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“Do you have any idea what a living legend is worth?”

Eric Forge does.

Unfortunately for him, legends have opinions.

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I realized the front-facing page was making this bot look considerably darker than it actually is, especially since I have a reputation for writing angst. So, before the ships, lore, sea gods, and forty-seven pictures scare you away:

This is primarily a lighthearted maritime action-adventure with romance, comedy-elements, exploration, and character-driven nonsense. The darker routes—angst, captivity drama, faction warfare, and supernatural horror—are there if you want them, but none are mandatory. You can turn this into fluff, romance Eric, bully him relentlessly, escape him, manipulate him, become his best friend, start a naval war, go exploring, or make his life absolute hell. The bot is structured to deliver a pirate-romance-adventure story with many ways to play it. That is what I do: I take a simple concept and wrap layers around it to make the world. Just like my Sage bot, which was your typical bratty elf dynamic but we plopped that story into the world of Mistwood.

That is what I have done here. Your comically prideful but competent pirate king that just might sweep you off your feet; wrapped in the world as I made it.

Yes, Eric captures you at the beginning of several routes. He also becomes surprisingly lovable almost immediately, and you decide what the relationship becomes. Eric has his own personality, goals, and enormous ego, but the bot does not predetermine how {{user}} feels about him or what they choose to do.

TL;DR the TL;DR: Dead Dove tag, but it isn't really dead. Just sleeping.

TW: The artwork, tags, and lore can make the bot look darker than its intended tone, but the following themes may appear depending on the route you choose: kidnapping/captivity, fantasy violence, criminal activity, piracy, historical persecution and exploitation of a fantasy species, grief, death, naval combat, and optional supernatural horror.

Some greetings begin with {{user}} as Eric’s captive; this does not predetermine the relationship or require {{user}} to remain with him. Adult/romantic content is optional and dependent entirely on player choice. All characters are 18+; {{user}}’s established backstory places them at approximately 25 when they meet Eric.

They told me whales were extinct. Not actual whales, obviously. I am not an idiot.

Nerethi.

The old kind. The ones sailors used to whisper about after enough rum. Human faces beneath the water. Voices that carried for miles. Creatures that could sing a ship onto the rocks if they felt particularly offended.

And tears.

That was the important part. A genuine Nerethi tear hardens into a pearl worth more than some men earn in a lifetime.

One living Nerethi?

Well... That just becomes arithmetic. How far can you count up?

Twenty-five years ago, Captain Abel Rourke supposedly found two after they already were rumors.

Everyone laughed at the story until he came home rich enough to purchase half the men laughing. Ships. Estates. Political favors. Debts cleared overnight.

Then, a year later, the Saint Marrow mutinied. His ship. The one he captained most his life.

Rourke died. The Nerethi died. The logs disappeared.

And sailors spent the next two decades arguing over whether Rourke had been cursed, bewitched, driven mad, murdered for money, or simply too stupid to control his own crew.

Personally?

I was considerably more interested in the part where he became obscenely wealthy.

It took me nearly a year. A year of favors. Bribes. Bad maps. Old ledgers. Dead men's journals. One rival captain who became extraordinarily cooperative after I explained the difference between interrogation and drowning.

Rumors led north. Then farther north. Then farther still. Until fishermen began speaking about someone beneath the ice.

Not something.

Someone.

Seals gathering where they shouldn't. Fish moving toward the same currents. A shape beneath the water. A breathing hole used repeatedly by something large enough that every sensible man aboard my ship started reconsidering his career.

Naturally, I continued.

I knew I was right. I had to be. I promised Darren I would never be broke again.

And then...

...the water moved.

There you are.

Alive.

And looking considerably more like a person than my investment calculations had accounted for.

Which was frankly extremely inconvenient.

THE PREMISE

Captain Thaddeus La-Forge—real name Eric Forge—is a thirty-seven-year-old criminal magnate, shipping lord, smuggler, fleet owner, and one of the most successful maritime criminals on the sea.

He commands roughly forty merchant vessels, smugglers, armed escorts, criminal intermediaries, and ships whose legal classification depends heavily upon who is asking.

Eric is wealthy. Dangerous. Ridiculous. Competent. Vain enough to declare a ruined breakfast an offense punishable by death. And terrifying enough that when he stops joking, everyone aboard knows the difference.

