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], "pools": [], "description": "[i]King George, the biggest, baddest wolf in all the Three Worlds has got a big problem. No, it's not that he's dirt broke. No...it's not that the only bitch he's got is a bloodthirsty nympho. NO...It's not EVEN that he's about to be taken for the ride of his moderately short, likely truncated, life.\n\nThey say you should take a guy out to dinner before taking them over a barrel. \n\nWell, lucky for King, he's about to get a big helping of steaming hot meat!\n\n[s]Oh, and come into possession of an eldritch Underworld artifact, the likes of which will irreparably change the course of his destiny forever—[/s]\n\nWitness King and friends tackle lusty perils, delve drippy sex dungeons, and fell hung foes...some other time. Because right now you're about to see their very first (but equally lewd) adventure aboard...[b]THE ROYAL CHARGE![/b][/i]\n\nArtwork by [icon]Pux[/icon]!", "description_bbcode_parsed": "King George, the biggest, baddest wolf in all the Three Worlds has got a big problem. No, it's not that he's dirt broke. No...it's not that the only bitch he's got is a bloodthirsty nympho. NO...It's not EVEN that he's about to be taken for the ride of his moderately short, likely truncated, life.

They say you should take a guy out to dinner before taking them over a barrel.

Well, lucky for King, he's about to get a big helping of steaming hot meat!

Oh, and come into possession of an eldritch Underworld artifact, the likes of which will irreparably change the course of his destiny forever—

Witness King and friends tackle lusty perils, delve drippy sex dungeons, and fell hung foes...some other time. Because right now you're about to see their very first (but equally lewd) adventure aboard...THE ROYAL CHARGE!

