Haliburton

A

Pirates Of The Caribbean

Tale

Disclaimer: I do not own Pirates of the Caribbean. I do not own Koehler, Twigg, Bo’Sun, Grapple, Jack the Monkey, or any other character written about (Oh, and I don’t own Barbossa, nor do I own Ragetti. If I did I would be a very happy girl. Muwahahaha! :] Mmmyes, I do have a sick mind. Thanks for noticing).

Isolde is my creation, and solemnly mine. If you want to use her, send me a review and at the end request. I’ll get back to you.  Isolde’s cottage isn’t based on mine, yet the surrounding area is. Go my dedication and me to my precious Bitter Lake…my…pressssscious…

Summary: The deceitful crew of The Black Pearl wind up in a different place then they had been knocked out in. They meet up with a wily teenager who nearly beats a few of them into submission, and startles the rest with her updates, all before the week it out. The time is set in the Golden Age of Piracy and Privateering (1700s), three years before the cursed pirates meet their end.

Don’t ask me how; I have author powers! Boredom strikes yet ensues in an amusing yet frightful tail. Not a Mary-Sue (heaven forbid…), just cute at times. Who could resist making fun of Ragetti? He’s to easily moulded…Must be the eye. Muwahahaha…

Chapter Two

In Which The Pirates Find Out The Year, Fruit Pelts People, And Isolde Eats Very Good Eggs

Isolde blinked her eyes a few times, adjusting her sights to the dim yet existing light. She could only make out the wooden ceiling and the blurry shapes of lit candles on a desk or table. The air wreaked with the scent of salt water and seaweed, plus a dosage of old fish.

She rolled over on her side and promptly fell off of whatever she had been lying on, and landed painfully on a wooden bowl with very lumpy lemons. It was then she realized her mouth tasted foul and the backdrop of something sour lingered.

The memories of the pirates and the monkey, Jasper escaping, the gun, and most of all, her stomach suddenly came back to her. Where she was, she couldn’t tell, but judging by the hard wooden floor, she had a good guess.

“Ship…” she murmured to herself. A sudden voice nearly made her squeal with shock yet she only managed to weakly sit up and lean her back against the…whatever she had been lying on.

“Yah, The Black Pearl. Cap’n Barbossa ordered us to take you aboard after you passed out and all…” Ragetti answered her. There was a squeaking sound and Isolde realized he was cleaning his false eye.

“Oh, that’s disgusting…” Isolde muttered, and a squelching sound confirmed he was ignoring her and had put his eye back in. “It’s not even the right size for your socket…”

“Well, excuse me if I’ rather have an eye then wear a patch…” Ragetti retorted cheerfully, popping his eye in and out a few times just to spite her. Squelch squelch squelch…

“Gross,” Isolde muttered, and attempted to stand She got to her knees and fell back on a grubby fabric surface with a ratty blanket on it. A hammock? Sure felt like it.

“Well then, I suppose you’ve ignored the fact I could have choked to death and fed me lemons when I was asleep?”

Ragetti snickered for a few moments, nodding his head, as he couldn’t talk through giggling. He tossed the lemon that had been in his lap to Isolde, who didn’t catch it and instead got hit by the fruit on her chest.

“Ow, god damn it!” she swore loudly, curling an arm around the sore sport (which was a rather embarrassing point for her to get hit).

“Oh, ah, sorry, matey…” Ragetti apologized quietly, yet would have taken it back in a moment had he known the lemon was coming right back at him. It smacked his forehead and his eye popped out with a slick sound. He squealed, “Me eye!” before lunging forward and catching it in his grubby left hand.

“Bloody, be careful!” he scolded a giggling Isolde.

“How’d you loose it?” Isolde inquired.

“Loose what?” Ragetti replied, cleaning his eye frantically on his (dirty) vest before carefully placing his false eye back in.

“Your real eye. How’d you loose it? Get it gouged out in a bar brawl or something?”

“You have a sick, er, sick mind, poppin,” Ragetti curled his lower lip at her, but went on. “Well, I had to suffer to help get rid o’ the curse that’s on us’ns.”