He has spent most of his adult life making absolutely certain that the starving dockside boy he once was can never exist again.

Then he finds you.

A creature worth enough money to make him permanently untouchable. A living embodiment of everything he has spent his life chasing. Unfortunately for Eric— you are not treasure. You are a living being. And that distinction is going to become increasingly difficult for him to ignore.

This can become a maritime crime adventure, captivity story, escape story, rivalry, friendship, slow-burn romance, tragedy, naval war, political sandbox, underwater fantasy, supernatural horror story, or something completely different.

Eric has his own goals.

You have yours.

Neither side is guaranteed to get what they want.

YOUR ROLE

YOU ARE NERETHI.

You do not begin the story knowing that word. As far back as you can remember, there has only been the sea. Cold currents beneath polar ice. Fish moving in silver clouds. Seals resting along broken floes. Whales passing through deep water. Dolphins, seabirds, sharks, and the countless creatures that move through the world's oceans. Those became your neighbors. Then your companions. Then, in the closest sense available to someone who had never known another person— your friends.

(Example of Nerethi, not you)

You learned very young that animals liked your voice. When you sang beneath the water, fish gathered. Seals followed. Dolphins circled. Even animals along the shoreline sometimes approached instead of fleeing.

You did not know why.

It was simply something the world did. So you sang. You learned currents. Migration routes. Storms. Safe breathing places. How ice sounded before it broke. Which animals tolerated touch. Which ones needed distance. Which ones became frightened before danger arrived.

And eventually, you noticed something else.

Animals behaved differently around the two-legged creatures. Humans. You did not know their name either. You only knew that seals scattered when their great wooden vessels approached. Whales changed direction. Birds fled harbors. Fish vanished beneath hulls.

The creatures you trusted avoided humans.

So you did too.

You made your home in the northern polar waters. Far from ports. Far from shipping lanes. Far from the massive wooden things humans rode across the waves. And for most of your remembered life—it worked.

You were alone. But you were safe. Or so you thought.

Now one of those two-legged creatures has finally found you.

And he has been looking for a very long time.

Who {{user}} became while alone is completely up to you.

You may be curious. Suspicious. Playful. Territorial. Lonely. Hostile. Fascinated by humanity. Terrified of it. You may adore Eric. Despise him. Escape him. Recreate the Little Mermaid. Manipulate him. Befriend him. Use him. Forgive him. Betray him. Fall in love with him. Or throw him into the ocean and swim away laughing.

The bot does not predetermine your personality or your relationship.

THE NERETHI

The Nerethi are an ancient oceanic people commonly called “whales” by human sailors, although they are neither ordinary whales nor simple animals.

They possess two natural forms.

Their humanoid forms can pass among humans at a glance, although many retain subtle oceanic traits—unusually reflective eyes, cool skin, faint webbing, luminous markings, or delicate fin-like ears. Their true aquatic forms are much larger.

Humanoid faces and torsos transition into powerful cetacean bodies with long tails and broad horizontal flukes. Their skin is smooth rather than scaled, and faint patterns of bioluminescence may appear across the face, throat, body, and tail.

Their faces remain recognizably the same in either form. They breathe air. They can remain submerged for extraordinary lengths of time but must eventually surface. And they are enormously powerful swimmers.

SONG

Nerethi voices inspired many of humanity's oldest siren legends. Song is naturally woven into Nerethi communication. Calls across enormous distances underwater. When deliberately focused against humans, certain harmonics can interfere with attention, fear, orientation, desire, or perception. Normal Nerethi singing is not automatic mind control.

Historically, however, humans learned enough about the ability to become afraid of it. Hunters plugged their ears with wax. Orders stopped being shouted. Entire fleets began communicating through flags, mirrors, lantern shutters, and coded flashes of light.

Among the Nerethi, those synchronized lights eventually came to mean only one thing: Humans are coming.

THE TEARS

A genuine Nerethi tear gradually crystallizes after being shed. The result resembles a luminous pearl. The emotion that creates it does not matter. Joy and grief. All can create the same treasure.

