“Black Apple” • Shadow-Smile of the Mid-Sea
Unofficial Profile Primer — Circulated Between Ports, Pearlwrights, and Fools
Name: Julius Applebottom
Age: 17 (estimated)
Origin: Unknown coastal family, lost to sea as infant
First Recorded Crew: Palm Pirates (Status: annihilated)
Current Status: Independent pirate; flagless—for now
Reputation Tier: Legend-in-the-making / bad omen in human shape
There are a dozen versions of his story, but they all agree on three points:
He should be dead.
He laughs in places sane men whisper.
The sea remembers his name even if the world doesn’t.
“Black Apple” – for the rot-colored scars and the way trouble seems to fall around him.
“Shadow-Smile” – for the burned-in grin that never quite reaches his eyes.
“Resonance Orphan” – among Collegium archivists who study disasters from a safe distance.
“The Cabin Boy Who Outlived His Ship” – tavern name, said with either awe or disgust.
Sober witnesses swear he looks like a corpse with a sense of humor; drunks insist they’ve seen his laughter move before his lips.
The official records barely mention the Palm Pirates: one mid-tier crew, captain famed for martial “palm” techniques, bold enough to push into the Mid-Sea Labyrinth Regions.
Then came the story every pearlwright mutters when they drink too fast:
Three cursed Giant Pearls collided.
Resonance built, folded, and broke.
The wave that followed wasn’t water. It was pressure.
Ships caught in it weren’t smashed; they were rewritten.
The Palm Pirates were there when the resonance tsunami bloomed.
Most died instantly. Some were left adrift, bodies and souls tangled in underwater caverns and scarred currents.
One cabin boy fell into the heart of it and did not come back for a very long time.
Julius Applebottom was:
A joy-sick child sailor whose laughter could fill a deck,
A stowaway genius who’d already been kicked off more ships than most men ever board,
A budding Pearlwright who, at six, stabilized a volcano-type Meito pearl mid-battle and manned the guns when the grown gunners went down.
When the tsunami hit, he should have died.
Instead, he slipped sideways into a resonance pocket—a scar in the sea where broken pearl-energy and echoing lives churned together.
What that does to an adult is unspeakable.
What it did to a child is what the sea now has to live with.
He spent what divers, wrights, and drunk monks estimate as a full year inside that scar.
His skin burned pale white and webbed with resonance scars, like cracks in porcelain that never quite close.
His eyes turned pure black, reflecting no light, only resonance flicker.
His body began to bleed smoke—a thin, shadow-like gas that leaks whenever his emotions spike, like a furnace venting pressure.
Alone, convinced he was dying, he laughed so long the expression froze into his muscles: a permanent, too-wide, too-bright grin.
When the scar finally spat him out, he floated back toward the surface looking like a drowned ghost that refused to sink.
He was eight.
The Mid-Sea has layers. Most pirates argue about Axis I and Axis II, the usual routes and nightmares.
Julius fell deeper.
He vanished into Axis-III, the hard-to-map underlayer where:
Pearl beasts grow strange instead of large,
Caverns pulse with old battles’ Kokuto resonance,
And wood that survives there comes out marked and nearly indestructible.
For roughly eleven years, Julius did what no child should do and what no sane adult could:
He sanded himself against the madness, learning to breathe without drowning in the echoes.
He learned to seal his own scars, to keep the smoke from boiling over and suffocating everything around him.
He listened to dead pearls and ruined hulls until he understood how they broke—and how not to.
He did not train under a master. His teacher was:
The sound of his own heartbeat in flooded caverns,
The pressure of three dead Giants still whispering in the stone,
And the knowledge that if he lost focus for a second, he might become a walking disaster instead of just a dangerous rumor.
Some say he made friends down there: blind pearl eels, half-mad beasts, sunken bell-spirits. Others say he spent the entire time alone and that’s why his laughter sounds the way it does.
What is known:
He surfaced at seventeen with more control than anyone had a right to expect.
