Seeking more friends...

[zeemverse.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone... :)

I'm just two livejournal friends away from updating my pirate project, avepasifika, and I have time today to work on it... so if you've nothing to do, I'd invite you to come read. (And friend!)

Ave Pasifika is friend-funded, in that its updates are dependent on how many friends the livejournal has. It's definitely adults only and may contain triggers of various kinds.



One Sunday morning, five years ago, Tangaroa Takuira runs away from Jesus.

It’s a fashion thing, mainly; Jesus is like seriously kitch right now, up there with the burka and halal meat and the other, multifarious accoutrements of organised religion. Jesus (and specifically, Jesus-as-preached-by-Takuira-Senior) is totally cramping Takuira’s style. So Takuira portions out his wardrobe into two tartan suitcases, one for summer, one for winter, climbs out his bedroom window and heads for the ocean.

He’s heard that you miss home when you leave it but he doesn’t, not at all, and by the time he reaches the beach he’s practically forgotten his Life-Before and is ready for his Life-After.

He walks through the airships parked haphazardly on the sand, their black carapaces shining under the rising sun like great beetles. Pirates stand in their shade, smoking, talking, bartering contraband for fat stacks of papercredits. Sometimes-smirking at the fear they spy in the faces of locals who pass by above, on the metal promenade that runs parallel to the coastline.

Few dare walk through the place the pirates lay anchor, but Takuira isn’t afraid of pirates. Takuira isn’t afraid of much, really; not of pirates, not of Jesus-kitch and not of the eternal damnation his father promises at each Sunday sermon. Takuira is young; so young; he lives like he’s bulletproof.

The pirates watch Takuira curiously—the six-foot-six teenager, so wide at the shoulders his school friends nicknamed him Ox—and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Takuira finds a ship he likes, a long-nosed craft with yellow lightning painted down the side and engines that spin like the basket of a washing machine. He dumps his suitcases and presses his hand to the shiny blades of its propellers and feels an answering rumble tremble up to meet his fingers, the airship purring at him like a cat.

“You want a job, brer?”

A woman is at his side—a pirate-ess? From the colour of her hair he guesses she’s from Indi’O or maybe the high Atlantic; it’s flaxen and braided to her waist. Her skin’s gone wrinkled dun-brown from the sun. From the sun and life. Takuira is seventeen and he hungers for what she’s got and what she’s had and that purring lightning ship that rubs against the crease of his lifeline like it wants in.

Takuira says, “Yeah. That’d be pretty cool.”

The brown woman and her long-nosed craft take Takuira to international airspace.

He’s never gone back.