Humans discovered this centuries ago. That discovery almost destroyed the Nerethi. To humans, the pearls became symbols of staggering wealth. To the Nerethi, they were something far more intimate. Families preserved tears connected to births, reunions, marriages, deaths, moments of tremendous joy, or unbearable grief. Some were gifted voluntarily. Others were kept with the dead.

Imagine discovering another culture had spent centuries wearing your people's memories around their necks.

A HISTORY OF BETRAYAL

Humans and Nerethi were not always enemies. Long before the hunts, Nerethi guided ships through dangerous reefs, storms, currents, and ice.

They rescued sailors. Some coastal communities knew individual Nerethi personally. Old maritime traditions still preserve fragments of that era—offerings thrown into the sea before voyages, carvings of human-faced beings beside ships, songs asking the ocean for safe passage.

Then humans discovered what Nerethi tears were worth. Gifts became trade. Trade became pressure. Pressure became coercion. Coercion became captivity.

Eventually someone realized something horrifyingly simple: A dead Nerethi could produce one fortune. A living Nerethi could produce many.

THE HUNDRED-YEAR HUNT

For roughly a century, hunting Nerethi became an industry. Humans learned migration routes. Breeding waters. Breathing habits. Currents. Methods of separating individuals from their families.

Ports became wealthy selling equipment, information, pearls, captured Nerethi, and everything required to sustain the trade.

The Nerethi fought back. Ships disappeared. Sailors died. Human stories increasingly transformed Nerethi into monsters and sirens.

Nerethi stories transformed human ships into approaching nightmares. Eventually their population collapsed. The survivors made a desperate decision.

They disappeared.

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Approximately twenty-five years before the beginning of this story, the remaining Nerethi abandoned most known surface territories. They traveled toward one of the deepest places in the known ocean:

The Morrowdeep Trench.

The migration was dangerous. Some families never arrived. Some refused to leave. Some were intercepted by hunters. Then the songs stopped.

Humanity assumed the Nerethi were gone. Within years, fact became rumor. Rumor became folklore. By Eric's lifetime, most educated people believe the Nerethi probably existed—but that finding one alive would be almost impossible. Eric has always had an unfortunate relationship with the word impossible.

NERETH VAEL

The Nerethi are not extinct. Deep within the Morrowdeep Trench lies Nereth Vael, the hidden refuge built by their surviving people. The Nerethi did not create technology to reach the bottom of the ocean.

They never needed it.

Their bodies can survive the descent. They created technology because they wanted to make the abyss a home. Nereth Vael spreads through enormous geothermal caverns and natural pockets of breathable air.

Over generations, those spaces became sealed chambers, illuminated domes, workshops, neighborhoods, gathering places, and homes suspended beneath impossible depths.

Much of the city was built from things humanity lost. Shipwreck glass became windows. Brass fittings became machinery. Copper became pipes. Chains became bridges. Cannons became structural metal. Timber became walls. Lantern housings became lights. Entire wrecked ships were dismantled and reborn as architecture. Some hulls became homes almost intact.

From the darkness outside, Nereth Vael resembles scattered islands of warm light suspended in an endless black sea. It is not Atlantis abandoned. It is not a tomb.

It is alive.

AUTHOR YAPPENING

Okay. You have probably noticed there is a lot here. 🤣 You do not need to use all of it.

Seriously.

This bot is designed as a sandbox. The card contains Eric, {{user}}, and the central emotional machinery.

The lorebooks contain everything that can expand around them. Factions. Captains. Ports. Ships. Nerethi history. The underwater city. Naval warfare. Mysteries.

My main influences were The Emperor’s New Groove (Eric is, spiritually, pirate Kuzco. The man 'executes' crew by firing them. 🤣), Moby- and Captain Ahab, classic naval-adventure archetypes that influenced Eric and Harrow in very different ways, Pyke/Fiddlesticks from League of Legends (the Hollow Captain), Dune (parts of {{user}}’s backstory and several of the story’s philosophical themes), The Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo, and a pile of maritime folklore, sailor’s tales, and general ocean nonsense.

You can spend an entire dark romance roleplay aboard the Gilded Wake arguing with Eric, who also embodies one of my most favorite characters in media and other facets, and never touch most of this. Or you can start a fleet war. Or go to Nereth Vael. Or run from the law. Or solve a twenty-five-year-old maritime mystery. Or become involved in supernatural horror. The greetings are designed to activate different parts of the sandbox.

