"Drummond!" Lovely Mari woke up yelling, a flurry of bed sheets, swinging limbs, and tousled golden hair "Drummond, I had a dream! It was so real!" She flung her shapely legs out of the bed and hit the floorboards running. Her calves flexed beneath her uncharacteristically modest cornflower sleeping gown, and she sprang up to clear the tea table in the center of her bedroom. In one more step she pounced upon her bookcase and began tearing large, leather-bound tomes from the shelves, searching for something!

In the corner of her room, where small buildings from various nations and human eras piled up like unwanted toys, two tiny eyes peered from a cathedral. The Teen had taken to wrapping himself up in a brocade runner from the abandoned altar, toting a heavy Bible under one arm. He never read it: these props, in this location, were his protection from the storm of chaos that the hypersexualized giantess represented. Keeping well in the shadows, the Teen nonetheless tracked her activity as she pored through the books.

"Not here," she grumbled, savagely rifling through parchment pages. "Right country, wrong year… dammit! Drummond, I need your help! Where th' hell are ya?" She yelped as something squirmed within her abundant bosom, a tiny dark blur emerging from within her plunging cleavage. "Oh, there y'are, ya lil' wiggle-worm! What th' heck were ya doin' in there? On second thought, don't tell me! I don't wanna hear about it!"

Her huge face leered at Drummond, large heart-shaped pupils glowing like neon signs, before she threw back her head and laughed heartily at her own joke. The bedraggled SWAT Operator bobbed and surged between her heaving boobs. "You jammed me here last night, Goddess," he croaked up at her. "I was reading A Wrinkle in Time to you. You liked it right up until the point you released that explosive torrent you call 'snoring'."

"I do not snore!" Outraged, she shimmied her shoulders, swinging the tiny stowaway back and forth, crushing him between twin colliding planets. "Anyway, shut the fuck up, you gotta help me with something. Have you ever heard of pirates?"

He clutched his spinning head and affirmed that he had.

"They were from your stupid planet, like, a long time ago."

"Yes, they flourished around the 16th and 17th centuries. What does this have to−"

"An' I don't mean in the movies." Lovely Mari licked her thumb and turned some more pages. "I mean, like the actual ones."

"Okay, so, like Irish laborers, French privateers, Dutch fortune-hunters, mutinied British sailors, and teenaged conscripts from the Caribbean? Why do you−"

She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. One slim hand plunged between her breasts and fished around, yanking her little man out like a fish. "No, real pirates, y' idiot! Swords an' cannons an' sexy women an' booze! Doncha know anything?" She tossed him to a bookshelf, and he had to duck and roll quickly to avoid a row of collapsing tomes.

He sat upon the edge of the shelf, shirtless and well-muscled. He'd slept in his BDU pants, supposing that the rest of his outfit was scattered unevenly between the shire of her bed, the landscape of her bedroom, and anywhere upon (and within) her titanic person. He swung his bare feet above the sheer drop-off to the floor and looked up at the underside of her book and her breasts. "I don't have access to your head, my Goddess, as handy as that would be." He shuddered at the thought. "Please walk me backward through the events that brought you here."

Without looking up from her research, she recited: "All right, I was dreamin' about pirates, see, and I was a pirate, an' I was hangin' out with other pirates, and we did pirate-things. Are ya followin' me so far?" She glanced at him; he nodded, lips pursed. "So then I woke up, an' I had t' find out more about pirates, so I went to my bookcase an' started lookin' up pirate-stuff, an' then you started bein' an annoyin' pest who doesn't know enna-thin', an' I gotta do all th' work around here like always!" She slammed the book with deafening force and gritted her teeth, lunging at him.

Drummond noted the exits. Straight down, it looked like, unless he could scurry behind a book.

"Aw, ya know I love ya!" Her broad lips puckered up into a vortex of glistening pink and rammed into his chest like a VW Bug. He let her bowl him over, falling back to the shelf while she slathered him in playful licks.

