Chapter One: The Beginning
All Lieutenant Arthur Gillette had wanted had been a quiet evening with a pint or two of beer that hadn't been sitting around in rotting barrels for upwards of half a year. Well, to be honest, there were lots of other things that he wanted too, but he knew that he should keep his goals realistic in order to avoid disappointment (or worse), so the quiet evening and the good beer had been all that he had actually asked for. Beer that wasn't stale or flat and a few peaceful hours in which to enjoy it couldn't be too much to expect, could it?
"Did you hear that, Art? Well, did you hear it? You weren't even paying attention, were you?"
This was what he had gotten instead. To be honest, the beer at the sign of the Flying Manatee was quite good, but everything else was keeping him from enjoying it. In fact, he was being prevented from drinking his beer at all, whether he enjoyed it or not. He was having a bad night. He had an unwanted woman (a girl, really, if one judged her by the maturity of her actions rather than the maturity of her body) in his lap and the beginnings of what promised to be a serious tension headache pounding at his brain. And now, to make matters even worse yet, his drinking companion, one Lieutenant Theodore Groves, was elbowing him in the ribs and laughing loudly enough to wake the dead men swaying in the breeze at Gallows Point. Neither the night nor his head showed any signs that they would be improving anytime soon, and the woman continued to cling to him like a barnacle despite his best efforts to dislodge her, but at least he could do something about Groves. He temporarily gave up trying to get the daft woman to cease playing with his wig as he turned towards his fellow lieutenant.
"Yes, I heard what the man said, Teddy, every single time you and he said it. I've answered you twice before, but I'll say it again. I know that you've been bored these last few months. We've all been bored, but the fact remains that stolen chickens still aren't tour concern." Gillette next turned his attention to the farmer sitting across the small round table from him. The farmer, a sunburned but otherwise handsome man in his mid thirties and coincidentally the only male at the table who did not have any female companionship, returned Gillette's gaze but, for the moment, said nothing. "Look, Mr. Trently," Gillette began and then paused in order to try to fight down the massive amounts of irritation that he was feeling. He didn't want to frighten the man by seeming overly hostile, just let him know that he was being annoying. "Sir, I lament the loss of your poultry, but there are land-based authorities that you should contact in regards to your troubles. Officially, our jurisdiction ends at the high tide line, so unless your chickens were living on little rafts in the bay, there's nothing we can legally do for you."
"Um, actually..." The farmer's face had taken on an expression of confusion as he looked back and forth between the scowling Lieutenant Gillette and the chuckling Lieutenant Groves. "I never said anything about any of my chickens being stolen."
"Then what in the blazes have you been blathering on about for the past ten minutes?"
"Eggs. My chickens weren't taken. Their eggs were, at least a half dozen of them."
"Oh for the love of God!" Gillette rolled his eyes with disgust. "We're the Royal Navy. We fight off invading armadas. We-- Would you please stop that!" The girl in Gillette's lap had apparently decided that his lack of positive response to her was because she was not being forward enough, so she had taken it upon herself to start unbuttoning his uniform and exploring the interior. He had to spend several moments defending himself from her questing fingers before he was able to return to his previous line of thought. "We are the Royal Navy. We make sure that the island is not lost to foreign nations. We repel, capture, and punish pirates. We occasionally render assistance to merchantmen or fishing vessels that are having difficulty at sea. If some thief strolls into your henhouse and wanders off with a few birds, it's an unfortunate breach of the law but not our concern. We care even less when all the thief gets away with is the makings of breakfast for three. We don't rejoice in the fact that the crime has been committed, but if a problem isn't nautical in nature, then it's not our problem."
Trently gaped at Gillette for several moments then stormed away. Gillette didn't even bother to watch him go. He had already redirected his aggravated glare to Lieutenant Groves, who was still laughing.
"I fail to see just what's so funny about the situation."
"You really weren't paying attention!" Groves's mirth probably would have had him slapping the table if both of his hands hadn't been already occupied, one with a mug of rum punch and the other with the left breast of the pretty little brunette on his lap. Even as it was, the little blond who was also in Groves's lap looked like she was beginning to feel ignored. Fortunately, both women were quite petite, because Groves's chair wouldn't have withstood the strain if they had been any larger.
"I was paying enough attention to know that that idiot wanted to waste military resources in order to locate six eggs which, if his hens were having a poor laying day, might never have existed at all."
"If that's all you heard, then you weren't paying attention at all!"
"What are you talking about?"
"That man's eggs were most definitely stolen, because he saw the culprit making his escape, eggs in hand."
"This still sounds like a job for the local constabulary," Gillette said with a sigh. He was tired of arguing. His head hurt. He just wanted to sit and quietly drink his beer. His poor neglected beer, it had been sitting just out of reach for more than half an hour as he tried to divest himself of first the remora-like woman on his lap and then of the equally tenacious (but, thankfully, less physical) Farmer Trently. He longed for the good old days when people were capable of taking a hint. Suddenly, a thought struck him. "It wasn't one of our sailors was it, Teddy? Please tell me that this whole damnable load of tripe wasn't caused by one of our deck hands at liberty looking to make an omelette."
"No, he wasn't one of ours." Groves was still grinning! If the man didn't produce some sort of useful information in the extremely near future, Gillette was severely tempted to beat it out of him. Fortunately, Groves either sensed Gillette's growing anger at his reticence or he simply felt that he had held off the denouement for long enough. Whatever the case, he averted his fellow lieutenant's wrath by finally saying, "Before you informed the good farmer that we weren't interested in his troubles, he was in the process of swearing up and down that he saw none other than Captain Jack Sparrow leaving his chicken coop, carrying a heap of eggs in his hat."