Seeing as I performed the best in the boar wrestling competition, I was permitted to leave the area first. After climbing back aboard my ship, I was off, sailing the waters around Victoria in order to find the location of our next challenge. The fancy earrings I wore pulled me south, toward the great frozen lands of Antarctica, where no pirate has ever sailed before. More dangerous than the Bermuda Triangle, more frozen than the icy Arctic, it was insanity to sail that way. But the stripe earrings pulled me forward, and who was I to refuse them? Captain Kingswell doesn’t back down from a challenge, no matter how ludicrous it seems!
As we approached the frozen tundras of the southern continent, I began to wonder what sort of challenge we would face here. Perhaps we would each be given a treasure map, forced to search through the ice and snow for some sort of hidden object. Maybe we would have to converse with penguins, convincing them to guide as to a certain landmark. There could be any number of tasks. With the wind turning bitterly cold, I went into my cabin and grabbed a coat from my cupboard. Noticing the gleam of my beautiful Melbourne-made earrings, I couldn’t help but admire myself in the mirror.
When I turned around, there was somebody else in my cabin. It was Nash ‘No Knees’ Fawcett, sitting on his pirate wheelchair behind my desk, drinking my whiskey. When I asked how he had gotten on my ship, he explained that after being eliminated for failing to defeat the boar, he had stowed away on my ship.
“Kingswell,” he said, “I need you to listen to me. I think that Gavin gave us these magical earrings to corrupt our souls and turn us into his servants, like the wraiths in The King of the Bling. You’ve seen those movies, right? The parallels are uncanny.”
I thought that was totally preposterous, so I called in my crew to remove Fawcett from my cabin. Then I made him “walk” the plank. Of course, he can’t walk (or swim), so we definitely won’t be seeing him again. But now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I actually think he might be right about that whole thing. Oh well.
– Kingswell