“Curse? What curse? I hardly believe in silly things as superstitions.”

Ragetti crossed his arms over his chest and sneered cruelly at Isolde, whose sight was clearing up and she was staring at his false eye.

“The curse. We took a lot of gold; Aztec gold, a set of…of, 882 pieces, I think. It was cursed and we have to return all the pieces, along with some blood or something.” Ragetti shrugged sadly, before saying, “A crew man knifed me cheekbone and eye so I went blind. My eye was messed up and mushy so I just got a wooden one.”

Isolde made a disgusted face and wrinkled her features up, making a rather ugly expression all on it’s own. She crossed her arms over her stomach uneasily and made a disgusted grunt.

“That is…utterly disgusting.”

Ragetti continued sneering at Isolde, yet she wasn’t paying any more attention to the lanky buccaneer. Looking around herself, she discovered salty smelling wooden planks. A few hammocks were strewn about, tacked onto the walls, while there were cots about, their wood looking like it was rotting before her very eyes. No blankets or anything that resembled comfort was in sight.

“It must get cold…” Isolde whistled quietly. Ragetti narrowed his eyes as much as possible.

“Well, we’re cursed, ‘member? We don’t feel much…actually, we don’t feel noffink at all.”

Isolde raised a brow and looked at him oddly. She picked up another lemon and absently tossed it from one hand to the other.

”So if I flung this at you, hit you smack in the nose, you wouldn’t feel it?”

“Well, f’er some reason we be feeling stuff now that we got here…” Ragetti mumbled uncertainly. Within a moment he yelled out a rather dirty curse word and leapt up, rubbing the spot on his forehead where a lemon had just bounced off, a large red spot appearing on his skin.

Isolde snickered, drawing herself up to full height. With a sneer, she commented lightly, “That’s for giving me a horrible visual picture of what squished up lost eyes may look like.”

She was abruptly cut off when the door to the (murky) large room (well, large enough to accommodate at least sixty people without difficulty) suddenly slammed open, and the fat and dirty man with grey pants and a filthy white shirt fell inside.

“What’ goin’ on ‘ere? Why did y’eh cry out, Ragetti?” Pintel questioned suspiciously.

Ragetti wrinkled his nose at his companion, pointing to the basket of lemons at Isolde’s feet. The girl shook as she tried to hide her laugher, disguising it as a rather well practised cough. Pintel growled and muttered something under his breath, yet it seemed to amuse his lanky friend highly, as Ragetti’s face curved lopsidedly into a smile.

Pintel glared at his friend and picked up the lemon, which had rolled which the sway of the boat to about a meter away. He yanked the lemon from the ground, yet got pelted by a lemon from behind, on the behind. With a yelp, he whirled around to be confronted by an all-to-innocent whelp and a shaking with laughter one-eyed pirate. Pintel flung the fruit in his hand at Ragetti, missing the pirate by a good meter or so.

“Cap’n wants t’er speak whi’ch you, whelp,” Pintel commented dryly, marching back out the door, a lemon flung by Ragetti striking him in the left ankle, causing him to loose his balance and fall onto his girth.

Isolde strolled onto the deck a precious five minutes afterwards, the bold little bitch that she was. Apparently, the anxiety of having to wait for so long had not rubbed off on the captain, who stood waiting patiently near the bow of the boat.

“Ah, Miss Isolde,” Barbossa greeted her curtly enough, and she hailed back with a “Arr matey and avast…and whatever you guys say around…here.” Blinking once and not at all entirely sure how to respond to such a greeting, he straightened his shoulder and sucked in his already thin stomach. The feather upon his cap flopped awkwardly to the side, yet at that exact moment a breeze blew past and corrected the plume.

“I called you up here to discuss a privilege I have prepared for yours truly to attain.”

Isolde’s right eye gave a very small yet noticeable twitch. Did he think he was fooling her? He had just been relieved of a curse he’d been under for seven years and counting. That, and he was a pirate. Like she was going to trust him for anything.

“Seeing as I did happen to help you on your way to recovering from scurvy, I imagine you’ll be happy to accept the offer.”

“What is it, first, mate?” Isolde shot out at him. Barbossa grinned silkily, tilting his head to the side.

