X. Leafed Behind Part I.

"D’anna! Quit eating that crap!" Majel yelled, banging on the bamboo bars of her cage like a mental asylum patient.

"That's not fair," D'anna whined. "Just because you didn't want any food doesn't mean that I should starve, too!"

“You’re eating garlic butter by the spoonful! You're just making yourself taste better, you prat!" the cat hissed. Her eyes widened in sudden horror. “Oh gods, how do a bunch of castaways make butter in the first place?!"

"I dunno. I guess they'd just churn milk for a while," D'anna said between bites, "that's how I used to do it back at the farm..."

Majel's eyebrows furrowed in frustration. "Yes, and where does milk come from?"

"Cows, usually."

"And if they had cows, don’t you think they would’ve eaten them before resorting to cannibalism?"

D'anna paused for a moment. "Well, they could've used goat milk! Or sheep milk, even!"

"Cows, goats, sheep—D'anna, any animal on this island has already been eaten! That's why they started eating each other!"

D'anna stopped chewing and looked down at her wooden bowl of butter. "Do you think I should make myself vomit, then?"

"If you could, then yeah, probably..."

D'anna heaved for a couple seconds before her eyes lit up. "Ooh! Do you think that this would make me taste like vomit, then? That way, they wouldn't wanna—"

"Hey," one of the cannibalistic Navymen shouted. He banged his spear against D'anna's cage. "Can you two please shut the hell up? You're ruinin' me appetite!"

The elf leaned back in her cage. "Huh…”

Majel leaned forward quizzically. "What do you mean ‘huh’?"

D’anna shrugged. “He's got a point..."

"He has a point? One of the people who plan to kill, cook, and then eat us? That guy?"

"Look, I'm just saying that we shouldn't try to ruin their appetites! If I have to be eaten, then I'd hate to be wasted on someone who wasn't all that hungry in the first place. I'd wanna be savored, you know? Best case scenario."

Majel took a deep breath that turned halfway into a sigh. "You're a bastard. Hand me the butter."

"Careful not to spill it," D'anna squirmed as she titled the bowl between the bars, "there's not a whole lot left."

"It'd be fine, I could lick the sides clean or something..." Majel grunted, straining to take the bowl. Once she had it, she sat back down in her cage and began to slurp up the melting fat. "Not the first time I... sluuuurp... had sloppy seconds..."

"Hey!" the navyman yelled, banging his spear against Majel’s cage. "Appetite!" 

Doctor Picardo, a surgeon from Saint Khan's, had hired the Rogers to retrieve a very rare plant for him, the Coaca. According to the doctor, it served many different purposes to the natives of Zsa-Gabor. They used its seeds for ingredients, along with other things like candles and makeup. Its wood comprised most of the Zsa-Gaborian's infrastructure, a delightful shade of reddish-brown. But Leonard was most interested in a substance found within the Coaca's leaves. It acted as a natural painkiller, according to an ancient Zsa-Gaborian journal he had acquired. (One of the few good things about living amongst pirates is that you can buy literature off them for very little. That is because most of them cannot read, thus, books have no value to them.) 

The substance could—apparently—withstand pain of an incredible threshold. One small dose, he theorized, was ten times more effective than his current anesthetic. (A whole lotta booze.)

Zsa-Gabor looked like your run-of-the-mill tropical island. There was a large mountain range in the distance, surrounded by miles of forest. Cain's boarding party was in the middle of the latter, scouring for any plant that resembled the Coaca.

Cain looked at the reference image and back to the plant. "Nay, too many branches! And the leaves be too small, as well..." he sighed, dismissing the uprooted sapling with a wave of a hand. His zombic companion gave a sad groan and dropped it.

Cain looked at the drawing again, this time really looking at it. He didn't want to spend all that time searching for the damn thing only to dig up something else completely.

Initially, Cain had tried to use the zombies like bloodhounds. He figured he could give ‘em a whiff of the plant and have them track down the source. Things fell apart, however, when he realized that he had no plant for them to smell and that none of them had a nose.

Basked in the orange hue of the setting sun, Cain sighed and placed his hands on his hips. "It be gettin' dark soon, we ougtha get back to the Wound and check in with tha others. I don't feel comfortable leavin' D'anna alone for this long, especially at night..."

"Bwaaarghhh..." one of the zombies groaned.

"Exactly! And Majel'd probably be too shit-faced ta stop anythin' before it happens..."

"Grawh-bwah-graaa..." the other one moaned.

"That's my ex-wife ye be talkin' about!" Cain yelled, slapping him in the back of the head. He folded the sketch and shoved it into his pouch. "Now c'mon, we be losin' light."

As he started to make his way back to the Wound, the skeleton looked over his shoulder. "And in tha future, let's keep it in our pants, Thompson..." 

“Yaaagh…”

Majel sighed. Being trapped in a suspended cage for hours was more dull than she ever thought possible. She and D'anna had ran out of conversational topics some time ago. (As well as garlic butter.) There was only long stretches of silence now—interrupted by the occasional, unsuccessful attempt to re-engage talks.

She had counted all sixty-eight sticks of bamboo used to build her cage. D'anna's used sixty-seven. She noticed that there were five different types of trees that surrounded them: palms, tall broccoli-looking trees, willows, and small ones that grew nuts or fruit or... something.

Down below, she noticed a couple of the castaways crafting a rotisserie out of sticks. A wooden crank would spin a long piece of bamboo—which would be skewering either her or D'anna. One of Navymen lit a fire underneath a cauldron and poured a tray of vegetables inside. The smoke rose in the air as the soup started to boil. The cook tasted a spoonful of it and decided that it needed some protein...

"The HMS Delight, huh?" Cain chuckled, retracting his spyglass. Searching for the plant had led him to the opposite shore of Zsa-Gabor, where there was a shipwrecked galleon tipped to its side. Although, it could barley be classified as a ship anymore. It was as if some leviathan chewed away half the vessel—tearing its sails into pieces, shattering all of its windows, and snapping its three masts into half.

“I would call ‘em ‘poor devils,’ but... those uniform wearin’ warmongers had it comin'..." the skeleton smiled. He definitely would have been hard imagining the torment those Navymen must’ve been through—had he any sort of flesh anymore.

He was about to loot the ship (and its potentially dead crewmates) before he noticed grey clouds in the horizon. They were moving... faster than clouds usually do. He traced their path with his eye sockets—which led right into the middle of the jungle. His face contorted with rage when he realized it had to be smoke.

"Godsdammit! I knew those sausages were gonna screw things up one way or the other!" he yelled.

"We be lookin' for a plant and what do they do? Start a goddamn forest fire!" he growled as he started to run towards it. His mates tried their best to keep up, but zombies could only shamble so fast.