stow it all away

The joke goes that if you're going to be a toto out in open water, you might as well have a wooden head so you don't sink. Wood, meaning the material the boats are made from, and another kind of wood that sharks have two of. 

Blahaj has been a cabin boy for as long as he can remember, and he's heard that joke all throughout that time. Good thing you have a wooden head! Say, is that head made of wood? Better hope your head is wood! And every iteration in between. 

In all honesty, it was little more than a cheeky annoyance. but an annoyance was an annoyance, and Blahaj being the smallest and easiest to tease of any given crew he was boarding with for the night gave him an antisocial streak he still had not shaken off into adulthood. Even if he still needed to be social to SOME degree if he wanted a place to sleep. 

Of course, he didn’t need to be on the boat to sleep per se, he could sleep just fine in the water. It’s just that…if he overslept the crew would yank the anchor up and Blahaj might let go of the anchor chain instead of being pulled up along with it and the crew might be in such a hurry that they don’t even bother tossing him a rope or life preserver and just leave him adrift while the Stowaway Fleet sails on. 

That had only happened once. Squalo nearly got eaten by something HUGE, barely caught up to one of the dinghies trailing along the back of the fleet, and it took ages to work his way back up to a more prestigious vessel. With so much more reputation on the line than before, he wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. 

It was easy to jump from ship to ship, it was harder for any given crew to let Blahaj stick around. He was a distracting nuisance who usually didn’t understand how to follow orders, and that usually ended with him getting kicked off to be someone else’s problem. 

One such crew was running out of ways to make him walk the plank and not climb back up to try his double somersault cannonball again (make sure you’re watching this time it’ll be so cool!) when someone mentioned that they’d heard the boat with the crooked flagpole had a very odd character Blahaj ought to meet: a fellow toto by the name of Woomy. 

Fellow toto weren’t exactly the rarest of creatures, by all accounts aphex were the most common wherever you went, but there was always the occasional fish or bird toto flitting about, no matter what crew Blahaj was bothering today. But Woomy was a rarity, in the most literal sense of the word. Woomy was a sea monster. 

Blahaj had to know more. He failed one more somersault into the water and took off for the boat at motor speeds. He wove between smaller boats, carrying fishing hauls and supplies or just some barnacle scraping cabin boys doing their miserably boring work. Blahaj wasn’t eager to relive his adolescence, at least not that part of it. 

As he approached, a glint caught his eye. Someone’s spyglass was trained onto him. Blahaj grinned up at his observer with a flash of his jagged teeth, then veered out of their line of sight to grab onto the anchor and shimmy up the rattling chain. 

As he climbed on, he was greeted with the usual odd stares from the ship’s established crew. He gave them big smiles in turn, watching as someone with a straight back and a stern expression marched up to him. 

“Can I help you?”

“YEah!” Blahaj surprised the aphex with his enthusiasm. “I’m here to see the sea monster toto! Woomy!”

A couple of laughs floated from around the crew, and the deckhands went back to what they were doing. The authoritative figure put a hand to his head. 

“Woomy is a squid. A quite common animal. Not even a giant squid. A. Regular. Squid.”

“Oh.” Blahaj deflated a little. “Well, I haven’t met a squid toto before. Can I still see them?”

The aphex shrugged, and pointed. “That’s for Woomy to decide. Try not to bother them too much, or I’ll saw your head into planks to fix the flagpole.”

Blahaj laughed and jogged off in the wrong direction, was corrected, then continued forward. He slowly jogged to a halt, standing before the toto he’d come all this way to gawk at. 

Woomy held an astrolabe up to their eye, aiming it at the first few stars poking through the clear afternoon sky. They lowered it, upon realizing Blahaj’s staring, and regarded him in turn. 

“I see your grip on anchors has improved, Bahy.” Woomy smiled at the shark. “It’s nice to see you again.”