“A guide. My crew and I need a guide. You seem to know where you’re running off to and fainting.”

Isolde snorted, fiddling with a braided lock of hair for a moment before snottily commenting, “Well, if you had let me go sooner, I wouldn’t have suffered Sugar Shock.”

Barbossa was silent for a moment. Was that what the form of scurvy was called? Sugar shock? How peculiar, but never the less, perhaps it had something to do with…er, well…Yes.

“We fed you some lemons in y’er faint. Scurvy, y’eh see, comes from not consuming enough vitamin C.”

Isolde snorted contemptuously, eyeing the captain with a look of superiority that he did not appreciate. His eyes flashed and his lip curled a bit to reveal a few teeth edges. Isolde, quite taken aback and frankly intimidated, cleared her throat.

“I didn’t have scurvy, stu-I mean sir. I have a really fast, um, metabolism. You know, I digest things quicker then most and don’t gain a lot of weight. I hadn’t eaten breakfast when my cat, Jasper, the thing you shot at, ran off and I had to catch him.”

Isolde paused for a moment, and fiddled with the tedious task of straightening her bandana. Clearly she was trying to frustrate Barbossa, and was doing a fine job at that.

“Well, out with it, girl!” Barbossa snapped, and a few near-by crewmembers looked up from their tasks.

 “Well, my stomach didn’t like not being fed, and decided to make me faint and screw up my system a bit. Savvy?”

Hah! She had always wanted to use that word, ever sense she heard it one time on an old TV show called Pirate Islands. The opportunity, however, had never arisen. Ah, but it had arisen now…and the captain knew what it meant. Bonus!

"Ah, well, that was my, ah, second estimation, miss Isolde..." Barbossa lied with a smirk, doing a rather fine job of pulling it off. He peered at her oddly for a moment before his lips curled slightly to reveal a few teeth, and scowled. "What be y'er last name, lass?"

     Isolde hesitated for a moment, catching his rather nasty gaze. Quite frankly she was indeed intimidated by it, and an inner voice was urging her not to argue with confused, pirates just realised from a seven-year curse.

     "Bellamy. Isolde Bellamy, actually," she said, her voice carrying the small traces of arrogance to show she was boasting.

     Barbossa went slack for a moment. Could it possibly be possible...? Well, he was cursed. Er, is, was, he didn't quite know at the moment. But a curse was a curse, and she had just stated one of the most notorious pirate's of the age.

     "Eh, as in Charles Bellamy?" Barbossa questioned quietly. A few of the ship's crew had stopped their work, and if they were near enough to hear the name, had started listening. Those who hadn't had already asked around.

     Isolde paused in a moment of deep thinking, scrounging for an answer.

     "I had a great, great, great, great...er, really old grand father named Charles Bellamy, yeah..."

     Barbossa leaned back and heavily supported himself upon the railing of the Pearl. He stared at the child for a moment, his head tilted loosely to the side. How was it possible?

     "What year be it, Miss Bellamy?"

     "2003, Barbie," Isolde said, taking full advantage of the slackened pirate's slackness by slapping him a silly nickname.

     "It was the seventeen hundreds when we was last at the Caribbean..." Barbossa said quietly. A long moment of silence ensued, and the only sounds were that of the water lapping against the sides of the boat, birds chirping and leaves rustling.

     A door creaked open and Ragetti emerged from within the barracks behind it. He cleared his throat and with a smile said, "I believe she was about to agree to your request, cap'n."

     "Oh, right...Sure, we have an accord," Isolde said stupidly, realizing to late she remembered what the deal actually was.

     Barbossa grabbed her wrist and shook it roughly before she could say anything else, and without making another comment, he strode off, went up some stairs, and out of her sight. A door closed somewhere and work went back to normal.

     "What was that?" Isolde muttered to herself, rubbing her wrist idly with her other hand.

     "A pirate handshake. Encase you was hidin' a dagger or something up y'er sleeve," Pintel muttered from somewhere nearby.

     "Dun' worry, though. Cap'n Barbossa trusts you somewhat, otherwise you wouldn't be his guide!" Ragetti pointed out happily.

