Aye, day came for me once more, to rub me thumping noggin in its brightness. The light was partially eclipsed by blurry, bobbin’ shapes dippin’ in and out of me vision. My ears were subjected to a frantic squeaking and whistling. Yarr, twas like being stuck in a child’s recorder recital. And yet the tilting of the ground beneath me told me I were not stuck in that wretched place – I was at sea. My vision cleared, resolving me confines into the all too familiar prison décor of vertical bars and me captors into a gang of prairie dogs. This were an ill turn. I’d heard tell of a roving ship crewed by unlikely beasts but I’d not thought meself luckless enough to fall prey to them.
I snarled at them in me most fearsome manner. Twas pretty fearsome, for following a nasty incident with Discombobula Dentata (see ye Orthodontic Odyssey to learn o’ me distress), I’d had to have me teeth replaced. The only teeth available had been the sharpened mouth spines a savage tribesman. Suitably cowed, the bobbing and weaving desert rodents released me.
Merely standing set off a ripple of dipping dogs. I was starting to get seasick when I spotted a mallet to me right. Good fortune favoured me, for tis the side on which I have fingers. I seized it and laid about the prairie pirates. Whenever one of the little savages popped up I whopped him back down. I slowly made me whalloping way to the gunwales, fending off their sprightly charges with me hammer of righteousness.
I’m rarely a man of god, but there’s just something about being kidnapped by yipping rodents that invokes the Old Testament in me. Once I’d hammered every last one of them (it took a fair few whacks to inhibit their reflexive springing) I released the dinghy. I’d no desire to sail off with their ship – I’d no crew and the wheel was only knee high. I heaved meself over the side and balanced precariously on the little craft.
I was about to set off when I heard that damnable chitterin’ from the deck and looked up just in time to see an articulated beam spin out from the vessel and swing down in an arc upon me. Me last sight were of a vast hammer’s head being ridden by a screaming prairie dog with gold teeth as it pounded down onto me. Damn prairie dogs.
