herotypical | voice + action ✪ there must be some way to bring the hero home

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voice + action ✪ there must be some way to bring the hero home

[ after a week of agonizing combat, buffy summers returns home with only exhaustion on her mind. despite all the excitement and crisis, there's little left to do other than collapse onto her bed and fall into a sleep fit for a weary, worn-out soul. morning sees her feeling no less -- shudder -- zombieish. the horror of the last week is bone-and-marrow deep and has yet to fully make itself known in her system. the slayer is running on auxillery humanity, stringing herself along from second to second until she can find a friendly face. find willow and...

and all she finds is an empty room. an empty closet. empty drawers. her best friend is gone. deported while she wasn't even looking. come the afternoon, after she's gotten the first onslaught of emotions out of her system, buffy sits alone on the empty bed. she addresses her journal: ]

Willow and I have this game we like to play. Willow Rosenberg. She was in town...but now she's not. [ a pause allows buffy to catch her breath. to stay strong. ] We call it 'Anywhere But Here' -- self-explanatory, really. Pick a fantasty-elsewhere to be and a fantasy-someone to share it with. I'm not talking about the obvious ones: home or family or anything even remotely whiffing of responsibility. I'm talking about fun. I'm talking about pure escapism. I'm talking Daniel Craig on the beach or Amy Yip at the waterpark.

I'll go first. Show you how it's done. [ but which escape route from reality should she take? ] The '88 Winter Olympics. The Saddledome. Calgary, of all places. Brian Boitano is taking the time to personally skate me through his gold medal routine. Perhaps there's hot chocolate involved. I, being made entirely of my own imagination, copy each move perfectly.

Got it? Good. Because now it's your turn.

[ when her broken little tribute to an absent friend is finished, she'll be searching out her injured pirate (wherever he may be convalescing) and it's off to good spirits, where she can be found working a shift behind the bar. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Almost four, for myself. I had a year on him when he showed up.

Wow.

So this game; anywhere but here you play a lot then?

Me and Will did, yeah. Especially in high school. Because who wants to ever be there when they could be anywhere else?

I'll take your word on it. Pirate and all that, I didn't get any formal schooling. Such things tend to only be for rich or nobility. Sabo and Vivi don't seem to like it though.

The school part wasn't the worst. But the school-being-on-a-Hellmouth part?

Eh.

Hellmouth being where all the vampires come from, or something else?

More like the vampires are drawn to it.

That sounds unpleasant. So I guess that's why you had to move there, eh? What about Scotland?

Scotland was more about practicality. [ she waves her hand. ] But I'm guessing that -- in comparison -- you're more of a nomadic kinda guy. Right? After all -- pirate.

A little. As far as most pirates go, I probably traveled a bit less than most of them, eh?

My Pops was a pirate emperor so we protected his islands and mostly did a lot of business traveling between them rather than trying to explore the whole world.

Pirate...emperor. See -- that's what I don't get. Pirate royalty. That's so backwards.

[Laughs.] Because you're thinking it's like other forms of royalty. Pirates can't be ordered about by anyone they don't respect. That's why mutinies are rare, because if you don't respect a captain, he can't really make you join his crew in the first place, eh?

[So hypothetically you could be really overly trusting as a captain and get a whole crew of Blackbeards, but that would be... odd as heck.]

"Pirate Emperor" was an honorary title that came about from the other people. Pops and the others didn't start off trying to be a pirate emperor or anything. They just got called that when they were so strong they'd carved out their own territories to defend. It's like the bounty names, you don't get to pick those either, the marines or whoever just decide to give one they think is clever and explains a little about how dangerous you are, eh?

Even Gol D. Roger didn't want to be called the Pirate King. Especially since they started calling him Gold Roger. He wasn't trying to be a pirate king, he was just trying to make it to the end of the world before he died, eh? But he did the impossible, so they started calling him that. Ultimate pirate and all that.

Sparrow's a Pirate Lord. [ she confesses. admits. explains. she's still fuzzy on how it works. ] And Liz's the king. But it's all very...

I'm not convinced they base any of it on respect. Not really. Not at the heart of things.

He's mentioned his father before.

Maybe not, but pirate respect can take on many forms. Even my father's enemies respected him as the world's strongest. They wanted him dead because of it, but it was still an odd form of respect, eh.

His father...

[ buffy has never met the man. not truly. not outside of shift shake-ups. but she felt as though she knew as much as she needed to know. ] It's not hereditary. I don't think. It's not like Jack's dad was the lord and he..

[ but does she know that for certain? not really. all she did know was: ] Teague. He...keeps the code.

Right.

We don't have so much of a code in my world. Traditions, you know, paying Davy Jones a tithe if you play Davy Back, things like that.

But most of the stuff everyone's expected to know we made up ourselves and enforced ourselves. [Points to the tattoo on his chest.] Like everyone knows not to mess with this....

[Shakes his head. Foodvalten already fell in his time, and the more the Straw Hats come back, the more he learns about the other islands falling.] Or rather, they used to.

....Davy Back?

[ she ignores all else and hones in on this. because jack had his own debt owed to davy jones.

once owed. ]

It's a game.

A pirate game. Usually if two opposing pirate crews want something, they're just going to fight over it. But when it's something like nakama, fighting is too risky, eh. So in Davy Back there are several rounds, and you play to win over crewmates.

And? How is it played? What are the rules? How do you win?

There's 1, 2, or 3 rule sets. You toss the coins in the sea to tell Davy Jones about the game, and that sets how many rounds there are.

The games vary, there's Captain Duel, Donut Races, Groggy Ring, Hit & Dead Ball -- which is like Dodgeball, pretty much anything so long as the two captains agree to it.

If a crew wins one of the challenge rounds, they can pick an opposing crewmate to join their side. If they don't want anyone from the other crew, they can choose to take the flag instead and it can never be raised again. Any lost team members can only be regained by more rounds of Davy Back Fight, and same for the flag.

That's it for overall rules. Each side can interfere or "cheat" and there might be some additional rules per round or game, but they might get broken anyway, eh. Generally though, the crews try not to get too out of hand otherwise it'll just devolve into a full-out fight and that would defeat the purpose.

How...civilized.

For pirates anyway.

No. I think that's pretty civilized by a lot of yardsticks. Not just the piratical ones.

You think so?

I always that it was just more something clever than civilized. And I've yet to meet a pirate who doesn't consider himself at least a little clever, eh.

And so what do you think of yourself, hm?

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