     The rest of Isolde's day was spent looking around the ship, Ragetti and (grudgingly) Pintel serving as her guides. Of course, she was continuously worried about Jasper and if he was going to be okay, if he was okay, or if a forest fuzzy had mauled him. And as one could guess, she didn't enjoy the tour. Being leered at by freshly un-cursed pirates was a rather significant putout.

     The sun started setting soon enough, and the pirates began to get nervous, wondering if their skeletal forms would still take their body over. After all, they could feel, but judging by Ragetti's recovery rate from Pintel's stab, they still had the odd immortality

“I have to go. Like, right now. Jasper’s locked out and could possibly be wandering about in the forest. Cisco is out of food, I bet…” Isolde mused.

“Whose Jasper an’ Cisco?” Pintel asked, absently fiddling with his cap.

“My cats. Jasper is the black cat you all tried to kill for some reason, and Cisco is an orange tabby I have at the cottage. I have to go.”

“Cap’n Barbossa will have to know, but you can go wait by a rowboat in the meantime,” Ragetti told her, walking the other way towards what Isolde presumed to be the captain’s cabin. A long while went by and Ragetti re-appeared looking rather confused, beside him strolling Barbossa.

“You’ll be showing us where this cottage of y’ers is, before we leave y’eh alone for the night, Miss Bellamy.”

”Oh, yeah right. No way. You guys will ransack the place while I sleep,” Isolde snorted indignantly, once again crossing her arms over her stomach (since at 13 it had become hard to cross her arms over her chest without feeling awkward. Damn puberty!). Unfortunately, Isolde was then introduced to the end of a loaded flintlock pistol pointed at her. With a moment of quick consideration, she ran the possibilities of spiting the pirates and letting them shoot her. However, that would render her dead. However, that rendering her dead would render the pirates guideless. However, that rendering her dead rendering the pirates guideless still rendered her dead. She did not very much feel like being rendered dead.

“Aye aye, Barbie!” Isolde chirruped, and within fifteen minutes she was in a boat, rowing towards shore with Barbossa, Ragetti, Pintel and a pirate named Nipperkin (which Isolde gallantly made fun of, not being able to resist the temptation of ‘Nipperkin’.)

“Nipperkin…Hehe…Are you sure your mother was sober when she named you, Nippy? Or is it Nips? How about Nip-kin? Oh, I got it, Napkin! Hehehe!”

Nipperkin, who had been raised well and educated (thus granting him a snobby-second class attitude) indignantly straightened his tricorner cap and flattened his brown hair, narrowed his hazel eyes, dust off his grey shirt and black pants, and merely (after performing a rather interesting fleet of cleaning imaginary mud off of his boots) turned his nose up at Isolde and sniffed.

“Hehe, snubbed…” Ragetti snickered playfully at Isolde, who gave him a very threatening glare, yet he missed the hint.

After the boat ride, Isolde led the pirates through the forest (“It’s eerily dark here…” Pintel commented), down the dirt road Grapple had caught her (“It’s eerily dark here as well,” Pintel commented), the next road over which passed by a steep hill with cliff face in it (a cottage was at the top of the hill, long abandoned yet Isolde forgot to mention it easily) and finally arrived at the point where the road crossed her cottage’s drive way (“It’s eerily-OW!” Pintel commented, being hit over the head by Barbossa). She pointed out the bomb fire pit that was a few feet away from the driveway, and the tree that was a few feet away from that.

“Watch out for those if you plan to raid my place during the night,” Isolde sniffed, and then pointed towards her cottage. “My place. Stay out, or I’ll get my cats to maul you.” Unfortunately, her joke wasn’t caught, and Nipperkin whispered a rather nasty threat to her.

“So we just take the road back, go through the forest, and we’re back to the bay, then?” Barbossa questioned, and Isolde nodded. Without saying goodbye or anything (well, Ragetti did wave), the pirates turned around and marched off.

Immediately, Isolde darted down the driveway, and nearly tripping up the porch steps, dug the key out of her pocket, unlocked the door, and flung it open. To her relief, Cisco was asleep on a chair, and Jasper had been hiding under the porch. He came loping up the steps and flung himself into the cottage.

