Location: Ile Fourchue, St. Barths
It was a dark and stormy morning, and tall shadows cast themselves against the saloon wall. Not a soul stirred, aside from Julia, who was hard at work preparing her chocolate chip pancake bread. Perhaps too hard at work because as she buzzed from stovetop to stovetop, one shadow, in particular, began to stretch and morph until it resembled nothing before seen on the Ocean Star. As quickly as it had appeared, it began to slither away, past Julia’s turned back until it siphoned into the engine room in a cloud of black smoke. Moments later, the groggy residents of Ocean Star stirred unbidden by the skipper’s hand as if awoken by a strange force. Each possessed an eerie nagging that something was awry, and the cloud of unease simmered over breakfast, making even the chocolate chips acrid. The crew slogged through the thick haze of the morning, zombie-like, until a high-pitched scream curdled the air. Every rescue diver turned their head, suddenly alert to the situation at hand. They activated their new rescue skills, searching the area in a U- shaped pattern until they found Sam under the boat, entangled with the very same creature who had slunk into the engine room hours before. This situation was not demonstrated in the PADI rescue videos, so the students were at a loss for what to do. Coincidentally, Nick revved the engine at this moment, and the beast slithered away back to the engine room.
Meanwhile, on the island of Il Forchue, a similar scene unfolded. Kylie, Julia, Jack, and the veteran admired the beautiful landscape at hand, drifting further apart as they took in the view. In an eerily similar fashion to the scene on Ocean Star, a sharp scream caused three heads to swivel on their axes towards Kylie, suspended in the air by an unfamiliar creature. The beast spun around, faster and faster, until Kylie became a blur, then slowly slunk down into the earth, leaving Kylie disgruntled but safe on the sand. Back together on the boat, the group recounted their parallel experiences, becoming even more startled by the haunting of their watery home. Having only dealt with the ghost of Virginia in the past, everyone felt ill-equipped to deal with this much more terrifying force. Unbeknownst to the group, as they pieced together the facts of their day and assembled a plan of action, an ominous force looked on from the mast, ready to wreak havoc again at any moment…
To be continued…
Tune in on 4/9 for Part 2 – Virginia’s Brother’s Wrath
HELP
(JK, we love it here and feel very safe. This blog is fiction. Creative writing is discouraged in all of our scientific papers, so we have to get it out somewhere.)