Tragedy Strikes Mistress Squidlington’s All Singing All Dancing Cockle Club

Posted on By Captain Pigheart

Gaaargh, tis oft surprising to an optimistic pirate such as meself with what swiftness a pleasant evenin’ in ye bar can descend into carnage. Twas such a night what took two of me young and enthusiastic mates and cast ‘em into ye shallows.

I’d personally rescued Kemberton Shatz and Grim Pitch from the smoulderin’ ashes of their orphanage home. There be no need to go into details o’ how it came to such incinerating – these things happen all ye time. Arr. They adapted easily to a life at sea and showed an impressive resistance to scurvy and cutlass points.

At length they were permitted to scurry about free o’ chains, and naturally visited Mistress Squidlington’s All Singing All Dancing Cockle Club, one of the Grim Bastard’s favourite hostelries. Twas perhaps a freedom they were unready for. Ye nudified wenchery and debauched sea beasties quite blew their tiny minds.

By the time the rest o’ the crew arrived Kemberton were half buried beneath a heaving mass o’ engorged jellyfish while Pitch provocatively sashayed with a sweaty porpoise. Twas a sight to gladden’ me eye and we cheered ‘em on.

Gaaargh, so fond were our enjoyment o’ Mistress Squidlington’s diverse entertainments that we noted not the attention we’d drawn with our young pups. Ye see, the Cockle Club were cunningly located within a cave giving access to both ye land dwelling folks (of which ye people be an example) and to ye denizens of ye deep (of which a vast and hungry squid be an example). The free entrance be a blessin’ upon trade up to the point at which it turns ye customers into a meal for ye swim-through visitors.

Me example of a giant squid were not as specious as ye may have thought, for one of its species did indeed rear its bulbousness from out of ye pool and with thrashing tentacles it devastated the joyful evening.

Tis hard to know whether the cephalopodous assassin sought out Kemberton Shatz and Grim Pitch for their own sweet juciness or if twere the briny sheen they gained in the Cockle Club that made ‘em so appetising. Gaargh, it took a whole week to find suitable replacements for them.

Ye Damned Beast

Posted on By Captain Pigheart

Ye ocelot bounded out of the bush, seized me fine tricorn brim and dashed off into the grass. Ye first time twas endearing but the cursed half-deer half-aggravating vermin had been playing this game for days.

Though I’d attempted to blast the thing’s skull from off its neck I’d so far fallen short. Oftentimes I’d fallen in a river. At length the brute’d return it and prance gaily about. Gaargh, how I long to eat the creature.

De Gashe – Origins

Posted on By Captain Pigheart
The son of an offal miner and a milliner, Franklyn soon learned that people are like gloves stuffed with organs. If you remove the organs, you can wear the glove. He was destined for a life in either career, but like so many young people of his generation he was spared from early labour by his parents’ class aspirations.
Cruelly denied an opportunity to develop chimney lung he was sent to an Academy of Competence in the local borough. There he learned little but graduated with a plethora of qualifications, none recognisable to employers.
 
Engorged with ignorance, Franklyn undertook a world tour of Europe, embracing art, history, culture and night life. During this adventure he learned the value of the fairer sex (omitted from his school curriculum), and was inducted into a number of influential sects. Mysteries were revealed to him by way of near fatal intoxicants and implausible rituals. 
 
He returned to England a different man; the real Franklyn lived on, in a tiny amulet worn about De Gashe’s neck.
 
His first murder was committed on the site of a now fictional genocide site, triggering a catastrophic wave of temporal destruction which annihilated his own reality and flung De Gashe into a future.
 
Thus ripped from his own time by the unseemly portal, De Gashe travels back and forth through the universe at the whim of fate, a deity or some devious scoundrel with a button. Perhaps one day he will discover this.
 
In the meantime what can any Victorian gentleman with a penchant for blades and intoxicants (and an enviable collection of rings) do except seek such such divers entertainments as the world has to offer.

The Blissfully Brief Tale of Luckless Larry and King Clam

Posted on By Captain Pigheart

Me mate Luckless Larry owed his utter limblessness to levellin’ a drunken accusation o’ cuckoldery at a polar bear. Twas unwise. Nonetheless, he survived his maulin’ and were later installed as the figurehead on The Good Ship Lollipop. There he became legendary, though he suffered further when we forgot to feed him. O’ course when she sank that was reputed to be the last of him.

Tis true that he were rescued from the sinking ship by a drastically unattractive merwench and thence conveyed to the King’s cavernous court. However, rumours that his ill luck were turned about by winning a chess contest against King Clam have since been quashed. He amused ye courtesans with his dextrous features until one day he crushed a sacred prawn with his earlobe thus incurrin’ the King’s wrath.

He was sentenced to be made into one o’ the King’s garden-sized chess pieces. And so he spent much o’ the year stacked up in a shed, to be brought out only long enough for the party guests to grow tired with ye game and return to the barbecue. As far as I know, his attempts to escape came to naught and he resides there still beneath a broken deckchair, sad and useless. Unlucky, gaargh.