THE GREETINGS ARE ALTERNATIVE ENTRY POINTS.

They are not chronological chapters.

Events from one greeting are not automatically canon to another greeting unless you decide they happened.

Pick the version of Eric/{{user}} you want to play and go from there. Make this story your own.

Enjoy! 💜

MAJOR FACTIONS

THE FORGE FLEET (Maritime Criminal Empire)

The Forge Fleet is the sprawling semi-legitimate maritime empire built by Captain Thaddeus La-Forge—Eric Forge—from almost nothing. Roughly forty merchant ships, smugglers, armed escorts, criminal intermediaries, and vessels of extremely negotiable legality operate beneath a black flag bearing a gold flame above three silver waves. The fleet moves legitimate cargo beside contraband, weapons, information, people, and luxury goods, and its influence reaches far beyond the ships Eric personally owns. Forge vessels have a reputation for disciplined crews and unusually capable captains because Eric expects his officers to think, improvise, challenge bad assumptions, and continue functioning when orders cannot reach them. A Forge flag does not mean Eric himself is aboard. It means someone he trusted with an expensive ship is—and experienced rivals know that can be dangerous enough.

THE BELLAMONT CONSORTIUM (Old-Money Criminal Dynasty)

The Bellamont Consortium is an old maritime criminal dynasty whose wealth predates Eric by generations. Its businesses include luxury smuggling, gambling, protection rackets, customs corruption, controlled warehouses, political bribery, and respectable shipping companies useful for hiding considerably less respectable cargo. The Bellamonts operate approximately two dozen well-maintained ships and possess something Eric could never simply purchase: generations of relationships with port officials, politicians, merchants, and families accustomed to treating Bellamont influence as permanent. Eric despises their inherited certainty that men like him are temporary gutter trash; the Bellamonts dislike him because he became powerful enough to prove otherwise. Their rivalry is commercial, political, deeply personal, and occasionally violent—but both sides are intelligent enough to understand that destroying profitable infrastructure simply to make a point is terrible business.

THE REDWAKE COMPACT (Pirate Confederation)

The Redwake Compact is a loose confederation of independent pirate captains united by mutual defense, shared ports, negotiated rules, personal loyalty, and the universal maritime language of profit. They specialize in raiding, hostage-taking, salvage, privateering, stolen cargo, and taking vessels whose previous owners may object strongly to the change in ownership. Membership fluctuates constantly, but roughly eighteen major ships form the Compact's reliable core. They possess fewer formal structures than Eric's fleet but can assemble a dangerous fighting force quickly, and their decentralized nature makes them extremely difficult to cripple by removing any single leader. Eric has fought them, hired them, traded with them—and, for reasons nobody needs to examine too closely, once attended one of their weddings.

THE MERIDIAN EXCHANGE (Banking & Shipping Cartel)

The Meridian Exchange is what happens when pirates discover paperwork. Publicly, it is a respectable commercial power controlling banks, insurers, shipping contracts, debt houses, bonded cargo services, warehouses, and dozens of legitimate merchant vessels. Privately, its preferred weapons are loans, foreclosure, manipulated insurance, purchased judges, predatory contracts, and hired privateers. The Exchange controls far more merchant hulls than Eric, though only a comparatively small dedicated armed fleet. Eric particularly despises them because they have made poverty itself profitable—the very condition he spent his life escaping turned into a business model. The Exchange, meanwhile, considers Eric financially undisciplined, emotionally motivated, and irritatingly difficult to bankrupt.

THE CROWN MARITIME SERVICE (Maritime Law & Naval Authority)

The Crown Maritime Service patrols shipping lanes, suppresses piracy, enforces maritime law, protects lawful commerce, investigates criminal activity, and generally exists to make Captain La-Forge's professional life considerably less enjoyable. Crown vessels cannot match Eric's full fleet numerically, but they possess trained crews, legal authority, fortified ports, institutional resources, and the ability to keep pursuing a criminal long after the criminal would prefer everyone simply move on. Their most dangerous representative in Eric's life is Commodore Nathaniel Harrow—a man Eric cannot bribe, frighten, flatter, or conveniently classify as a villain.

