“Well, don’t just stand there, stranger. Grab a stool and help me with this damn rifle!”

Ralf was throwing around profanities like no tomorrow, but for Joe, it was pretty understandable - he also never liked to clean and fix his grandfather’s old rifle, and always tried to slip away. Unfortunately, no chance for him this time.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“I can’t put this piece of junk together, that’s what the problem is.” Despite being very agitated on the outside, Ralf’s eyes were firmly focused to a task. “It doesn’t fit.”

Joe put out his hand, gesturing to his unlikely “nanny” to give him a rifle.

“What’re you going to do?… Whatever, take it.”

It took him quite a few minutes, but Joe found a problem by carefully exploring the bolt with his fingers. No wonder Ralf couldn’t quite figure it out - it was almost impossible to notice crack underneath a bolt, that wasn’t quite allowing it to slide in fully. Joe himself would have never figured it out too if he didn’t remember that the exact same thing happened during one of their hunting trips.

He pulled out a bolt and showed a problem to the skeptically looking armsmaster.

“Here. The bolt is cracked.”

Ralf took a detail from his hands, twirled it in a hand, getting a full view of it. Then he chuckled to himself.

“Not bad. Well, this is a waste. I have no tools to fix that. To the trash it goes, then. Say, you seem to know your way around guns. Where did you learn that?”

“My grandfather taught me.”

“Really, now?” Ralf’s eyes narrowed. “Do tell, who was your grandpa?”

“A hunter. He taught me how to shoot and how to skin animals.”

“A hunter, says he…” A big man snorted and turned away from Joseph.

There was one question Joe wanted to ask from the very beginning. But the frequent events around him kept distracting him. Now, that it was only him and Ralf. There was no guarantee that he’d get a satisfying answer, but it was worth a try.

“Who are you, people?”

Ralf stared at him in utter confusion.

“You what, mate?”

“I mean, are you pirates, mercenaries, military - what kind of group are you all?”

The double-chin’d armsmaster kept staring at Joe with unblinking eyes.

Then, a thunder-like laugh rang out in the air. Ralf was shaking, while half-lying on the table. Joe was patiently waiting for him to calm down, wondering what on earth could’ve possibly earned such reaction.

Still laughing, Ralf wiped off remaining tears from his face.

“Lad, have you completely lost your brain when Xander did you in? Are you blind? Do you really have no idea where you are?!”

“No! I woke up and all I’ve been doing was following you, people, around! How the hell would I know, if no one actually tells me?!”

The last sentence came out stronger than he intended, but Joe, after processing Ralf’s words, suddenly realized just how bad his situation truly was. With no friends around, no means of communication, among completely alien people and weird creatures, all armed to the teeth, in the middle of the void with no way out; his head started spinning, as everything fell down on him at once. He felt his legs losing support, and his body fell onto a stool, completely drained and empty.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Ralf watching over him.

“Oh, for Kon’jar’s sake… you aren’t kidding, are you? You really don’t know anything?”

Joe had no energy to answer. Shaking his head was the best he could muster.

“Wew, lad… that’s quite a deep water you took a dive into…” Ralf had no smile on his face, his eyes were quite serious. He was contemplating something for a moment, before continuing. “…You can think of us as pirates if you want. Or mercenaries. They are quite similar, anyway - both are risking their necks for any scrap of gold one can find. Not like the Emperor’s Navy, Kon’jar bless the sleazy bastard, is any better.”

“Emperor? Emperor of what, again?”

Ralf placed both of his hands on his head.

“Look, kid… just do me a favor, and tell me, what you remember. Anything at all. Endless questions give a headache to this here old man…”

Joe began to count on his fingers.

“My name, my childhood with grandfather, the other ship, waking up in the room on the far end of this ship, meeting cat and Roth, eating with them, him teaching me Inner State, going to meet Captain and quartermaster, going here… and that’s mostly it.”

