M O'er the Ocean Blue

[King Shark]

Cartwright leaned back against his chair, which groaned against the effort. He was a heavy man with a great big round belly, who wore an unflattering black shirt stretched to its limits by his bulk, and a baggy pair of plain shorts. Wherever he went, Cartwright wore slippers…even at the local watering hole. He was old, and possessed of wispy white flyaway hair that he slicked back, and through which patches of scalp could be glimpsed; it was the brittle hair of an old man, the kind of hair that says one is old but that precedes the true infirmity of being at the end of one’s rope. He was still mobile, though slow and hunched, and many speculated that he may not have many good years left in his back, which was known to trouble him.

He walked with a cane.

He wore sunglasses habitually, because his eyes were sensitive to sunlight.

He enjoyed an afternoon beer, or sometimes more.

He loved to talk.

Cartwright was figure in the community who commanded the respect of a loose contingency of other old men. They frequented the only bar in town with the proprietary air of an Old Boys’ Club.

Each day they would gather in the afternoon: a parliament of old owls who ruled over a dragon’s hoard of gossip and stories. Oftentimes locals and travelers would find tables nearby where they could sit and listen. It was a delightful opportunity to overhear the comings-and-goings, seasoned with sage wisdom and the biting honesty of the elderly.

Their table was always open when they arrived, and there was always a crowd at the time of their arrival. When they entered, the establishment was typically abuzz with light chatter, but it died down immediately as soon as the first of them stepped through the door.

Once they’d assembled properly, the three of them, and sat down, there was a ceremonial silence. It wasn’t a defined ceremony, it was just the way it was done. The old men sat down to a table, their drinks already set out for them, quietly took their first sips, and then…

Then it could begin.

Cartwright was the opener. That was standard procedure for this event. Dante’s Abyss had its pre-game, the Death Game had its own version of it, and these old men had their opening topic that signaled that the games had begun.

“They’ve rallied around him, I hear,” began Cartwright. He paused, sipped his beer, and savored the way the other two mantled themselves with silence. He had their attention. “They’re like a paramilitary cult of some sort, I hear. Not the gun-toting kind, though, no, Sir. They’re not gun-nuts at all. They’re computer geeks, would you believe it? A bunch of asthmatic basement dwellers who caught the show on television, and got whipped up into a frenzy by him. They wear shirts with his face on them! They leave their rooms behind, with their Thundershark posters, their action figures, and their computer screens, and these poindexters set sail to find him.

“And they found him, I hear. Came down from their islands, used their parents’ money, bought a boat, and searched him out. They’ve been sailing around, they’ve got spears and bows, glasses and inhalers, and they fancy themselves men of the sea. A cult, practically, worshiping this thing that they call a Demigod.”

When Cartwright had paused for a long enough time to signal that he was finished speaking, the floor was open.

Anderson cleared his throat to announce his entrance into the conversation.

Anderson was the opposite of Cartwright in many ways. Anderson was a shriveled beanpole, long and thin, with a lot of neck but scarcely any chin. His back was straight, his shoulders square, and he wore the same pair of coveralls everyday with no shirt underneath. He wore a straw hat that protected some of his skin against Opealon’s harsh sunlight. The rest of his skin was as leather as a shoe, and as tanned. He was still rather mobile, and made his living fishing off the dock of the floating village.

“What do you think draws ‘em to ‘im?” Anderson asked. He had a gruff voice made harsh as gravel by years of smoking.

He was smoking then, in fact, and put his pipe back to his lips when he was finished speaking. A thin curl of sweet smelling pipe smoke eddied up from the end of a blossoming red ember in the heel of the pipe bowl, worming its way through the air.

If the others minded, they didn’t show it.

“I reckon it’s that damned show,” replied Cartwright, his tone bitter. “That, and the nature of their sort. The weak rally to the strong. They see a King, not a monster, and they fall in line. He wouldn’t be the first King who’d used the backs of the weak as step stones on a climb to power.”

“Heard he doesn’t even know he’s a King,” grumbled Anderson, slurring gently around his pipe stem. “Heard he ain’t got the sense the Arbiter gave a tuna.”

