“Where the FUCK is Jones?!” The Captain shouts at the crew from above. Everyone scrambles, trying to avoid taking the blame for him, or trying to locate him to make him stand up and take this instead of us, or just trying to figure out what in the nine hells going on here.

Someone manages to drag him out from below deck, still blurry eyed from sleeping the day away. He’s a scrawny kid, only here for his uncanny talent in spell casting.

He trips on nothing then snaps awake and stands at attention as May lets go of him in front of the crowd.

“Jones Ja- uh, Jacob Jones reporting Sir!” He does some sad attempt at a salute, closing his eyes too, the coward.

Captain Ares walks down the stairs onto the main deck. Striding confidently towards the very nervous Jacob Jones.

“You know something Jones?”

Jones doesn’t lower his hand or even open his eyes as he speaks, “What sir?”

“If you’d been at your post, or even just opened your fucking eyeballs, you’d know it was Ma’am.”

Jones opens his eyes with that to see a tall Tiefling woman, with red tinted skin, short winding horns, and a long red tail with a scorpion stinger at the end.

“Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am!”

“Put your damn arm down, Jones, you’re not even doing it right,” she says exhaustively.

He puts his arm to his side but still stands at attention.

The Captain turns to her first mate, Kade, “How do I get him to stop doing that?”

“I think he said ‘at ease?’”

“At ease Jones.”

When Jones finally looks her in the eyes instead of up at the sky, the real interrogation begins.

“Jones, I’m only gonna ask this once. I’ll ask it slowly so your tiny brain can understand it,” she grabs him by the collar and pulls him up to her face, “Where. Are. We.”

Jones’ loose fitting boots look like they’re about to fall off, the height different between the Captain and scrawny little Jones is staggering.

He stutters to find the words, anything to get him out of this. Sadly for him, he found the wrong ones.

“I- I don’t know?”

In a fit of annoyance and rage, she throws him over the edge of the ship.

Jones frantically tries to swim before realizing, “There’s no water??”

“NO SHIT!” Kearan, the quartermaster, yells down at him.

Jones stands up and takes in his surroundings, all around, as far as the eye can see, is sand. Not even beach sand, their entire ship and crew had somehow landed in the middle of a desert.

After Jones gets back up to the ship, he meets the Captain in her quarters.

She sits at her desk, behind the large windows showing only the endless desert. On her desk is a small stack of papers, a few knives, and a few scattered pieces of treasure.

From somewhere underneath the desk, she pulls out a detailed leather skinned book with an odd nozzle in the top. She pops the top off and takes a swig of what Jones can only guess is rum.

“Sit down Jones,” she gestures to the wood chair to his right.

He sits in it awkwardly, and looks nervous, avoiding her eyes as he asks, “So what did you want to talk about, Captain Ares?”

She stares at him with her dark brown eyes, glaring with a look that says, “You know what.”

“Well uh. So you see- I might have had a wild magic surge last night when I cast this ritual for the winds and-“

“A what?”

“I cast it every night, you had asked-“

“No. The first part.”

“A wild magic surge?” The beat of silence tells him yes, “I’m a sorcerer, my magic comes from my bloodline, but it also comes at a cost. Every so often my spells will go… wrong.”

“Alright then,” Captain Ares says, standing up, “You’re going to tell me what exactly went wrong, where we are, and how we get back to the Cerulean Sea. You have 2 hours. Until then, I’m going to confirm for everyone out there that this is your fault, get a tally of supplies just in case, and set up a watch order.”

The Captain comes out from behind her desk and comes right in front of Jones, placing her hand on his shoulder, “If you don’t have a solution to this within the next 2 hours, you won’t like what comes next, I can promise you that.”

As Captain Ares leaves to address the rest of the crew, Jones is left in her quarters. His mind is racing, and he prays to his god that he can live to see tomorrow.

Hello! This story is written with my friends character(s) from a series she is writing! If you’d like to follow her on this platform her username is ‘paige’

Please don’t copy anything directly from this or future stories which include these characters

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