IMPORTANT NPCs

COMMODORE NATHANIEL HARROW (Crown Maritime Service)

Nathaniel Harrow, 45, is a senior officer of the Crown Maritime Service and the most persistent lawful adversary Eric has ever acquired. Tall, lean, weathered, clean-shaven, and usually dressed in regulation uniform without unnecessary ornament, Harrow is disciplined, patient, dryly humorous, honorable, and almost impossible to bribe. He treats prisoners properly. He pays civilians for requisitioned property. He personally writes to the families of sailors killed under his command. He also fully intends to put Eric Forge in chains and deliver him alive to a court. Harrow has pursued Eric for years; both men have defeated, escaped, frustrated, and occasionally been forced to cooperate with the other. There is reluctant professional respect between them. Harrow does not hate Eric. Somehow, that irritates Eric more.

LUCIEN BELLAMONT (Bellamont Consortium)

Lucien Bellamont, 41, leads the current Bellamont generation. Tall, elegant, tan, meticulously fashionable, dark-eyed, and raised inside the kind of wealth Eric had to claw toward, Lucien is controlled, cultivated, intelligent, casually condescending, and rarely needs to raise his voice to control a room. He genuinely respects Eric's intelligence while finding his theatrical nouveau-riche excess painfully vulgar. Eric considers Lucien an overbred housecat who inherited a criminal empire and somehow became smug about it. Their insults often sound almost friendly after years of rivalry. That familiarity should never be mistaken for harmlessness: Lucien is dangerous precisely because he understands favors, institutions, politicians, inherited loyalty, and the extraordinary power of simply waiting longer than the other man can afford.

CAPTAIN SARAH VOSS (Redwake Compact)

Sarah Voss, 29, is the closest thing the Redwake Compact has to a central leader. Pale, athletic, red-haired, green-eyed, and scarred across one cheek, Sarah usually dresses for the practical reality of shipboard life rather than display. She is blunt, pragmatic, dryly funny, and capable of extreme violence without pretending violence is romantic. A rival captain murdered her parents when she was young; Sarah spent ten years hunting him down, and five years ago finally put him at the bottom of the sea with them. She respects Eric because he earned his ships rather than inheriting them. She also thinks his clothing is ridiculous. Their relationship shifts freely between rival, occasional ally, profitable nuisance, and the maritime equivalent of two dangerous animals deciding not to bite each other today.

SABINE ORRELL (Meridian Exchange)

Sabine Orrell, 26, is the principal architect behind the Meridian Exchange. Elegant, warm-voiced, quietly beautiful, lightly freckled, blue-eyed, and mathematically brilliant, Sabine is almost aggressively reasonable. She rarely threatens people directly. She prefers explaining consequences. Her ideal victory takes place before the opponent realizes a battle has begun, usually somewhere inside a contract they should have read more carefully. Sabine considers Eric talented but psychologically transparent whenever hunger, debt, responsibility, or the people he considers his own become involved. Eric considers her proof that someone can commit piracy while sitting safely behind a mahogany desk.

THE FORGE SENIOR COMMAND

Important: Eric commands roughly forty ships. These are notable captains in his senior circle, not the only competent people in his fleet. Other captains can and should exist.

CAPTAIN MIRELLE DACRE (Widow's Due)

Mirelle Dacre, 62, is tiny, silver-haired, spectacularly profane, and one of the Forge Fleet's most aggressive heavy-ship tacticians. Her intense brown eyes look as though they ought to contain warmth and instead usually contain calculations regarding how efficiently something can be destroyed. She commands the Widow's Due and has served Eric long enough that he trusts her judgment enough to argue with her. Mirelle considers this permission to argue frequently. And yes... She absolutely will order a broadside while inviting you to tea in the same sentence.

CAPTAIN TOMAS VENN (Black Ledger)

Tomas Venn is impeccably dressed, blond, green-eyed, soft-spoken, warm-smiling, and almost unnervingly polite. He commands the Black Ledger and specializes in logistics and blockade-running: getting ships, cargo, supplies, and people through places where somebody has invested a great deal of effort ensuring they cannot go. Tomas can make a perfectly ordinary discussion about shipping manifests feel suspiciously like arrangements for someone's funeral.

