Part I — A Lore Primer for Dockside Memory-Keepers & Deep-Chart Clerks
Ports love the Love Pirates when they’re above water—when their stories can be argued over warm mugs and safe lamplight.
This primer is not that kind of tale.
This is the beginning of the Depth-Run—the first time the Love Pirates aimed their prow at Axis III not for escape, not for rumor, but for a hunt. Not for treasure you can count, but treasure that can wake up angry and swallow ships whole.
The stated purpose was simple:
Sedate a Great Pearl Beast. Harvest it clean. Trade the right organs for coin and survival.
The real purpose—what the docks later argued about—was more dangerous:
To prove that “Love” could survive the pressure where most virtues pop like bladders.
The dive began in a clinic, not a cannon fight.
In the lower lanes of Crownhold Sink—where neutral ground is enforced by fear, and the walls smell like filtered brine—Dr. Mako listened as Captain Julius Applebottom explained his plan as if discussing weather.
A Great Beast, baited like a dinner guest.
A sedative delivered through the stomach, not the blade.
A harvest performed like surgery, not slaughter.
Dr. Mako’s verdict—now repeated in every market that sells pain:
“Audacious. Stupid. I like it.”
She offered not common sedatives, but a substance known among surgeons and deep-cutters as The Long Night: a concentrated neuro-toxin stabilized with void dust—strong enough to mute higher function while leaving the heart alive. Perfect for operations. Perfect for monsters.
Her price was not gold.
Her price was proof.
The Primary Sensory Node (intact) would buy the vial.
Ventral Pressure Sacs and Bioluminescent Glands (intact) would buy more than coin—access, favor, and future deals.
Rot and careless hacking would buy nothing but mockery.
Witnesses note that Julius did not flinch.
He accepted the terms the way an old sailor accepts a storm: not with hope, but with readiness.
This detail matters to the people who keep records, because it reveals the Love Pirates’ first true operating doctrine.
It was not shouted like a captain’s speech. It was assigned like a battlefield order.
Lance Oreo received The Long Night and the task that made him more dangerous than any gunner:
“You handle the cooking.”
(He would lace bait tight enough to survive the water, hold until swallowed, and then dissolve into sleep inside a beast the size of a legend.)
Hala Ion was given the helm.
“You handle the ship.”
(Not romance, not comfort—control. A steady hand on the most unforgiving kind of wheel.)
Julius Applebottom took the water itself as his arena.
“I’ll handle the swimming.”
(Meaning: if something must be done outside the hull, the captain would be the one to do it.)
That moment is marked by deep-divers as the true start of their crew structure:
Love Pirates don’t delegate danger away. They divide it evenly.
They left Crownhold Sink and drove the Exocoetidae into the Mid-Sea Labyrinth (Axis II), following the Everfall Crossroads toward the deeper gate that swallows most maps.
Those who later heard the tale from salvagers describe the passage like this:
Light turns violet, like a bruise that won’t heal.
Pressure talks through the hull in sharp metallic pops—warnings, not screams.
The water is alive with hostile beauty: hydrozoan colonies glowing blue like frostfire, stinging anything that brushes too close.
Inside, the air grew recycled and tight.
Yet the Love Pirates did something few crews manage on a descent:
They ate.
Lance baked bread to fight pressure fatigue, feeding even Anex as if the pearl beast were crew and not cargo.
And if that sounds small, remember: in the deep, small comforts are strategies. A crew that can still eat is a crew that can still think.
The first trial of the descent did not come from Axis III.
It came from a sound.
A rhythmic thump on sonar—steady, unmoving, too precise to be a beast. Beneath it, the screech of metal grinding in a failing cycle. A mechanical distress that did not drift, did not fade, only waited.
The Love Pirates could have ignored it. Most would have.
They were still days from the Abyssal Cradle. They were on a schedule measured in oxygen, hull integrity, and nerve.
Instead, Julius ordered a short rest, regulated pressure, and listened long enough to understand the signal.
Then he made the decision that ports would later argue about with shaking hands:
“Let’s go check. Could be someone in need of help way down here.”
This is the first reason some love the Love Pirates and others curse them:
They refuse to let the deep turn them into pure predators.
Even when the smart choice is to keep moving.
