A Lore Primer for Dockside Memory-Keepers, Market Gossips, and Tavern Bards
Port Azure is the kind of island city that looks like peace from a distance—bright water, busy channels, honest nets drying on lines. Up close, every plank has a price. The port pays “tribute” to the distant Shogunate, but the daily boot is worn by privateer guilds who squeeze the town with “protection” taxes until even laughter starts sounding like debt.
arc 1 love pirates
So when the old folks say, “We weren’t waiting for heroes,” believe them. They weren’t waiting for anything at all. They were just trying to keep their kids fed and their doors unbroken.
And then a ship arrived that did not fit the water.
Ask the dockhands what they saw and you’ll get the same answer spoken in different prayers:
A hull like scaled armor.
A sound like a beast exhaling.
A silence afterward that felt… deliberate.
The Exocoetidae settled into the berth with a heavy, mechanical sigh—ballast tanks stabilizing—followed by the hard language of internal locks: metallic clunks, bulkheads sealing, hatch security engaging. Not a sailor’s padlock. A fortress choosing to close its teeth.
arc 1 love pirates
It was docked in the darker stretch under a warehouse overhang where the air stays humid and fish-scented and the water laps black against pilings like it’s keeping secrets.
arc 1 love pirates
Port Azure has seen strange boats, sure. But most strange boats at least pretend to be normal until they’ve robbed you.
This one didn’t pretend.
The first official witness wasn’t a privateer or a priest.
It was Tom Littlefoot—red-bearded, broad-shouldered, and tired in the way only small-port leaders get tired. He introduced himself plainly: Tom… and yes, Mayor, though he joked the title bought him about as much ale as a rusted hook these days.
arc 1 love pirates
Tom did what Port Azure’s rulers usually don’t: he asked business before he asked for blood.
He noted the ship’s strangeness with the kind of humor that keeps fear from showing its teeth: you don’t see many boats with scales in these waters; usually things with scales try to eat boats, not be boats.
arc 1 love pirates
And then—this matters—he looked at the captain who climbed out.
Resonance scars.
A grin that didn’t leave.
A presence that made even brave men swallow twice.
Tom flinched. Held his ground anyway.
arc 1 love pirates
That’s the first crack in the Port Azure story: not the pirate’s arrival—the port choosing not to immediately run.
When Julius asked what there was to know about Port Azure, Tom answered like a man who’s been paying for truth with bruises:
“Supplies and silence,” he implied, are the two most expensive commodities in town.
arc 1 love pirates
Then he said the name that made the dockworkers pretend they hadn’t heard:
Captain Cronus.
Not just a privateer—the collector, the one with a heavy hand who liked to know everything that came in and out of the harbor, especially anything expensive.
arc 1 love pirates
Tom pointed out the simple truth of tyrants: Cronus didn’t fear crime. He feared competition. He really feared anything he couldn’t tax.
And he gave the old port advice that gets passed down like a superstition:
If you see black sails and a peacock crest—turn around and dive deep.
arc 1 love pirates
That warning ran through Port Azure fast—fishwives to riggers, riggers to drunks, drunks to children who repeated it like a rhyme.
Because everyone had already seen the peacock.
Tom’s directions pushed the newcomers toward a tavern: The Grinning Siren, southeast of the docks—supposedly the place where things the Captain “doesn’t need to know about” get handled.
arc 1 love pirates
Here’s where stories split.
Some claim the Siren is a sanctuary. Others call it a mouth that eats secrets.
All agree on the proprietor:
Yarn Grin—a man who looked Julius dead in the face and spoke the kind of truth that only a bar-owner can afford.
He said there was no Madame K. Not really. Just a name sailors whisper when they want to believe the world has an “underground” that can save them from the law.
arc 1 love pirates
And then Yarn did the thing that turned the night from rumor into history:
He offered information—the address of a man in the naval fortress.
Aliaster.
arc 1 love pirates
Yarn’s warning wasn’t heroic. It was practical, spoken like someone who’s watched people vanish for less:
Port Azure’s waters have eyes.
Keep your eyes open for peacocks.
arc 1 love pirates
That line—peacocks—is now carved into more than one dockpost, scratched in by hands that wanted to remember who their enemy was.
This is where the primer becomes communal—because Port Azure didn’t experience Julius Applebottom as a single event.
They experienced him as a pressure change.
Dockhands swear the air got heavier after the Exocoetidae locked itself shut—like the ship was holding its breath on purpose.
arc 1 love pirates
Shopkeepers noticed the market hush when the scarred captain walked through—eyes watching from shutters, the usual bustle suddenly subdued, as if the town sensed a storm coming.
arc 1 love pirates
Privateers didn’t rally. They watched. Some looked sick. The port remembers that too: not courage—dread.
arc 1 love pirates
And in the middle of that hush, the Love Pirates did something the locals still argue about:
They didn’t start with theft.
They started with the truth of who was bleeding the port.
So they went toward the naval fortress.
The oldest dockside tellers insist this was the moment Port Azure collectively understood it wasn’t dealing with “a bad captain.”
It was dealing with something wrong.
When Julius, Hala, and Anex came back into view of the harbor, the port’s gossip says the sun was high but the streets felt colder, and even the beast at their side tasted something sour in the water—“like milk left in the sun.”
arc 1 love pirates
And then they saw it:
The Gilded Cage—a massive galleon painted gaudy gold and crimson, a floating palace of excess. But the gold wasn’t what people remember. They remember the wrongness: the dark, oily water around its hull, the absence of fish, and the rhythmic thumping from within like a giant heart beating against wood.
arc 1 love pirates
They remember the guards too—hulking figures with grey, pebbled skin, standing too still to be merely disciplined.
arc 1 love pirates
That’s where Part I ends in most responsible ledgers:
With a port holding its breath.
With a “Love” flag not yet fully understood.
With the Gilded Cage waiting like a smile you don’t trust.