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The dinner with Captain Urg Varmit went fine. I played good cop and Jack played bad cop. I tried to keep the captain distracted and talking about things he was interested in and his ship and such, while Jack put him on the defensive, making like he wasn't entirely certain this ship was good enough to get the job done. The result was that the Captain was sufficiently convinced and we all ended up having some booze and getting a little happy and generally having a pretty good time.

The next day we arrived at location, and they took the robot down. I stood in the control room while Jack man-handled the two robot operators. Back to good-cop, bad-cop. He criticized everything they did, putting them on the defensive. They mumbled about stupid arrogant Americans in Norwegian. I came over and encouraged them with my wiles. After they finished for their shift for the day, Jack commented loudly that he'd take over operation of the robot. After it was approved, I headed out with the controllers and we headed back to my guest quarters to “thank” them for all their work today. Mmmmm… Norwegians.

Afterward, I had come out on deck to check on Jack. He had found the sub, problem was the robot couldn't get inside it. And the robot wasn't fitted for cutting metal, so Niko had dived down to go either axe the sub a question or, if that didn't work, to hopefully attach the cutting tool to it while it was still submerged. I put on a headset so I could listen in on what was going on and headed back out on deck to chat with the two guys who'd just nailed me who were taking an after-sex smoke at the railing.

While Jarl and Pedar were chatting with me at the railing about the types of dangerous sea creatures in the area, I started getting some noise from the headset on Niko's end. Apparently he'd just been grappled by some kind of octopus, or something with tentacles. When I asked Jarl if they had “sharks, kraken…” around here, he laughed and said, “kraken?” I smiled at him, and amended “giant octopus?” and he shook his head at me. Just then we heard an extremely loud WOOSH from over the railing. As we turned to look over the side, a giant tentacle flew up out of the water, and snatched Jarl right off the deck in front of me, pulling him over the side.

Pedar's cigarette fell from his mouth as he turned and dashed for the pilot room to sound the alarms.

Well, Jarl was gone. Oh well. And Pedar had disappeared now too. So I guess it would be okay to get my spear out. Which I did, and then climbed on top of the railing to look over the side. As I glanced down at it, I cast a spell to see if this was somehow magic. I figured it probably was, but it wouldn't hurt being certain.

I guess this one, with its ugly maw coming up out of the water just now, was a different one than Niko was fighting. And a lot larger than his, so he said through the headset. “It's magical,” I said, “and the one squeezing the boat is about twice as powerful as we are.”

Another few tentacles slung up over the side of the boat as I said this, gripping it tightly, and pulling roughly. Its head dunked back down under the surface of the water, so I jumped on the nearby tentacle and ran down it toward the water, and then jumped to where the head had been. Once I landed, I dove below the surface and came right up to the gigantic eye of the beast. And before it, I wove a magic spell, setting a curse upon it, to hopefully impair its ability to destroy the boat. Damn thing.

It seemed angry once the spell went off, and I popped back out of the water and swam over and onto one of the nets Ahren had set into the water. I climbed as far up as I could and went ahead and summoned the catboys on deck. Ahren pulled me up onto the deck too a heartbeat later. Jack was here, the catboys were here, Ahren was here, and a dozen or two marines were here with some kind of assault rifles. I began directing people as much as I could to attack the big one tussling with the ship.

It appeared that someone had set the thing into the ship's crane, because while it was attempting to pull the ship apart, the crane had pulled its head forcibly out of the water, enabling us all to get a better shot at it. I coordinated, and a few seconds later, Jack and Niko (wait, where had he come from?) and I launched over the side, along with the catboys, to all dive down straight at its head, its eye, letting gravity aid our death-from-above attacks. As we all dropped our blows, we rolled off of it and the assault rifle fire rained down upon the beast, who started thrashing in the water/air just as it broke the crane off of the rear of the boat under our assault.

As the rest of us scurried back into the boat, the unfortunate but inevitable happened: the beast managed to crack the boat in half. Well, there was no saving it now. Since the rear of the boat was nearly in the water anyway, we all just ran up the back and prepared for another onslaught. But, we turned to see the beast release the boat and sink back into the water. Niko jumped back in, but sent a moment later over the headset that the creatures were fleeing.

I started coordinating an evacuation while Niko headed back down to the sub to search the captain's quarters in person. He returned before we were finished evacuating everyone, and thus, his absence went unnoticed. He thought he had the document, and looking through the things he had brought up, I confirmed that he did have something magical at the very least, that appeared to be a scroll. Fabulous.

But now, how to get back to shore?