A Lore Primer for Dockside Memory-Keepers & Tavern Bards
I. Who the Tale Belongs To
Ask ten sailors about Julius Applebottom and you’ll get eleven answers.
Some say he’s a ghost in boy’s skin, a resonance-burn victim who laughed so hard in the jaws of death that his face forgot how to stop smiling. Others swear he’s the ocean’s apology for all the children it’s taken.
All agree on three things:
He should have died with the *Palm Pirates** in the Mid-Sea.
* He came back from the deep with smoke in his veins and stars in his voice.
He chose to fly a flag called *Love** and dared the Estes Sea to mock him for it.
This is the accepted primer of how the Love Pirates began.
### III. Eleven Years in the Dark
Most stories skip this part. Bards love the moment he walks into the tavern. They forget the years before it.
After the wreck, Julius vanished into the deep again—this time by choice.
He drifted down into the *Abyssal Cradle Regions (Axis III)**, where pressure makes metal whimper and only Pearl Beasts and the very stubborn endure.
He treated the *Mid-Sea Labyrinth (Axis II)** as a playground, running currents like alleyways, dodging hunters and wrecks with the casual cruelty of a child who no longer fears drowning.
Down there, he learned three things:
1. How to shape his smoke into something more than a curse—using Yoto pearls as fuel to cast afterimages and illusions.
2. How to listen to the sea’s resonance without going mad.
3. That if he did not master what the tsunami left inside him, he would be a walking disaster for anyone foolish enough to stand near him.
By seventeen, he emerged from the deep with:
A hand-carved skiff of *Axis-III Lithwood**, sculpted from a single drowned tree—long and narrow as a blade, tuned to his resonance.
* The quiet, absolute certainty that he would no longer “ship-hop.”
* A decision heavy enough to alter currents:
He would raise his own flag.
---
### IV. The Hook in the Horizon
The day the Love Pirates began did not start with cannon fire. It started with milk.
Julius rose from the depths aboard the Axis-III Skiff, drifting toward a jagged stone that clawed out of the sea like a petrified hook: Pirate Hook Pier, in the southeast waters off Coconut Island.
* At the base: a narrow rock ledge, a green-haired woman staring at the horizon, and a pearl beast coyote padding around tidepools.
* At the top: a rickety tavern nailed to the sky and a rope ladder that looked more like a dare than an invitation.
Julius sent a Scar-Shadow Double to stand on his skiff, grinning up like a decoy, while the real boy ghosted up the ladder behind the bartender.
This bartender, known as Four Ante, had seen more storms than most men see sunsets. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Julius spoke behind him.
What followed is now standard tavern recitation:
* Julius asked where he was.
* Four Ante told him: Pirate Hook Pier, edge of Coconut Island, Southern Archipelago.
Julius asked for a *large tankard of milk**, having dreamed of it through years of abyssal water and recycled breath.
Four Ante served it, watched the smoke curl from Julius’s scars, and realized this wasn’t just another weird kid.
When asked what the deep had been like, Julius answered simply:
> “The Abyssal Cradle is peaceful.
> Axis II? Just a playground for pirates.”
Not bravado. Observation.
When pressed—was he back for business, or just thought?—Julius finally said aloud the thing that had dragged him back to the surface:
He was prepared.
No more ship-hopping.
He was going to raise his own flag.
---
### V. “The Love Pirates” – A Name that Shouldn’t Work
When Four Ante asked what flag he meant to fly, Julius spoke without hesitation:
> “The Love Pirates will be my crew;
> we will go where there is no love
> and leave a seed of freedom that all pirates carry,
> rob the wealthy and give to the poor.”
An undead-smiling resonance-scarred boy claiming Love as his banner was so wrong it looped back around to terrifying.
Most pirates choose names built from fear: Blood, Storm, Fang, Black, Drowned. Love is something they use, not something they swear to.
But from that moment, the doctrine was clear:
* Sail into places rotted by cruelty, greed, or despair.
* Take from those who hoard power and comfort.
Leave behind something better than coin: *proof that another life is possible.**
The name earned dockside laughter at first. That never lasts long, once people hear how he recruits.