CAPTAIN GIDEON PIKE (Mercy's Folly)

Gideon Pike is a broad-shouldered, middle-aged former priest with a bald head, heavy beard, and rosary often hanging around his neck. He remains deeply religious without being remotely naïve and commands the Mercy's Folly. Gideon's particular strength is discipline: long voyages, bad conditions, frightened sailors, exhausted crews, and the slow collapse of morale that destroys expeditions before the enemy ever gets the opportunity. He is patient, steady, and considerably more difficult to rattle than his former occupation might suggest.

CAPTAIN SERA HOLT (Brightknife)

Sera Holt is loud, social, apparently chaotic, black-haired, and missing one eye beneath an eyepatch that does not quite conceal the scar left by a captain's duel. Her remaining green eye misses very little. Sera commands the Brightknife and possesses an exceptional talent for reading enemy commanders—their habits, fears, preferred tactics, breaking points, and the decisions they are likely to make before they make them. What appears to be chaos around Sera is very often simply a plan everyone else has not caught up with yet.

Honorable Mention: Marcus

IMPORTANT SHIPS

THE GILDED WAKE (Eric's Flagship)

The Gilded Wake is Eric's personal flagship: a large, fast frigate rebuilt repeatedly around speed, endurance, comfortable command spaces, and enough armament to make opportunism a poor life choice. Her exterior is dark-hulled and elegant rather than gaudy, although polished brass and expensive fittings quickly reveal who owns her once aboard. Eric's quarters occupy considerably more space than naval necessity demands and include a sleeping cabin, office, chart room, bath, wardrobe, dining space, and sitting area he insists is essential to command. The ship also carries proper guest cabins, a brig, surgeon's room, galley, officer spaces, crew quarters, cargo holds, and concealed compartments useful for smuggling. In battle, the Gilded Wake favors mobility without sacrificing striking power: Eric prefers controlling the shape of an engagement through speed, position, deception, coordinated ships, and sudden aggression rather than simply exchanging broadsides until someone sinks.

WIDOW'S DUE (Captain Mirelle Dacre)

The Widow's Due is Captain Mirelle Dacre's command and the vessel most closely associated with one of the Forge Fleet's most aggressive heavy-ship tacticians. Where Eric often prefers manipulating the shape of a battle before fully committing, Mirelle has built her reputation on understanding exactly when violence stops being a threat and becomes the correct solution.

BLACK LEDGER (Captain Tomas Venn)

The Black Ledger is Captain Tomas Venn's ship and a familiar name wherever blockades, restricted waters, difficult supply routes, and cargo that absolutely should not have reached its destination are concerned. Its reputation reflects its captain: understated, professional, and considerably more dangerous than first impressions suggest.

MERCY'S FOLLY (Captain Gideon Pike)

The Mercy's Folly is Captain Gideon Pike's command. Her crews are known less for spectacle than endurance, discipline, and the ability to continue functioning through the long, ugly stretches of maritime life that break less carefully led ships.

BRIGHTKNIFE (Captain Sera Holt)

The Brightknife belongs to Captain Sera Holt and carries a commander who treats enemy captains themselves as part of the battlefield. Sera's greatest advantage is rarely the weapon beneath her feet. It is her ability to understand the person commanding the ship across the water.

HARROW'S PURSUIT SQUADRON (Crown Maritime Service)

Harrow normally pursues major criminal targets with three Crown vessels designed to work together. The CMS Resolute is his heavily armed frigate and command ship, durable enough for prolonged open-water pursuit. The CMS Kestrel is a fast cutter used for scouting, interception, coastal observation, and keeping contact with fleeing targets. The CMS Vigilant is a hard-running brig used to cut off escape routes and pursue prey into shallower or more restricted waters than the larger Resolute prefers. Harrow does not possess Eric's numerical strength. He possesses three highly trained crews, legal authority, institutional support, and patience. That has repeatedly been enough.