He does not command a grand flagship.
He rides the sea on a single hand-carved skiff, hewn from a lone Axis-III trunk that somehow grew in the dark and refused to rot.
Vessel (tavern-name): The Coffin-Stripe (name varies by storyteller; some call it the Wraith Sliver, others the Apple’s Core)
Features:
Carved from one piece of wood; no seams, no joinery, as if it were grown in the shape of a blade and hollowed out later.
Dark, oil-sheened grain that drinks lanternlight; scars along the hull that glimmer faintly when his smoke touches them.
Just big enough for:
Julius,
A chest of scavenged Yoto pearls,
A few tools and a coil of rope,
And maybe, if he’s feeling generous, one more soul.
It has no visible sails.
Locals swear it moves anyway—sometimes riding waves, sometimes skimming them like a thrown knife, sometimes resting motionless as the sea rearranges itself beneath it.
Where other pirates build fleets, Julius arrived with a single blade of wood aimed at the horizon.
Budding Master Pearlwright
Reads pearls by how his scars itch and burn.
Has an instinct for stopping catastrophic failures at the last second.
Rumor claims he can “talk down” a panicking Meito as if it were a spooked horse.
Helmsman – “If he can reach the wheel, don’t bet against him.”
Knows how hulls want to move and how storms prefer to break.
On a real ship, grown helmsmen who let him touch the wheel either swear by him forever… or never let him onboard again.
Deck Guns Specialist
Terrible duelist with hand firearms.
Terrifying battery commander: prefers bank shots, ricochets, and using the sea itself as a reflector.
Pirate Combatant
Fights like a proper pirate: everything is fair, nothing is sacred.
Bully’s nightmare: will turn your own footing, gear, and pride against you.
Smoke & Yoto Illusions
Bleeds black smoke when emotions flare; can thicken it at will.
Feeds it with Yoto Pearl charge to create:
Ghost lights on the water,
Shadow doubles on deck,
And, when the stories get very quiet, whole fleets of phantom ships marching out of the dark.
Weakness whispered in back rooms:
“No pearls, no phantoms. He burns through charge like a drunk burns through coin.”
The strangest part of his tale is not that he survived.
It’s that, according to those who met him on obscure islands and forgotten reefs, he chose to stay away.
He knew what he could do wrong:
A laugh at the wrong time could bleed smoke into a harbor and panic a fleet.
A misjudged illusion could start a war between ships that never meant to fire.
A slip with a cursed pearl could turn a city’s bay into another resonance scar like the one that made him.
So for years he hid:
Patching stranger’s engines in exchange for old Yoto shards.
Fixing helm-chains and resonance cracks in exchange for maps and rumors.
Vanishing again before his name could stick.
Not out of fear of the sea.
Out of fear of himself.
Somewhere between Axis-III caverns and the upper lanes, something in Julius Applebottom shifted.
Stories say it happened the day he found a chart marked with three things:
The Palm Pirates’ last known route.
The sigils of three cursed pearls that killed them.
A blank space where his own name should have been.
He patched his skiff, packed his tools, loaded his crate of Yoto fragments, and carved something new into the inside of his hull:
“If the sea made me, the sea can watch.”
He is now openly hunting for a crew:
Misfits the world doesn’t want,
Beasts and pearl-burned souls the Collegium calls “hazardous,”
Anyone willing to sail under a flag that hasn’t been drawn yet.
He does not have colors. Not yet.
But tavern-talk from the Sunlit Fringe to Port Seabright says:
“There’s a pale boy out there on a strip of haunted wood, laughing at storms and asking very careful questions about cursed pearls and Monkey Paw legends.
He says he’s not ready to be anyone’s captain.
Then he smiles, and you realize the sea might disagree.”
“There was a ship the sea forgot,
A cabin boy the sea did not.
He fell, he burned, he learned to wait—
Now Black Apple’s coming to negotiate.”