“Well, there’s that,” admitted Cartwright. “From what I’ve heard…you know, from them that watched the Game, I guess he’s more beast than man. But he is part man, too, mind. Ain’t just a wanton mad beast, he’s got some sense. A very base kind of humanity to him, apparently, that seems to appeal to the weak folk.”

“Figure he considers those cult geeks people, then?” Anderson asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Can’t rightfully say. Travelers have been saying, it seems like the geeks stride on into town, buy up a bunch of fish and things, bring it back to him, then move onto the next place. Nobody’s quite sure of where they’re going. I ain’t quite sure they know where they’re going, by the sounds of it,” Cartwright stated.

Another man cleared his throat, a bookish old dog named Winston. It was his turn to step into the arena.

It was unclear whether Winston was his first name or his last name. He had a waspish countenance, was bespectacled, and had a nose that called up the image of an eagle’s beak. His salt and pepper hair was carefully combed and gelled. He wore a moth-eaten button up, black slacks held up by black suspenders, and a blue bow tie. Unlike the others, he drank whiskey, not ale.

“I’ve heard that once a man gains that kind of power,” Winston began, with the whip-lash tone of a man who thought he was making a significant point. “...that he tends to go mad. Madness and power go hand and hand, you know.”

“I ain’t sure he’s got the brains to go mad, myself,” quipped Anderson. “From what I’ve heard, he’s as thick as a tree trunk. Ain’t enough goin’ on in his brain for ‘im to go mad.”

“Ayup,” agreed Cartwright, bobbing his head once. He took a pull from his beer, then let out the post-sip sigh that some folks can’t help but make. “Reckon you’ve got to have a certain degree of senses in order to lose them.”

Cartwright held the final say. It was understood between the old men. Having rendered a verdict, Cartwright rearranged himself to the tune of his seat’s protests.

For a time, the men drank in silence.

Then, as was his duty, Cartwright opened the next order of business.

“Heard there was a Mickey Mouse sighting,” Cartwright announced simply.

Unable to help himself, Anderson snorted derisively.

Winston sipped delicately at his whiskey, set down his Glencairn whiskey glass, then pushed his glasses up his nose. That meant he had something to say, which drew the other men’s gazes.

“My wife said-”

“Oh, here we go,” mumbled Anderson.

“MY. WIFE. SAID,” roared Winston, shrill, rising to his feet and slapping both hands down on the table. “...that the mouse was spotted some fifty nautical miles away, as the gull flies. If he’s headed to the lifts, he’ll pass right through here. Matter of fact, even if he’s not headed to the lifts, he’ll probably have to stop over.

“What’s more, the King Shark Cult was spotted sailing this way as well, in that slapdash pile of logs they’re calling a ship. What a world! Where Sharks are Kings, and mice are walking and talking amongst men and women!”

Finished, looking smug, and peering over his beak-like nose at the other two, Winston sat back down. Slowly, though. Very slowly.

“...you’re a real prick, you know that?” grunted Anderson.

The old fisherman finished his ale, set down his mug, then stood with the careful deliberation that belonged to the elderly.

Anderson dipped his straw hat to Cartwright, ignored Winston entirely, then made his way for the entrance, pushing through the batwing doors and into the afternoon sunlight. The buzz of regular conversation swelled up behind him, brought on by the conclusion of the event.

Up above the floating village, where fishing was life, and where old men told tales, the sun beat harshly.

Under the same sun, a gangly nerd with round red-rimmed spectacles pulled a spyglass away from her eye, collapsed it, then placed it in her breast pocket. She wiped the sweat from her freckled, sun ravaged brow and grinned.

Emily was a lank young woman, hair a fiery orange, with a shock of freckles that would startle a leopard. She wore her hair in twin braids that fell past her bony shoulders and down the white, sweat stained dress shirt. She hadn’t changed her clothes in weeks. Her eyes, emerald green, sparkled in the light. Out ahead of her the sun spilled a floodlight of reflection that dazzled against the whitecaps and rolling waves. The salt in the air made her heart soar.

“Thar she blows,” Emily said, grinning then casting her gaze upwards.

Nanaue looked down at her, blank faced, jaw hanging open. The sun glimmered off of his gunmetal grey crown. The peaks of the shark teeth adorning the circlet dazzled at the tips where the light splashed over them.