Artwork by \r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Pux
\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t!", "writing": "[center]1[/center]\nThis wasn’t the first time somebody’d fucked King George half to death, and knowing he’d live to tell the tale wouldn’t’ve brightened his mood.\nWhat could he say? \nThat he, Smuggler Extraordinaire, pinnacle of lupine hunkiness, lover of all things vanilla-scented and feminine took an unfeminine cock farther up his ass than pigs took roasting spits?\nWell, that'd be the short version.\nKing wondered where it all went wrong, his world spinning on a carousel of fatigue. He fell into a speculative trance that sunk him into the cum-splattered ripples of time. \nSinking…\nSinking…\n\n[center]2[/center]\n“It’s sinking, bro!” \nSky and sea squeezed its blue hands around a scrawny, white horizon. The Royal Charge, a fishing boat that probably looked dredged out of a ship graveyard on its first voyage, bobbed along with Prince George balanced atop its deck’s handrail. The small fox leaned forward with nothing but his loose grip on a frayed boarding net preventing waters below from having him. He watched, blocking sunlight with his other hand, as the anonymous shadow of their fishing cage grew beneath the waves. His brother King tugged its rope wearing nothing but a strained grimace and his sweat-stained birthday suit. \n“I’ve got it,” he grunted. “Get your junk outta my face while I’m tryin’ to work. You stink!” \n“I’m wearing shorts, you can’t smell my junk. How come you get to strut around naked and I don’t, anyway? You stink up th’joint more than a buncha drunk skunks! I’m first mate, aren’t I? I say first mates get struttin’ privileges too if they’ve gotta smell your stale nuts all day.” \nKing’d discreetly sniffed himself during Prince’s rant. \n“And I’m captain,” he said, “And the captain says—” their submerged cage tugged back, nearly ripping the rope out of King’s now smoking hands, “—only he and any lovely bedmates he invites aboard are allowed to strut!” \nThe rope pulley above them groaned in rusted protest. King’s foot braced against the rail pushed Prince farther over the waves. \n“Hardly seems fair t’me.” \n“One day, young ward of the seas,” King intoned magnanimously. “You shall air out the family jewels too, when you’ve jewels worth airing.” \n“Family coppers, maybe.” \n“What was that?” \n“Oh nothing. I was just saying this’d be a lot easier with a real crew. One with lotsa big, sweaty, strong guys,” Prince said while swaying on one foot, nose inches above the tide. \n“This’d go a lot faster if you helped me instead of fantasizing about pirate gym bros, Mr. ‘First Mate’!” Thick cords bulged on King’s neck. Damp muscles ballooned from the strain of pulling against the sea. Or maybe an Atlantean was trying to steal the cage, steal their breakfast. Or five. Or twelve. Yeah, twelve. It’d take a dozen of those shrimpy bastards to beat him in a tug-o-war! \nSplintery creaks exploded all around them as old wood struggled with failing effort to stay in one piece. King’s smug grin plummeted. Their one and only pulley felt like it hung on by a toothpick’s grasp. \n“One of ‘em can have a sexy scar,” Prince said with airy indifference. “Maaaaybe a peg leg.”\nWait a second…what’d he need Prince’s help for? Didn’t he always say he was so slick with elbow grease he could drag a galleon across concrete? Wasn’t he the baddest lone wolf across all the Three Worlds? Wasn’t. He. King George?! \n“Yes! I AM!!!” \n“You are what—WHOA!” King’s sudden, jerky haul threw Prince off the railing, utter cockiness fueling him more than any second wind could ever hope to achieve without a few adrenaline shots to top it off. Their fishing cage soared on an eruption of waves, smashing through the rails and into King, whose avalanche of bulk would’ve turned Prince into a fox panini had he not rolled out of the way.\n“You okay?” Prince asked, making a token effort to tug one of the veiny logs King used for arms.\n“Yeah…shit, that really hurt…” \nThe George brothers paused, looked at one another, then at their successfully reeled cage. \n“Awesome!” Prince jumped with his hands to the sky, “All that muscle you got from jerkin’ off is finally payin’ off!” \nKing, forgetting his pain, jumped onto his feet, flexed, and posed for an imaginary camera at the same time. His gleaming sneer would’ve made the sun reach for its shades. “Damn right it is! What do you need sexy scars and peg legs for when you’ve got the strongest wolf ever for a big brother?” \nPrince squinted. “Are you sayin’ I should fantasize about you instead of pirate himbos? That’s kinda sus. You didn’t even say ‘no homo’...”\n“T-that’s not what I meant! And how is it sus to fantasize about me but A-OK for you to drool over some scurvied sailor’s jockstrap?” \n“So you waaaaant your little brother thinking dirty thoughts about you and no one else?” Prince’s sneer was a master forgery of King’s. “And I thought Panther was the jealous one.”\n“You little…!”\nTheir catch groaned in the cage. The brothers quit bickering long enough to squat around it.\n“What is he?” Prince asked, pointing through the heavy bars at their prey. \n“Edible. Dibs on the tail.” \n“You always get the tail!” \n“That’s cuz, and it brings me no pleasure whatsoever to remind you in moments like these,” King said in a small, honeyed voice with a stinger on its ass, “I’m the captain. Meaning: I always get first dibs. Ergo: I get the tail.” \n“The tail’s the best part and you know it!” \n“Duh. That’s why it’s mine.” \nTheir squinting prey turned away from the sky, the sun a glaring ball of unfamiliar heat that swallowed everything into its form blurring whiteness. He swallowed scorched air in big gulps, cooking his lungs, frying his gills. Most Atlanteans spent their first time above water in similar states of disorientation. Minus the cage in…most cases. The exceptions might’ve said their hosts had very similar conversations to the one happening on the Charge’s deck right now, if they hadn’t been cast out to sea from a chamber pot. Their prey squinted harder, eyes adjusting.\n“You may have a foot,” said the focusing blob of King George with the grand magnanimity of a curried don.\n“No way.” said the smaller blob, still too blurry to be Prince George and not a yellow smear on the sky’s canvas. “I want an arm at least.”\n “You’ll never finish it. One hand. Take it or leave it.” \n“Is this the Surfaceworld?” \nThe Georges quit arguing to watch their breakfast sitting up on his knees. \n“Above water you mean?” Prince asked, knowing it’s only rude to talk with food when it’s in your mouth. “Then yup, sure is! What are you by the way? Edible, right?” \n“Prince! Don’t scare th’kid. Of course he’s edible!” \n“Just makin’ sure.” \nThe boy grabbed the cage’s bars, his wet scales, gold jewelry, and the choppy tide competing to out-sparkle one another under the sun’s harsh spotlight. King, priding himself an expert of nautical lore, thought the boy was some kind of aquatic horse with a coiled tentacle for a tail. In other words: definitely edible.\n“Please, help me!” he cried, choked with desperation.\nKing pretended to scratch his scruffy chin to wipe his drool. “No use beggin’ for your life. Think of it this way, you Atlanteans eat each other all th’time right? All animals do. That’s life. It’s like a round…circle…thing or whatever.”\nPrince stared sidelong at him. “A round circle thing or whatever?”\n“It was th’first thing that came to mind, alright?” \n“Just take me far away from here,” the definitely edible fish boy persisted, tears flowing, “they’re after me. They’ll…they’ll…”\n“Great! You made him cry. Now we’re never gonna taste him.”\n“Who’s after you?” Prince asked, eyes widened, tail swaying, “A shark dude? Hungry whales? A killer jungle piranha tribe? And don’t worry ‘bout my brother. He thinks he’s a big bad wolf, but he’d never eat somebody while they’re crying.”\nKing opened and closed his mouth, undecided on whether to take offense to such a blatant attack on his wolfish pride or the insinuation that all wolves aspired toward badness. He did, but that wasn’t the point! “I might still eat you,” he hurriedly added, “Who knows? If I go long enough without food I might eat th’both of you!” \nThe boy wiped his tears with his forearm. “I know you won’t eat me, Mr. George.”\nKing’s ears splayed. Forget wind stripped from sails. He exploded like a whoopie cushion under a hydraulic press. \n“What’s a wolf?”\n“He is,” Prince said, now seated cross-legged. His big, bright eyes threw themselves in the ring with the boy’s scales and jewels and the sparkling sea. “But what are you? And who’s after you? Don’t forget that!” \n“I-I’m a seahorse,” the boy said, sunlight glinting off a particular piece of jewelry as he leaned back, an ornate choker like many slender, golden fingers weaving around one another, jealously clutching a prize hitherto hidden under the boy’s chin: the largest, real sapphire Prince’d ever seen. His eyes widened with blue-tinted sunlight reflected off of them. He blinked several times when the boy covered the dazzling gemstone with his hand. King, who’d also seen it, shook his head as though coming out of a sleepy daze. “Mercenaries attacked Father’s palace. Mother helped me escape.”\n“So you’re, like, a real prince? My name’s Prince by th—Hey!”\nKing dragged his brother into an impromptu squat-huddle, their backs turned to the confused seahorse. He squinted back at the boy before turning to his brother. “We’re throwin’ him back.” \n“Like Hell!” \n“Keep your voice down!” \n“Like Hell!” Prince whispered harshly. “Didn’t ya hear what he just said?” \n“Did you?” King hissed back. “Atlantean royal dispute. Underworld politics. We’re screwin’ up bad enough bein’ this far out on a scotch-taped heap like th’Charge without given’ undersea bandits a reason t’climb aboard.” \n“What happened to all that junk about my big brother bein’ the strongest guy sailin’ the seas?” \n“Nobody’s stronger than a spear through th’gut.” \nPrince’s frown became the sly, toothy grin that always made King wish their mother swallowed. “Let’s hold ‘em ransom.” \nKing’s perking ears betrayed his stony glare. \n“We keep him aboard, get t’dry land, then send out word that we’ve got an Atlantean prince for sale. But, if th’bad guys find us first, we hand him over at a discount. Underworld politics.” \nThe twin of Prince’s grin stretched across King’s face as ideas bubbled in the pot. Ocean bandits desperate enough to board a Surfaceworld ship might have things to trade for him. A waterlogged treasure chest full of gold, for instance. Or a slit throat in the dead of night, his better judgment argued. Nah. It’d be the cheaper option for them, sure, but it was more fun to imagine himself bathing in a swimming pool of doubloons. That King wore dozens of gold chains, rings on all his fingers and toes, his idiot laughter echoing in the gilded vault containing his pool. He had a bejeweled goblet of rum in one hand, Panther’s ass in the other, and she wore all the jewelry he could squeeze onto her—No. Scratch that. King didn’t want his treasure getting sticky. \nPrince snapped fingers in King’s face. \n“Ahem. Right. Excellent plan, First-Mate Prince,” he said in his deepest Captain’s voice yet. “But what about Panther?” \n“What about her?” \n“Y’kno how much she loves fish. She’d never let an Atlantean aboard unless he’s in th’freezer.” \n“Or in the pantry,” said a third voice. “We’d have t’sun dry th’meat first, tho.” \n“Right. Or…the…pantry…” \nThe Georges glanced to the left where Panther, naked and squatting beside them and glossier than spilled ink under a spotlight, said. Her tail swayed. Her smile exuded a predator’s confidence, pre-pounce. The seahorse boy was either awed by the appearance of a new mammal he’d never seen before, or didn’t know what it meant when someone licked their lips at him.\n“No!” King said, pulling her into the huddle the way one pinches the cleanest edge of a used napkin. “He’s our meal ticket. Don’t eat him.” \n“What good’s a ticket when th’meal’s right there?” she asked, a low, growling noise coming from somewhere other than her stomach. Felines. He might’ve said that aloud if he wanted a jugular shaped like peeled apple skins. \n“Don’t eat him,” he repeated. “That’s an order.” \n“Yes…Master,” she said in a black, rumbling groan that’d send storm watchers running for the shutters. King smiled. \n“But you’ll have to satiate my…other hunger instead.” \nHis smile wavered. “Save it for tonight,” he said steadily despite icy rivulets trickling down his spine. \n“But I’m hungry noooow. Who knows what’ll happen if someone doesn’t keep me occupied?” She said with an airy certainty that promised would happen involved her claws and the boy running into them over and over again. \nKing turned to Prince for help, instead finding empty air where he once sat. Hot-cold clawtips drummed the back of his neck, stabbing obscenities back down his throat. Every inch of his body trembled with a wild panic that trapped animals everywhere aspired to. Every inch except his treacherous cock. Several inches of it in fact, which throbbed to attention at the hope of something other than sweaty palms to play with. \nPrince waited until Panther’d dragged his mostly limp brother to his cabin before peeking from behind the cage. “Thanks for blocking me.”\n“No problem,” the seahorse boy said. “Do mammals not enjoy company with the opposite sex?” \n“We do. It’s th’crazy, nymphomaniac, bloodthirsty ones we guy mammals got beef with.\"\n“Makes sense. What’s beef?” \nPrince opened the cage and the boy stood. He struggled finding his land legs atop a deck that teetered on the whims of tides looking to coax a meal out of his turning belly. Prince stole another look at his sapphire while helping him step out of the cage. The plan was a ruse. Something to bribe his brother’s greed. But…seeing the gemstone again, the way light danced on its cut faces like rolling waves, the venal, conniving vulpine in him begged to go all in. They could hand him over for the choker. Or they could keep him in a cage and nobody would ever have to know. Or he could take the choker now then toss him overboard. He’d say the boy escaped. No one, not even King, would know he had it. Or…\nPrince slapped himself with both hands. “Y’kno,” he said with great effort to ignore the gemstone’s magnetic pull, “you’re awfully chill ‘bout all this. How do you know my bro really won’t eat you later?” \n“I just do,” the boy said, fingers wrapped around the sapphire. \n“What about his name? You just ‘knew’ that too?” \nThe boy didn’t answer. Prince shrugged, then snatched his other hand. “I’ll pry it outta ya later. Wanna see my comic books?” \n“W-what are those?” \n“You don’t got comics in the Underworld?! And I thought it was borin’ up here,” he said, tugging him along, “I never caught your name. Can you tell me that at least?” \n\"P-prince Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac XIII.” \n“Yeaaaah, let’s go with Tido. Hey, watch th’tail.” Sunlight continued its hot descent on the Royal Charge, unabated by a cloudless, blue sky. Prince tugged his new, mostly unrelenting, friend along, whose land legs might as well’ve been stilts with skates attached. No one stood by the taffrails when bubbles pocked the waves at the Charge’s tail, nor when shadows beneath the surface gave a slow pursuit.\n\n[center]3[/center]\nYour own Servant, Bodyguard, and Concubine Rolled into One! Answer the attached questionnaire, tear it out, scratch off the arcane locator seal with your bare finger, and leave it in a package with your lump sum payment in a discreet location. Then, look forward to your new slave within the next FORTY-EIGHT HOURS! EASY!\nThis was the Overworld magazine advert through which King inadvertently bought Panther three years ago. The ad depicted a fat pelican with greased hair, sunglasses, gold chains and piercings in places he’d’ve never dreamed of getting, flanked by voluptuous women of various animal species wearing nothing but heavy manacles and chains. All of them were predators. They surrounded the grinning bird, grinding against him on all sides, leering at him like he was the biggest stud on the Three Worlds or soon-to-be the biggest bird they’d ever roasted.\nYou checked boxes on the questionnaire, each with an assigned price, which tallied up to your mail order slave’s final cost. King’s was a number he couldn’t read nor pronounce if he could. He scratched off the seal, put the torn sheet in a bottle, then threw it overboard. He was bored. Fantasizing about his ideal woman passed time, and provided spank material. Plus, he didn’t pay. Or so he thought.\nHe hadn’t known the bottle he threw overboard was a genuine Four Era artifact. “Vintage, 2024”, its faded label read in a language King didn’t understand. The bottle alone would’ve bought him an entire harem of servant-bodyguard-concubines. The other three bottles from the waterlogged safe he’d fished out of the ocean read “Vintage, 1785”, \"Exquisitely Aged”, and “Classic Artisanal”. The booze gave him a hoity-toity buzz, the kind he’d’ve gotten the good glasses out for if he had any. He chugged each bottle with his pinky out. \nHe awoke later that night with Panther, then nineteen, snuggled atop him in his hammock, purring like a well oiled airship engine. He forgot the ad by then, but not his crippling fear of finding ambush predators and their fangs and claws on him in the dead of night. They didn’t send her with his change.\n“Where th’Hell did ya come from?!” He demanded with all the authority his face kissing the ground and his arm being twisted painfully around his back afforded him after their brief scuffle, hammock swaying overhead.\nPanther got off his back. She didn’t mind the missed punch. It didn’t hurt at all. “The sky,” she said. “Did I pass your test?”\nIt all came back. The Overworld magazine ad. The fat pelican. The nipple piercings.\n“Uh. Sure. What’s your name?” \nShe sat on her knees before him, tail swaying, all but her yellow eyes and white fangs shrouded in the darkness of his cabin. He didn’t need to see her to know she was beautiful—for a cat. He’d felt her silky, naked pelt on his scraggly fur. Even her voice had curves. “I’m a panther, Master.” \nKing might’ve asked if she meant leopard or jaguar, or clarified that that hadn’t been what he’d asked, if hearing a real, live, breathing, conscious female call him “Master” hadn’t ignited a white hot, dick-throbbing flame whose torch he never knew he had. It’d snuffed out all his questions. He never looked gift horses in the mouth, except to check for gold teeth.\nPornography meant everything to King. He needed it like otters needed water, or bears needed honey, or…or…some other animal associated with an iconic thing. Moths and flames, maybe. Lambs and slaughters? Anyway, he watched, read, dreamed, bought, sold, breathed, craved porn. He kept various stashes locked and hidden all over the Charge. Partly because Prince always got his favorite material sticky, but mainly because Panther hated competition.\nShe was everything decades of porn addiction told him he wanted, and more. So…so…SO much more. \nBadass. Dark. Dangerous. Mysterious. Seductive. Warrior Woman. Lustful. These were some of the marked checkboxes on King’s ad. Oh. And Insatiable.\nHe’d underlined Insatiable. \nWhy, oh why, did he underline Insatiable? \nRegret for having not checked Cooking or Cleaning settled after their first night sleeping together, in which very little actual sleep was had and yoga classes were deeply considered. At least then he’d have a sandwich and a made bed to lie in after getting his hips ground to sawdust. Not that he’d ever make her cook or clean for him. Panther was as much a member of his crew as Prince, however meager a crew he led. She got a cut of their smuggling profits (Master’s emergency fund), she had her own room (Master’s storage space), and had an equal say when discussing their next ventures (Master’s second vote). \nKing didn’t own slaves. Besides, you only owned someone like Panther insofar as her lust allowed: with a leash in her hand and a collar around your neck. \nA sandwich would’ve been great right about now. And some air freshener. His cabin reeked. Years of cohabitation turned it into a museum exhibit of splattered fluids, the hammock they currently “occupied” the dripping, jostling centerpiece. He got head, but never ahead of their messes. Sailing with Panther meant sailing with an expensive autopiloting system.