---
### VI. The First Heart Reclaimed – Hala Ion
At Pirate Hook Pier that day sat Hala Ion:
* A “Happy Ending” specialist by trade—an expert in patching up spirits and keeping broken crews from shattering entirely.
* A woman whose eyes had seen too many failed captains and too many promises sunk in red water.
Julius approached her table not with rum or coin, but with a silken bag of tiny Yoto pearls—his own, formed from his will.
He told her:
* These pearls judge, in their way.
* They burn what doesn’t belong.
* They show different faces depending on the heart that holds them.
He wasn’t trying to buy her. He was testing if they should even speak.
Suspicion warred with exhaustion. In the end, curiosity and the ache for change won. Hala plunged her hand into the bag.
The pearls did not burn.
They glowed—soft amber, warm as sunrise on calm water. Smoke wrapped her forearm like a comforting bandage, and for the first time in far too long, the tightness in her chest eased.
She described it later as:
> “What the world feels like
> the morning after a storm finally realizes
> it’s tired of killing you.”
In that moment, Hala stopped seeing Julius as a walking hazard and started seeing him as something far more dangerous: a possible future.
When Julius told her his story in full—that he was a boy who wanted to see what the world was like when he was truly free—Hala did something quietly legendary:
She believed him.
She agreed to sail under a flag named Love.
---
### VII. The Song on the Hook
Bards love this part because it sounds like cheating.
Standing in that ramshackle tavern atop the stone hook, Julius sang.
Not a simple shanty, not a siren’s theft-song—something in between prayer, confession, and declaration. Verses about:
* Confrontation and false expectations.
* Corruption of hearts by gifts and favors.
The demand to take responsibility for losing and* winning.
* Love as something that haunts and redeems, not just comforts.
The sea itself seemed to hush to listen.
* Waves fell into rhythm with his pulse.
* Smoke from the Yoto pearls rose and bent into impossible constellations above the tables.
* Anex, the coyote-like pearl beast on the lower ledge, raised its head and harmonized, its chest-Meito pulsing in time with Julius’s heartbeat.
By the last note, Hala’s cheeks were wet with silent tears.
Her verdict:
> “I didn’t know freedom sounded like that.
> I thought it sounded like silence.”
Her decision:
> “If you can make the world listen like that…
> I want to see what you do when you’re screaming at the gods.
> I’m in.”
Four Ante, an old killer retired behind a bar, toasted with his best rum and gave the line that dock-keepers have been repeating ever since:
> “You’re not just a cabin boy with a bag of tricks, Shadow-Smile.
> You’re a storm waiting to break.
> To the Love Pirates.
> May your mercy be as terrifying as your song.”
---
### VIII. The First Articles of Love
From those hours at Pirate Hook Pier, the unofficial Articles of the Love Pirates can be inferred:
1. Love as Weapon & Oath
Not romance. Not softness. Love as the stubborn refusal to leave people in chains—coin, collar, or fear.
2. The Test of the Pearls
New hearts are measured not by promises, but by how Julius’s Yoto pearls respond to them: burn, comfort, bind, or reflect.
3. Freedom Above All
They rob to break systems, not just to fill holds. The richest prize is a port that no longer bows to the wrong flag.
4. Monsters for the Broken
They are not pretty heroes. They are scarred things—smoke, grief, resonance and ruin—choosing to stand between the helpless and the hungry.
---
### IX. Current Status – A Flag on the Wind
The Love Pirates at this stage are more story than fleet:
* One Axis-III Skiff that rides the water like a knife.
* One shadow-scarred captain with smoke for a cloak and stars in his throat.
* One grief-tempered Happy Ending specialist who has remembered how to hope.
* A pearl beast coyote who seems to have decided the boy is pack.
And yet, wherever the tale is told, the same closing refrain is starting to spread through taverns and dockside whispers:
> *“There’s a boy with a dead man’s smile
> and a flag named Love.
> If he points his prow at you,
> pray you’re cruel enough to fear him,
> or kind enough to be spared.”*