The First Hundred Years
Dec. 30th, 2010 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinonTitle: The First Hundred Years
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Characters: Jolene, Joanne (with some Linebeck, parenthetically, and even less of Link); Jolene>Linebeck
Word count: 3003
Warnings: Mild language
Notes: This...got out of hand. It is, bar none, the stupidest thing I have ever written. It's pretty much crack, with some rather silly gags about "LOL THIS IS A VIDEO GAME" and "LOL THE ZELDA SERIES SURE IS WEIRD" and all sorts of things I'd probably know better than to try if I were actually in Zelda fandom. And Monty Python references. And taking extreme liberties with everything, ever, forever.
...But dammit it was really fun to write. ._.;
For the first year, she scours the seas.
For the second year, she scours them again, harder, in case she missed something.
For the third year, she goes over the entire ocean with a fine-toothed comb.
In the fourth year she has to replace half her crew because they've had it with all this scouring and combing. All this trouble for someone who, initial dramatic rescue aside, never did anything useful? It's ruthless, yes, and ruthlessness is a good quality in a pirate captain. But it's sort of inefficient. Hunting someone down to the ends of the earth only sounds like an awesome and terrifying threat until you realize how far apart the ends of the earth are, and that's about when it starts to sound like way too much hassle.
In the fifth year, someone talks Joanne into trying to reason with her. She does not take life advice from mermaid cosplayers.
In the sixth year, she says something rude and Joanne leaves.
She notices her sister's absence in the seventh year.
By the end of the eighth year she's replaced the other half of her crew, too.
The ninth year is uneventful: more bloody-mindedness and scouring.
On the tenth anniversary of his disappearance, she ascends to the top of the mast and shouts into the sky: "LINEBECK! YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME!" It is oddly therapeutic.
In the eleventh year, she decides to take steps to ensure that he cannot, in fact, hide from her. She gets a stronger telescope.
By the twelfth year, she still hasn't seen him. This is inconceivable – after all, her telescope is extremely strong.
In the thirteenth year, Joanne mails her another telescope, because apparently getting ocular instruments from your sister is something of a tradition. This one isn't as strong as the one Jolene already has, and it has some disgustingly twee mermaid motif, and hardened she-pirates don't write thank-you notes. But it's a nice gesture, so Jolene dashes off a quick letter for non-gratitude-related purposes, which the postman promptly delivers to entirely the wrong person.
In the fourteenth year, she scrutinizes every wave of the ocean both coming and going and still there is no sign of him. She chucks her telescope overboard in a fit of pique.
(Fifteen years since the day he absconded in the night, a man sits in a bar on an insignificant island in the southeastern quadrant. Five years since the day Jolene climbed the mast and roared out her threat, the fickle ocean wind finally carries that sound to its intended target. He dives into a crate and stays there until morning, at which point he will claim he was merely acting in his official capacity as Surprise Crate Inspector and, good for you, everything seems to be in order here.)
In the sixteenth year, Jolene decides to move on. She resumes being a blight (honorably, of course) on honest sailors and not-so-honest sailors, and there is much looting and plundering and dramatically leaping about on heaving decks. She practices her swordplay extensively, in case she meets someone who deserves to be hacked to bits with a bit more than the usual flourish.
It's not until the nineteenth year that anyone dares mention to her that when she's snarling insults at the fencing dummies, or the boxes she sometimes randomly attacks, or any unlucky soul she's forced into practicing with her, she refers to them by one name and one name only. A certain name that starts with "L" and ends with "inebeck."
In the twentieth year, it is further noted that, seriously, being able to defeat someone in a duel is all well and good, but this Linebeck guy, whoever he even is, has basically no incentive whatsoever to stand and face her, and every reason to flee the instant he catches sight of her sails. So her first move is to get different sails. If the ship is rigged out differently, maybe he won't recognize it quickly enough to make a getaway.
She realizes in the twenty-first year that personally standing at the prow shouting challenges at every ship that passes is not really doing much for her in terms of stealth or of concealing her identity. Oh, well. So much for sneaking, then. She is Jolene. She is the fiercest pirate alive and she likes seeing (through Joanne's telescope) the stupid looks on people's faces when they realize who they're up against and what they're in for. The simple joy of that moment is one thing she will never sacrifice. She'll have to work around this some other way.
