The Eristic Illusion

[Cadmus]

(// My Feedback Thread.)



Something wasn't quite right.

The engines growled their usual growl, and the bulkheads shook with their usual rattle. The ice clouds outside the bridge rushed past with a sound like a rough waterfall, ice pellets continually flying into the ship in a white torrent of frozen water, almost as if this was a ship of old earth, heaving on the tempestuous seas of the Antarctic, fighting through the storm...

There was no fight here, just routine flying.
But something was still wrong.

The semicircular control panels of the pirate train all looked fine - there were no light lit that shouldn't be, no levers down that should be up, nor was any thing else amiss.

This bridge was clean, so that wasn't the matter. This ship was always clean - it wasn't one of those dirty pirate ships... at least on the inside.

But that didn't the modify the singular fact that something was wrong, and Cadmus knew it.

A hand reached up onto one of the consoles and tapped a button, shutting off the stream of jazz that had been playing on the ship's speakers.

The captain of this ship then pulled himself up from underneath the control console he had been underneath, brushing some hair from his eyes as he regained his considerable composure.

He was clad in a suit - dark grey, white shirt no tie.
That was certainly odd, for any captain of a ship of the pirate family - but what was more odd was that he didn't look one bit a pirate - from his glasses to his face, he looked like he belonged on New Wall Street, trading stocks. His brownish blonde hair was long, pulled back behind his head - making him look like more of a dandy than anything. A dandy, that is, unless you looked at his eyes at the same time. They were stern, resolute, firm with purpose - traits rare among most men, he acknowledged.

But for all his destiny, he could not figure out what the devil was causing that noise.

He sighed and took his glasses off, placing them in his breast pocket and moving to the front of the bridge, hand dancing over the control panels as he made his way there.

He bent over the navmap, checking his course briefly, plotting a new one, and setting the ship on autopilot. He was going down below to take a look.

Something wasn't right, and Cadmus knew it, though he had no idea what wasn't right or what he knew wasn't right... he knew he knew that it was there, but not what it was.

And that was how it was most of the time, he thought bemusedly as he made his way to the rear of the bridge.