Tales of a Peculiar Pirate

13. A One-sided Smack Down

Polly struggled desperately against the rope that bound her, but to no avail. How a rope that she was guessing was made out of a beam of light was even tangible, let alone strong, was beyond her. The laser lasso wrapped around her stomach jerked her into the waters that were still unwelcomingly icy despite having been blasted by the sun's rays for at least an hour.

However if she was going down, she wasn't going down alone. Inhaling deeply just before her head joined the rest of her body in the sea, Polly grabbed Fethar, and within moments they were both underwater.

Just like pretty much every other human being she knew, Polly couldn't breathe underwater, or at least to her knowledge she couldn't. She had never actually tried because she had a little more than half a brain cell floating around in her head. Though she doubted they would stay there, Polly stuck Fethar in her hair and hoped that the accessory would stay in her hair long enough to help them wiggle out of the tricky situation they had found themselves in.

To her great surprise, now that she was in the same state of matter as the fish, she could hear them. She couldn't understand them because they weren't speaking the international language or her language, but at least now she didn't have to watch them arrange bubbles into letters to know they were talking.

Evangeline's voice was a lot higher pitched than she had expected. Her voice was a cross between a squeaky toy and a squirrel who had just gotten all their acorns stolen. If Evangeline waltzed into a music production studio and someone threw in a beat and some autotune, she could have dropped a dubstep track right then and there.

Qwertyuiop sounded strikingly similar to the drone of a laptop fan, and Polly decided that if she was picking sides based on whose voice she liked better, it would have to be Evangeline's. There was just something about the buzz of laptop fans that brought a frown to her face and a twitch to her eye.

Polly didn't know how she was going to tell Evangleline she didn't have gills and wasn't an amphibian, in fact she was pretty sure Evangeline should have already known that, but that wasn't going to stop her from trying. As far as she knew, her life depended on it.

With great fervor, she tugged on the surprisingly sturdy rope that tied her to the tiny fish and made like a wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-man in an attempt to get the fish's attention. Yet the fish paid her no mind and continued to eye Qwertyuiop, who they had also wrapped up in red, warily. Polly sure hoped that she wasn't the new hostage because she doubted Qwertyuiop would try as hard to save her, someone from a totally different species, as he did to save the last fish.

"Polly!" exclaimed the last voice Polly had expected to hear.

Swimming straight toward her like torpedos were none other than the kiwis she had thought were still playing near the rock, and Wiki was waving a wing. The lass could have cried on the spot right then and there given how happy she was to see those familiar faces. Then it hit her.

"That wasn't Wiki speaking, was it?" asked Polly to herself. "Nah, I'm probs tripping."

Polly almost opened her mouth to ask Wiki if she had really just popped her beak open and spoken, but common sense stopped her right before she would have taken in a mouthful of salty water.

"Surround her," cried Wiki, sounding very much like a general calling for her troops to gather around the enemy. Polly couldn't even ask why.

The three kiwis circled around their human pal and stretched out their wings.

"Here goes and good luck," tee-hee-ed Wiki before she began chanting.

Polly felt faint and she wasn't sure if it was because she had been holding her breath for just that long or because she felt like she was about to get sacrificed to a higher power by the birds she had taken on as her shipmates.