Beneath her shimmering waves of flaxen hair, a strange, new earring he'd never seen before commanded his attention. It looked like a large, rainbow-colored book, swinging heavily from her ear lobe by a white gold filigreed chain. It was sealed with a very serious lock. The lock, and the way it grudgingly turned through space, told him this wasn't flimsy jewelry. He was quite convinced he had never seen it before, and he had studied much of her property during her frequent outings, so where had this come from? Wheels turned in his head while the goofy giantess lapped and snorted at him.

"Anyway, so that's what I gotta do today." She straightened up, tossed a book over her shoulder and took up another one. The discarded tome arced through space but halted inches before striking the floor. It hovered, closed itself properly, then landed with careful grace upon a tidy stack of other books.

Drummond sat up and wiped a thick coat of saliva out of his eyes. "I'm sorry, what do you gotta do today?"

She shook her head and laughed. Her hair glistened and sparkled around her in a supernatural mane. "Baka, you don't listen to a word I say, do ya? I gotta find a sexy pirate costume!"

There's only a million of those on my world, he thought dourly. "I'm sorry I'm being slow, my Goddess, I just woke up and nearly drowned. Why, exactly, do you need to find a sexy pirate costume? Are you going to a party?"

She giggle-snorted, making her immense breasts dance beneath her nightgown. "I guess y' could say that. Except I'm about three-hundred years too late, ain't I? Ah, perfect!" She whipped out a J-pop magazine that had, for no reason, been inserted into a thick, dusty volume of historical records. Presenting him with a glossy page for her little tactical officer's perusal for all of two seconds, she dropped the magazine and darted off to her armoire to plunder its goods as well.

He regarded the magazine from his height, then slid off the shelf and dangled from it for a second, swinging down to the next level. He repeated this until he was safely on the ground. His bare feet made no sound as he walked over to the magazine, laboriously dragging thick pages over until he found the image that inspired her. It was a heavily stylized manga illustration of a woman in pirate garb. Her lithe body twisted like a snake, for no better reason than to thrust her chest out and jam her hips back. The clothes were unrealistic, with an exaggeratedly tall and wide pirate captain's hat like a huge black bowl, and a rib-crunching bustier that exposed the midriff and jammed the woman's modest goods up like a soup on high boil. Shreds of billowing blouse hovered around the shoulders and fluttered around the sides, beginning and ending nowhere, and a thick leather-and-gold belt hung at a jaunty slope to suspend a highly improbable sword. Drummond snorted derisively, walking around the image to pick apart every flaw, every gaffe, every creative liberty taken in an illustration whose point he couldn't readily detect.

But damned if Lovely Mari hadn't found every last garment in her armoire. Damned if she hadn't arrayed it all perfectly upon her own unlikely body. "How do I look?" she bellowed down at him, striking a pose in tall boots with tall heels.

The fact was that she looked delicious. Despite the liability of her outrageous proportions and a costume completely impractical for combat, much less for deceiving anyone from the intended period, the healthy, vibrant giantess looked like she was made of sexual candy, and every fiber in his body craved to dive in and start eating.

"Beautiful as always, my esteemed Goddess," he called up to her. "Knock 'em dead." The capricious witchy preened, blew him noisy kisses, and danced out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the cabin to teleport backward through time. Drummond only stood in place for a minute, forcibly calming himself down. There's still a job to do, man. You have new information: act on it. It took several more minutes to scale his mistress's bed and collect most of his clothes and weapons. This day, he declined to burrow into Mari's panties and gratify himself, opting instead to use this electric energy to motivate him through the hard work ahead of him.

From his vantage point, the Teen watched the black-clad Operator hop to the bedroom floor, sprint past the tea table, and take a running leap inside the insane giantess's armoire. It looked like his leg had healed well; the Teen wondered if the giantess had used her chaotic magic to facilitate that. And he shuddered as Drummond passed the dark brown stain in the floor, a mess neither the Operator nor his whore-goddess had bothered to scrub up. This was the grim memorial to Pavla, whose voice haunted the Teen in the darkened corridors of the cathedral. He squeezed the Bible against his chest and went to look for his shoes.

*   *   *

Boot heels scuffed over wooden planks in the shadowy Brass Monkey tavern in the center of Nassau, New Providence Island. Men and women laughed over the clank of metal tankards, and sailors traded stories at the bar. The air was less dusty in here, the balmy sun blocked, but the humidity found its way everywhere.