\n“You aren’t finished already, Master?” Panther slammed her ass down on the sacks of broken glass King once called his lap, clapping cheeks stamping successive punctuation marks on her rapid pace. He seized, sharp breaths stolen from his lungs each time her clenched pussy crash landed on his hilt, sealing his eleven inches in an envelope of warmth and pain. He’d’ve had an easier time with a boa constrictor around his dick. \n“N-no way! I’m just gettin’ started!” King grabbed her bouncing tits the way a stubborn child grabs a shock machine’s metal bars again, refusing to admit defeat. Slippery warmth electrified his palms as their hips continued their lopsided tango, hers gyrating in ways only a steamroller would’ve called sensual, his flattening. Panther lived to please her Master’s every sexual desire. King never had the heart to say otherwise. She’d’ve snatched it out if it could. \nHer applauding ass smashed his weak thrusts into their strained hammock. Anyone with their ear pressed to the cabin’s thick door would’ve heard it all, heavy panting, sweaty grunts, and the occasional muffled cry for help. \n“I can go slower, if you’d like.” \n“D-don’t be, gnnngk! Don’t be…ghk!!!” Ugh…What…What was I saying?” \nTwo Panthers sneered down at him through a steamy heat haze. Blurry spots floated between them. King felt like he’d taken a downhill trip inside a rolling barrel. \n“Don’t be silly?” \n“Right. That.” \n“Shall I get you water, Master?” Panther, a young woman ten years his junior with ten times as many notches on her metaphorical belt, offered with a syrupy purr. His joints screeched their falsetto of agony alongside the ringing in his ears. Wolfish pride made him ignore all of it. A pride that meant to snatch the reins out of her smug little claws when it made him thrust forward with all his might to get on top of her. They fell off the hammock instead. Panther hit the dampened floor first, her body the fleshy trampoline for King’s plummeting muscles. His cock speared her pussy on impact, sending his throbbing lance so deep into her inferno that he thought it’d burn off. Pleasure overshadowed all pain from the fall, a sharp spark of it shot through his cock like the barrel of a photon rifle, up his spine, to his fingers and toes. His watered eyes went bobbing up in their sockets. His lips pursed to contain a drooly, tongue-lolled moan. \nAny fear wading in his ocean of bliss that he might’ve crushed her quickly drowned when four dark limbs unraveled out from under him to clutch his body like the legs of a dying spider. She squeezed. King’s arms and legs went stiff as parched boards. His eyes nearly fell out to hang on their nerves. He bit his lip in a futile effort to keep his insides from spilling out. \nThen her pussy squeezed too. He came.\nThere wasn’t any point in trying to pull out, even if his bones hadn’t become piles of gravel. Panther always got what she wanted. \n“Seventeen in one hour, Master,” Panther purred while his overworked nuts pumped any drop of semen they could find. Her greedy, smoldering pussy slurped his penis like a flattened straw. She made it her mission to have more wolf cum in her than King’s testicles could ever hope to emulate. \n“Is…that…good for you?” \nHer pink tongue slithered his mouth where they traded spit and moans atop drenched floorboards. Their arms and legs coiled together in a tangle of horny gropes and grinds. As much as she’d wrung him, as much as he felt some prime, essential part of his masculinity stripped by her wild dominance, King couldn’t resist the occasional rut into her velvety heat. Her loins repaid him with luscious bites around the axed stump that’d been the base of his cock. Surely he’d sated her. Seventeen times! Surely he’d earned his freedom? Or a ten minute break at least!\nTheir lips parted. Panther met his hopeful, haggard, dubiously sane grin with a smile sweeter than candy. \n“It’s a decent warmup,” she said.\n\n[center]4[/center]\nThe best part of chores was shirking them to read comics on the upper deck. Prince was eleven when Panther got dropped on his brother’s lap: old enough to know girls weren’t so gross after all, smart enough to’ve resigned himself to porno mags after listening to one of their sessions. At least she kept King busy. \nFading daylight winked down at them, the sky a darkened tableau like black ink dropped onto vivid watercolors. It’d taken Prince an hour to coax Tido to sit and read after lending him a pair of shorts, the worried boy still glancing at the water here and there. They’d need lanterns to continue reading on deck soon. \n“What’s this one?” Tido asked, squinting at his comic like a foreign map. Prince took it from him, flipped it over, then returned it. \n“That’s UltraFox #5,” Prince said, on his belly and flipping through another book while kicking his legs, “it’s the one where DivaLynx captures his crew and feeds ‘em to th’reality blender.” \n“That’s horrible!” \n“I know. Wicked.” \nTido put UltraFox #5 down, hesitated, then plucked another comic from one of the piles surrounding them. “What about…this one?”\n“That’s my favorite. DinoMech HyperDestroyer #1. It’s about these cyborg dinosaurs who blow up planets, kill all the men, and subjugate the women for heinous hyper-warp breeding experiments. Sometimes in that order. It’s awesome!” Prince mistook Tido’s silence for awe.\n“I never knew mammals led such tumultuous, minacious lives…Everything Father said about the dangers of the Surfaceworld pales in comparison to this history!” \n“History?” Prince asked. You didn’t learn words like tumultuous or minacious from reading comics, but they sounded bad. \n“Aren’t these paper tomes illustrated accounts of Surfaceworld events? Although, when you said we’d read comic books, I’d expected something more…” Tido’s snout wrinkled at a two-page spread smeared in enough red ink to revise an entire memoir, “comedic.”\nPrince, who believed in Santa Claus because the Three Worlds would’ve been a heck of a lot more interesting with an old man who broke into kids’ houses to eat their sugary offerings and leave gift-wrapped behavioral incentives than without, stopped kicking his legs. “I wish! I mean, things’d be pretty dangerous if we lived in an UltraFox comic, sure, but we’d be real pirates. In space! Not some low rung smugglers with a dinky ship.” \nTido sighed, relieved. He didn’t know what to think about a place where somebody’s head could explode like a mallet smashing a cherry pie while making noises like “KABLOOSH!” except how he could get as far away from it as possible. \n“What you have sounds rather pleasant,” he said. “Criminal acts aside, of course. A quiet life. Never having to look behind your back. Never wondering who might put a knife in it, who might betray you next…” He got on his back to watch what remained of the clouds, tinted the color of dying flames by the sinking sun. The metaphor would’ve flown over him. His closest approximation was seafoam stained sickly, neon colors by passing glow serpents, monsters that grew up to fifty feet long. Seafoam didn’t sprawl underwater the way clouds did in the sky. They didn’t captivate one’s mind for hours and hours with their changing shapes. Especially not with glow serpents around. They didn’t grow that long eating plankton. \n“Miss me with that,” Prince said, settling beside him. “You try swabbin’ th’deck t’night and tell me how pleasant it is.” \n“It can’t be that bad,” Tido said, his knowledge of Surfaceworld pirate lingo gleaned entirely from Atlantean storybooks. He knew what “shanties” were, and what “walking the plank” meant (whatever mammals found so harrowing about falling into still water), but whatever “swabbin’” was, the deck's graying complexion told him it’d missed its last few appointments.\n“You’re a real prince. Real princes don’t do chores. Servants wait on you hand ‘n foot! You get t’have wild parties ‘n huge parties just cuz ya feel like it.” \n“Princehood entails more studying and fewer ‘wild parties’ than you’d like,” Tido said. \n“Yeah? Well life ain’t so pleasant when ya gotta smell your bro’s sweaty nuts all day,” Prince countered.\nBoth boys stared at the bronzing clouds.\n“Count your blessings,” Tido said after a while, “I don’t have a family to throw parties with anymore, frivolous or otherwise.”\nPrince’s ears splayed back. “Hey, sorry dude. I didn’t mean it like that.”\nThe pulley groaned, its rope yanked taut. Prince dashed to the crank faster than Tido blinked, the one King’d been “too big ‘n strong” to need when pulling Tido out of the water. All of Prince’s jumping, pushing, pulling, and tugging on the unyielding, rusty lever amounted to sore palms and a rope that wouldn’t reel. “Tido, help me!” \n“W-what do you want me to do?” \n“Turn this crank with me, duh!” \nThe rope pulled, the crank’s lever jerked forward, nearly yanking Prince off his feet with it. Tido ran over to take the lever while Prince grabbed the rope. He pulled with all his feeble might, putting muscles gained from years of lifting silver spoons and etiquette tomes to their first test. They failed. He couldn’t tell if that shrill, fraying noise came from the rope or his arms. \nThe rope yanked viciously. Tido pitched all the way over the crank, Prince launched overboard with the rope and busted pulley like a blonde marble in a slingshot. There was a sharp cry, a glutinous splash, the silence. \n“Prince!” \nTido ran to the railing where he searched blackening waves, lapping the ship’s hull like a dinner plate, for Prince. He surfaced moments before Tido jumped after him. “Draw a line, quick!” he shouted. “There’s—” \nPrince went under. No, something pulled him under. Tido’s panicked mind didn’t comprehend what drawing a line on a sheet of paper would’ve done to help, but he didn’t have time to do anything else before scaly, yellow-clawed fingers steepled a fierce grip around his slender shoulder. His blood ran cold, but not as cold as his captor’s fanged grin.\n\n[center]5[/center]\n King shambled out of his cabin reeking of the feline sauntering behind him. The deck, wrapped in sunset’s chilly shroud, was warmed by sauna fumes billowing from the opened door behind them. You couldn’t smell the ocean’s salty aroma around the steaming pair. Only musk, and sweat, and jizz. Lots of jizz. \nA captain shouldn’t have to put up with thirst so momentous it’d take an entire reservoir to quench. A captain, a wolf captain, shouldn’t have to walk around smelling like a cat. A captain, a wolf captain, who smelled of cat, shouldn’t have to search a dark ship for a shower! \n“That damned kid didn’t put th’lanterns out…Bet he didn’t mop up either. Said I wanted th’deck clean enough t’eat off of,” King panted. It’d been a figure of speech before Panther hauled him away. Now he considered sniffing the floorboards for breadcrumbs. “I can’t make it to th’pantry. Fetch me somethin’ t’eat, wouldya? And a drink. Two drinks. Scratch that, bring th’whole barrel up.”\nPanther said nothing. \nKing straightened, ears perked. Darkness swallowed the ship in a panorama of long shadows. Crashing waves broke its perfect silence like the underside of an assassin’s hood. \nNo. A near perfect silence. \nLarge feet stomped below deck, where King kept his weapons and porn stash hidden. Panther led the way to the stairs, striding over floorboards that usually creaked louder than an old woman’s knees with feathery agility. King licked his lips, spread his arms for balance, willing himself to become as light when he took his first slow step. His big toe inched closer to the ground. Closer…closer…\nCRRRRRRRRRK…\n“Didja hear that?” a voice like someone armed to the teeth and looking for an excuse grunted below.\n“Check it out. There may be others hidin’ aboard after all.” \n“Panther, hide!” King hissed at the empty space she occupied a split second ago. He gaped at it, slack jawed. What’d felt to him like a million years had actually been the moment or two it took for the intruder to run upstairs.\nCreatures from black lagoons would’ve called him a two out of ten in the dark. His scales sheened the color of oil spills from what little choked daylight was left. His barbs on his fins were gruesome syringes of malice, and he had enough to cover a spooky hospital’s stock. The snarling Atlantean thug carried two spears: one with a sharp, jagged head for disemboweling whales, one hanging between his legs for disemboweling everyone else. King’s gaze hadn’t stopped its jealous descent when the immediately deadlier of the two spears pointed at his heart.\nKing didn’t name Panther “Panther”, it’d just stuck. You didn’t have to wonder why a girl named Panther might drop down from a mast, land on your shoulders, clutch your head in a vice grip of sweaty thighs, and if you did, as in the thug’s case, you didn’t for very long. \nA sound like an entire crowd cracking their knuckles shut everything up. \nThe fishman fell forward, not facedown, because his actual face now gawked at the sky. Panther landed beside him with all the noise of fallen cotton balls. \n“Oh,” King said. \n“Master, please hide.” \n“Uh.”\n“I’ll handle th’rest.” \nHe’d stuck his dick between those thighs. His head’d nestled between them more times than he could’ve counted with an abacus. He’d never hear twigs snap the same way again. \n“Er,” he said. \nPanther slinked downstairs. King stayed behind, cringing every time an unseen victim’s gasp, shout, gurgle, sometimes all three at once, flittered up to him. \nAll went quiet a minute later. He hadn’t budged an inch from his spot until now. \nRecumbent Atlanteans littered his path downstairs. Their heads were facing the right ways, but their weapons were sheathed everywhere but in their scabbards. He now knew to thoroughly scrutinize any bladed suicides whereever Panther lurked. The hall leading into the lower deck was splattered but empty. He’d make Prince mop up later. \n“Panther?” King called in the unctuous tones of one praying their echo wouldn’t answer back. It did. “Paaaaaanther? You good?”\nKing inched toward the lower deck’s maze of pillars and barrels with day’s last light glowing in portholes like fireflies trapped behind fogged glass. The Charge didn’t have a cannon aboard, not even those tacky iron ones you see in movies or reenactments. Its locked gunports collected dust, crates of contraband cluttered where cannons stood a lifetime ago. You kept life vests and inflatable rafts, not cannons, on a ship like the Charge, which won fights by outrunning everything that had fewer than two sails and/or engines that sputtered like refurbished jalopies. \nAnyone wanting serious smoke with their glorified dinghy would've been bored or desperate, and King liked their chances with both.\nUntil they came aboard. \n“Panther?” \nA bulbous, red tentacle snaked around his ankle from behind a nearby pillar. It sent his world spinning with an incredible tug, dangling him upside down as a behemoth of an octopus man skulked out of shadows that seemed to bloat to fit him. This man absolutely brimmed. His belly had enough fat to fry an entire flock of Laputans, even more grease oozing from his jiggly form like a huge sack of undulating earthworms. He held Panther above his head with arms thicker than steel beams. Tentacles writhed about her naked body to gag and restrain her. She didn’t look too thrilled. Aside from glaring murderously and thrashing ferociously, her fangs uselessly dug into the thick meat of the tentacle covering her mouth. Fangs King often feared might one day sever him at the root. \nHis cock twitched, speaking of which. He couldn’t stop himself from reminiscing about certain foreign reading material he kept hidden with very similar scenes depicted on their covers. \n“Nice lil’pussy cat ya got here,” the octopus cackled, “I think I’ll have some fun with her, after I deal with—AAAAAAAUGH!!!\" \nKing botched what should’ve been a dramatic landing by landing on his head. He shot upright, wobbling but conscious, a smug grin stretched across his face. \n“You punched me in the eye!” the red man roared as tentacles shielded half of his face. “Who does that?!” \n“I do!” King’s grin broadened. He’d never punched anybody in the eye before and resolved to do it more often. He’d also never said things like, “Release her, fiend!” while pointing at nefarious foes either. Opportunities were scarce in that regard. Nefarious foes usually had better things to do than messing with him. King regretted saying it now. Movie stars had kickass soundtracks galvanizing their corny lines, and Prince’d broke his boombox weeks ago. \nOh, right. \n“Where’s Prince! What’ve you done with…my…brother?” \nKing’s flushed gaze wandered southward before snapping north again. This man brimmed with more than fat between the knees. King’s treacherous cock perked with intrigue. Hopefully no one stood behind him to see his tail’s singular wag. \n“Wouldn’t you like t’kno?” \n“Yes…I…I would!” King said, his pointing finger wavered. He’d’ve practiced more one liners in the mirror if he knew he’d come up this short in the moment.\n“You’ll have t’beat it outta me, cutie. I’ve got plans for you.” \nKing deduced said plans involved the thick, fleshy rebar swinging between the man’s legs, from which all the skeezy fry joints in the Three Worlds derived their oily stenches.\nHis neglected asshole puckered, joining his dick’s mutiny. \nFocus! \nHe had a girl to impress, however much she horrified, drained, and emasculated him. A girl on the tracks was a girl on the tracks, even if speeding trains were better off derailing themselves at the risk of not finishing the job. Panther redoubled her efforts to break free when she saw King’s sneer, shaking her head vigorously. \nShe wanted him to run. \nHell, so did he. \nBut this was the perfect setup.\nA villain. \nA damsel. \nA shaken bottle of bubbling testosterone. \nHe could even ride—er, fuck the guy after besting him in hot, sweaty, homoerotic combat!\nNo homo. \nTo, um, assert his dominance. Yeah. Nothing else. It happened all the time in his favorite doujins.\nIf only Prince hadn’t broken the boombox. \nKing ran a hand through his fiery locks, flicked it back with a glittery flair too fabulous to’ve been anything as mundane as sweat, then pointed at his foe again. He cleared his throat. “If that’s th’way it’s gotta be, don’t even think about beggin’ for mercy!” Howling, King lunged with readied fists, eyes blazing. \nThe fight itself lasted about five seconds. \nThe next two minutes could’ve been a segment on a wrestling program, where the babyface gets his stomped in while the ref’s out cold in the background. Panther took the place of the booing crowd by wincing. The octopus didn’t even need his hands. \nKing spent ten seconds after that doubled over, moaning, hurting in places he never knew he had before meaty fingers yanked him to his knees by his hair. \n“Yer still a ripe cutie. Even all black ‘n blue,” the man said, preceding a moist slurping that could’ve been him licking his beak behind drool-soaked tentacles or something within King that sprung a leak. \nA nautical mast erected. Nuts the size of cannonballs clenched. King couldn’t look away, partly because his left eye’d swollen to where it couldn’t close, but still. He played snakes and ladders with pulsing veins all the way up to the man’s plump ruby of a dickhead, which drooled thick, cloudy saliva back down its shaft. \nPowerful heat moistened his bruised face as though he’d stuck it in a brick oven. It tasted of gas station sushi fresh out of the microwave, bulldozing his nostrils with such force that he felt it ramming down his throat. Then it hit him. His haywire nerves caught on a moment too late that a literal cock was being rammed down his throat. Its monumental thrusts gave his gullet the kind of beating reserved for back alleys and people who owned lots of money.