His enormous shoulders heaved gently with his breath, his giant barrel chest rose and fell, and his gills flared on even keel with the rhythm of his body.

He was a towering presence, a washed grey, nine feet if he were an inch, but bedecked with tremendous arms wrought in muscle. He wore his presence like regalia, and though he was a simple being, he had an aura of purpose around him.

He wore jorts, an immaculate pair of them that always offered the perfect fit, which he had won with his performance in a deadly televised competition.

He also wore a temporary tattoo on his arm, an anchor standing sentinel over the backdrop of a heart with an arrow through it, courtesy of his followers.

His mouth, a terror of teeth, hung open wide in a smile. And oh, didn’t he look splendid? Emily would never grow tired of seeing that precocious glimmer in his black eyes, or the way he approached each new experience with a bright curiosity. He wasn’t very sharp, but he was bursting with spirit.

“Tharrrr,” King Shark rumbled back, pointing off at the silhouette resting at the crest of the horizon. “Town?”

“Town,” agreed his geeky companion amiably. “We’ll be there before the sun sets. Pacifidlog Town, according to my map. If I’m reading it right. Bunch of bumpkins, I guess.”

“Bumpkins,” repeated Nanaue, nodding. “Bumpkin town.”

 

[Mickey Mouse]

A few months after the Nausicaa Incident.

* * *​

“...what d’ya think it is?”

“Don’t be daft,” Lyndon scowled. “You know exactly who that is.”

His long lips curled downward as he turned to face his manservant. Lyndon was a slight man but stood with the confidence of aristocracy, owing to the fact that he had, at one time, been quite well-regarded in the upper class circles. He still wore his velvety purple coat from those days — the days before his entire estate had been snatched from the sky by big, black unmade tentacles and plunged into the ocean. His manservant, Carl, was the only remnant that remained of his former life, dedicated to the last, if a bit… well, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the shed, to say the least.

He was a big man, though, and strong, which was incredibly convenient given the state of affairs the Nausicaa Incident had left them in. To put it simply, their luck had run out — not that Carl had any in the first place — and his copious fortune had been rendered inaccessible to him. The pair had tried their best to book passage back to the floating islands on multiple occasions, but as it happened, even the poor folk down on the surface expected some sort of compensation for their work, and Lyndon had access to none of his own coin.

He’d begged and begged for someone to take pity on them and give them one single free passage, but to no avail. It turned out that dedicating your whole political career, however short-lived, to cutting off the surface-dwellers from most of Opealon’s natural resources didn’t endear you to the common folk. Especially when they were the ones harvesting and mining those resources in the first place.

Now, though… maybe they’d finally found a better bargaining chip.

“Cut him out,” Lyndon ordered, waving a hand toward the prize trapped inside their net. He stepped toward it, trying his best to get a closer look without getting too close — Arbiter forbid the creature was alive and tried to fight back. Carl might be expendable, but he wasn’t about to let even the smallest thread on his silky blouse be touched.

In the first couple of months following the Nausicaa Incident, talk of missing heroes — not to mention countless civilian casualties — had been on everyone’s lips. The City of Hope’s response to the event had been so catastrophic that several of the galaxy’s most prominent warriors had either been grievously injured, killed, or disappeared entirely, and naturally, the public wanted answers. Through the recovery efforts, one single refrain kept being repeated: what happened to those we’ve lost? Will they be back? Will they be more ready to save us next time?

The City of Hope took the brunt of the blame for the many miscalculations leading to the loss of so many of the Crossroads’ heroic figures, and few knew that better than the Skylanders who’d ended up stuck down below, like Lyndon. For weeks, he’d suffered his own share of abuse at the hands of the surface-dwellers for his role, however minor, in the City’s failure to protect the planet for Darkseid and his unmade goons — however unwarranted that critique may have been.

Eventually, that talk died down. He’d managed to find a way to lay low with Carl. He wanted little to do with the rumors and accusations and really, really mean insults people hurled at him, so he relished in the opportunity to, for once, fade into the background. With this new development, though, he began to think that the very fervor that had made his life on the surface such a living hell might actually be the thing to get him out of here.

Carl’s knife cut through the ropes of their net, and the small, diminutive form of one of those very same missing heroes tumbled out onto the deck of their small skiff. The burly, brutish manservant leaned down, pressing an ear to the thing’s chest.

