The notifications turned out to be the ship upgrades finally settling in. As Elisa introduced Riv to all the academic understanding of proper ship operations she knew, Marco pointed the ship in roughly the right direction and got down to the long-awaited fun part.

Marco gawked at the window before slapping his cheeks to get his mind back in the game. This was no time for extra reading. The merchantman wasn’t much of an option. He knew that kind of ship, and it wasn’t his style. They were slow, sturdy things. If he had been hauling grain, it would have been perfect. On the run while looking for adventure, it was about as exciting as a horse-drawn cart.

The War Galleon was tempting. Eventually, they’d run into scary things in the water. Everyone did. Galleons were what you sent to clear those kinds of things out so the merchantmen could get through. There was one more option, and it was appealing enough to make the decision tough.

“Elisa?” Marco asked. “I have a chance to upgrade my ship into a new class. I’m thinking Sloop. It makes us a lot faster, and we have the variety. That or War Galleon. The last one is Merchantman and I don’t think we go for that one. ”

Elisa closed her eyes, and her face got the serious look she had when she was reading a book. A few moments later, she opened them back up again.

“Sloop’s the best choice right now. Almost every ship is going to be stronger than us, so anything that makes us fast enough to get away from pursuers is the right choice. Anyways, about those knots —”

Marco committed to the decision mentally, pushing through the are-you-sure resistance the system put up in his way.

The ship flashed with light, temporarily stunning Elisa out of her knot-tying speech. When it cleared, the new craft was under their feet. It was a smallish sloop, judging by the usual size of small ships. By the former standards of the Foolish Endeavor, it was enormous.

“Right now, Marco?” Elisa asked. “What if it had dumped us in the water?”

“I guess I didn’t think about that. It’s better, though. Isn’t it?”

“It’s very nice. We are already moving faster.” Elisa looked up to the sail, judging it good enough to nod in approval at, at least. “Now get us the rest of the way there. I’ll make sure Riv gets a full run-through by the time we arrive.”

“Great. I’ll keep sailing. Riv’s island is nearby?” Marco asked.

“Near enough. We should be there in less than an hour. It’s a nice place, I hear. Good restaurants. Nice inns.”

“And clerics, and guards.”

“Yes, don’t remind me. We’ll have to drop him off and go. Hopefully, we can do that uneventfully.”

“I’ll do my best.” Marco gave a mock salute. “Now let me steer. I need to get used to this thing. It’s a lot different now.”

Steering wasn’t the only thing on his mind. The weirdest notification in the bunch was still hanging there, just waiting to be understood. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a simple thing.

Marco felt a sudden knowledge of where the entrance would be, and an even vaguer sense of what kind of treasures it might hold. Somewhere deep inside him, a lust for the power took hold. He had to have it.

At the same time, he couldn’t just take it. Riv wanted to go home. That was his call, not Marco’s. He would do a lot of things in search of adventure, but betraying a friend wasn’t one. That was more like Gamble, and there were few people he wanted to be like less than him.

Thirty minutes later, he could just see the island in the distance. Other ships dotted the water, moving goods and people to and from the docks. In another thirty minutes, he’d be docked himself, and probably arrested if anyone realized who he was. At that point, he would be connected to the dock, which had legal obligations to the island, which had legal obligations to the government.

All those obligations linked together like a chain, one that would shackle him, his ship, and his life to land as soon as he got close enough to an authority to get the manacle on his wrist if he was noticed.

Ah well. Easy come, easy go if so. Just the first roll in a series of gambles I’ll be making for a long time, I bet.

Lucky for him and Elisa, they really didn’t need to stop for long. 19-H had given them plenty, even disregarding weird rewards he didn’t quite know what to do with yet. He went to the system screen for the ship, looking over various functions he had never been able to really examine. He could see all the food in the hold, for one, loaded directly into the upgrading mass of the smaller previous version and carried over here.

That’s odd. We are a crew of three.

A twinge in the back of Marco’s head told him he was missing something important, if he could only figure out what. He jumped over to the crew page, where his name was listed as captain, and a number of other ship roles were listed as empty.

Below them, in a box of their own, were two more names.

“You couldn’t trust a single one of them,” Marco recalled Garrick saying in one of his stories. “You really couldn’t. I had to go to the system for verification of anything I could get. One man had one leg, and he hid that. As if it was something to be ashamed of!”

The system listed all sorts of things in descriptions, but it left the bulk of what was possible unsaid. But Marco had grown up around people who had spent their whole lives on the water or supporting those who did, which made forgetting that he could do what he was about to do even worse.

The system didn’t make you verify with someone else that they were crew before you added them. On the other end, they could deny to become crew or choose to ignore the system screen until ready. Once they hit yes, being crew obligated them to the captain’s orders, outside of a few circumstances or a willingness to weather the system penalties involved. But as crew, they would also draw the benefits of the position until removed.

Letting his finger slide over the screen, he assigned Elisa to the ship’s navigator position and Riv to quartermaster. Then, swiping all his windows closed, he sprinted below decks to find the others.

“Elisa, any new notifications?” Marco asked.

“Yes. Again, warn me before you do things. It nearly scared me to death.”

“So it’s just free strength?” Marco asked after reading the screen.

“That’s just the start, Marco. Eventually, you’ll get benefits beyond that. You’ll know some of what I know about navigation. You’ll get a bit of Riv’s skills, my skills, and anyone else you allow to join. You just need to get your own class far enough first.”

“Well, good. It’s a shame we’ll lose what we are getting from Riv so soon, though.”

The ship was still pointed dead-on at Marco’s potential destroyed future, flying like a dart towards him spending the rest of his life in a barred cell or on a farm. Still, it didn’t appear anyone present had the skills to know exactly who he was, given that his ship looked completely different now. There was maybe a chance that they would be able to drop Riv off and get away before anyone noticed.

Marco let himself feel good about that just a bit too soon, just before he saw one of the ships dotting the water near the island break away from the others. There was no mistaking the direction it chose to sail once it was moving. They had been seen, and they were now being chased.

“Bad news, Riv. We’ll have to figure out another place to drop you off. That other ship doesn’t look friendly.” Marco spun the wheel and let the ship keep turning as he assessed the situation. It wasn’t great.

“I understand.” Riv nodded. “Can we get away?”

“For a while. The wind only moves a ship so much. And this new ship is very fast.”

Marco had no doubt that the captain of the new ship had a higher level than him, but he was in what appeared to be a sturdy patrol ship used for guarding islands. It was far from a speedy smuggler ship, which was essentially what the Foolish Endeavor was at this point in its development. It was a small light ship with almost nothing in its hold and a bare-bones skeleton crew.

“It’s going to catch up. But it will take a long time,“ Marco concluded.

“Is there anything we can do?” Elisa asked. “Can we fight?”

“Not realistically, no.” Marco looked at the size of the ship in question. Nobody was giving something like that to an amateur. He might be talented, and he liked to think he was, but it wasn’t going to make a difference that bridged ten or twenty levels with the other captain. “So we need an escape plan.”

“I’ll get in my notebook,” Elisa said. “And Riv, sorry. We might not be getting you home as soon as we thought.”