\nThe would-be assailant was too big, too rough to notice how snug his throat felt. King made all the right noises; his gurgling moans sounded like all the desperate, choking gags the octopus expected. If King fought back too little, or not at all, it’d been because of the pummeling he just took. \n\"Soooooo gooooood!!!\" King's internal monologue swooned gaily as dynamite exploded on his taste buds. Why were hung hotties always beating him up and kidnapping his friends?!\nPanther, bless her heart, must’ve thought he was being violated. Or was simply enraged that her favorite toy was being played with so flagrantly in her presence. Her struggles tripled in effort while King savored the acapella of Atlantean moans and his brains wetly ping-ponging in his skull. \nThis continued for five, unobstructed, minutes. \n“Ghaaaah!” the octopus’s oral onslaught ended on his horny cue. He slammed his cock to the hilt, flattening King’s face against his moist, blubbery crotch. His cocktip mashed against the floodgates of King’s esophagus, which were blown wide open by a tidal wave of a salty orgasm. The man’s dick bulged like a stopped hose with each heavy spurt of aquatic nut butter. King’s cheeks flooded to the brim on the first shot, ropes flew from both nostrils on the next, and on the third King swore he cried cum out of his rolling eyes. His frazzled effort to swallow it all caused the first real choking fit of the night. This left everything below his chin: chest, belly, between the legs, utterly drenched in spunk.\nThe octopus yanked his cock free the way one wrenches a stubborn cork out of a bottle. Enough cum to knock up an entire aquarium of Atlantean whores sprang from King’s gaped maw, now a steaming geyser, in torrents.\nKing’s dick clenched rhythmically, squirting wolf cum to join the growing white pool at his knees. Hardly anyone else noticed. \n“Puppy wants more milk, eh?” \n\"Yebsh pwesh,\" King sputtered deliriously.\n“What’d ya say earlier? No beggin’ fer mercy!” the octopus cackled, uncomprehending of the ancient, storied dialect of the fucked stupid. “Lesse how yer other end takes m’knob.”\nThe big man’s greasy foot used King’s face to stamp the soaked floor. His wagging tail was yanked, a loogie in the ocean of agony flooding him head to toe. Then the seas parted. The harpoon hit its mark. King’s howl rocked the Royal Charge harder than any waves ever could.\n\n[center]6[/center]\nPrince woke with his arms tied behind his back, ankles bound. Tido, similarly bound, dissimilarly bruised all over, sprawled beside him. Prince spat down his throat when he wouldn’t wake up to his name and nudging. \n“You alright?”\n“I-I’ll live,” Tido said after he finished coughing. “Where are we?”\n“One of th’broom closets. See if y’can sit up. I’mma bite your ropes off.”\nTido did as told. Prince finished gnawing his hands free quicker than he thought. You could always rely on King to skimp on their equipment.\n“You’re remarkably calm, considering our dire situation,” Tido said. \n“Ya think this is my first time gettin’ tied up? You should see me ‘n King when we go bar hoppin’.”\n“What?” \n“Nevermind. Untie your legs, then do me. No homo. Th’jerks that jumped me are th’ones after you? What do they want anyway?”\n“They’ll likely pelt you,” Tido said, nervously fiddling with knots, “use your bones to fashion weapons and armor. Find dry land to cook your meat—Atlantean superstition holds it’s bad luck to light fires aboard a vessel of any kind, magical fires in our case. They might eat it raw. Magic fire is expensive in the Underworld. That’s probably why you’re still alive. Meat tastes best as, um, fresh as possible. Done. Let me untie you now.” \n“I meant with you.” \nTido began untying Prince’s wrists in silence at first. “Remember what I said about family betraying you? My eldest brother had Father killed. His men stormed our palace.” Tido quavered. “He wants my choker. Ancient texts foretold it’s rightfully mine.”\nRopes fell from Prince’s wrists. He rubbed them before untying his own ankles. \n“You’re not about t’tell me you’re actually a thousand years old or somethin’ lame like that, are ya?”\n“What? No, I’m—”\nPrince covered Tido’s mouth, glancing around suspiciously. “Don’t say it! You’re screwed if we happen t’be livin’ in a fictional reality. Pervy sickos go crazy for jailbait online.” \nTido’s mouth hung open even after Prince removed his hand. “Pervy-who? Jail-huh?? On-what???”\n“Later. Anyway, you were sayin’?” \nTido couldn’t stop blinking. He’d had more coherent discussions with whirlpools.\n“I was saying I’m…” he leaned forward to whisper his age in Prince’s ear.\n“No kiddin’? You’re, like, way short dude. Didn’t know seahorse litters had runts too.” \n“You didn’t even know what a seahorse was until a few hours ago!” \n“Details. Keep goin’. Why would a prince want some (admittedly valuable) jewelry so bad he’d stage a coup over it?”\nTido took a deep breath. “My choker grants me the power to see the future. It’s how I knew your brother’s name, and how I knew I’d be safe if I got into your fishing cage.”\n“Yeah, sure. Hey, don’t gimme that look. I believe you! I still put teeth under my pillow for fuck’s sake. Not my teeth. Bar hoppin’ with King’s good for stuff other than gettin’ tied up. But you ain’t exactly ‘safe’ right now is my point.” \n“Not now, no, but I will be. I’ve seen glimpses of our adventures, our futures together. That must mean we get out of this alive…right?”\nPrince surveyed everything he knew about quantum mechanics, gleaned entirely from a lifetime of comics, movies, video games, and anime, rubbing his chin. Tido’s choker sounded more like something out of a storybook than a space opera. That was good. Magic rules were never as stringent in the fantasy genre. Hopefully they really were in a fictional reality! \n“Maybe,” he said eventually. “It depends on if th’future’s set in stone or if reality’s one big spaghetti bowl of alternate timelines. Are th’noodles plain, independent lines, or are people like tomato sauce slidin’ from noodle t’noodle when they make certain choices? There could be hundreds, thousands, millions of us who get outta this okay, ‘n just as many of me who become some ugly fish dude’s fur coat.”\nTido stared at him. \nPrince didn’t notice. He hasn’t had this much fun since they robbed that crime lord’s hideout fronting as a milkshake parlor. The day’s long stomach ache’d been worth it. He glanced at Tido’s choker, then got down on his hands to take a closer look. Wild thoughts from the weaselly side of the animal kingdom clouded his mind last time he saw its resplendent sapphire. Now he had to squint to see the faintest sparkle. “Why didn’t they take it already?” \n“I wouldn’t tell them how to use it because I saw what happens if I do. These bruises are preferable to a spit.”\n“Gnarly.”\n“What?”\n“Never mind. Consult th’cosmos or whatever. Scry up some intel.”\nTido nodded while touching the gemstone with both hands. “I’ve got enough for one more use today. Please catch me.”\n“Catch you? What for?”\nBlue light spilled through the broom closet’s door frame, briefly illuminating the dark lower deck. The octopus’s jostling back turned blue before fading to purple then back to red. His moans, King’s cock gargling, and Panther’s snarling all drowned a deep thrum that spread around them like a drum beat’s echo falling down a bottomless well.\nPrince’s hairs still stood after the surge of…whatever that was finished coursing through him. He’d never skip another bath if getting fleas felt half as lame as this! \n“Nngh…” Tido groaned in Prince’s arms. He beckoned the other boy closer, weary eyes opening. Prince listened.\n\n[center]7[/center]\nForget coffee. Who needed smelling salts? King now knew taking an artillery shell of a dick up your unlubricated ass was the one true pick-me-up of champions. Then again, he didn’t feel particularly “picked up” despite the octopus’s pudgy grip on his tail suspending his knees far off the ground. The one true mauling-abusing-and-ravaging of champions sounded far more accurate.\nThe octopus’s thrusts made King’s cheeks clap louder than a stadium-wide standing ovation. His foot curled its meaty toes over the back of King’s head, making him snog sex-stained floorboards. King’s nuts were smashed against his crotch by twin aquatic wrecking balls as they swung between his legs with unstoppable force. A homogenized sex din of orgasmic moans, sobs, and moist impacts deafened all other noise in the lower deck, dulling all of King’s senses with its coital tumult.\nAll except his touch sense, of course. The flaming missile using his asshole for target practice proved that much. King had a much easier time playing the part of the violated cum sock this time.\n“Take it all, puppy! Take it all!”\nThe octopus’s foot left his head to stomp the ground, bracing for the biggest thrust yet. King’d only been reamed by half the man’s mast so far. He didn’t know if he could take a full rocket without getting torn in half, but knowing things was the privilege of those unclouded by tongue-lolled dazes. He did know the sweet release of the massive dick reeling backwards until rigid glans tugged the inner rim of his clenched ass. The man’s torpedo aimed for his belly. Years of jerking off to stomach-bulging fantasies couldn’t’ve prepared him for what having your guts rearranged actually felt like. \nA barrel lid flew by, bounced off a pillar, rebounded from an adjacent wall, then smacked the octopus’s blackened eye. Panther and King fell from his grasp, one landing with more grace than the other, as the screaming Atlantean staggered with hands and tentacles clutching his face. \nPrince’s mouth hung open. Believing Tido was different from witnessing evidence of precognition firsthand.\n“Panther!” he shouted, “Get King’s trunk. Th’one with his weapons ‘n porn stash. It’s in that barrel behind you. No, that one!” \n“He keeps it locked,” she said in a mix of anger and undertowed interest, standing between the wailing behemoth and her prone, moaning Master. \n“Don’t worry about that. Get it ‘n throw it at that porthole over there. Don’t look at me like that, just do it!” \nPanther snarled, dashing for the barrel as Prince threw himself at tentacles he knew would snatch at her ankles. He’d always imagined they’d feel sticky, or slimy from all the tentacle porn in his brother's collection. That they’d squeeze like an oily wetsuit one size too small. The enraged octopus’s tentacles, eager to please, ensnared the unresisting fox and hoisted him off the ground. \n“You’ll regret that, little boy!”\n“I think I’ll regret runnin’ out of soap. P.U.!” \nPanther dumped the barrel out behind them, piles and piles of junk forming the throne for King’s trunk to land on. She’d’ve loved this find any other day. Any other day she’d’ve needed no witnesses and the open sea instead of the key. Master’s guns would’ve been an unfortunate casualty instead of what she needed in this exact moment. Prince must’ve wanted her to break it open. She threw it with all the might of a possessive jungle cat who, submerged deep in her well of jealousy, hoped the trunk would smash through the glass instead of hitting the porthole’s rim. \nThe trunk soared. \nPrince watched it, the world slowing down, focus blurring his vision’s edge. Damn! Why’d he have to drop the boombox? His imagination supplied a cheesy, jazzy heist tune, the trumpeting kind that plays in his favorite shows when intricate plans come together with creaseless satisfaction.\nThe trunk’s corner hit the metal porthole, bursting it wide open. Magazines flapped through the air with papery, X-rated wings. Pin-ups, special editions, limited series collections all fluttered like doves around King’s falling pistols. One magazine in this flock of doves was a hawk. The magazine. The one which, as Tido predicted, flew on course to hit the octopus’s other eye the moment his hands moved from his face. \n\"Auuuuugh!!!\" \nHe dropped Prince, who landed crouched with his hand out.\nGuns clattered around them. One gun, the gun, finished its somersaults by landing on Prince’s hand.\nPrince stood, a bit slower than he probably should’ve given the situation—the world was only in slow motion in his head, aiming King’s pistol. \n“Hasta la vista, baby.” \n\"Guhhhnk!” the blinded octopus seethed. “Hasta la what?\"\nBANG!\nPrince didn’t know what it meant either, but he’d always wanted to say that.\n\n[center]8[/center]\nKing groaned. Everything ached. The Charge’s usual creaking chorus dragged nails on the chalkboard behind his forehead. He couldn’t sit or swallow without yearning for Death’s embrace, but it’d all been worth it. All of life’s best pleasures fucked you up somehow.\nTido lay in a hammock adjacent to his, awake, eyes closed. \nPrince entered in a stream of silvery moonlight, old wood fighting loudly with rusted hinges as he opened the cabin’s door. King groveled, squinting and flattening his ears against his skull.\n“You guys need anythin’? Water? Snacks? Dildos? Flamethrowers?” \n“Water would be lovely,” Tido said in a small voice. \n“Condoms,” King croaked, “go back about fourteen years and get Dad some condoms.” \nPrince got Tido’s water, passing Panther downstairs as one passed rowdy biker bars by crossing the street. They had enough seafood now to last the rest of their voyage, “Thanks to Tido,” she’d said with a grin too red to’ve been wry. She’d just enjoyed a midnight snack after dressing meat all night. Panther with raw meat wasn’t someone you wanted to be around without a sick bag handy. Only dragons who torched villages for fun made faces like hers while dining. He had to watch his step to keep from tracking footprints. \n“Pour it on me, please,” Tido said after Prince returned. \n“Kinky.”\n“What?” \nPrince poured water over his scales. They drank like dry sponges, reflecting the sapphire’s weakened glow like hundreds of delicate mirrors. Tido sighed contentedly. \n“I spoke to Panther. She won’t eat ya or nothin’. Just make sure y’don’t go out at night without me for a while, ‘n don’t make sudden moves around her. She said she can’t be responsible if you forget. It’s mostly a joke. Mostly.” \n“I see.” \n“It took me, like, two years before I could take a leak a night without gettin’ pounced. Th’masts are her favorite hidin’ spot. Had t’learn which floorboards creak louder than th’others, I’ll show ya later.”\n“None of this sounds like joking to me.” \n“You’ve never had Panther’s fangs around your throat.” \nTido waited for elaboration that never came before saying, “Thank you”. \n“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t work for free,” Prince sneered, taking King’s empty cup from their shared nightstand-barrel as quietly as he could. “How long till you’re outta bed, ya think?” \n“A few days,” Tido said, “a week at most. The choker’s magic is very debilitating, and I’ve used it twice today.”\n“I meant your bruises, dummy!” \n“O-oh…um, I’ll be able to assist with chores within the same amount of time, I think. Why are you making that face? You’re snickering! I can ‘swab the deck’ as good as anybody! It can’t be that hard, whatever it is, and…and…I can wash my own utensils as well!” \nKing bellowed.\n“Focus on healin’ up before we start spoonin’,” Prince said as he pulled Tido’s blanket over his shoulders.\n“Okay. What? You’re giggling again. Did I say something wrong?”\n“Don’t worry about it.”\nKing and Tido soon fell asleep. Prince imagined his doofus brother storming their home with bandits, upturning their family, sending more bastards after him when he escaped. A deep frown twisted his face. Tido’s innocence, the kind of one who definitely didn’t have a flashlight and a dirty magazine under their covers at bedtime, was a treasure all its own. A treasure now safely locked away aboard the Royal Charge.\nPrince smiled. \nHe left the cabin and shut the door, taking midnight with him. \nNo light disturbed their dark slumber…until a flashlight snapped on underneath King’s blanket.\nDays washed away. \nDeep underwater, deeper than any submarine without great insurance and a helmsman with nothing to lose but unutilized healthcare benefits would’ve dared descend, an Atlantean kingdom illuminated by thousands of magic fire lights simmered; a scintillating jewel submerged in black waters.\nFishman soldiers in armor plucked off golden reefs swam up and down spotless white marble halls within the palace. You’d’ve never known the workforce recently downsized by about half. Underwater coups tended to be tidy affairs. You didn’t need a scampy little brother to mop up the mess later. Prisoners were invited to dinner upon silver platters within hours. Still, patrols were needed. Curfews were mandated. Those who hadn’t sworn loyalty to the new King were being made to give body and soul to the royal chef’s cutting board instead. \nKneeling underwater was tricky. A shark soldier swam into the cavernous throne room to do it before the seahorse on the chair. Many hadn’t pulled the trick off. The shark learned quickly so things wouldn’t be pulled off of him too.\nThe seahorse could’ve been Tido’s twin, plus twenty years.\nThey even shared a name. Once. \nThis seahorse was Prince Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac II and, after strenuous pruning of the family tree, was now King Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac. \nThe first. \nThe one. \nThe only. \n“My Lord,” the shark said, “the mercenaries haven’t returned with the fugitive, Aquarius Tidonium—”\n“Do not speak my name in reference to another,” the King boomed as deeply as he could, grateful for the spacious room’s underwater acoustics. “What of the choker?” \nSweating underwater was its own nifty trick. The shark was on a roll. “Its whereabouts are…unknown, my Lord.” \nThe King wanted to shout. To stomp. To kick something, or someone, which bore no distinction to him. The old him would’ve done that. The Prince. He lacked brute strength to crush his crystal goblet of blobfish eyes by clenching his fist. He couldn’t afford losing more manpower than already sacrificed on gladiatorial entertainment and testing Surfaceworld torture equipment. Either of those would’ve been Kingly tantrums.\n“Find it,” he said in a voice level enough to stack marbles on before, after quick consideration, adding, “or else.”\n“Y-yes, my Lord!” the shark stammered. He couldn't swim out of the throne room fast enough. Him! Twice the snobby punk’s size. Thousands more teeth with as many days spent chomping prey that wasn’t cut to size and served under a dome. Rage boiled within the private cauldron of his predatory mind. It’d only take a second. One bite. No one would stop him. \nRight?\nWhat if he tried and someone did stop him? \nWhat’d happen to him then?\nHe’d seen what the scrawny, sheltered, spoiled wretch did to his captain. Not had done, but did personally, with all the impish glee of a boy burning off a hornet’s wings. He didn’t know someone could get so…so…flat. \nHe swam faster, his thoughts from the past minute locked away in a heavy mental trunk. This new King wasn’t someone you begrudged, no matter how soundproof your closed doors were. You didn’t call him your Lord without capitalizing the L. \nKing Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac, the first, the one, the only, smiled. \n“You there,” he pointed at one surprised guard, then another. “Kick that man until I tell you to stop.” \nThe Atlantean kingdom, seating its new tyrant, simmered in darkness.", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "
1

