Homeward
Captain Lannery Storm stood on the deck of the Gallant Angel with her arms crossed. She had a cutlass on each hip and had made an initial attempt to brush her hair, though she had quickly given up on that front in favor of just tying it back.
Behind her was the Omenpath back to the Stormwreck Sea. Somewhere on that side, Andres and Cristomo were working on the last bits of paperwork for Andres to formally return to Torrezon and for him and Cristomo to be legally married by the Church of Dusk so that their child wouldn’t be born a bastard. Somewhere else, her half-brother and half-sister, Marciano and Evereth, were setting up protections to keep the Betrayer from sinking his fingers into Luneau. And in a third place, her cousin and her grandmother were keeping Jagged Teeth Island in line.
But in front of her, on this side of the Omenpath, was the towering metropolis of Towashi.
The elderly rat man Captain Storm was meant to meet stood at the dock with his hands folded behind his back. Gathered around him were five kids: two nezumi, two kitsune, and an ogre. Both nezumi and one of the kitsune were just seven years old, followed by the other kitsune at eight, and finally the ogre at nine. Children. Orphans. Just like Storm herself.
Storm jumped down off of her ship as soon as the gangplank was lowered. “Hey, Mister Silentsign,” she said, trying to sign as quickly as she spoke. Nezumi sign language was a little difficult for her, but she had been watching videos about it on her communicator and heckling a few people she knew used it. “Everyone ready to go?”
The nezumi signed back. “They’re ready. I’ll be coming with you to ensure that they settle in, of course.”
“Of course,” she repeated. It was what the old man had done the previous times that the kids went to Jagged Teeth Island to meet their potential parents. “Want me to stop anywhere so you can jump in to fight a fish?”
Silentsign’s left ear twitched in amusement. “Perhaps on the return trip.”
“Sounds good, old man.” That was, of course, said with the highest respect. Like pirates, Reckoners rarely made it to their seventies. Storm turned back to the kids. “Alright, let’s get on the ship! Any of you who makes Adrian tell stories about Durron gets the dragon’s share of candy before we make it to shore again!”
Storm hated returning to Jagged Teeth Island. It felt like everything she was supposed to want, and it just made her feel bad that she didn’t want it. Thankfully, she wasn’t here for an extended visit, because she would rather eat her own legs than listen to her grandmother talk at length about the cultural benefits of settling down again. She had gotten enough of something vaguely adjacent to that while dealing with Andres and Cristomo’s entire everything lately, when they weren’t trying to put a new hole in the wall of their cabin.
Honestly, she was about ready to find an extraplanar nunnery just to avoid all of it.
She kicked the gangplank down to the dock and slid down it just to show off, which turned into a short jog at the end. Her crew started scrambling to unload things, while Silentsign bid the orphans goodbye so that they could join their new families here. Storm recognized most of the people living on this island, of course, but her gaze drifted past the crowd to try to find two women in particular.
Mariah Storm stood like a solid pillar of stone with her shoulders squared. She was the head of the island’s trader’s guild. At a glance, she and Storm looked like sisters rather than cousins: same brown hair, same sun-crisped tan, same squared shoulders and commanding gait. Storm considered that to be because of the good genes from the sides of their family that they shared. The difference was, as always, in the details: Mariah bore green eyes rather than the brown that Storm shared with her half-brother and half-sister, and Mariah was a powerful geomancer like their grandmother while Storm had...nearly nothing.
And standing beside her was Tetsuko Umezawa, a Dominarian woman with black hair and a shaved undercut that Storm honestly was pretty jealous of. Even though Tetsuko now wore the same clothing as everyone else on the island, she carried a weapon she called a jitte rather than go without one. She was probably closer to Storm’s age than to Mariah’s, but Storm never bothered to ask.
Storm counted to three, then pivoted in time to catch an orc girl flinging herself at her legs. The child was probably eight or nine years old, but Storm couldn’t remember. Her black hair was braided carefully and laid over her shoulder; probably Tetsuko’s work. One of the women had obviously convinced her to wash up so her green skin wasn’t covered in dirt and sand like it usually was. “Heya, Dolly,” Storm greeted, hefting the girl into her arms. “You’ve gotten bigger!”
Dolly giggled. “Hi Auntie Lannie! Did you bring my new brother?”
“Patience, Dolly,” Mariah reminded her as she and Tetsuko crossed the dock to join Storm. It wassounfair of her to be taller than Storm. “Let them have time to get their things together first.”
“But I wanna see him again!” The orc’s cheeks puffed up as she pouted.
“Hey now, cannonball, don’t argue with your momma,” Storm laughed as she set Dolly back down on her feet. “He’s on his way.”
The other kids who had been adopted – the nezumi twins by an older human couple, Maple-Paw by a goblin family unit that had already taken in a bunch of other orphans of varying species, and Flower-Nose by a younger orc man and his siren spouse – made their way down the docks and to their new families. Finally, Takuroshi made his way down the gangplank. He was fairly tall despite being somewhere around Dolly’s age, and Silentsign had warned Mariah and Tetsuko at length that ogres never stopped growing, though the speed at which they did would slow down in time. Storm was just glad that they had gotten him moved to the island before he outgrew her ship.
The ogre boy had short beige fur, which made him look almost bald. His ears were pointed and pinned back a bit when he saw the crowd, like he had during previous trips to this island. But he carried his own luggage toward Mariah and Tetsuko and Dolly.
Dolly darted forward. “Hi Takuroshi!” she chirped. “You get to live here now! Wanna come see your room?”
Takuroshi hesitated and looked up at Mariah, who nodded encouragingly. “O-okay,” he agreed, letting Dolly grab his hand and drag him off.
Storm snorted once the kids were out of earshot. “Either she’s going to pull him out of his shell, or they’re going to be the most dynamic duo on this island.”
“Or both,” Tetsuko agreed. “So, any chance we can convince you to stay for dinner and update us on the Storm Fleet?”
Storm glanced back at her ship. Silentsign was signing rather aggressively to Avarett about something to do with bones, Marian was cursing a storm over her maps, and Udolf had already vaulted off of the ship in order to get their food stores replenished.
She turned back to her cousin and her cousin’s partner. She offered them a grin that felt more forced than it looked. “Yeah, absolutely.”