“He’s still breathin’, sir,” Carl looked up at his master.

“A simple fix,” Lyndon smirked, sweeping closer now and swiping the knife from Carl’s hands. He looked at his manservant with a raised, calculating eyebrow.

“Dead mice tell no tales.”

Mickey Mouse’s eyes snapped open, a gloved hand launching upward almost automatically. His survival instincts kicked in as the former aristocrat lifted the dagger into the air, prepping to bring it down on his prey.

His fingers wrapped around Lyndon’s wrist, and the human man’s eyes went wide. If the mouse king’s senses had returned to him, he might’ve been able to almost smell the fear radiating from him. As it was, though, his head was pounding and his vision was still blurry — bein’ asleep for a long time could do that to ya, y’know — and he couldn’t even begin to tell where he was, let alone how the folks around him were feeling.

“Sir, sir!” Carl shouted, but — much to Lyndon’s dismay — the manservant did not jump to assist his master. Instead, he stumbled backwards on the skiff, falling to the floor. The impact of his more burly body sent the master and the mouse’s side of the little fishing boat up into the air. The smaller passengers flew off the ground, flying over Carl’s head and landing with a splash in the water.

At least, from Carl’s perspective, Lyndon did. His master burst up through the surface moments later, sputtering and struggling to catch his breath.

“Carl — the mouse — ” he stammered, “he’s alive!”

“That’s what I said, sir!” Carl whispered urgently.

“Help me out, dammit!” the master said, stretching his hand out towards his manservant. Before Carl could even think to reach for him, though, Lyndon felt the cold steel of some sort of weapon on his shoulder, sending a chill down his soaked spine. Reluctantly, he glanced up to see Mickey Mouse, his faculties now starting to come back, standing atop a floating purple carpet, keyblade in hand. He did not look happy.

“Watch your language, pal,” the mouse king frowned.

He flipped the keyblade in his hand and shoved the golden hilt into Lyndon’s face. Within seconds, the master’s entire world went black, and he started to go limp.

Mickey turned to face Carl, scowl still plastered on his face. For a few moments, they stared each other down, fear creeping up Carl’s features as he started to try and crawl backwards. Mickey kept his eyes focused solely on the manservant as he reached down and yanked Lyndon by his collar out of the water so he wouldn’t drown, flopping his unconscious form on the carpet.

“So this fella tried to stab me, huh?” he asked. Cautiously, Carl nodded.

Mickey’s frown turned upside down almost immediately.

“Well, that was super silly of him, huh, pal?!”

* * *

Several weeks later, present day. Basically.

* * *​

“Are we there yet?”

Lyndon’s eyes rolled. The mouse had asked them the same question, incessantly, for the past several days as they finally started to get within striking distance of their destination. Mickey, sitting atop the magic carpet and flying just ahead of the skiff, was nevertheless too perceptive to not perceive this.

“I saw that, fella,” the king scrunched his face. “I was just askin’ a question.”

“Your questions tire us, mouse,” the former aristocrat said. “If you’re so concerned with getting to the islands sooner, why not fly up on your magic carpet?!”

“Fella, you know the carpet can’t go that high!” Mickey frowned. “It’s too far for him!”

“Oh, come now, master,” Carl interjected, “he’s merely wondering! It is a long journey, after all, sir.”

Lyndon groaned, and flopped back on the boat, pulling his eye mask down in some attempt to nap. For the life of him, Mickey Mouse couldn’t tell why the fella hadn’t taken to him yet. Usually when he’d spent this long with someone, they would’ve gotten past any reservations by now and started thinking of him as quite delightful, a bright spot to be around. Lyndon seemed to hold something against him from the moment he’d knocked him in the noggin with his keyblade, even though they’d managed to smooth over the miscommunication rather quickly!

Turned out — to hear Lyndon and Carl tell it, anyway — when they’d found him, people had been looking for him! The pair of humans had intended to return him to the folks who were searching for him, but apparently Carl had read the wanted poster incorrectly, being that he couldn’t read and all. It said ‘Dead or Alive,’ but the manservant had simply stopped at the first word and assumed they wanted him dead. Mickey had been more than happy to clarify for him that was not the case! (Although, come to think of it, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would’ve asked for him dead at all, even if the alive part was tagged on.)