This wasn’t the first time somebody’d fucked King George half to death, and knowing he’d live to tell the tale wouldn’t’ve brightened his mood.
What could he say?
That he, Smuggler Extraordinaire, pinnacle of lupine hunkiness, lover of all things vanilla-scented and feminine took an unfeminine cock farther up his ass than pigs took roasting spits?
Well, that'd be the short version.
King wondered where it all went wrong, his world spinning on a carousel of fatigue. He fell into a speculative trance that sunk him into the cum-splattered ripples of time.
Sinking…
Sinking…

2

“It’s sinking, bro!”
Sky and sea squeezed its blue hands around a scrawny, white horizon. The Royal Charge, a fishing boat that probably looked dredged out of a ship graveyard on its first voyage, bobbed along with Prince George balanced atop its deck’s handrail. The small fox leaned forward with nothing but his loose grip on a frayed boarding net preventing waters below from having him. He watched, blocking sunlight with his other hand, as the anonymous shadow of their fishing cage grew beneath the waves. His brother King tugged its rope wearing nothing but a strained grimace and his sweat-stained birthday suit.
“I’ve got it,” he grunted. “Get your junk outta my face while I’m tryin’ to work. You stink!”
“I’m wearing shorts, you can’t smell my junk. How come you get to strut around naked and I don’t, anyway? You stink up th’joint more than a buncha drunk skunks! I’m first mate, aren’t I? I say first mates get struttin’ privileges too if they’ve gotta smell your stale nuts all day.”
King’d discreetly sniffed himself during Prince’s rant.
“And I’m captain,” he said, “And the captain says—” their submerged cage tugged back, nearly ripping the rope out of King’s now smoking hands, “—only he and any lovely bedmates he invites aboard are allowed to strut!”
The rope pulley above them groaned in rusted protest. King’s foot braced against the rail pushed Prince farther over the waves.
“Hardly seems fair t’me.”
“One day, young ward of the seas,” King intoned magnanimously. “You shall air out the family jewels too, when you’ve jewels worth airing.”
“Family coppers, maybe.”
“What was that?”
“Oh nothing. I was just saying this’d be a lot easier with a real crew. One with lotsa big, sweaty, strong guys,” Prince said while swaying on one foot, nose inches above the tide.
“This’d go a lot faster if you helped me instead of fantasizing about pirate gym bros, Mr. ‘First Mate’!” Thick cords bulged on King’s neck. Damp muscles ballooned from the strain of pulling against the sea. Or maybe an Atlantean was trying to steal the cage, steal their breakfast. Or five. Or twelve. Yeah, twelve. It’d take a dozen of those shrimpy bastards to beat him in a tug-o-war!
Splintery creaks exploded all around them as old wood struggled with failing effort to stay in one piece. King’s smug grin plummeted. Their one and only pulley felt like it hung on by a toothpick’s grasp.
“One of ‘em can have a sexy scar,” Prince said with airy indifference. “Maaaaybe a peg leg.”
Wait a second…what’d he need Prince’s help for? Didn’t he always say he was so slick with elbow grease he could drag a galleon across concrete? Wasn’t he the baddest lone wolf across all the Three Worlds? Wasn’t. He. King George?!
“Yes! I AM!!!”
“You are what—WHOA!” King’s sudden, jerky haul threw Prince off the railing, utter cockiness fueling him more than any second wind could ever hope to achieve without a few adrenaline shots to top it off. Their fishing cage soared on an eruption of waves, smashing through the rails and into King, whose avalanche of bulk would’ve turned Prince into a fox panini had he not rolled out of the way.
“You okay?” Prince asked, making a token effort to tug one of the veiny logs King used for arms.
“Yeah…shit, that really hurt…”
The George brothers paused, looked at one another, then at their successfully reeled cage.
“Awesome!” Prince jumped with his hands to the sky, “All that muscle you got from jerkin’ off is finally payin’ off!”
King, forgetting his pain, jumped onto his feet, flexed, and posed for an imaginary camera at the same time. His gleaming sneer would’ve made the sun reach for its shades. “Damn right it is! What do you need sexy scars and peg legs for when you’ve got the strongest wolf ever for a big brother?”
Prince squinted. “Are you sayin’ I should fantasize about you instead of pirate himbos? That’s kinda sus. You didn’t even say ‘no homo’...”
“T-that’s not what I meant! And how is it sus to fantasize about me but A-OK for you to drool over some scurvied sailor’s jockstrap?”
“So you waaaaant your little brother thinking dirty thoughts about you and no one else?” Prince’s sneer was a master forgery of King’s. “And I thought Panther was the jealous one.”
“You little…!”
Their catch groaned in the cage. The brothers quit bickering long enough to squat around it.
“What is he?” Prince asked, pointing through the heavy bars at their prey.
“Edible. Dibs on the tail.”
“You always get the tail!”
“That’s cuz, and it brings me no pleasure whatsoever to remind you in moments like these,” King said in a small, honeyed voice with a stinger on its ass, “I’m the captain. Meaning: I always get first dibs. Ergo: I get the tail.”
“The tail’s the best part and you know it!”
“Duh. That’s why it’s mine.”
Their squinting prey turned away from the sky, the sun a glaring ball of unfamiliar heat that swallowed everything into its form blurring whiteness. He swallowed scorched air in big gulps, cooking his lungs, frying his gills. Most Atlanteans spent their first time above water in similar states of disorientation. Minus the cage in…most cases. The exceptions might’ve said their hosts had very similar conversations to the one happening on the Charge’s deck right now, if they hadn’t been cast out to sea from a chamber pot. Their prey squinted harder, eyes adjusting.
“You may have a foot,” said the focusing blob of King George with the grand magnanimity of a curried don.
“No way.” said the smaller blob, still too blurry to be Prince George and not a yellow smear on the sky’s canvas. “I want an arm at least.”
 “You’ll never finish it. One hand. Take it or leave it.”
“Is this the Surfaceworld?”
The Georges quit arguing to watch their breakfast sitting up on his knees.
“Above water you mean?” Prince asked, knowing it’s only rude to talk with food when it’s in your mouth. “Then yup, sure is! What are you by the way? Edible, right?”
“Prince! Don’t scare th’kid. Of course he’s edible!”
“Just makin’ sure.”
The boy grabbed the cage’s bars, his wet scales, gold jewelry, and the choppy tide competing to out-sparkle one another under the sun’s harsh spotlight. King, priding himself an expert of nautical lore, thought the boy was some kind of aquatic horse with a coiled tentacle for a tail. In other words: definitely edible.
“Please, help me!” he cried, choked with desperation.
King pretended to scratch his scruffy chin to wipe his drool. “No use beggin’ for your life. Think of it this way, you Atlanteans eat each other all th’time right? All animals do. That’s life. It’s like a round…circle…thing or whatever.”
Prince stared sidelong at him. “A round circle thing or whatever?”
“It was th’first thing that came to mind, alright?”
“Just take me far away from here,” the definitely edible fish boy persisted, tears flowing, “they’re after me. They’ll…they’ll…”
“Great! You made him cry. Now we’re never gonna taste him.”
“Who’s after you?” Prince asked, eyes widened, tail swaying, “A shark dude? Hungry whales? A killer jungle piranha tribe? And don’t worry ‘bout my brother. He thinks he’s a big bad wolf, but he’d never eat somebody while they’re crying.”
King opened and closed his mouth, undecided on whether to take offense to such a blatant attack on his wolfish pride or the insinuation that all wolves aspired toward badness. He did, but that wasn’t the point! “I might still eat you,” he hurriedly added, “Who knows? If I go long enough without food I might eat th’both of you!”
The boy wiped his tears with his forearm. “I know you won’t eat me, Mr. George.”
King’s ears splayed. Forget wind stripped from sails. He exploded like a whoopie cushion under a hydraulic press.  
“What’s a wolf?”
“He is,” Prince said, now seated cross-legged. His big, bright eyes threw themselves in the ring with the boy’s scales and jewels and the sparkling sea. “But what are you? And who’s after you? Don’t forget that!”
“I-I’m a seahorse,” the boy said, sunlight glinting off a particular piece of jewelry as he leaned back, an ornate choker like many slender, golden fingers weaving around one another, jealously clutching a prize hitherto hidden under the boy’s chin: the largest, real sapphire Prince’d ever seen. His eyes widened with blue-tinted sunlight reflected off of them. He blinked several times when the boy covered the dazzling gemstone with his hand. King, who’d also seen it, shook his head as though coming out of a sleepy daze. “Mercenaries attacked Father’s palace. Mother helped me escape.”
“So you’re, like, a real prince? My name’s Prince by th—Hey!”
King dragged his brother into an impromptu squat-huddle, their backs turned to the confused seahorse. He squinted back at the boy before turning to his brother. “We’re throwin’ him back.”
“Like Hell!”
“Keep your voice down!”
“Like Hell!” Prince whispered harshly. “Didn’t ya hear what he just said?”
“Did you?” King hissed back. “Atlantean royal dispute. Underworld politics. We’re screwin’ up bad enough bein’ this far out on a scotch-taped heap like th’Charge without given’ undersea bandits a reason t’climb aboard.”
“What happened to all that junk about my big brother bein’ the strongest guy sailin’ the seas?”
“Nobody’s stronger than a spear through th’gut.”
Prince’s frown became the sly, toothy grin that always made King wish their mother swallowed. “Let’s hold ‘em ransom.”
King’s perking ears betrayed his stony glare.
“We keep him aboard, get t’dry land, then send out word that we’ve got an Atlantean prince for sale. But, if th’bad guys find us first, we hand him over at a discount. Underworld politics.”
The twin of Prince’s grin stretched across King’s face as ideas bubbled in the pot. Ocean bandits desperate enough to board a Surfaceworld ship might have things to trade for him. A waterlogged treasure chest full of gold, for instance. Or a slit throat in the dead of night, his better judgment argued. Nah. It’d be the cheaper option for them, sure, but it was more fun to imagine himself bathing in a swimming pool of doubloons. That King wore dozens of gold chains, rings on all his fingers and toes, his idiot laughter echoing in the gilded vault containing his pool. He had a bejeweled goblet of rum in one hand, Panther’s ass in the other, and she wore all the jewelry he could squeeze onto her—No. Scratch that. King didn’t want his treasure getting sticky.
Prince snapped fingers in King’s face.
“Ahem. Right. Excellent plan, First-Mate Prince,” he said in his deepest Captain’s voice yet. “But what about Panther?”
“What about her?”
“Y’kno how much she loves fish. She’d never let an Atlantean aboard unless he’s in th’freezer.”
“Or in the pantry,” said a third voice. “We’d have t’sun dry th’meat first, tho.”
“Right. Or…the…pantry…”
The Georges glanced to the left where Panther, naked and squatting beside them and glossier than spilled ink under a spotlight, said. Her tail swayed. Her smile exuded a predator’s confidence, pre-pounce. The seahorse boy was either awed by the appearance of a new mammal he’d never seen before, or didn’t know what it meant when someone licked their lips at him.
“No!” King said, pulling her into the huddle the way one pinches the cleanest edge of a used napkin. “He’s our meal ticket. Don’t eat him.”
“What good’s a ticket when th’meal’s right there?” she asked, a low, growling noise coming from somewhere other than her stomach. Felines. He might’ve said that aloud if he wanted a jugular shaped like peeled apple skins.
“Don’t eat him,” he repeated. “That’s an order.”
“Yes…Master,” she said in a black, rumbling groan that’d send storm watchers running for the shutters. King smiled.
“But you’ll have to satiate my…other hunger instead.”
His smile wavered. “Save it for tonight,” he said steadily despite icy rivulets trickling down his spine.
“But I’m hungry noooow. Who knows what’ll happen if someone doesn’t keep me occupied?” She said with an airy certainty that promised would happen involved her claws and the boy running into them over and over again.
King turned to Prince for help, instead finding empty air where he once sat. Hot-cold clawtips drummed the back of his neck, stabbing obscenities back down his throat. Every inch of his body trembled with a wild panic that trapped animals everywhere aspired to. Every inch except his treacherous cock. Several inches of it in fact, which throbbed to attention at the hope of something other than sweaty palms to play with.
Prince waited until Panther’d dragged his mostly limp brother to his cabin before peeking from behind the cage. “Thanks for blocking me.”
“No problem,” the seahorse boy said. “Do mammals not enjoy company with the opposite sex?”
“We do. It’s th’crazy, nymphomaniac, bloodthirsty ones we guy mammals got beef with."
“Makes sense. What’s beef?”
Prince opened the cage and the boy stood. He struggled finding his land legs atop a deck that teetered on the whims of tides looking to coax a meal out of his turning belly. Prince stole another look at his sapphire while helping him step out of the cage. The plan was a ruse. Something to bribe his brother’s greed. But…seeing the gemstone again, the way light danced on its cut faces like rolling waves, the venal, conniving vulpine in him begged to go all in. They could hand him over for the choker. Or they could keep him in a cage and nobody would ever have to know. Or he could take the choker now then toss him overboard. He’d say the boy escaped. No one, not even King, would know he had it. Or…
Prince slapped himself with both hands. “Y’kno,” he said with great effort to ignore the gemstone’s magnetic pull, “you’re awfully chill ‘bout all this. How do you know my bro really won’t eat you later?”
“I just do,” the boy said, fingers wrapped around the sapphire.
“What about his name? You just ‘knew’ that too?”
The boy didn’t answer. Prince shrugged, then snatched his other hand. “I’ll pry it outta ya later. Wanna see my comic books?”
“W-what are those?”
“You don’t got comics in the Underworld?! And I thought it was borin’ up here,” he said, tugging him along, “I never caught your name. Can you tell me that at least?”
"P-prince Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac XIII.”
“Yeaaaah, let’s go with Tido. Hey, watch th’tail.” Sunlight continued its hot descent on the Royal Charge, unabated by a cloudless, blue sky. Prince tugged his new, mostly unrelenting, friend along, whose land legs might as well’ve been stilts with skates attached. No one stood by the taffrails when bubbles pocked the waves at the Charge’s tail, nor when shadows beneath the surface gave a slow pursuit.