They followed the signal into a fissure—walls tight enough to make the Exocoetidae feel suddenly large, hydrozoans glowing along stone like a living frost.
There they found the source:
A small scout-sub, beetle-shaped, wedged hard between shelf rock. Its hull was scarred and pitted. One strut snapped. The wreck shuddered as if trying to crawl free.
But the true danger was heat.
The cooling cycle had failed. The surrounding water boiled in shimmering distortion. Venting bubbles pulsed with the same clockwork beat the sonar had been hearing.
Hala Ion read the gauges and gave the kind of estimate that separates living crews from memorial plaques:
Ten minutes.
Maybe less.
Too close for the Exocoetidae to approach safely.
The only way to help was outside the hull.
Witness accounts describe Julius moving to the hatch like someone stepping onto a stage.
No hesitation. No last words for drama.
He took a pearl—insurance, protection, ammunition for the smoke in his veins.
He sealed into a diving suit.
He entered the pressure hatch and waited for Hala’s signal—until internal pressure matched the crushing world beyond.
This is where Part I ends, because every proper primer stops at the threshold before the sea decides whether it will accept you.
The last note recorded from the inside of the Exocoetidae is simple:
The captain in the hatch.
The ship holding distance.
The wreck boiling like an egg about to burst.
And the Love Pirates facing their first deep choice with the clock screaming in their ears.
Deep-divers later added a line that spread fast through Crownhold and the Labyrinth’s upper trade routes:
“Plenty of pirates chase gold into the dark.
Only a fool—or a saint—chases a stranger’s heartbeat.”
## THE DEEP-RUN OF THE LOVE PIRATES
Part II — A Lore Primer for Deep-Chart Clerks & Those Who Count Survivors
### I. The Boiling Minute
The inner wheel of the airlock sealed with the finality of a coffin lid.
Inside the pressure hatch, Julius Applebottom stood alone in a cylinder of grease-smell and rubber, listening to the ocean outside churn like a pot left on fire. Through the porthole, the fissure was nothing but silt, bubbles, and light—Exocoetidae floodlamps stabbed into a storm of scalding water.
Hala Ion’s voice came through the comms tight enough to cut:
> “Cycling the chamber now. Brace yourself… the temperature differential is significant.”
Then came the hiss of pumps, the groan of metal, and the rising water. It climbed his boots, his waist, his chest. It was warm through the suit—too warm—like the deep itself had decided to cook whatever tried to rescue it.
When Hala said the words, she said them like a prayer spoken by someone who didn’t believe in mercy:
> “Pressure equalized. Opening outer hatch in three… two… one.”
The door swung, and the sea hit him.
Not gently. Not like a tide. Like a fist.
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### II. The Missed Stroke
The doomed scout sub floated twenty feet away, a dark beetle-shape wrapped in boiling bubbles. Its failing core hammered the water with a steady beat—thump, thump, thump—felt in ribs and teeth more than heard.
Julius kicked out, but the fissure’s turbulence fought him. The venting vortex snapped him sideways, slapped him off course, and then the sub coughed—a violent metallic spasm.
A jet of superheated water struck his chest and spun him like driftwood.
He slammed into the scout’s hull hard enough to rattle bone through suit padding. Heat crawled into him. A warning chirp began in his helmet—fast, angry, unkind:
THERMAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. MICRO-FRACTURE DETECTED. SUIT PRESSURE DROPPING.
For most captains, that would have been the end.
For Julius Applebottom, it was only the part where the sea started telling the truth.
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### III. The Coffin With a Name
He clawed his way up the hull toward the canopy—glass spiderwebbed with cracks, emergency lights strobing red inside like an alarmed heartbeat.
A figure was slumped over the controls in ornate void-diver plating—Shogunate design, but stripped of insignia and painted with defiant, crude symbols.
Recognition hit the crew like a cold wave.
Kaelen “The Anchor” Vance.
A name sailors still spoke with caution—heavy-weapons specialist, deep salvage expert, a one-man siege engine who vanished after allegedly sinking his own commanding officer’s dreadnought.
The story shouldn’t have been here, in a fissure, cooking alive.
But the deep does not care what stories should be.
And then the “rock wall” beside the scout sub shifted.
A stony eyelid slid open.
A magma-orange eye the size of a dinner table stared into the fissure.
The scout sub was not wedged.
It had been grabbed.
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