By year twenty-five, she's refitted her ship to be the fastest damn thing on the seas. Anything she can see, she can run down. Which is why it's a pity she lost her good telescope. Then she could see more. And destroy it.
So for the next few years, in between raids, she looks into the possibility of getting a sea chart that shows the locations of enemies and other ships, and moves in real time. She's certain they exist, but anyone she asks about it says that can't be done. It's just paper.
At some point around the twenty-ninth year she's resorted to throwing out bait for the creepily anthropomorphic fish who, she's been told, know way too much about maps considering that ink doesn't even work properly underwater. In the next year she gets a response: "magical moving charts are a protagonist-only thing, small fry! When you're trying to save the world, you can take for granted all kinds of things that make no logical sense!"
In spare moments in years thirty-one and thirty-two, she wonders why that fish called her "small fry."
In the thirty-third year she decides it's because she retains all of her youthful beauty and the fish took her for a mere maid of sixteen. This kind of mistake contributes greatly to her effectiveness as a pirate, she concludes. It's the juxtaposition between her ferocity and her good looks. Her chief weapon, after all, is surprise. And fear. Her two main weapons are surprise and fear. And ruthlessness.
Anyway, since she can't have that – and she knows she's not a protagonist, because she's not wearing enough green and what she does have is probably the wrong shade – she applies herself instead, starting in year thirty-four, to finding more weapons. Surprise, fear, ruthlessness, and swords are a pretty good set to start out with. Cannon Island, although it is already named Cannon Island, will have no cannons for sale for another sixty-some years, so her options are limited, but she comes up with something.
She is in that stupid shooting gallery playing with that stupid bow until year forty-three, because those stupid little blue-haired girls keep popping up and she, of course, shoots everything that moves. She walks back out into the sun in a daze, only slowly remembering that it has been nine years since she went in there and, before that, she was probably on some kind of quest. Stupid minigames. After spending so long at this trivial little distraction, she's nearly lost track of what the quest even was.
(By year forty-three, by all appearances, he's forgotten about her completely. For the first few years after his – shall we say "departure?" Yes. A dignified departure with nothing of slinking-off-in-the-dark-without-a-word-to-anyone about it – for the first few years after they parted ways, her memory tended to sneak up on him. He'd be trying to sell someone on a completely factual, entirely unembroidered account of his own prowess, usually in the context of "on an ordinary day I could take out six or eight pirate armadas with both hands tied behind my back while whistling the Ballad of the Wind Fish – I know, I’m impressed, too – but today I can’t help you.” And then as a sort of involuntary footnote, he’d say, “and there was this woman –” and catch himself, and glance warily over his shoulder and then say “never mind her. My point is…”
By year forty-three, he’s stopped doing this. He never speaks and seldom thinks of her. But anyone saying anything starting with the syllable “jo-” triggers a reflexive need to reprise his role as Surprise Crate Inspector. Honestly, though, what kind of word is “jocose?” Who even says that in this day and age?)
In the forty-fourth year, Joanne finally gets the letter Jolene wrote her thirty-one years prior. The man who gives it to her seems to expect it to be part of some long convoluted trading chain, but she has nothing she particularly wants to give him. She writes Jolene another letter and posts it, reflecting that while this incident is a little weird, certainly it will never happen again, and surely never again will postal workers read their private family correspondence out loud to unrelated third parties. That would be really unprofessional.
Jolene receives this letter in the forty-fifth year, because it takes a while for the mailman to find her in her incredibly fast ship. "I'm glad you're all right," it says, and "I hope you were able to use the telescope I sent you ♥," and "You'd better not still be after revenge on that Linebeck guy. I know you had it bad for him but" – at which point Jolene stops reading and sets the letter on fire, because circumstances like this call for pointless dramatic gestures. And destruction.
For the duration of the forty-sixth year, she scours the seas.
Ditto the forty-seventh and forty-eighth.
And forty-ninth.