3

Your own Servant, Bodyguard, and Concubine Rolled into One! Answer the attached questionnaire, tear it out, scratch off the arcane locator seal with your bare finger, and leave it in a package with your lump sum payment in a discreet location. Then, look forward to your new slave within the next FORTY-EIGHT HOURS! EASY!
This was the Overworld magazine advert through which King inadvertently bought Panther three years ago. The ad depicted a fat pelican with greased hair, sunglasses, gold chains and piercings in places he’d’ve never dreamed of getting, flanked by voluptuous women of various animal species wearing nothing but heavy manacles and chains. All of them were predators. They surrounded the grinning bird, grinding against him on all sides, leering at him like he was the biggest stud on the Three Worlds or soon-to-be the biggest bird they’d ever roasted.
You checked boxes on the questionnaire, each with an assigned price, which tallied up to your mail order slave’s final cost. King’s was a number he couldn’t read nor pronounce if he could. He scratched off the seal, put the torn sheet in a bottle, then threw it overboard. He was bored. Fantasizing about his ideal woman passed time, and provided spank material. Plus, he didn’t pay. Or so he thought.
He hadn’t known the bottle he threw overboard was a genuine Four Era artifact. “Vintage, 2024”, its faded label read in a language King didn’t understand. The bottle alone would’ve bought him an entire harem of servant-bodyguard-concubines. The other three bottles from the waterlogged safe he’d fished out of the ocean read “Vintage, 1785”, "Exquisitely Aged”, and “Classic Artisanal”. The booze gave him a hoity-toity buzz, the kind he’d’ve gotten the good glasses out for if he had any. He chugged each bottle with his pinky out.
He awoke later that night with Panther, then nineteen, snuggled atop him in his hammock, purring like a well oiled airship engine. He forgot the ad by then, but not his crippling fear of finding ambush predators and their fangs and claws on him in the dead of night. They didn’t send her with his change.
“Where th’Hell did ya come from?!” He demanded with all the authority his face kissing the ground and his arm being twisted painfully around his back afforded him after their brief scuffle, hammock swaying overhead.
Panther got off his back. She didn’t mind the missed punch. It didn’t hurt at all. “The sky,” she said. “Did I pass your test?”
It all came back. The Overworld magazine ad. The fat pelican. The nipple piercings.
“Uh. Sure. What’s your name?”
She sat on her knees before him, tail swaying, all but her yellow eyes and white fangs shrouded in the darkness of his cabin. He didn’t need to see her to know she was beautiful—for a cat. He’d felt her silky, naked pelt on his scraggly fur. Even her voice had curves. “I’m a panther, Master.”
King might’ve asked if she meant leopard or jaguar, or clarified that that hadn’t been what he’d asked, if hearing a real, live, breathing, conscious female call him “Master” hadn’t ignited a white hot, dick-throbbing flame whose torch he never knew he had. It’d snuffed out all his questions. He never looked gift horses in the mouth, except to check for gold teeth.
Pornography meant everything to King. He needed it like otters needed water, or bears needed honey, or…or…some other animal associated with an iconic thing. Moths and flames, maybe. Lambs and slaughters? Anyway, he watched, read, dreamed, bought, sold, breathed, craved porn. He kept various stashes locked and hidden all over the Charge. Partly because Prince always got his favorite material sticky, but mainly because Panther hated competition.
She was everything decades of porn addiction told him he wanted, and more. So…so…SO much more.
Badass. Dark. Dangerous. Mysterious. Seductive. Warrior Woman. Lustful. These were some of the marked checkboxes on King’s ad. Oh. And Insatiable.
He’d underlined Insatiable.
Why, oh why, did he underline Insatiable?
Regret for having not checked Cooking or Cleaning settled after their first night sleeping together, in which very little actual sleep was had and yoga classes were deeply considered. At least then he’d have a sandwich and a made bed to lie in after getting his hips ground to sawdust. Not that he’d ever make her cook or clean for him. Panther was as much a member of his crew as Prince, however meager a crew he led. She got a cut of their smuggling profits (Master’s emergency fund), she had her own room (Master’s storage space), and had an equal say when discussing their next ventures (Master’s second vote).
King didn’t own slaves. Besides, you only owned someone like Panther insofar as her lust allowed: with a leash in her hand and a collar around your neck.
A sandwich would’ve been great right about now. And some air freshener. His cabin reeked. Years of cohabitation turned it into a museum exhibit of splattered fluids, the hammock they currently “occupied” the dripping, jostling centerpiece. He got head, but never ahead of their messes. Sailing with Panther meant sailing with an expensive autopiloting system.
“You aren’t finished already, Master?” Panther slammed her ass down on the sacks of broken glass King once called his lap, clapping cheeks stamping successive punctuation marks on her rapid pace. He seized, sharp breaths stolen from his lungs each time her clenched pussy crash landed on his hilt, sealing his eleven inches in an envelope of warmth and pain. He’d’ve had an easier time with a boa constrictor around his dick.
“N-no way! I’m just gettin’ started!” King grabbed her bouncing tits the way a stubborn child grabs a shock machine’s metal bars again, refusing to admit defeat. Slippery warmth electrified his palms as their hips continued their lopsided tango, hers gyrating in ways only a steamroller would’ve called sensual, his flattening. Panther lived to please her Master’s every sexual desire. King never had the heart to say otherwise. She’d’ve snatched it out if it could.
Her applauding ass smashed his weak thrusts into their strained hammock. Anyone with their ear pressed to the cabin’s thick door would’ve heard it all, heavy panting, sweaty grunts, and the occasional muffled cry for help.
“I can go slower, if you’d like.”
“D-don’t be, gnnngk! Don’t be…ghk!!!” Ugh…What…What was I saying?”
Two Panthers sneered down at him through a steamy heat haze. Blurry spots floated between them. King felt like he’d taken a downhill trip inside a rolling barrel.
“Don’t be silly?”
“Right. That.”
“Shall I get you water, Master?” Panther, a young woman ten years his junior with ten times as many notches on her metaphorical belt, offered with a syrupy purr. His joints screeched their falsetto of agony alongside the ringing in his ears. Wolfish pride made him ignore all of it. A pride that meant to snatch the reins out of her smug little claws when it made him thrust forward with all his might to get on top of her. They fell off the hammock instead. Panther hit the dampened floor first, her body the fleshy trampoline for King’s plummeting muscles. His cock speared her pussy on impact, sending his throbbing lance so deep into her inferno that he thought it’d burn off. Pleasure overshadowed all pain from the fall, a sharp spark of it shot through his cock like the barrel of a photon rifle, up his spine, to his fingers and toes. His watered eyes went bobbing up in their sockets. His lips pursed to contain a drooly, tongue-lolled moan.
Any fear wading in his ocean of bliss that he might’ve crushed her quickly drowned when four dark limbs unraveled out from under him to clutch his body like the legs of a dying spider. She squeezed. King’s arms and legs went stiff as parched boards. His eyes nearly fell out to hang on their nerves. He bit his lip in a futile effort to keep his insides from spilling out.
Then her pussy squeezed too. He came.
There wasn’t any point in trying to pull out, even if his bones hadn’t become piles of gravel. Panther always got what she wanted.
“Seventeen in one hour, Master,” Panther purred while his overworked nuts pumped any drop of semen they could find. Her greedy, smoldering pussy slurped his penis like a flattened straw. She made it her mission to have more wolf cum in her than King’s testicles could ever hope to emulate.
“Is…that…good for you?”
Her pink tongue slithered his mouth where they traded spit and moans atop drenched floorboards. Their arms and legs coiled together in a tangle of horny gropes and grinds. As much as she’d wrung him, as much as he felt some prime, essential part of his masculinity stripped by her wild dominance, King couldn’t resist the occasional rut into her velvety heat. Her loins repaid him with luscious bites around the axed stump that’d been the base of his cock. Surely he’d sated her. Seventeen times! Surely he’d earned his freedom? Or a ten minute break at least!
Their lips parted. Panther met his hopeful, haggard, dubiously sane grin with a smile sweeter than candy.
“It’s a decent warmup,” she said.

4

The best part of chores was shirking them to read comics on the upper deck. Prince was eleven when Panther got dropped on his brother’s lap: old enough to know girls weren’t so gross after all, smart enough to’ve resigned himself to porno mags after listening to one of their sessions. At least she kept King busy.
Fading daylight winked down at them, the sky a darkened tableau like black ink dropped onto vivid watercolors. It’d taken Prince an hour to coax Tido to sit and read after lending him a pair of shorts, the worried boy still glancing at the water here and there. They’d need lanterns to continue reading on deck soon.
“What’s this one?” Tido asked, squinting at his comic like a foreign map. Prince took it from him, flipped it over, then returned it.
“That’s UltraFox #5,” Prince said, on his belly and flipping through another book while kicking his legs, “it’s the one where DivaLynx captures his crew and feeds ‘em to th’reality blender.”
“That’s horrible!”
“I know. Wicked.”
Tido put UltraFox #5 down, hesitated, then plucked another comic from one of the piles surrounding them. “What about…this one?”
“That’s my favorite. DinoMech HyperDestroyer #1. It’s about these cyborg dinosaurs who blow up planets, kill all the men, and subjugate the women for heinous hyper-warp breeding experiments. Sometimes in that order. It’s awesome!” Prince mistook Tido’s silence for awe.
“I never knew mammals led such tumultuous, minacious lives…Everything Father said about the dangers of the Surfaceworld pales in comparison to this history!”
“History?” Prince asked. You didn’t learn words like tumultuous or minacious from reading comics, but they sounded bad.
“Aren’t these paper tomes illustrated accounts of Surfaceworld events? Although, when you said we’d read comic books, I’d expected something more…” Tido’s snout wrinkled at a two-page spread smeared in enough red ink to revise an entire memoir, “comedic.”
Prince, who believed in Santa Claus because the Three Worlds would’ve been a heck of a lot more interesting with an old man who broke into kids’ houses to eat their sugary offerings and leave gift-wrapped behavioral incentives than without, stopped kicking his legs. “I wish! I mean, things’d be pretty dangerous if we lived in an UltraFox comic, sure, but we’d be real pirates. In space! Not some low rung smugglers with a dinky ship.”
Tido sighed, relieved. He didn’t know what to think about a place where somebody’s head could explode like a mallet smashing a cherry pie while making noises like “KABLOOSH!” except how he could get as far away from it as possible.
“What you have sounds rather pleasant,” he said. “Criminal acts aside, of course. A quiet life. Never having to look behind your back. Never wondering who might put a knife in it, who might betray you next…” He got on his back to watch what remained of the clouds, tinted the color of dying flames by the sinking sun. The metaphor would’ve flown over him. His closest approximation was seafoam stained sickly, neon colors by passing glow serpents, monsters that grew up to fifty feet long. Seafoam didn’t sprawl underwater the way clouds did in the sky. They didn’t captivate one’s mind for hours and hours with their changing shapes. Especially not with glow serpents around. They didn’t grow that long eating plankton.
“Miss me with that,” Prince said, settling beside him. “You try swabbin’ th’deck t’night and tell me how pleasant it is.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Tido said, his knowledge of Surfaceworld pirate lingo gleaned entirely from Atlantean storybooks. He knew what “shanties” were, and what “walking the plank” meant (whatever mammals found so harrowing about falling into still water), but whatever “swabbin’” was, the deck's graying complexion told him it’d missed its last few appointments.
“You’re a real prince. Real princes don’t do chores. Servants wait on you hand ‘n foot! You get t’have wild parties ‘n huge parties just cuz ya feel like it.”
“Princehood entails more studying and fewer ‘wild parties’ than you’d like,” Tido said.
“Yeah? Well life ain’t so pleasant when ya gotta smell your bro’s sweaty nuts all day,” Prince countered.
Both boys stared at the bronzing clouds.
“Count your blessings,” Tido said after a while, “I don’t have a family to throw parties with anymore, frivolous or otherwise.”
Prince’s ears splayed back. “Hey, sorry dude. I didn’t mean it like that.”
The pulley groaned, its rope yanked taut. Prince dashed to the crank faster than Tido blinked, the one King’d been “too big ‘n strong” to need when pulling Tido out of the water. All of Prince’s jumping, pushing, pulling, and tugging on the unyielding, rusty lever amounted to sore palms and a rope that wouldn’t reel. “Tido, help me!”
“W-what do you want me to do?”
“Turn this crank with me, duh!”
The rope pulled, the crank’s lever jerked forward, nearly yanking Prince off his feet with it. Tido ran over to take the lever while Prince grabbed the rope. He pulled with all his feeble might, putting muscles gained from years of lifting silver spoons and etiquette tomes to their first test. They failed. He couldn’t tell if that shrill, fraying noise came from the rope or his arms.
The rope yanked viciously. Tido pitched all the way over the crank, Prince launched overboard with the rope and busted pulley like a blonde marble in a slingshot. There was a sharp cry, a glutinous splash, the silence.
“Prince!”
Tido ran to the railing where he searched blackening waves, lapping the ship’s hull like a dinner plate, for Prince. He surfaced moments before Tido jumped after him. “Draw a line, quick!” he shouted. “There’s—”
Prince went under. No, something pulled him under. Tido’s panicked mind didn’t comprehend what drawing a line on a sheet of paper would’ve done to help, but he didn’t have time to do anything else before scaly, yellow-clawed fingers steepled a fierce grip around his slender shoulder. His blood ran cold, but not as cold as his captor’s fanged grin.