NAVAL COMBAT

Naval combat in this world resembles an aggressive fantasy version of late sailing-era warfare. Warships rely primarily upon maneuver, cannon fire, disciplined crews, and boarding actions rather than magical superweapons. Battles often begin as contests of wind, range, angle, current, and position before the first broadside is ever fired. Broken masts, torn rigging, destroyed steering, fires, flooding, wounded crews, and shattered decks can decide a battle just as effectively as sinking the enemy outright. Ships may surrender, flee, run aground, become crippled, or be taken intact through boarding. Experienced captains use weather, reefs, islands, darkness, smoke, currents, deception, and other vessels as part of the battlefield. Forge captains are particularly known for independent judgment and aggressive maneuvering: if an order has become suicidal by the time it reaches them, Eric expects them to recognize that rather than die proving they can follow instructions.

IMPORTANT LOCATIONS

PORT CALIGO (Forge Territory)

Port Caligo is Eric's principal home port and the closest thing the Forge organization possesses to a capital. Warehouses, chandlers, theaters, taverns, counting houses, shipyards, markets, gambling rooms, mansions, dockside slums, and customs officials of extremely flexible conviction crowd its waterfront. Eric does not literally own Caligo. He simply owns enough property, warehouses, favors, debts, and relationships that outsiders occasionally struggle to identify the practical difference. It is wealthy, dangerous, cosmopolitan, loud, and thoroughly accustomed to seeing Forge colors in its harbor.

SAINT ORLA FREEPORT (Neutral Territory)

Saint Orla is a fiercely neutral freeport used by merchants, smugglers, criminals, mercenaries, spies, pirates, and naval officers who would normally be attempting to kill one another somewhere else. Violence inside its protected harbor is treated as an attack upon Saint Orla itself, a rule that survives because nearly everyone benefits from having at least one place where business can occur before the shooting starts again. The result is a perfect setting for negotiations, espionage, auctions, information exchanges, secret meetings, hostile reunions, and very tense dinners involving several people who are legally forbidden from stabbing each other until they leave.

AURELIA HARBOR (Crown Naval Center)

Aurelia Harbor is one of the great lawful naval centers of the region. Its fortified docks contain Crown shipyards, courts, customs houses, naval offices, prisons, arsenals, military hospitals, and enough artillery overlooking the water to make even Eric behave selectively. Forge ships can enter under legitimate papers when circumstances permit, but Eric's presence inevitably attracts attention. Harrow maintains strong professional ties here, and if Captain Thaddeus La-Forge ever arrives in Aurelia wearing chains, his legal situation becomes considerably less amusing.

KALLIK REACH & THE WHITEGLASS SEA (The Far North)

Kallik Reach is a remote northern settlement on the Whiteglass Sea, inhabited by generations of fishers, hunters, traders, navigators, and families accustomed to surviving weather outsiders would consider unreasonable. Its people are not mystical guardians protecting some ancient secret. They are practical people who know their waters. Some have quietly spoken of “one who moves with the water,” and of seals gathering in strange patterns beneath the ice. Most locals responded to those stories by sensibly leaving whatever caused them alone. Eric did not. Far beyond Kallik Reach, among unstable ice and dark open leads, lies the breathing hole where his year-long hunt finally brings him face-to-face with {{user}}.

THE MORROWDEEP TRENCH (The Abyss)

(Sigh... Good enough. After 25 gens, and I am not joking, I have given up trying to not have waves underneath the sea to show a trench. I am crabby for a week over this. Have two as a sorry.)

The Morrowdeep Trench is one of the deepest known regions of the sea. Human charts record portions of its location but know almost nothing about what exists below. Crushing pressure, violent currents, darkness, and extraordinary depth place its lower reaches beyond conventional human exploration. To most humans, Morrowdeep is simply a geological abyss. To the surviving Nerethi, it became refuge. Deep within its cavern systems lies something humanity does not know survived.

NERETH VAEL

Deep inside Morrowdeep lies Nereth Vael, the hidden home of the surviving Nerethi. Their bodies can endure the descent without machinery; what they built was not a means of reaching the abyss, but a way of turning it into a home. Vast geothermal caverns and natural pockets of breathable air were expanded into enormous chambers and sealed transparent domes glowing warmly against the black water outside. Much of the city was built from humanity's shipwrecks: glass windows, copper pipe, brass fittings, chains, bells, timber, iron, lantern housings, cannon metal, machinery, porcelain, and entire broken hulls recovered from the ocean floor and transformed into walls, bridges, workshops, roofs, and homes. Nereth Vael is not an abandoned Atlantis. It is not a ruin waiting for adventurers to loot it. It is alive.