In year fifty she remembers she really ought to get back to Joanne, and writes a letter saying, "Of course I'm not still after him! He's not worth it." She invests the past seven years' takings in anachronistic firepower and appends to this letter an invitation for Joanne to come aboard for a while, "so we can travel together again and do sisterly stuff. I am not still plotting my revenge, so we won't have a fight like last time." She looks over the specs for the torpedoes and crosses off that last sentence there, because the denial strikes her as suspiciously specific.
So in the fifty-first year Joanne comes aboard again. And, a few months later, leaves again.
As she marks off the beginning of the fifty-second year, Jolene recalls the last conversation they had before her sister left. Joanne said, "You're still numbering years based on when he left. You have issues." Jolene still doesn't see any big problem with that. She has to have some way to keep track of years, and the timeline for this universe is pretty convoluted and bizarre. This is the simplest way.
In the fifty-third year, the torpedoes are completed, and she oversees their installation.
Her true reign of terror begins in the year 54 SLVNLSC (Since Linebeck Vanished in the Night like a Scurvy Coward). She sails wherever she wants and is never challenged; word of her three principal weapons of surprise, fear, ruthlessness, and huge torpedoes has spread over all four seas. She can, nine times out of ten, expect any and all valuable cargo to be handed over within the hour any time she so much as looks at another ship.
She looks at a lot of ships in year 55.
In year 56, she looks at more ships.
It occurs to her in year 57 that with all this plunder she could buy an even better telescope than the one she lost long ago, and stop relying on this rather tacky and now severely beat-up little one Joanne sent her. ...Nah, this one's fine.
The number of ships that are even around for her to attack starts dwindling somewhere around year 63.
By year 67, it's become clear that since she can sail anywhere unchallenged, and practically anyone else who travels practically anywhere is always challenged (by her), most people have decided it's not worth the trouble to travel and are just staying home.
So in year 68 she decides to take a vacation. She can certainly afford it.
(It's been seventy years and he still doesn't know there's been a calendar named after him. He hears about a fierce she-pirate named Jolene operating in waters somewhere far enough that it isn't his problem, and he wonders vaguely whether it's the same Jolene. And if so, hey, good for her. And if there are no hard feelings about his departure, he'll have no problem piggybacking on her notoriety. Though for whatever reason, he suspects there might in fact be hard feelings. Either way, he's not in any hurry to go out looking for her. She's kind of scary even when she isn't mad.)
Jolene decides pretty early on that vacation is boring, but she sticks with it until year 74. Ought to be enough time for people to start feeling safe on the seas again, right? And then she'll come back. It should be noted that at no point in this interval does she consider dressing up like a mermaid. Not out of curiosity. Not out of boredom. Not to try to figure out what Joanne sees in it. Never. At all.
So year 74 rolls around and she comes back out of retirement and she still has more money than she knows what to do with. Somehow that takes all the excitement out of it. But she isn't the type to just throw all this treasure away... And then an elegant solution presents itself. She's going for the heart container.
She loses another two years to that hellish shooting gallery, and then she blows it up. But that's all right, because there'll be a new one in twenty or thirty years. It's still a very satisfying destruction. If only she could destroy everything that let her down – oh, wait. She can. Of course she can. She's a pirate.
She sets out in year 76 SLV (yes, only SLV now, because while it is important to remember that the vanishing that he did occurred during the night, and that he was acting as a scurvy coward when he did so, that abbreviation was getting really cumbersome) with a new desire for revenge. And she didn't get rid of the old one first. And these things stack.
Year 77 should be the year, because multiples of seven are significant. It isn't.
Maybe it'll be year 80, then. Multiples of ten are significant, too, and she's waited this long, so why not? ...But it isn't, of course.
Her search never lets up in the slightest, but somewhere around year 84 she starts to wonder what exactly she's going to do once she's made him pay and doesn't have this whole "insane revenge quest" thing going for her anymore. By now it's taken up a pretty big chunk of her life, and she's gotten pretty comfortable with it. She starts mentally cataloguing all the slights she's received over the years, evaluating which ones might be most satisfying to grossly overreact to (incidentally, 84, while also a multiple of 7, is not the year she finds him).