The mouse had been surprised to hear that months had passed since the big battle with Davy Jones in Nausicaa, and that somehow, he’d been quite asleep the whole time since! He’d been having a wild dream about a circus and some creepy folks that worked there; it had been rather spooky, but honestly, at this point he thought he might’ve preferred staying there than being stuck on the Opealon oceans for weeks at a time. It turned out the only lifts in this quadrant of the planet up to the floating islands — where, Mickey supposed, he would find some answers as to what had happened to Cap’n Jones and Darkseid and the whole mess — were quite a few weeks’ journey away from where he’d washed up. Lyndon and Carl had been kind enough to offer to accompany him, though he was starting to suspect they expected some kinda reward for finding him, and he simply didn’t have the means to furnish that.

Nevertheless, things were going well! He only caught Lyndon mumbling about how he wished ‘we’d killed the mouse when we had the chance’ once a day now!

On the horizon, a small conglomeration of fishing boats coalesced together to create a small village that looked… well, Mickey didn’t want to be judgey, but it wasn’t what he’d come to expect from Opealon’s architecture, based on what he’d seen in the City of Hope and Nausicaa. It was much more, uh… podunk?

“Land ho!” he squeaked, pointing a hand toward the town. Carl slowed his rowing, and Lyndon popped up from his nap and slid his eye mask off of his face. Mickey glanced back at them from where he perched on the carpet.

Lyndon squinted. “Yuck,” he scowled. “That’s Pacifidlog Town. Bunch of bumpkins.”

Bumpkin. Maybe that was a better word!

“Bumpkins,” repeated Mickey, looking back at the town. He grinned. “Bumpkin town, fellas!”

 

[King Shark]

The only bar in town was abuzz, which was unusual, to say the least. Its usual patrons were the elderly, with an end of day surge around the time the fisherfolk hung up their rods for the evening. To call the level of buzz surrounding the bar unusual would, in fact, have been a dramatic understatement. An excited throng of people old, young, and middle aged formed a messy column that extended through the tavern’s butterfly doors and out into the town proper, where it began to splinter in different directions according to the town’s space limitations. There simply wasn’t enough room for a crowd that size to extend in a line indefinitely; where it had to, it began to snake around buildings and out onto the floating raft contraptions that served as the town’s closest approximation to yards and porches.

The town had taken a day off, something virtually unheard of in the quiet working community, which reserved such actions for instances of a prolific death, a catastrophic fish migration, or a period of religious observance.

But, celebrities did not come to Pacifidlog Town, and there was no stopping effects of King Shark’s arrival.

Beside the butterfly doors, adjacent to the ‘Auditions!’ poster, a group of young fishermen chatted animatedly.

“He saw the death of Superman! He was there! And now he’s here?”

“I heard he’s mounting a resistance against Darkseid, and that he’s looking for the most elite crew members to take with him. The strongest, fastest, smartest batch of soldiers he can find!”

"You know, he actually is royalty! I heard his father is some kind of Shark God! He’s even got a crown!"

"I heard he's all shark, and no man, just bipedal! I caught a glimpse of his junk on TV and it was crazy looking!"

“If I bomb this audition, I’m just going to join the cultists. With Superman gone, we’re just going to end up Unmade anyway.”

“I wonder how strong he really is? He was wearing that power dampening collar that whole time! I wonder if he could hold his own against Superman?”

Such was the chatter on the floating logs of Pacifidlog Town.

Inside the local watering hole, a wide booth had been erected. It consisted primarily of pallets and driftwood, topped with a long, smooth, cut stone for a surface that might’ve been an incredibly rare asset in a town such as theirs. The din of chatter was almost a roar, so much so that interviews themselves were difficult to conduct.

Nanaue sat in the place of honor at the center of the interview table in a raised driftwood throne decorated with shells, fishbones, and paltry gems. He wore a crown of enormous polished teeth, polished, and bound by a ring of black gems and onyx the color of his beady eyes. He tossed back entire uncooked trout, plucked from a bucket, the way one might snack on a bag of popcorn. At his right was a gangly, moon-faced, red-headed girl with a spray of freckles. At his left there was a bespectacled wiry man in his thirties with a hairline that had long since been frightened back from his forehead and clung scantily to his scalp in carefully maneuvered comb swipes.