5

 King shambled out of his cabin reeking of the feline sauntering behind him. The deck, wrapped in sunset’s chilly shroud, was warmed by sauna fumes billowing from the opened door behind them. You couldn’t smell the ocean’s salty aroma around the steaming pair. Only musk, and sweat, and jizz. Lots of jizz.
A captain shouldn’t have to put up with thirst so momentous it’d take an entire reservoir to quench. A captain, a wolf captain, shouldn’t have to walk around smelling like a cat. A captain, a wolf captain, who smelled of cat, shouldn’t have to search a dark ship for a shower!
“That damned kid didn’t put th’lanterns out…Bet he didn’t mop up either. Said I wanted th’deck clean enough t’eat off of,” King panted. It’d been a figure of speech before Panther hauled him away. Now he considered sniffing the floorboards for breadcrumbs. “I can’t make it to th’pantry. Fetch me somethin’ t’eat, wouldya? And a drink. Two drinks. Scratch that, bring th’whole barrel up.”
Panther said nothing.
King straightened, ears perked. Darkness swallowed the ship in a panorama of long shadows. Crashing waves broke its perfect silence like the underside of an assassin’s hood.
No. A near perfect silence.
Large feet stomped below deck, where King kept his weapons and porn stash hidden. Panther led the way to the stairs, striding over floorboards that usually creaked louder than an old woman’s knees with feathery agility. King licked his lips, spread his arms for balance, willing himself to become as light when he took his first slow step. His big toe inched closer to the ground. Closer…closer…
CRRRRRRRRRK…
“Didja hear that?” a voice like someone armed to the teeth and looking for an excuse grunted below.
“Check it out. There may be others hidin’ aboard after all.”
“Panther, hide!” King hissed at the empty space she occupied a split second ago. He gaped at it, slack jawed. What’d felt to him like a million years had actually been the moment or two it took for the intruder to run upstairs.
Creatures from black lagoons would’ve called him a two out of ten in the dark. His scales sheened the color of oil spills from what little choked daylight was left. His barbs on his fins were gruesome syringes of malice, and he had enough to cover a spooky hospital’s stock. The snarling Atlantean thug carried two spears: one with a sharp, jagged head for disemboweling whales, one hanging between his legs for disemboweling everyone else. King’s gaze hadn’t stopped its jealous descent when the immediately deadlier of the two spears pointed at his heart.
King didn’t name Panther “Panther”, it’d just stuck. You didn’t have to wonder why a girl named Panther might drop down from a mast, land on your shoulders, clutch your head in a vice grip of sweaty thighs, and if you did, as in the thug’s case, you didn’t for very long.
A sound like an entire crowd cracking their knuckles shut everything up.
The fishman fell forward, not facedown, because his actual face now gawked at the sky. Panther landed beside him with all the noise of fallen cotton balls.
“Oh,” King said.
“Master, please hide.”
“Uh.”
“I’ll handle th’rest.”
He’d stuck his dick between those thighs. His head’d nestled between them more times than he could’ve counted with an abacus. He’d never hear twigs snap the same way again.
“Er,” he said.
Panther slinked downstairs. King stayed behind, cringing every time an unseen victim’s gasp, shout, gurgle, sometimes all three at once, flittered up to him.
All went quiet a minute later. He hadn’t budged an inch from his spot until now.
Recumbent Atlanteans littered his path downstairs. Their heads were facing the right ways, but their weapons were sheathed everywhere but in their scabbards. He now knew to thoroughly scrutinize any bladed suicides whereever Panther lurked. The hall leading into the lower deck was splattered but empty. He’d make Prince mop up later.
“Panther?” King called in the unctuous tones of one praying their echo wouldn’t answer back. It did. “Paaaaaanther? You good?”
King inched toward the lower deck’s maze of pillars and barrels with day’s last light glowing in portholes like fireflies trapped behind fogged glass. The Charge didn’t have a cannon aboard, not even those tacky iron ones you see in movies or reenactments. Its locked gunports collected dust, crates of contraband cluttered where cannons stood a lifetime ago. You kept life vests and inflatable rafts, not cannons, on a ship like the Charge, which won fights by outrunning everything that had fewer than two sails and/or engines that sputtered like refurbished jalopies.
Anyone wanting serious smoke with their glorified dinghy would've been bored or desperate, and King liked their chances with both.
Until they came aboard.
“Panther?”
A bulbous, red tentacle snaked around his ankle from behind a nearby pillar. It sent his world spinning with an incredible tug, dangling him upside down as a behemoth of an octopus man skulked out of shadows that seemed to bloat to fit him. This man absolutely brimmed. His belly had enough fat to fry an entire flock of Laputans, even more grease oozing from his jiggly form like a huge sack of undulating earthworms. He held Panther above his head with arms thicker than steel beams. Tentacles writhed about her naked body to gag and restrain her. She didn’t look too thrilled. Aside from glaring murderously and thrashing ferociously, her fangs uselessly dug into the thick meat of the tentacle covering her mouth. Fangs King often feared might one day sever him at the root.
His cock twitched, speaking of which. He couldn’t stop himself from reminiscing about certain foreign reading material he kept hidden with very similar scenes depicted on their covers.
“Nice lil’pussy cat ya got here,” the octopus cackled, “I think I’ll have some fun with her, after I deal with—AAAAAAAUGH!!!"
King botched what should’ve been a dramatic landing by landing on his head. He shot upright, wobbling but conscious, a smug grin stretched across his face.
“You punched me in the eye!” the red man roared as tentacles shielded half of his face. “Who does that?!”
“I do!” King’s grin broadened. He’d never punched anybody in the eye before and resolved to do it more often. He’d also never said things like, “Release her, fiend!” while pointing at nefarious foes either. Opportunities were scarce in that regard. Nefarious foes usually had better things to do than messing with him. King regretted saying it now. Movie stars had kickass soundtracks galvanizing their corny lines, and Prince’d broke his boombox weeks ago.
Oh, right.
“Where’s Prince! What’ve you done with…my…brother?”
King’s flushed gaze wandered southward before snapping north again. This man brimmed with more than fat between the knees. King’s treacherous cock perked with intrigue. Hopefully no one stood behind him to see his tail’s singular wag.
“Wouldn’t you like t’kno?”
“Yes…I…I would!” King said, his pointing finger wavered. He’d’ve practiced more one liners in the mirror if he knew he’d come up this short in the moment.
“You’ll have t’beat it outta me, cutie. I’ve got plans for you.”
King deduced said plans involved the thick, fleshy rebar swinging between the man’s legs, from which all the skeezy fry joints in the Three Worlds derived their oily stenches.
His neglected asshole puckered, joining his dick’s mutiny.
Focus!
He had a girl to impress, however much she horrified, drained, and emasculated him. A girl on the tracks was a girl on the tracks, even if speeding trains were better off derailing themselves at the risk of not finishing the job. Panther redoubled her efforts to break free when she saw King’s sneer, shaking her head vigorously.
She wanted him to run.
Hell, so did he.
But this was the perfect setup.
A villain.
A damsel.
A shaken bottle of bubbling testosterone.
He could even ride—er, fuck the guy after besting him in hot, sweaty, homoerotic combat!
No homo.
To, um, assert his dominance. Yeah. Nothing else. It happened all the time in his favorite doujins.
If only Prince hadn’t broken the boombox.
King ran a hand through his fiery locks, flicked it back with a glittery flair too fabulous to’ve been anything as mundane as sweat, then pointed at his foe again. He cleared his throat. “If that’s th’way it’s gotta be, don’t even think about beggin’ for mercy!” Howling, King lunged with readied fists, eyes blazing.
The fight itself lasted about five seconds.
The next two minutes could’ve been a segment on a wrestling program, where the babyface gets his stomped in while the ref’s out cold in the background. Panther took the place of the booing crowd by wincing. The octopus didn’t even need his hands.
King spent ten seconds after that doubled over, moaning, hurting in places he never knew he had before meaty fingers yanked him to his knees by his hair.
“Yer still a ripe cutie. Even all black ‘n blue,” the man said, preceding a moist slurping that could’ve been him licking his beak behind drool-soaked tentacles or something within King that sprung a leak.
A nautical mast erected. Nuts the size of cannonballs clenched. King couldn’t look away, partly because his left eye’d swollen to where it couldn’t close, but still. He played snakes and ladders with pulsing veins all the way up to the man’s plump ruby of a dickhead, which drooled thick, cloudy saliva back down its shaft.
Powerful heat moistened his bruised face as though he’d stuck it in a brick oven. It tasted of gas station sushi fresh out of the microwave, bulldozing his nostrils with such force that he felt it ramming down his throat. Then it hit him. His haywire nerves caught on a moment too late that a literal cock was being rammed down his throat. Its monumental thrusts gave his gullet the kind of beating reserved for back alleys and people who owned lots of money.
The would-be assailant was too big, too rough to notice how snug his throat felt. King made all the right noises; his gurgling moans sounded like all the desperate, choking gags the octopus expected. If King fought back too little, or not at all, it’d been because of the pummeling he just took.
"Soooooo gooooood!!!" King's internal monologue swooned gaily as dynamite exploded on his taste buds. Why were hung hotties always beating him up and kidnapping his friends?!
Panther, bless her heart, must’ve thought he was being violated. Or was simply enraged that her favorite toy was being played with so flagrantly in her presence. Her struggles tripled in effort while King savored the acapella of Atlantean moans and his brains wetly ping-ponging in his skull.
This continued for five, unobstructed, minutes.
“Ghaaaah!” the octopus’s oral onslaught ended on his horny cue. He slammed his cock to the hilt, flattening King’s face against his moist, blubbery crotch. His cocktip mashed against the floodgates of King’s esophagus, which were blown wide open by a tidal wave of a salty orgasm. The man’s dick bulged like a stopped hose with each heavy spurt of aquatic nut butter. King’s cheeks flooded to the brim on the first shot, ropes flew from both nostrils on the next, and on the third King swore he cried cum out of his rolling eyes. His frazzled effort to swallow it all caused the first real choking fit of the night. This left everything below his chin: chest, belly, between the legs, utterly drenched in spunk.
The octopus yanked his cock free the way one wrenches a stubborn cork out of a bottle. Enough cum to knock up an entire aquarium of Atlantean whores sprang from King’s gaped maw, now a steaming geyser, in torrents.
King’s dick clenched rhythmically, squirting wolf cum to join the growing white pool at his knees. Hardly anyone else noticed.
“Puppy wants more milk, eh?”
"Yebsh pwesh," King sputtered deliriously.
“What’d ya say earlier? No beggin’ fer mercy!” the octopus cackled, uncomprehending of the ancient, storied dialect of the fucked stupid. “Lesse how yer other end takes m’knob.”
The big man’s greasy foot used King’s face to stamp the soaked floor. His wagging tail was yanked, a loogie in the ocean of agony flooding him head to toe. Then the seas parted. The harpoon hit its mark. King’s howl rocked the Royal Charge harder than any waves ever could.