In year 85 it also occurs to her that "make him pay" is a sort of vague objective. Forget not knowing what to do after she's had her revenge – how exactly is she going to get said revenge? It has to involve the torpedoes, obviously. And all that fancy sword work she learned. She's put a lot of effort into this down the years and he had better damn well appreciate it. Of course, if he's going to be appreciating anything, that sort of implies he can't be dead at the time. Surprisingly, she thinks she's all right with this.
From year 86 on, she has a strong feeling she's going to find him soon. She will not be unprepared.
Year 87 is dedicated to an activity she is adamant about not calling "rehearsal."
In year 88 she writes to Joanne asking for any final advice, and Joanne writes back saying "tell him how you feel," which is patently ridiculous. Some people just do not understand these things at all. She resolves to never discuss pirate business with Joanne again.
So in year 89 she makes almost no attacks on enemy ships, and returns to preparing on her own.
By year 90 she thinks she's got a workable script, but it could maybe use a little revision.
In year 91, though she's the deadliest fencer alive, she decides wouldn't mind being deadlier.
It'll be year 100. She's sure. That's a significant number if she's ever seen one. So there follow nine years of keeping her blade sharp and biding her time.
One hundred years since she saw him last, she's not even sure what he looks like anymore, but she is ready. She has this nailed down. She is going to make a lasting impression and he is going to live in fear of her for the rest of his life, although she has not, as yet, decided how long she will allow the rest of his life to be.
And there, on the horizon: a plume of steam from that dilapidated little shrimp barge he calls his ship.
In about ten minutes things are going to go terribly off-script and she's going to find herself fighting a little boy wearing so much green he has to be the protagonist.
(In about ten minutes a little boy wearing a lot of green is going to find himself acting as mediator in an incredibly awkward and dysfunctional quasi-romance. Fortunately, this will not ultimately demand anything of him beyond hitting things with a sword, because he is the hero, and hitting things with swords is what all heroic tasks boil down to. He's lucky that the relationship in question is so dysfunctional, or this might be more of a stretch.)
But there is a moment right before she announces herself and gives chase, when she inventories the past hundred years and decides they've put her exactly where she meant to be.
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Characters: Jolene, Joanne (with some Linebeck, parenthetically, and even less of Link); Jolene>Linebeck
Word count: 3003
Warnings: Mild language
Notes: This...got out of hand. It is, bar none, the stupidest thing I have ever written. It's pretty much crack, with some rather silly gags about "LOL THIS IS A VIDEO GAME" and "LOL THE ZELDA SERIES SURE IS WEIRD" and all sorts of things I'd probably know better than to try if I were actually in Zelda fandom. And Monty Python references. And taking extreme liberties with everything, ever, forever.
...But dammit it was really fun to write. ._.;
For the first year, she scours the seas.
For the second year, she scours them again, harder, in case she missed something.
For the third year, she goes over the entire ocean with a fine-toothed comb.
In the fourth year she has to replace half her crew because they've had it with all this scouring and combing. All this trouble for someone who, initial dramatic rescue aside, never did anything useful? It's ruthless, yes, and ruthlessness is a good quality in a pirate captain. But it's sort of inefficient. Hunting someone down to the ends of the earth only sounds like an awesome and terrifying threat until you realize how far apart the ends of the earth are, and that's about when it starts to sound like way too much hassle.
In the fifth year, someone talks Joanne into trying to reason with her. She does not take life advice from mermaid cosplayers.
In the sixth year, she says something rude and Joanne leaves.
She notices her sister's absence in the seventh year.
By the end of the eighth year she's replaced the other half of her crew, too.
The ninth year is uneventful: more bloody-mindedness and scouring.
On the tenth anniversary of his disappearance, she ascends to the top of the mast and shouts into the sky: "LINEBECK! YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME!" It is oddly therapeutic.
In the eleventh year, she decides to take steps to ensure that he cannot, in fact, hide from her. She gets a stronger telescope.
By the twelfth year, she still hasn't seen him. This is inconceivable – after all, her telescope is extremely strong.