“Deborah,” stated Emily, the red-head beside Nanaue. She leaned forward on her elbows and looked intently at her interview.

Deborah, a woman with beefy arms and some extra paunch around the middle, sat placidly in a metal folding chair. She wore her hair short, grey as the sky, and with little fuss over its appearance. It looked unwashed. A simple white tank was her choice of top, while her bottoms were cut off jean shorts, a clear mark in her favor. She had a crow tattoo on her shoulder.

“Deb,” she corrected, her voice gruff and low. “After the divorce, I started going by Debbie. Now, I’m Deb.”

“Right,” stated Emily, looking over a sheet of paper, functionally a resume, before peering over the top and weighing the presence of ‘Deb’. “And you want to join us because…”

“Well, my husband was a piece of shit,” Deb stated bluntly, while her mouth drew into a tight line and a flush crossed her cheeks. She swigged a tankard. “That’s putting it mildly. I found him fucking an octopus. I said to myself, then, I said ‘Debbie,’ before I started calling myself Deb, ‘You can do better than this. You’re living in this podunk shit-hole, and there’s an entire world out there for you. And here you are, in your fifties, and you’ve been wasting yourself on some alcoholic piece of trash who’s given more attention to an octopus in the last twenty seconds than he’s given to you in the last twenty years!’ - that’s what I said to myself. So I hacked off my hair, put on some brawn, and started livin’. You know, there’s animals, they’re born one of two ways. You have altricial animals…they’re born helpless, they can’t move for themselves. Then you have animals that are precocial, like sharks. They’re born with the power to move, to do things on their own.”

Deb took a deep breath and stood up.

“I wasn’t born prococial, but I’m ready to do things on my own. I think that your folk are the ones I can do that with. Whaddya say?”

Emily paused, then leaned over with a hand over her mouth to whisper something into Nanaue’s ear.

His giant mouth split into a wide grin, and he clapped Emily on the back.

She slapped a giant stamp on Deb’s resume, a yellowed piece of paper that looked as if it had seen too much sunlight.

“Approved. Welcome aboard, Deb.”

The bar erupted into a cheer, and an elderly man with a toothless grin thrust a second drink into Deb’s offhand. She cracked a smile that pushed up her blocky cheekbones, drained the libation in a smooth draw, then tossed the wooden mug out over the crowd.

“I’m out of here, bitches!” she yelled, thrusting up a triumphant fist. “Next step, anywhere!”

She dissolved into a crowd of back-slappers and hand-clappers, while Emily plucked out the next sheet of paper.

“Next we’ve got…” her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open. “Hang on. This can’t be right. This says ‘Mickey Mouse’.”

“Must be some kind of imposter,” the young man on the other side of Nanaue murmured. “Mickey Mouse went missing. And even if he hadn’t, what business would he have with King Shark?”

The din of congratulations and general murmur began to die down, then.

The crowd began to part, and a small figure who stood waist height to most of the onlookers walked through the opening as if he had parted water itself.

Nanaue pushed his bucket away and leaned forward, beady eyes twinkling.

 

[Mickey Mouse]

“I heard you, fella,” Mickey Mouse piped up, stepping through the crowd and presenting himself to King Shark and his two little flunkies. His first words in public since his disappearance elicited enough of a gasp, but when he crossed his little arms and narrowed his eyes, turning his gaze toward the spindly young guy to Nanaue’s left, the entire room fell under a tense, hushed silence.

It had been months since any sign of the mouse king, and everyone here knew it — Mickey would’ve never bragged about this himself, but at this point, he was kinda famous around these parts. Nearly every single person in this dingy ol’ dive bar knew him, whether they were familiar with his unmistakable charm or his skills with his keyblade.

“Yeah,” he nodded, playing up the intensity just a bit, “I heard you. And I ain’t in a pasta.”

The bespectacled man blinked, and Nanaue turned his huge, shark head toward him, as if prompting him to respond.

“A… pasta?” the skinny guy asked.

“Yeah, pal,” Mickey scowled. “You said I was in pasta. And that just ain’t true. I’ve been lost in the ocean for a while, maybe, but pasta?! Heck no.”