Revealing the exact circumstances that lead to this weird situation, to begin with, wouldn’t be the wisest move. Joe decided to learn more before doing something dumb. Not that he didn’t do that mistake already - trying to talk back to this very man, who was now sitting near him, was a move that would’ve surely got him killed in any other situation. From the looks of it, Captain protected him, but why and for what reason?…

“Ain’t expected much… our quartermaster is strong as a daemon. Makes sense now that he knocked the best parts out of your head. You were down there for what, three hours? Five? I can see now, why you need some eyes on your back, but let’s get this out of the way - I have my load of work. You can come here as you like, but the time is a harsh woman, and I ain’t got much loving from her. Do you understand?”

“You have your own duties and can’t babysit me. I understand.”

Ralf grinned.

“Very good. You have a good head on your shoulders, even if it’s a bit cracked. I’ll give you a short story on what kind of mess you stepped into. Wanna details, ask the others. But first, let’s grab something to chew.”

*****

The food storage (with a kitchen in another half of the same room) was right across the corridor. It was the same size as the arsenal. Ham and cheese were nowhere to be seen among the half-stocked shelves, however. In fact, most of the edible items on the shelves were the ones that could last a significant amount of time on open air, which made sense. Still, Joe remembered that the food break with the doctor in the medical and abovementioned meal was very much present there.

In a kitchen half, there was a giant container, blocked with a large bolt. There was also a big water tap nearby, with a metal barrel underneath it. Joe looked inside, yet he saw not a single trace of rust on the inner side of the barrel.

Meanwhile, Ralf pulled out a big meat knife and quickly, with minimum effort, cut a piece of bread into almost perfectly identical slices. Joe could barely follow his movements. After being done with the bread, the man walked over to a container. He pulled the bolt and opened it.

Joe glanced inside. A brief gust of freezing wind blew into his face, making him stumble back and cover his face.

“...A freezer?…”

“First, or second in the world, kid! Those eggheads at the University sure know their stuff. Figured out how to keep the food fresh and cold in the damn void, and here it is, their masterpiece! Useful for negotiating too, from time to time…”

Just like shelves on the outside, a freezer had a lot of empty space inside. Ralf went in, ignoring the cold altogether, and emerged with a sack of potatoes, tomatoes, some already prepared meat, and a weird colorful weed that Joe couldn’t recognize at all.

Ralf quickly cut ingredients into pieces, put them into a pot and hung a pot above the fire into an oven in the wall, and leaned on a table, waiting for water to boil.

“And now we wait. Might as well tell you a story I promised. You listening?”

“Yeah, I’m listening.”

*****

He wasn’t lying. This was the driest, shortest, and most straightforward explanation. After hearing it, Joe’s head was full of questions, but at least, the basics were now clear enough.

Joseph was on the ship, called “Morning Star”. The crew of the ship picked him up during a raid on a remote settlement. They intercepted the slavers’ vessel, which was just about to leave. Right now, they were drifting in neutral territory between two countries, who very much didn’t like each other. Ralf called one of them, quoting - “tin cans”, and another “Some fanatics from the east, pulling lightning out of their assess”. Sumeilien, “The Glorious-ass Metal Empire” as the armsmaster dubbed it, was controlling territory to the west, and “Fanatics” - Ralf called their country “Hora-Hrothgar” - were mostly coming from north-eastern islands. When Joe asked about the Threshold, Ralf only smirked and called it “One big box of surprises”.

There wasn’t much else to do until the morning. Right now, they were back in the arsenal. The simple soup that Ralf cooked before was surprisingly tasty - Joe didn’t expect it at all. The armsmaster was lamenting the lack of spices on the ship, to which Joe honestly replied that the food was pretty good even without it. Ralf was stunned for a moment, before shrugging and telling Joe to wait and try some 'real' food.

He also got himself a couple of pistols and a straight sword. Ralf only dismissively shrugged and waved him off.

“Are there any books on the ship?”

“Books?” Ralf half-heartedly laughed. “What do you think we are, a gang of intellectuals? There are a couple I know of, Roth has something on medicine, and Captain was sometimes reading something in his room. If you wanna read, you got to find it yourself.”

Well, that was shaping up to be more difficult than he thought.

Still, given that Ralf has basically given him full freedom within a ship, that would be a good time to explore it.

His plans were rudely interrupted.

A loud howling went through the entire corridor. Ralf instantly jumped up, keeping a hand on a hilt of a sword. Joe threw a questioning look at him. Ralf’s answer was short and terrifying.

“We are under attack.”