THE SUMMER of MAKING — Chapter Numero Uno

Captain Trashbeard was starting to get sick of the ocean. Literally, sick. They say you get your sea legs with time, but it takes a lot longer when you have four of them… and so she laid splattered across her bed in the captain’s quarters, bouncing violently as Le Dumpstairè II cut through steep swells like a ninety-ton timber-hulled schooner through butter. These rough seas were making her queasy and miserable, though her regular diet of literal garbage was also surely not helping.

The captain felt something welling up from deep inside. The feeling was sadness. Trashbeard felt sad. No, homesickness was what she felt. No… no, that feeling would be seasickness—again. Uh-oh. She ran out onto the weather deck, heaved herself over the gunwales, and ejected a stream of yellow bile in a parabolic arc that landed a solid twenty feet out from the ship. First Mate Arrpheus, ever the loyal companion, came over to hold back her whiskers for the second time that day.

It was about that moment when the commotion began. The presently-occupied captain didn’t notice at first, but Arrpheus instantly detected a change in the water through the tippy-toes of her delicate hooves. Moments later she saw it with her eyes, too… she could tell things were off from some of the pixels, and from seeing quite a few commotions in her time. At first it was something about the texture of the waves. Then, it was a shift in the hue. Then, it was a gigantic volcano shooting through the surface on the horizon, followed by foothills, followed by an entire continental landmass erupting from below the ship, complete with trees and lakes and boulders and—especially peculiarly—a sizable hole in a cliffside rising from the nearby dunes, positioned a meager three furlongs down the sandy beach that now cradled the hull of Le Dumpstairé II. Arrpheus ran to the captain’s quarters and retrieved a couple of spyglasses from the enormous pile of trinkets at the foot of the captain’s bed. Most of these were recently shoveled into Captain Trashbeard’s AliExpress cart after a frenzied afternoon of googling things like “tariffs definition simple english wikipedia” and “what country is china in”

The rumbling had caused the peg to fall clean off of Arrpheus’s leg, but Orpheus was too puzzled by the curious cave to notice. She raised her spyglass to a squinty lil dino eye, trained it upon the distant landform, and did her best to describe what she saw to her vomitorious friend. “Cave. Round. Too round? Looks deep. Real dark. Neat.” Trashbeard was busy pawing at her head, scanning the beach for the captain’s hat that she’d lost along with the contents of her stomach. At first Heidi was only minimally intrigued by her pal’s description, but she raised up her stinky pukeface enough to poke a cheap plastic eyecup into her bulging eyeball… just in time to witness something that promised to change the course of their lives forever or at least for the next forty minutes probably at a minimum: a ghost rising out of the dark!! And not some crappy vintage premultiplied-alpha photobomb of an irrelevant victorian hag, cursed to eternally wander the pantry or some such. This was a thiccc, cartoony, Luigi’s Mansion-style dribble of additively-blended ectoplasm, spurting out of the subterranean dankness bleating theremin sounds from its derpy dead face. Not just a ghost, no no—this was a spOOoOoooOOOOOkyy ghost. Which meant that cave wasn’t just a cave… it was a spooky tomb!!!

Heidi and Orpheus shared a glance that instantly cancelled their plans for the rest of the day. Twenty minutes later they stood at the maw of the tomb, gazing into a magnificent stone void that could only be borne of intelligent hands and/or paws and/or hooves. Orpheus adjusted the brim of her trustiest hat and choked up on the handle of a sturdy and dangerous-looking bullwhip. Heidi, clad in an absurdly low-quality Temu tank top that seemed to be cardboard-levels of stiff, pulled two overripe bananas out of a filthy backpack and holstered them on either side of her booty shorts. The tiny raccoon hoisted her inventory back upon her shoulders and turned her gaze upward to the lumbering dinosaur at her side. Their eyes met. A silent nod passed between our mismatched heroes. And there the beginning came to an end; buttressed by the stainless bonds of their timeless partnership, Heidi Croft and Explorpheus Jones descended into a season of adventure set upon a continent deserted by all but the best of friends.