts her hands afterwards, unless she spends some effort to try and clean them, but after all this effort she ends up with something that looks like a torch, and will probably work as a torch.
Ick. Gross. She has got to find a way to do this without getting sticky next time. For now she'll just use another scrap of sailcloth and maybe the water in the shallows to wash her hands, vigilant against any sign of tentacles while she does.
Good. Once she's got her hands clean, she'll light her torch and explore the first lower deck more thoroughly, and then descend further below to do the same.
The first lower deck is much easier to see in the flickering orange light of the torch, even if it smells somewhat strange and plasticky-sweet and unpleasant. Several other barrels are opened on that deck -- most are completely empty, or have naught but crumbs of some kind of food in them, but a few have supplies like rope and sailcloth and tar. Some of the others are sealed tight with no clear way to open them.
There are also fraying hammocks strung here, one or two or three or four to a section, the sections clearly delineated by the fraying sailcloth separating the sections. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how the sections are laid out, but they were clearly intended to separate areas from one another, possibly for privacy -- though it's also clear than anyone could have easily pushed them aside if they so wished.
Some of the areas are using still-sealed barrels as tables of some kind. There's dice with symbols she doesn't recognize and a deck of faded-to-unreadability cards in one room, and another has dozens of little carved figurines of animals and sea creatures, laid out in a menagerie, made of bits of wood or ivory. Everything is covered with a thick layer of dust that has gone undisturbed for quite some time.
Near the back of the ship is a door, a closed door, that likely leads into further rooms. The door is slightly ajar, but not open enough for Sable to see through without opening it.
Wow. Lot of supplies. And clearly people lived here. A whole crew had a life on this deck. She wonders what they were like. They made art, and played games. Did they tell stories? Did they have songs?
She also makes a mental note of where things are so she can get supplies if she needs them.
Gosh. Who would abandon such a lovely ship as this?
She makes her way back toward that door, and opens it to look inside.
The door opens on a small room with a large sailcloth curtain on either side, leaving naught but a small hallway towards another door in the back. On each side of the room, once shrouded by curtains that can do little to hide anymore, is a small bed, the mattresses lumpy and torn, the straw filling spilled out onto the floor. The areas each have their own small table, one that was once clearly kept neat and clean and tidy with naught but a kerosene lamp and a small stack of books atop it, though time has covered it with dust, and the books do not look readable anymore. The table on the other side is covered with assorted knick-knacks and small objects, strewn about haphazardly. They, too, are covered with the dust and detritus of age and time.
Wow. Officers maybe? It's really neat to see all this. She wishes she could have known these people.
Also, if would be nice if she knew where some kerosene was. That lamp would be so handy right now. Oh well.
After a few minutes perusing the knickknacks and imagining how the officers lived, she heads toward the last door at the back.
This door leads to a large-ish room, with once-tasteful sea-green wallpaper that has been ragged and worn down to strips and waterlogged curling pieces by time and mist. The edges of the room have detailed moulding, with flecks of gold paint that catch the flickering torchlight as Sable stands looking. The portholes in the room are also surrounded by the same sort of detailed gold-painted moulding. The room was clearly intended to be unusually beautiful once, or at least unusually beautiful for being on a ship of sail.
The room contains a sizeable desk, which has on it a kerosene lamp, cracked and dusty but looks like it still might work. The desk has a chair sat at it, and a spot for an inkwell, though the inkwell and any quills or any papers are missing. Instead, the shelves to the right contain several tubes wrapped in a slick fabric clearly designed to keep out water. The desk has a couple of drawers, and a chair is sat at it while two other are in places in the room such that all three could be turned towards one another for a conversation, if such a conversation was desired.
At the far end of the room is another door.
"Oh," she sighs out, delighted. "Your captain must've loved you."
She caresses the desk and a wall gently. "I wonder why they stopped here with you."
With a brief shake, Sable checks the lamp to see if there's any kerosene left in it, before moving on to the drawers.
The lamp has long since run dry. There may be more kerosene somewhere, but if so, Sable hasn't passed it, yet.
The desk and drawers are made of a dark wood that Sable is unfamiliar with. It's quite solid, but time and water has warped it, and so the drawers stick and are difficult to open, but they give way to being jiggled and some physical force, though they don't always open all the way. Inside she finds: half a dozen quills, some bottles of ink, pieces of paper with the writing on them unreadable due to the ink slowly spreading across the papers, a stack of paper that has not yet been using for writing (though is quite damp and not usable in its current state), several brass-and-glass instruments that look like they're the sort of things navigators should have (but she's not able to determine what they are or how they work), and other random bits and bobs of glass and dark wood and brass (gears, lenses, screws and tubes and things Sable cannot even categorize), some of which have been partly combined to do... something, though Sable has no way of telling what.
"Ooooh. Your captain liked to tinker with stuff, huh?"
She's so curious what the instruments do, and the other unexplained mechanisms as well. Those will have to be saved for later, though. She carefully closes the drawers again, then makes her way to the unopened door to see what's inside. She's not really sure why she's talking to the ship. Ships don't talk back, so...
Eh. It's not like anyone's here to make fun of her.
Through the door is a room as large as the last, slightly better lit if only from the extra portholes at the rear of the ship (though that matters little, given just how was the water-reflected cave light is compared to her flickering torch).
At the far end of the room is a bed, as large and lavish as can be gotten away with on such a vessel; taking up most of the back half of the room and made of hard wood that's held up through its long lonely stay here in the damp cave, its posters carved with abstract scrollwork still standing proud and tall.
The rest of the bed, however, has not lasted nearly so well. The mattress was clearly knifed open at some point, its soft down plundered for some other use, and what sheets and canopy remain have been unraveled and warped by time and damp, giving off a slightly unpleasant smell of age and mildew.
"Oh wow. This was lovely. The mattress needs to be replaced, clearly, but goodness..."
Why would someone need a bed that large? Sure grown-ups are bigger, but...
Oh.
She blushes, and then looks around the rest of the room to distract herself a bit.
Besides the bed, there's a small bedside table, and a large wardrobe in the opposite corner of the room, complete with a small chest of drawers underneath. To her left is a small folding table, partly collapsed, and a couple of chairs, upholstered in a fabric that might have been a pale sea green once but is now water-stained and faded beyond recognition. They might have been comfortable once, but they look lumpy and misshapen now, even in the flickering torchlight.