The Buccaneers Bay

[jammi]

The door burst open with the customary bang of boot being applied forcefully to ancient wood. John Crown sauntered in looking pleased with himself. Giving the traditional nod to Morris he proceeded to the bar, and still looking incredibly smug dropped onto a stool.

Fiddling around inside his flight jacket, looking for something, he eventually pulled out what looked like a battered and stained roll of parchment. Unrolling it, he pinned it flat by stealing the pints off the Buccaneers surrounding him and placing them on the corners. It was a map of the bar.

Charles walked over, polishing a empty mug with a dirty cloth. "Oi, John, what's that thing?" He queried. John was renowned for dragging in weird and wonderful objects from his foraging trips to the depths of space. This just looked like a piece of paper.

"This," John said a flourish, "is a top of the line piece of Hacker technology. I got it off one of them a few days ago." Charles eyed the map dubiously.

"I hope you didn't pay much for it. Looks like a piece of paper to me." John just grinned and tapped what looked like an ink blot on the top left corner. A menu appeared to rise from the paper, lines of ink running from the current image printed onto the parchments rough surface to pool into a puddle in the centre of the paper and paint words and icons. Now Charles looked genuinely surprised. Tapping a few of the freshly appeared icons, the map repainted itself with an image of Trafalgar's blueprints.

"This, Charles, is nanotech. The ink's just a digital drawing, but this map basically leaches off whatever systems are nearby and uses them to paint a map of where-ever you are. You could attack bloody Newgate and so long as you were near one of it's consoles, it'd paint you a good picture of what it's insides look like. This thing is worth every penny I paid."

As the small crowd of Buccaneers now peering at the map watched, John tapped a few more of the icons and changed the image back to that of the Bay. As a final touch, in spidery scrawled letters Buccaneer Turf appeared along the top of the parchment, followed by the grinning leer of the Jolly Roger. Grinning like the skull that had just appeared, John displaced the pints and rolled the paper up again, stuffing it back in his pocket. "Ain't you got anything useful to be doing?" He snapped light-heartedly at the still gawking pirates that surrounding him.

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