In the thirteenth year, Joanne mails her another telescope, because apparently getting ocular instruments from your sister is something of a tradition. This one isn't as strong as the one Jolene already has, and it has some disgustingly twee mermaid motif, and hardened she-pirates don't write thank-you notes. But it's a nice gesture, so Jolene dashes off a quick letter for non-gratitude-related purposes, which the postman promptly delivers to entirely the wrong person.
In the fourteenth year, she scrutinizes every wave of the ocean both coming and going and still there is no sign of him. She chucks her telescope overboard in a fit of pique.
(Fifteen years since the day he absconded in the night, a man sits in a bar on an insignificant island in the southeastern quadrant. Five years since the day Jolene climbed the mast and roared out her threat, the fickle ocean wind finally carries that sound to its intended target. He dives into a crate and stays there until morning, at which point he will claim he was merely acting in his official capacity as Surprise Crate Inspector and, good for you, everything seems to be in order here.)
In the sixteenth year, Jolene decides to move on. She resumes being a blight (honorably, of course) on honest sailors and not-so-honest sailors, and there is much looting and plundering and dramatically leaping about on heaving decks. She practices her swordplay extensively, in case she meets someone who deserves to be hacked to bits with a bit more than the usual flourish.
It's not until the nineteenth year that anyone dares mention to her that when she's snarling insults at the fencing dummies, or the boxes she sometimes randomly attacks, or any unlucky soul she's forced into practicing with her, she refers to them by one name and one name only. A certain name that starts with "L" and ends with "inebeck."
In the twentieth year, it is further noted that, seriously, being able to defeat someone in a duel is all well and good, but this Linebeck guy, whoever he even is, has basically no incentive whatsoever to stand and face her, and every reason to flee the instant he catches sight of her sails. So her first move is to get different sails. If the ship is rigged out differently, maybe he won't recognize it quickly enough to make a getaway.
She realizes in the twenty-first year that personally standing at the prow shouting challenges at every ship that passes is not really doing much for her in terms of stealth or of concealing her identity. Oh, well. So much for sneaking, then. She is Jolene. She is the fiercest pirate alive and she likes seeing (through Joanne's telescope) the stupid looks on people's faces when they realize who they're up against and what they're in for. The simple joy of that moment is one thing she will never sacrifice. She'll have to work around this some other way.
By year twenty-five, she's refitted her ship to be the fastest damn thing on the seas. Anything she can see, she can run down. Which is why it's a pity she lost her good telescope. Then she could see more. And destroy it.
So for the next few years, in between raids, she looks into the possibility of getting a sea chart that shows the locations of enemies and other ships, and moves in real time. She's certain they exist, but anyone she asks about it says that can't be done. It's just paper.
At some point around the twenty-ninth year she's resorted to throwing out bait for the creepily anthropomorphic fish who, she's been told, know way too much about maps considering that ink doesn't even work properly underwater. In the next year she gets a response: "magical moving charts are a protagonist-only thing, small fry! When you're trying to save the world, you can take for granted all kinds of things that make no logical sense!"
In spare moments in years thirty-one and thirty-two, she wonders why that fish called her "small fry."
In the thirty-third year she decides it's because she retains all of her youthful beauty and the fish took her for a mere maid of sixteen. This kind of mistake contributes greatly to her effectiveness as a pirate, she concludes. It's the juxtaposition between her ferocity and her good looks. Her chief weapon, after all, is surprise. And fear. Her two main weapons are surprise and fear. And ruthlessness.
Anyway, since she can't have that – and she knows she's not a protagonist, because she's not wearing enough green and what she does have is probably the wrong shade – she applies herself instead, starting in year thirty-four, to finding more weapons. Surprise, fear, ruthlessness, and swords are a pretty good set to start out with. Cannon Island, although it is already named Cannon Island, will have no cannons for sale for another sixty-some years, so her options are limited, but she comes up with something.
She is in that stupid shooting gallery playing with that stupid bow until year forty-three, because those stupid little blue-haired girls keep popping up and she, of course, shoots everything that moves. She walks back out into the sun in a daze, only slowly remembering that it has been nine years since she went in there and, before that, she was probably on some kind of quest. Stupid minigames. After spending so long at this trivial little distraction, she's nearly lost track of what the quest even was.