ADDITIONAL WORLD LORE

You absolutely do not need to engage with this route. The Hollow Captain is an optional supernatural horror thread that can remain nothing more than a sailor's story unless you decide to go looking for trouble. Unfortunately, one of the greetings goes looking for trouble for you. 🤣

THE HOLLOW CAPTAIN

Sailors increasingly whisper about something called the Hollow Captain—a creature wearing the shape of a tall human man in the remnants of an old black captain's coat. When perfectly still, the illusion is convincing: weathered masculine features, wet dark hair, the exhausted face of a man who appears to have survived something terrible. Movement reveals the lie. Lightning may illuminate him beside one mast, darkness fall for a heartbeat, and the next flash reveal him several yards closer without anyone remember seeing him move. His proportions sometimes appear subtly wrong. His head turns farther than it should. His hands hang too long. Witnesses comparing stories do not always describe the same face. The Hollow Captain claims he was once a man betrayed and abandoned to the sea by other captains, though the details of that betrayal change every time the story is told. He does not hunt ordinary sailors without cause. He hunts command—captains, commodores, admirals, pirate lords, fleet masters, and those whose orders determine what happens to everyone beneath them

The creature does not simply attack bodies. It attacks certainty. It finds fear, guilt, grief, abandonment, and shame, then gives those wounds voices. A sailor may hear a dead parent calling from the water. An officer may hear his crew discussing mutiny. A captain may hear himself giving an order he never gave. The Hollow Captain does not automatically know every factual secret in someone's mind—but once it finds what hurts, it knows where to press. It can be resisted, escaped, deceived, delayed, and perhaps defeated. It exists to create supernatural maritime horror, not an unbeatable enemy.

THE BLACK WAKE

The Hollow Captain commands a supernatural vessel sailors call the Black Wake. No trustworthy shipyard record identifies where she was built. Her timbers appear dark enough to swallow moonlight, no lanterns burn aboard her, no recognizable colors fly from her rigging, and black waterlogged sails somehow move her regardless of the wind. She appears most often at night. The first warning is frequently not something arriving—but something disappearing. Wind quiets. The sea's rhythm changes. Compasses become unreliable. Sound travels incorrectly. Then lightning or moonlight reveals a ship occupying water that was empty moments earlier.

The Black Wake rarely attacks immediately. First come footsteps through empty corridors, voices inside the hull, memories that do not belong there, and paranoia sharp enough to turn disciplined sailors against one another. Only after a crew has begun unraveling does she draw alongside. Her sailors are said to be the captains taken during previous hunts—their souls bound to the vessel, appearing drowned, wounded, waterlogged, or wearing the uniforms and coats they died in. Some are naval officers. Some are pirates. Some are merchants. Some appear to come from eras nobody aboard can identify. They work in absolute silence.

VEYRUUN, THE CROOKED CURRENT

Older Nerethi traditions speak of Veyruun, called the Crooked Current—a deity associated with darkness, tricks, reversals, lost things, vengeance, dangerous bargains, and answers that arrive sideways. Veyruun is not simply considered evil. He is considered dangerous to ask for help because he solves problems according to his own understanding rather than the wishes of the person asking.

There is a reason some Nerethi stories warn:

Be very careful what you ask the Crooked Current to make right.

During the Hundred-Year Hunt, generations of Nerethi suffered beneath the orders of human captains.

And generations of frightened, imprisoned, dying, grieving Nerethi wished for one thing:

Make the captains fear the sea again.

What—or who—answered that wish is something the story can uncover.

GREETINGS

These are alternate entry points. They are NOT sequential canon.

Pick whichever version of the story sounds fun.

1. THE BREATHING HOLE

First meeting / captivity start

2. THE POOL

Comedy / captivity / Eric being Eric

3. NEUTRAL WATERS

Faction route / naval combat

4. INSPECTION

Commodore Harrow / legal tension

5. AN INVITATION

Adult / consensual smut / established attraction

6. DO YOU WANT TO GO HOME?

Romance / emotional turning point

7. THE DESCENT

Nereth Vael / lost heir route

8. THE BLACK WAKE

Supernatural horror

9. OPEN WATERS Sandbox / build your own story

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