“Yeah!” a man shouted from the crowd behind him. “Mickey Mouse hates pasta!”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” the little mouse held up a hand, turning back to the throng of onlookers who’d gathered to watch the pirates’ auditions. “I had some noodles cooked by a guy named Riggy Tony once — those were tasty.”

The bespectacled man blinked again, sliding back in his chair. “It is him,” he said, mouth agape. “It’s the real Mickey Mouse.”

“You bet your bottom dollar,” the mouse king smirked, turning back to the pirates. “Who the heck else would it be?!”

“Forgive us, Mr. Mouse — ” the red-headed woman started.

She was met with another of Mickey’s gloved hands and a very stern expression. “Mr. Mouse was my father. I’m Mickey.”

“Uh,” she nodded, “alright, Mickey. Forgive us, Mickey, but no one’s seen you for nearly an entire year. It’s a little hard to believe that you’d wash up in this of all places.”

Mickey would give the woman that much — these weren’t his usual digs. In fact, Opealon overall had not been a grand ol’ time, all things considered. He’d gone to a falling city, battled the greatest evil this universe had ever known, and then taken a fat nap like the one Briar Rose infamously took back in his home realms. Thank goodness he didn’t need True Love’s Kiss to wake up; would’ve probably taken them ages to cross dimensions and hop universes and find his lady love.

Nevertheless, he was here, and he was ready for whatever was going to come his way — as long as it wasn’t Darkseid. To be honest, taking that nap had really put things in perspective. As he’d weaved through the different shades of that absolutely freaky circus nightmare, he’d come face to face with some familiar faces from his past and really taken a good, hard look at his life, and he’d come to one conclusion.

Heroism? Not frickin’ worth it.

“Well, I am here,” he stamped his foot, doing his best to put on an angry face. “And I’m ready to be a pirate.”

A chuckle from the crowd.

WOOSH — and he was gone! Emily glanced around the room, and the bespectacled man gasped as the mouse king dashed upward, disappearing into the shadows between the dive bar’s rafters. Nanaue sat still and almost silent. His chair creaked as he leaned back into it; he knew the mouse’s next move.

King Shark stared straight ahead as the mouse’s tennis shoes slammed into the wooden boards of the table the selachimorpha and his compatriots sat behind; he continued to stare as he hear the schwing of the keyblade swiping into the air.

Mickey Mouse leveled the blade at the crowd of people just a few meters away, staring down the blade with the most bad-A face he could muster. “I’ve been to the caverns beneath Nausea,” he started with a hint of a growl. “I’ve been in the trenches of Dante’s Abyss. I’ve traveled across one dimension and another. I’ve cut my way through the forests of Kraw.” He paused for a second, lowering the blade and turning deadly serious for a moment. If you really squinted, it was almost as if all the lights in the little pub dimmed as he glanced down to the ground, then let his eyes flit back up to look at the surrounding listeners.

“I’ve stared Darkseid in the face,” he muttered. The crowd gasped dramatically at the mention of the Fallen Arbiter’s name.

He turned to King Shark. “And I’ve survived.”

For a moment, the giant fish and little mouse stared at each other, beady eyes meeting beady eyes, communicating a wealth of experience in just a moment. Mickey knew that this fella, too, had seen some shittake mushrooms in his day. He didn’t really know whether or not they were gonna get on, well, swimmingly (no pun intended), but he knew that this was the first step toward shedding his previous life. He’d been fighting for too long to try and save the world — heck, to save the whole frickin’ universe(s) — and he had nothing to show for it. Evildoers still kept popping up, no matter how many times you pushed ‘em back down. Being a hero was like the worst game of Whack-a-Mole in the entire multiverse.

So why try? Why not have some fun for a change? Why not go and be a freakin’ pirate?

King Shark finally shifted in his seat, adjusting himself a bit and then smiling. He slapped Emily on the back again, and she lifted her big stamp up into the air and slammed it down onto Mickey’s chicken-scratch resume he’d scribbled in a hurry before coming up to bat. “Approved — ”

“WAIT!” the mouse squealed, leaping off the table with a backflip and pointing his keyblade at his new bosses. “I have one condition before I join.”

The three behind the table leaned forward in anticipation. Mickey smirked.

“I’m gonna need an eyepatch, pals.”