(By year forty-three, by all appearances, he's forgotten about her completely. For the first few years after his – shall we say "departure?" Yes. A dignified departure with nothing of slinking-off-in-the-dark-without-a-word-to-anyone about it – for the first few years after they parted ways, her memory tended to sneak up on him. He'd be trying to sell someone on a completely factual, entirely unembroidered account of his own prowess, usually in the context of "on an ordinary day I could take out six or eight pirate armadas with both hands tied behind my back while whistling the Ballad of the Wind Fish – I know, I’m impressed, too – but today I can’t help you.” And then as a sort of involuntary footnote, he’d say, “and there was this woman –” and catch himself, and glance warily over his shoulder and then say “never mind her. My point is…”
By year forty-three, he’s stopped doing this. He never speaks and seldom thinks of her. But anyone saying anything starting with the syllable “jo-” triggers a reflexive need to reprise his role as Surprise Crate Inspector. Honestly, though, what kind of word is “jocose?” Who even says that in this day and age?)
In the forty-fourth year, Joanne finally gets the letter Jolene wrote her thirty-one years prior. The man who gives it to her seems to expect it to be part of some long convoluted trading chain, but she has nothing she particularly wants to give him. She writes Jolene another letter and posts it, reflecting that while this incident is a little weird, certainly it will never happen again, and surely never again will postal workers read their private family correspondence out loud to unrelated third parties. That would be really unprofessional.
Jolene receives this letter in the forty-fifth year, because it takes a while for the mailman to find her in her incredibly fast ship. "I'm glad you're all right," it says, and "I hope you were able to use the telescope I sent you ♥," and "You'd better not still be after revenge on that Linebeck guy. I know you had it bad for him but" – at which point Jolene stops reading and sets the letter on fire, because circumstances like this call for pointless dramatic gestures. And destruction.
For the duration of the forty-sixth year, she scours the seas.
Ditto the forty-seventh and forty-eighth.
And forty-ninth.
In year fifty she remembers she really ought to get back to Joanne, and writes a letter saying, "Of course I'm not still after him! He's not worth it." She invests the past seven years' takings in anachronistic firepower and appends to this letter an invitation for Joanne to come aboard for a while, "so we can travel together again and do sisterly stuff. I am not still plotting my revenge, so we won't have a fight like last time." She looks over the specs for the torpedoes and crosses off that last sentence there, because the denial strikes her as suspiciously specific.
So in the fifty-first year Joanne comes aboard again. And, a few months later, leaves again.
As she marks off the beginning of the fifty-second year, Jolene recalls the last conversation they had before her sister left. Joanne said, "You're still numbering years based on when he left. You have issues." Jolene still doesn't see any big problem with that. She has to have some way to keep track of years, and the timeline for this universe is pretty convoluted and bizarre. This is the simplest way.
In the fifty-third year, the torpedoes are completed, and she oversees their installation.
Her true reign of terror begins in the year 54 SLVNLSC (Since Linebeck Vanished in the Night like a Scurvy Coward). She sails wherever she wants and is never challenged; word of her three principal weapons of surprise, fear, ruthlessness, and huge torpedoes has spread over all four seas. She can, nine times out of ten, expect any and all valuable cargo to be handed over within the hour any time she so much as looks at another ship.
She looks at a lot of ships in year 55.
In year 56, she looks at more ships.
It occurs to her in year 57 that with all this plunder she could buy an even better telescope than the one she lost long ago, and stop relying on this rather tacky and now severely beat-up little one Joanne sent her. ...Nah, this one's fine.
The number of ships that are even around for her to attack starts dwindling somewhere around year 63.
By year 67, it's become clear that since she can sail anywhere unchallenged, and practically anyone else who travels practically anywhere is always challenged (by her), most people have decided it's not worth the trouble to travel and are just staying home.
So in year 68 she decides to take a vacation. She can certainly afford it.
(It's been seventy years and he still doesn't know there's been a calendar named after him. He hears about a fierce she-pirate named Jolene operating in waters somewhere far enough that it isn't his problem, and he wonders vaguely whether it's the same Jolene. And if so, hey, good for her. And if there are no hard feelings about his departure, he'll have no problem piggybacking on her notoriety. Though for whatever reason, he suspects there might in fact be hard feelings. Either way, he's not in any hurry to go out looking for her. She's kind of scary even when she isn't mad.)