A man with sandy hair and a sharp smile turned a piece of parchment over in his hands, shaking his head slowly. His two companions smirked and adjusted their over-sized jackets. They both wore kerchiefs, tying up brown or flame-red hair.

"Can you believe it, Andy? One year ago, we asked for King George's pardon." He held up the parchment, chuckling. "And we got it. His Majesty forgave us all our previous crimes and let us start anew."

"Too bad you weren't as lucky with the Spanish commission." Andy punched him in the shoulder and took a long pull of cheap ale.

The sandy-haired man shrugged. "You win some, you lose some. I think we're going to make up for lost time, though. I feel pretty damn confident about that." His grinned returned with a wink. "Mark? You ready?"

"Been ready a long time, Jack." The darker conspirator nodded, and their chairs groaned over the floor as they stood. Mark slammed a pewter mug hard upon their table.

"Avast ye!" Jack's voice rang out clearly over the grumble of indolent pirates and laborers slowly getting drunk. "Looking for eight strong, hungry men to go on the account! Any of you blaggards here between jobs, don't mind a bit of hard work, with the promise of rich reward?"

From the back of the room a gruff voice barked, "Is that what you promise?"

"I promise nothing!" The room guffawed. "But you're like to make more with me than sitting on your arse, emptying your purse for grog and bumboo! Who's with me?"

"And who the hell are you?" The owner of the gruff voice rose. He was a mound of muscle and fat and fur, it seemed, missing an eye and some teeth. His meaty palm rested on the pommel of a cutlass at his hip. The men sitting with him eyed the loudmouth, anxious to see what came next.

"Who am I? Who am I, indeed." Jack looked at his companions, who shrugged at him. He shrugged back and walked around the table. His threadbare captain's jacket was common enough, but even in the dimness of this watering-hole, the bold colors of his expensive striped pantaloons leaped out and caught all eyes. "Maybe you know Henry Jennings, who taught me everything I know while we put the Spanish in their place."

The room grew quiet. The burly man shifted on his feet.

"Or maybe you know Captain Charles Vane? The son-of-a-biscuit I sent to hell, straight into a hurricane?"

A few grizzled old salts raised their mugs; the burly man cleared his throat and sat down.

"I have his ship, you know, the Ranger. I can walk you to it, if you're curious." Jack slowly made his way to the center of the room. Mark and Andy merely folded their arms and made a show of keeping their eyes on everyone. "But obviously we can't take that ship. It's too well known, it's too obvious. Governor Rogers has his men drifting around it like flies on shit, as we speak. The only thing I could grab from it was my flag." So saying, he dug into his jacket and pulled out a large black cloth. Crudely stitched to it was a dirty white skull, grinning over crossed swords. "There's another ship I have my eye on, however, and we sail within the hour. Who's with me?"

At that, men knocked back their drinks and got up to shake his hand and join his team. "I'm your man, Calico Jack!" they said, grinning hideously. "I'm with you, Rackham!"

Mark set the new crew up with a round of beer while Andy counted heads. "There's only seven, Jack. I thought you wanted one more."

Calico Jack rubbed his stubbly jaw, glancing at the burly oaf in the corner: he and his associates kept their heads down, their backs turned. "Well, blow. Guess we gotta hit up another bar." Mark rattled their coin purse dismally. There were only so many more rounds they could front.

Abruptly the front door to the Brass Monkey burst in, shattering beneath a long, 18-hole-laced boot. The bartender roared with disapproval, hushing up as soon as he saw the person clambering through the splintered boards. The leg wearing the boot was long, strong, and clean-scrubbed, leading to a plump, round rear that struggled to fight its way inside. Fancy fabrics of curious cut but superior stitching bound up heaving, bobbling breasts, each larger than a man's head. The young woman in possession of all these strange gifts thrust her fists on her hips and grinned winningly at the desperate, tired, dirty wretches who stared at her in wonder.

"Ahoy, ye scurvy land-lubbers!" belted out Lovely Mari. "Whose face does a saucy wench gotta sit on to get a grog around here?" Calico Jack and Andy could only blink and stammer, so it was up to Mark to approach and persuade this remarkable personage.