Greetings, all.
I have a solution.
*sits everyone down* Allow me to tell you a story about a man named Al. He was a young man who wanted to be a warrior, as do many of you young ones. As a warrior, he made it his duty to roam the countryside, seeking adventure and slaying savage beasts or, more often than not, fleeing from them in terror.
One fine day, young Al the would-be warrior was trotting through the woods near Yew when he stumbled across the following things, in this order: a hind, a hind, a lich, a chicken, and a pile of crumbling ruins. With his posterior still smoking slightly and his hair standing on end from the lich's warm welcome, he stumbled into the decrepit old house and saw a wizened, rather smelly old woman stirring a cauldron full of minced mongbat livers and pickled eyes of the Travesty. (Obviously she had found the Travesty's estranged spider-like family branch; that's the only way of explaining how she had harvested so many eyes from a creature which should, like any respectable intact human, only have two.) She told him that if he wished to seek shelter, he would have to fulfil a couple of tasks for her.
Now, most of us have, at one point, done those tasks. Al succeeded where very few have failed, and was eventually sent to collect a couple of simple ingredients. With his bag dripping with bloody severed deer hearts and amusingly phallic chicken livers, he made his way to a tavern where he was to collect a sample of whiskey from an old drunken pirate. Firstly, he spoke to Amathist, but it turned out that she had no whiskey, only rum. He realised he was at the wrong tavern. So, feeling silly, he went to the other drunken pirate, Mr Blackheart.
Are you still with me? Good! Let us continue onto the sordid part of this sorry tale.
When young Al requested a sample of Blackheart's ale, the great and venerable ocean warrior sprayed him with spit, clipped him over the ear, and essentially told him that he didn't hold audiences with anybody who wasn't utterly sozzled. Slightly disheartened, Al purchased several hundred jugs of cider, sat down by the window, and gradually began to work through them. Now, the human body is not supposed to be able to cope with several hundred litres of liquid, especially not alcoholic apple urine, but nobody told Al that. So, like a pathetic non-G-rated version of the Little Train Who Could, he drank doggedly into the night, only to have the magnificent specimen of pirate life rebuff his every advance. (I would like to point out that, as the night wore on, Al began to mix up Blackheart and the busty tavern wench, so these advances became rather, ah, amorous.)
Finally, he was sufficiently drunk to decide that wearing a tricorn hat was a marvellous idea. Off he went! And back he came, thus adorned, only to find that the pirate fell over himself in rapture and practically drowned him in samples of whiskey. Oh, it was a great day for Sosaria!
Of course, being utterly inebriated, young Al could not find his way back to the Hag's house. After speaking to a very helpful horse, he wandered through a moongate and onto a handy boat. At that point, his mind turned to his future. Why was he wandering through the backwoods, picking up deer hearts and chicken gizzards for hideous old moustached women? Why was he crawling to pirates in search of a single drop of whiskey? Why, after drinking several hundred jugs of cider, was he still alive? Disgusted with himself, Al swigged the last of the ale and went looking for a wife. (This seemed a natural progression of things to him at the time. You must understand, he wasn't at his best. And if you'd seen the Hag, you would want to insure yourself with a good woman too.)
Finally, as he passed a remote coastline, he saw - to his delight - the most beautiful woman he had ever spotted. Her long black hair was slightly coarse, her pert face slightly pushed in, her delectable shoulders slightly hunched and her wide, expressive, liquid eyes slightly simian, but in his current state, she looked like a Lady of the Snow turned by dark magic into something less lethal and more likely to make good chicken soup. Shouting his love, he leapt overboard and swam toward the distant shore. Possibly because he had drunk so much that he was now more water than flesh, he made it.
There followed the saddest scene in the history of Sosaria. As Al and his lady love bounded toward each other over the sand, he desiring the opportunity to enfold her in his mighty arms and she desiring the opportunity to pelt him with fruit and then grunt at him, a silver serpent came sliding down the slope like a flash of fanged lightning. Everybody is afraid of snakes, even the dreaded Al, bane of pirates - with a girlish shriek, he ran with surprising agility over the dunes. His lady, who was, of course, a gorilla, gave a seductive bellow and leapt up into the treetops, where she disappeared from sight.
Al finally managed to escape the foul reptile by flinging his tricorne hat at it. (He expected it to choke; instead, it developed a taste for rum, an eye for buxom wenches, and a yearning for the salty seas, and it slithered off to become a pirate. Later, it was tragically killed when a sea serpent mistook it for the female of the species. Let us have a moment of silence for it... okay, moment's over.) However, his lady love, who had so bewitched him with her feminine charms, had fled.
Weeping, he spent miserable weeks searching the island for her. Luckily, he had so broken the laws of human anatomy in his efforts to fulfil the Hag's quest that his blood had turned to cider, ensuring that he would not become sober - and thus come to his senses - for many, many a moon.
And so, as he roamed the twisting paths of Terra Sanctum, did he meet with a young lady in a blue kimono, who showed heartless amusement at his plight. By then, he was so lovelorn and so very, very drunk that, although he tried to profess his love for his lost gorilla maiden, all he could manage to spit out was his name and his honourable new title: Al the Drunk.
...the end.
(I would like to thank Amathist for the cameo, and beg for her permission to use it. I am begging after the actual post. Such is the way of the pirate.)
