The Lost Planet of Ko'sstahn (Winner - SFSD 8 Collection)

The Sunken Norwegian (8.2)

(Author's Note: Sub-genre Piratepunk.   Prompt below:-

Welcome, me hearties, to The Sunk'n Norwegian, a bar with a difference. See, this is a temporal bar and can be any/where/, any/time/, any/when/... Picture the scene... A dark, damp, dingy bar; the rank stench of every conceivable bodily excretion permeating ye're nostrils and making it rather difficult for ye to stop ye'reself adding to the rancid concoction.

A few tables away ye notice two people huddled, quite obviously deep in conversation. One of them is a pirate of old (my character was Charlotte Badger) whereas the other, ye can quite clearly tell simply by looking at him/her, is a space pirate. Ye strain, attempting to listen in on the conversation. Ye're only able to pick up snippets at first, but ye manage to glean that the space pirate is attempting to recruit for his/her next raid, whatever that may be. As casually as ye can ye move a table closer to the conversation. From there, ye can hear everything.

Ye're task for this round, troopers, is to start ye're story from there. Where you finish it is up to ye, but ye be havin' an upperlimit of 1500 words)

When I came to my senses, the first thing that struck me was the god-awful smell! Sweat, piss and vomit—and they weren't the worst of it. I had a mug containing some sort of dark liquid in my hands, my elbows rested on an old wooden table bearing the scars and stains of unmentionable accidents and I was sitting on a ricketty chair which had one leg shorter than the others. Smoke stung my eyes.

The room was shadowy, with a couple of lanterns hanging from the roof, casting a faint glow over a long wooden counter and the man standing behind it.

Where the fuck was I this time? Or rather 'when'?

I sat still, unobtrusively examining my surroundings - I needed more information. My initial scan identified twenty one people in the room, including the man behind the bar. There were five individuals leaning on the counter, but most sat in twos or threes, hunched around small tables. Everyone present was male, except for a pair of women huddled at the back of the room, large mugs of ale hiding their faces. That reminded me.

I wondered if it was safe to take a sip of what was in the mug. I brought it to my lips, sniffed, and analysed a drop with my tongue. The nanobot assessment came back instantly—it was ale, and safe enough to drink if you didn't mind the odd small rodent hair.

I risked a sip, burying my face in the mug as my ears strained to recognise the language being used around me. 'English' I thought, although strange words such as 'skillogallee,' 'swaggie,' and 'flash-cove' peppered the air, and it took a while for my translator to identify the dialect. Australian convict slang—late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. At least it gave me the approximate period and location.

Then my GPPPS (Global Place and Period Positioning System) finally kicked in. I was in a pub, The Sunken Norwegian, Launceston, Tasmania, on the 16th of June 1806, time 20:14 hours, to be precise.

Off hand, I couldn't think of a single important event which occurred on that date but I checked my internal data base to make sure. No, nothing. Which meant... well, what it meant was that there was about to be an unscheduled break in the space-time continuum.

And I had been sent here to stop it. Or at the least, mop up, so that it—whatever it was—didn't impact too heavily on the future.

Fuck!

I took a hefty swig from my mug and listened. All I could hear was low murmurs, bragging about whores, ships, and races - nothing of any significance. I cast another casual glance around the room, careful not to let my gaze linger on any individual and froze. What the-!