Jolene decides pretty early on that vacation is boring, but she sticks with it until year 74. Ought to be enough time for people to start feeling safe on the seas again, right? And then she'll come back. It should be noted that at no point in this interval does she consider dressing up like a mermaid. Not out of curiosity. Not out of boredom. Not to try to figure out what Joanne sees in it. Never. At all.
So year 74 rolls around and she comes back out of retirement and she still has more money than she knows what to do with. Somehow that takes all the excitement out of it. But she isn't the type to just throw all this treasure away... And then an elegant solution presents itself. She's going for the heart container.
She loses another two years to that hellish shooting gallery, and then she blows it up. But that's all right, because there'll be a new one in twenty or thirty years. It's still a very satisfying destruction. If only she could destroy everything that let her down – oh, wait. She can. Of course she can. She's a pirate.
She sets out in year 76 SLV (yes, only SLV now, because while it is important to remember that the vanishing that he did occurred during the night, and that he was acting as a scurvy coward when he did so, that abbreviation was getting really cumbersome) with a new desire for revenge. And she didn't get rid of the old one first. And these things stack.
Year 77 should be the year, because multiples of seven are significant. It isn't.
Maybe it'll be year 80, then. Multiples of ten are significant, too, and she's waited this long, so why not? ...But it isn't, of course.
Her search never lets up in the slightest, but somewhere around year 84 she starts to wonder what exactly she's going to do once she's made him pay and doesn't have this whole "insane revenge quest" thing going for her anymore. By now it's taken up a pretty big chunk of her life, and she's gotten pretty comfortable with it. She starts mentally cataloguing all the slights she's received over the years, evaluating which ones might be most satisfying to grossly overreact to (incidentally, 84, while also a multiple of 7, is not the year she finds him).
In year 85 it also occurs to her that "make him pay" is a sort of vague objective. Forget not knowing what to do after she's had her revenge – how exactly is she going to get said revenge? It has to involve the torpedoes, obviously. And all that fancy sword work she learned. She's put a lot of effort into this down the years and he had better damn well appreciate it. Of course, if he's going to be appreciating anything, that sort of implies he can't be dead at the time. Surprisingly, she thinks she's all right with this.
From year 86 on, she has a strong feeling she's going to find him soon. She will not be unprepared.
Year 87 is dedicated to an activity she is adamant about not calling "rehearsal."
In year 88 she writes to Joanne asking for any final advice, and Joanne writes back saying "tell him how you feel," which is patently ridiculous. Some people just do not understand these things at all. She resolves to never discuss pirate business with Joanne again.
So in year 89 she makes almost no attacks on enemy ships, and returns to preparing on her own.
By year 90 she thinks she's got a workable script, but it could maybe use a little revision.
In year 91, though she's the deadliest fencer alive, she decides wouldn't mind being deadlier.
It'll be year 100. She's sure. That's a significant number if she's ever seen one. So there follow nine years of keeping her blade sharp and biding her time.
One hundred years since she saw him last, she's not even sure what he looks like anymore, but she is ready. She has this nailed down. She is going to make a lasting impression and he is going to live in fear of her for the rest of his life, although she has not, as yet, decided how long she will allow the rest of his life to be.
And there, on the horizon: a plume of steam from that dilapidated little shrimp barge he calls his ship.
In about ten minutes things are going to go terribly off-script and she's going to find herself fighting a little boy wearing so much green he has to be the protagonist.
(In about ten minutes a little boy wearing a lot of green is going to find himself acting as mediator in an incredibly awkward and dysfunctional quasi-romance. Fortunately, this will not ultimately demand anything of him beyond hitting things with a sword, because he is the hero, and hitting things with swords is what all heroic tasks boil down to. He's lucky that the relationship in question is so dysfunctional, or this might be more of a stretch.)
But there is a moment right before she announces herself and gives chase, when she inventories the past hundred years and decides they've put her exactly where she meant to be.