Isolde locked the door, and didn’t leave a window unlocked or a shutter a crack open. She was scared, and not prepared to let any pirates raid her home. She lodged a chair in front of the door, the back frame securely fitted under the doorknob. Isolde proceeded to locking her and the cats in the den (the ‘litter box room’), and with only a comforter blanket, fell asleep on the floor, hiding under the futon.

The sun filtered through the window and landed neatly on Isolde’s face. Her eyes flickered open and she realized her head was sticking out from under the couch, verifying she had moved in her sleep. She yawned absently, groggily slithering out from underneath the futon and curling up on it instead.

In persistence, the sunlight moved in only a few minutes and continued glaring onto her face. Isolde turned her face into the blanket, attempting to block it out. She would have been successful, had Cisco not leapt onto her back and startled her into a state of full awareness.

“Shit, cat…I had the wickedest dream…” Isolde murmured, turning onto her back and petting her cat absently. The orange tabby meowed and leapt off, peeved that she had moved and spoiled his position.

Sitting upright, Isolde stretched her arms upwards, realizing she was still in yesterday’s clothes, bandana included. She looked around and found she was indeed in the den.

“That’s…interesting,” she muttered quietly, getting up and padding to her rightful room. She undressed, grabbed a towel and went into the bathroom for a shower. Twelve minutes later, she emerged, dried herself off, got dressed, braided her hair into four sections, and picked out a new bandana.

“Kitties, vittles!” she called to her cats, resisting the temptation to pick either one up, quite positive they’d leave fur behind on her black polar-fleece vest, red turtleneck (sleeves rolled up, it being summer!) and blue jeans.

Avoiding getting her black socks wet in a puddle that the cottage’s water-keg had left the night before (nobody had yet figured out how to fix it, and they were claiming to be too cheap to buy a new one). Making her way to the microwave, she paused to grab three eggs out of the fridge and a small bag of cat food that lay beside the fridge. She tipped the bag over a bit and watched carefully as cat food poured out and onto a food dish for her animals.

Afterwards, she put the bag away and cracked the eggs in a bowl, beat them and put the bowl in the microwave for two minutes.

“Scrambled eggs, Jasper,” she tittered to the black feline that had begun eating it’s own food.

“Anyways, as I was saying, I had a wicked dream last night,” she continued her discussion with the cats, explaining how she had meet up with pirates in the bay.

“Then, when I woke up, I was in the sunroom. Weird, huh?” she said, grabbing the eggs out of the microwave and pouring a healthy dosage of ketchup (if you consider two cups of the stuff healthy…) onto her eggs.

She dug her fork into the bowl of ketchup (and eggs) and let out a squeak as the sound of someone knocking on her cottage door rang out.

“Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin…” she muttered, half smiling at her own joke. Meagan must have come up to her cottage! Isolde thought. Meagan was her next-door neighbour at the cottage, and the two often visited each other’s cottage to chat, drool over some hot actor dude, or converse about books they’d read. That or they’d avoid being ravaged by the pets people on the lake had.

Opening the door, she closed her eyes briefly and began to say, “Hey, I was just chatting with the cats,“ yet got cut off at “Hey, I was just-“ by her voice getting jammed into her throat.

“G’Morning!”

“Ah shit.”

Hey hey, Softbrush here! Did you know that the legend of Bitter Lake is a real story? Aye, if you look in the Haliburton Ontario’s archives, find bitter lake, and look back some decades, you’ll find it. However, as nobody does that, and my family happened to like, knew the dude or something, we go around and scare the shit out of all the new people to our lake! Go Us! Wahoo! ; ) I’m experimenting with formatting this story. I can’t get it right without screwing it up, so I may just keep it in Web format regardless the annoying gaps within paragraphs.

Pantherpiller: Keep reading! I’m glad you appreciate the fine qualities and consideration that has been put into …er, I am happy you enjoy this…story. Yes, story.

Arrrg! On a side note, I found a kick-ass store that sells kick-ass pirate costumes. 120$, mind you…Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! Eeeiii!