6

Prince woke with his arms tied behind his back, ankles bound. Tido, similarly bound, dissimilarly bruised all over, sprawled beside him. Prince spat down his throat when he wouldn’t wake up to his name and nudging.
“You alright?”
“I-I’ll live,” Tido said after he finished coughing. “Where are we?”
“One of th’broom closets. See if y’can sit up. I’mma bite your ropes off.”
Tido did as told. Prince finished gnawing his hands free quicker than he thought. You could always rely on King to skimp on their equipment.
“You’re remarkably calm, considering our dire situation,” Tido said.
“Ya think this is my first time gettin’ tied up? You should see me ‘n King when we go bar hoppin’.”
“What?”
“Nevermind. Untie your legs, then do me. No homo. Th’jerks that jumped me are th’ones after you? What do they want anyway?”
“They’ll likely pelt you,” Tido said, nervously fiddling with knots, “use your bones to fashion weapons and armor. Find dry land to cook your meat—Atlantean superstition holds it’s bad luck to light fires aboard a vessel of any kind, magical fires in our case. They might eat it raw. Magic fire is expensive in the Underworld. That’s probably why you’re still alive. Meat tastes best as, um, fresh as possible. Done. Let me untie you now.”
“I meant with you.”
Tido began untying Prince’s wrists in silence at first. “Remember what I said about family betraying you? My eldest brother had Father killed. His men stormed our palace.” Tido quavered. “He wants my choker. Ancient texts foretold it’s rightfully mine.”
Ropes fell from Prince’s wrists. He rubbed them before untying his own ankles.
“You’re not about t’tell me you’re actually a thousand years old or somethin’ lame like that, are ya?”
“What? No, I’m—”
Prince covered Tido’s mouth, glancing around suspiciously. “Don’t say it! You’re screwed if we happen t’be livin’ in a fictional reality. Pervy sickos go crazy for jailbait online.”
Tido’s mouth hung open even after Prince removed his hand. “Pervy-who? Jail-huh?? On-what???”
“Later. Anyway, you were sayin’?”
Tido couldn’t stop blinking. He’d had more coherent discussions with whirlpools.
“I was saying I’m…” he leaned forward to whisper his age in Prince’s ear.
“No kiddin’? You’re, like, way short dude. Didn’t know seahorse litters had runts too.”
“You didn’t even know what a seahorse was until a few hours ago!”
“Details. Keep goin’. Why would a prince want some (admittedly valuable) jewelry so bad he’d stage a coup over it?”
Tido took a deep breath. “My choker grants me the power to see the future. It’s how I knew your brother’s name, and how I knew I’d be safe if I got into your fishing cage.”
“Yeah, sure. Hey, don’t gimme that look. I believe you! I still put teeth under my pillow for fuck’s sake. Not my teeth. Bar hoppin’ with King’s good for stuff other than gettin’ tied up. But you ain’t exactly ‘safe’ right now is my point.”
“Not now, no, but I will be. I’ve seen glimpses of our adventures, our futures together. That must mean we get out of this alive…right?”
Prince surveyed everything he knew about quantum mechanics, gleaned entirely from a lifetime of comics, movies, video games, and anime, rubbing his chin. Tido’s choker sounded more like something out of a storybook than a space opera. That was good. Magic rules were never as stringent in the fantasy genre. Hopefully they really were in a fictional reality!
“Maybe,” he said eventually. “It depends on if th’future’s set in stone or if reality’s one big spaghetti bowl of alternate timelines. Are th’noodles plain, independent lines, or are people like tomato sauce slidin’ from noodle t’noodle when they make certain choices? There could be hundreds, thousands, millions of us who get outta this okay, ‘n just as many of me who become some ugly fish dude’s fur coat.”
Tido stared at him.
Prince didn’t notice. He hasn’t had this much fun since they robbed that crime lord’s hideout fronting as a milkshake parlor. The day’s long stomach ache’d been worth it. He glanced at Tido’s choker, then got down on his hands to take a closer look. Wild thoughts from the weaselly side of the animal kingdom clouded his mind last time he saw its resplendent sapphire. Now he had to squint to see the faintest sparkle. “Why didn’t they take it already?”        
“I wouldn’t tell them how to use it because I saw what happens if I do. These bruises are preferable to a spit.”
“Gnarly.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Consult th’cosmos or whatever. Scry up some intel.”
Tido nodded while touching the gemstone with both hands. “I’ve got enough for one more use today. Please catch me.”
“Catch you? What for?”
Blue light spilled through the broom closet’s door frame, briefly illuminating the dark lower deck. The octopus’s jostling back turned blue before fading to purple then back to red. His moans, King’s cock gargling, and Panther’s snarling all drowned a deep thrum that spread around them like a drum beat’s echo falling down a bottomless well.
Prince’s hairs still stood after the surge of…whatever that was finished coursing through him. He’d never skip another bath if getting fleas felt half as lame as this!
“Nngh…” Tido groaned in Prince’s arms. He beckoned the other boy closer, weary eyes opening. Prince listened.

7

Forget coffee. Who needed smelling salts? King now knew taking an artillery shell of a dick up your unlubricated ass was the one true pick-me-up of champions. Then again, he didn’t feel particularly “picked up” despite the octopus’s pudgy grip on his tail suspending his knees far off the ground. The one true mauling-abusing-and-ravaging of champions sounded far more accurate.
The octopus’s thrusts made King’s cheeks clap louder than a stadium-wide standing ovation. His foot curled its meaty toes over the back of King’s head, making him snog sex-stained floorboards. King’s nuts were smashed against his crotch by twin aquatic wrecking balls as they swung between his legs with unstoppable force. A homogenized sex din of orgasmic moans, sobs, and moist impacts deafened all other noise in the lower deck, dulling all of King’s senses with its coital tumult.
All except his touch sense, of course. The flaming missile using his asshole for target practice proved that much. King had a much easier time playing the part of the violated cum sock this time.
“Take it all, puppy! Take it all!”
The octopus’s foot left his head to stomp the ground, bracing for the biggest thrust yet. King’d only been reamed by half the man’s mast so far. He didn’t know if he could take a full rocket without getting torn in half, but knowing things was the privilege of those unclouded by tongue-lolled dazes. He did know the sweet release of the massive dick reeling backwards until rigid glans tugged the inner rim of his clenched ass. The man’s torpedo aimed for his belly. Years of jerking off to stomach-bulging fantasies couldn’t’ve prepared him for what having your guts rearranged actually felt like.
A barrel lid flew by, bounced off a pillar, rebounded from an adjacent wall, then smacked the octopus’s blackened eye. Panther and King fell from his grasp, one landing with more grace than the other, as the screaming Atlantean staggered with hands and tentacles clutching his face.
Prince’s mouth hung open. Believing Tido was different from witnessing evidence of precognition firsthand.
“Panther!” he shouted, “Get King’s trunk. Th’one with his weapons ‘n porn stash. It’s in that barrel behind you. No, that one!”
“He keeps it locked,” she said in a mix of anger and undertowed interest, standing between the wailing behemoth and her prone, moaning Master.
“Don’t worry about that. Get it ‘n throw it at that porthole over there. Don’t look at me like that, just do it!”
Panther snarled, dashing for the barrel as Prince threw himself at tentacles he knew would snatch at her ankles. He’d always imagined they’d feel sticky, or slimy from all the tentacle porn in his brother's collection. That they’d squeeze like an oily wetsuit one size too small. The enraged octopus’s tentacles, eager to please, ensnared the unresisting fox and hoisted him off the ground.
“You’ll regret that, little boy!”
“I think I’ll regret runnin’ out of soap. P.U.!”
Panther dumped the barrel out behind them, piles and piles of junk forming the throne for King’s trunk to land on. She’d’ve loved this find any other day. Any other day she’d’ve needed no witnesses and the open sea instead of the key. Master’s guns would’ve been an unfortunate casualty instead of what she needed in this exact moment. Prince must’ve wanted her to break it open. She threw it with all the might of a possessive jungle cat who, submerged deep in her well of jealousy, hoped the trunk would smash through the glass instead of hitting the porthole’s rim.
The trunk soared.
Prince watched it, the world slowing down, focus blurring his vision’s edge. Damn! Why’d he have to drop the boombox? His imagination supplied a cheesy, jazzy heist tune, the trumpeting kind that plays in his favorite shows when intricate plans come together with creaseless satisfaction.
The trunk’s corner hit the metal porthole, bursting it wide open. Magazines flapped through the air with papery, X-rated wings. Pin-ups, special editions, limited series collections all fluttered like doves around King’s falling pistols. One magazine in this flock of doves was a hawk. The magazine. The one which, as Tido predicted, flew on course to hit the octopus’s other eye the moment his hands moved from his face.
"Auuuuugh!!!"
He dropped Prince, who landed crouched with his hand out.
Guns clattered around them. One gun, the gun, finished its somersaults by landing on Prince’s hand.
Prince stood, a bit slower than he probably should’ve given the situation—the world was only in slow motion in his head, aiming King’s pistol.
“Hasta la vista, baby.”
"Guhhhnk!” the blinded octopus seethed. “Hasta la what?"
BANG!
Prince didn’t know what it meant either, but he’d always wanted to say that.

8

King groaned. Everything ached. The Charge’s usual creaking chorus dragged nails on the chalkboard behind his forehead. He couldn’t sit or swallow without yearning for Death’s embrace, but it’d all been worth it. All of life’s best pleasures fucked you up somehow.
Tido lay in a hammock adjacent to his, awake, eyes closed.
Prince entered in a stream of silvery moonlight, old wood fighting loudly with rusted hinges as he opened the cabin’s door. King groveled, squinting and flattening his ears against his skull.
“You guys need anythin’? Water? Snacks? Dildos? Flamethrowers?”
“Water would be lovely,” Tido said in a small voice.
“Condoms,” King croaked, “go back about fourteen years and get Dad some condoms.”
Prince got Tido’s water, passing Panther downstairs as one passed rowdy biker bars by crossing the street. They had enough seafood now to last the rest of their voyage, “Thanks to Tido,” she’d said with a grin too red to’ve been wry. She’d just enjoyed a midnight snack after dressing meat all night. Panther with raw meat wasn’t someone you wanted to be around without a sick bag handy. Only dragons who torched villages for fun made faces like hers while dining. He had to watch his step to keep from tracking footprints.
“Pour it on me, please,” Tido said after Prince returned.
“Kinky.”
“What?”
Prince poured water over his scales. They drank like dry sponges, reflecting the sapphire’s weakened glow like hundreds of delicate mirrors. Tido sighed contentedly.
“I spoke to Panther. She won’t eat ya or nothin’. Just make sure y’don’t go out at night without me for a while, ‘n don’t make sudden moves around her. She said she can’t be responsible if you forget. It’s mostly a joke. Mostly.”
“I see.”
“It took me, like, two years before I could take a leak a night without gettin’ pounced. Th’masts are her favorite hidin’ spot. Had t’learn which floorboards creak louder than th’others, I’ll show ya later.”
“None of this sounds like joking to me.”
“You’ve never had Panther’s fangs around your throat.”
Tido waited for elaboration that never came before saying, “Thank you”.
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t work for free,” Prince sneered, taking King’s empty cup from their shared nightstand-barrel as quietly as he could. “How long till you’re outta bed, ya think?”
“A few days,” Tido said, “a week at most. The choker’s magic is very debilitating, and I’ve used it twice today.”
“I meant your bruises, dummy!”
“O-oh…um, I’ll be able to assist with chores within the same amount of time, I think. Why are you making that face? You’re snickering! I can ‘swab the deck’ as good as anybody! It can’t be that hard, whatever it is, and…and…I can wash my own utensils as well!”
King bellowed.
“Focus on healin’ up before we start spoonin’,” Prince said as he pulled Tido’s blanket over his shoulders.
“Okay. What? You’re giggling again. Did I say something wrong?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
King and Tido soon fell asleep. Prince imagined his doofus brother storming their home with bandits, upturning their family, sending more bastards after him when he escaped. A deep frown twisted his face. Tido’s innocence, the kind of one who definitely didn’t have a flashlight and a dirty magazine under their covers at bedtime, was a treasure all its own. A treasure now safely locked away aboard the Royal Charge.
Prince smiled.
He left the cabin and shut the door, taking midnight with him.
No light disturbed their dark slumber…until a flashlight snapped on underneath King’s blanket.
Days washed away.
Deep underwater, deeper than any submarine without great insurance and a helmsman with nothing to lose but unutilized healthcare benefits would’ve dared descend, an Atlantean kingdom illuminated by thousands of magic fire lights simmered; a scintillating jewel submerged in black waters.
Fishman soldiers in armor plucked off golden reefs swam up and down spotless white marble halls within the palace. You’d’ve never known the workforce recently downsized by about half. Underwater coups tended to be tidy affairs. You didn’t need a scampy little brother to mop up the mess later. Prisoners were invited to dinner upon silver platters within hours. Still, patrols were needed. Curfews were mandated. Those who hadn’t sworn loyalty to the new King were being made to give body and soul to the royal chef’s cutting board instead.
Kneeling underwater was tricky. A shark soldier swam into the cavernous throne room to do it before the seahorse on the chair. Many hadn’t pulled the trick off. The shark learned quickly so things wouldn’t be pulled off of him too.
The seahorse could’ve been Tido’s twin, plus twenty years.
They even shared a name. Once.
This seahorse was Prince Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac II and, after strenuous pruning of the family tree, was now King Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac.
The first.
The one.
The only.
“My Lord,” the shark said, “the mercenaries haven’t returned with the fugitive, Aquarius Tidonium—”
“Do not speak my name in reference to another,” the King boomed as deeply as he could, grateful for the spacious room’s underwater acoustics. “What of the choker?”
Sweating underwater was its own nifty trick. The shark was on a roll. “Its whereabouts are…unknown, my Lord.”
The King wanted to shout. To stomp. To kick something, or someone, which bore no distinction to him. The old him would’ve done that. The Prince. He lacked brute strength to crush his crystal goblet of blobfish eyes by clenching his fist. He couldn’t afford losing more manpower than already sacrificed on gladiatorial entertainment and testing Surfaceworld torture equipment. Either of those would’ve been Kingly tantrums.
“Find it,” he said in a voice level enough to stack marbles on before, after quick consideration, adding, “or else.”
“Y-yes, my Lord!” the shark stammered. He couldn't swim out of the throne room fast enough. Him! Twice the snobby punk’s size. Thousands more teeth with as many days spent chomping prey that wasn’t cut to size and served under a dome. Rage boiled within the private cauldron of his predatory mind. It’d only take a second. One bite. No one would stop him.
Right?
What if he tried and someone did stop him?
What’d happen to him then?
He’d seen what the scrawny, sheltered, spoiled wretch did to his captain. Not had done, but did personally, with all the impish glee of a boy burning off a hornet’s wings. He didn’t know someone could get so…so…flat.
He swam faster, his thoughts from the past minute locked away in a heavy mental trunk. This new King wasn’t someone you begrudged, no matter how soundproof your closed doors were. You didn’t call him your Lord without capitalizing the L.
King Aquarios Tidonium Liquadiac, the first, the one, the only, smiled.
“You there,” he pointed at one surprised guard, then another. “Kick that man until I tell you to stop.”
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