"Still. They wanted to ruin us." Towe scowled. "That has to have answers."

"And it will." The captain from the island of insanity put his hand on Towe's shoulder. "We'll get them by talking."

Thirty minutes later, there was tea spread out over a simple table under one of the public-space awnings. Towe and and Redd, as the other captain was apparently named, were the only ones that sat with Marco’s crew. The entire force of the semi-settlement was there, though, pretending not to watch and listen as they kept lethal force close and convenient to hand.

"Didn't ask for a thing," Redd said. "I gave them a coin to find me for help, and they didn't try to find me. You know how those light up when the other ship is in danger?"

Towe nodded. "I do."

"They're in the thick of things more than they are out of them. Never tried to draw me into it. Not once."

"Still doesn't explain why they were trying to break our power source. Nobody's said a word about that."

"You haven't given us a chance yet. What are you even using that for?" Elisa jumped in. "I counted seven runes. Those are siphons?"

"Siphons, containment. Every now and again that plinth will try to do something, and the runes stop it from doing it. In the meantime, our little colony gets powered."

"I don't know what that means," Marco said. "What is there to power here?"

"A couple forges. A few field for growing food. It doesn't sound like much, but the forges work better than they should, and fresh produce doesn't come cheap out here. It's not like we couldn't get more out of that thing, either. If it wasn't for it being so damn weird, we would have done so already."

Elisa looked at Marco. "They don't know the source of it. They think it's just something they found. Some unexplained artifact. Those exist. A lot of cities have something like that under them, powering something. It's a real advantage if you get it set up right."

"And we have plans to get it set up right." Towe leaned over and jabbed a weathered finger out. "Before we do that, you come along to break them up. We don't take kindly to that."

"Towe, you still haven't heard their reasons. Captain Marco, could you please fill us in on what's going on here?" Redd said.

Marco was willing, but he hardly knew where to start. He decided to start at the beginning, working through an abbreviated version of his trip from Gulf Isle out to the outer seas, giving them the short and sweet abridged edition of his fights with Steed and claiming the temple there.

After that, it got easier to keep straight. They met Thatch, they claimed his temple, they met Quill, and the fight began. He walked them through every ship he had sunk, every water spirit or foe he had calmed, every plinth he had found, and every single clue about Quill they had gathered. He could tell each of them knew parts of what he was saying, but only a small amount.

When he finished, the looks around the room ranged from disbelief to concern to emotions that looked like they approached actual anger. The near anger made sense, since it came from the person who had caught him in the act of thinking about destroying what, to them, was part of the town.

"So what does this do, then? Let's accept for the moment that it really is Quill's doing that it's here. Let's accept for the moment that these kids are telling the truth and learned more about this plinth out here than we learned being near it," Towe said.

"That does happen."

"I know it does, Redd, but it's not like it happens every day. Even if it was, it isn't as if we have any assurance they are telling the truth about the exact way it happened. They could know about this plinth and it could still be unrelated to Quill. We don't know anything about them."

Redd drummed his big fingers on the desk.

"Oh, I don't know about that. We told you about our time on the island, correct? The horror of it?"

There was an edge in Redd's voice that revealed a bit of how he still felt. He was a big strong man and he was holding it together, but it was very clear that not all of the experience on that island was dealt with.

"You did, Redd."

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"Towe, we told you about how we almost died, how there was no chance left for us when these kids showed up, and how they busted through everything to free us. Even if that wasn't what they were trying to do exactly, they did it, and we survived. "

"Dammit, Redd, I get it. It just doesn't mean anything,” Towe said. He ran his hand through his hair. “According to these kids, Quill is tricky. Deceitful. A master at it. These kids could be that too. They could have set up that whole island, for all we know. They could work for Quill in some way. Heck, they could have been immune to the whole thing. You said they left right after, chasing some ship. Did you see it sink? Did you actually see it go down?”

"No." Redd raised his hands, palms up. "I didn't. But you missed something important."

"And what's that?"

"They buried the dead. It took time," he said. "Hard soil. Their Sturdy there wasn't in good shape and couldn't help much. Everyone on their crew helped. Wasn't their job, and no one would have faulted them for not doing it. Hell, I might not have done it if some of them weren't folks I knew. But they helped."

The room digested that for a moment.

"Listen. Here's the deal," Marco said. "I can't pretend we wouldn't have destroyed that plinth thing if there was a good opportunity to do it safely. We still would. But we aren't going to fight you to make that happen. We can recommend it, but there are plenty more of them to find and destroy."

"And what happens if you destroy too many of them?" one of the other captains in the room asked. He looked like a mage-type. Mage types, in Marco's experience, always asked the hardest questions. "To ours, I mean. You said it's part of a network."

"Presumably it stops working," Elisa said. "Although there's always a chance it just becomes more powerful. Same amount of power with fewer outlets, so to speak."

"Well, I like the sound of that." Towe smiled. "Just do that. Hell, I'll even give you…"

"Sir." A young man shoved his way through the crowd. "You should come. Something's wrong with the artifact."

"The plinth?" The smile on Towe's face was wiped out immediately, replaced by a deep, angry scowl. "What did you do to it?"

"Nothing!" Marco said. "If we had, you would have seen."

"My ass, nothing." Towe stood up. "What's it doing?"

"It's building something," the young man answered.

The space erupted into voices all at once, with various captains arguing, crewmen whispering, and some latecomers trying to catch up with what exactly had been said. In the end, the arguments and whispers were useless. There was only one place they could go, really, once all was said and done. Marco and the crew found themselves headed back to the plinth itself, surrounded by every legitimate captain and settler in the place.

Even then, the town was taking no chances with them. The group began to file outside with Marco’s crew at the center, various guards and combatants surrounding them and regarding them with both suspicion and curiosity.

The walk back was tense. Marco had hoped the town would see the light and destroy the plinth at once, but too many of those present insisted it was too important for that to happen easily.

“It isn’t good, no matter what they are getting out of it,” Riv said, under his breath. "Nothing good comes from Quill. Nothing."

“No one here will listen to that,” Elisa replied, keeping her voice low as well. “They’re too invested. It's hard to get reason to stick in the face of profit.”

“Gods,” someone whispered as they finally got close. “It’s alive.”

“No,” Elisa corrected. “It’s just power. But it is waking up.”

"It was only as big as my fist when I left," the young man said. "How did it get that big that fast?"

The orb of power was the size of the shack the plinth had been in, and the shack itself was nowhere to be seen. As they got closer, it jumped up another foot in diameter, then another. Each transition simply snapped into being, leaving a bigger, stronger orb where the smaller one had been with only a split second's worth of delay.

"That's bigger than we've seen., Marco said. "How? Why?"

"The others we saw weren't near plinths." Elisa flipped open one of her notebooks. "I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing it's probably easier for Quill to make these when they are closer to one of the plinths. Please, everyone. Let us break it before it gets any worse."

"Are you insane?" Towe said. "Break it?"

"Just listen to her! This is how it was! On the island!" Redd’s eyes were widening in panic. He pulled his own sword, taking a big step towards the orb. "If you won't do it, I will. I'm not going to die over this."

"You'll have to get through me, Redd." Towe stepped between him and the growing mass of energy. "Me and my men."

Redd was up to it. He didn't go for broke with deadly force, but he did lower his big shoulder and bash into Towe and his men, sending several of the weaker ones reeling before the group could gather itself to resist him. He threw knees, elbows, and his weight around as he tried to break through, but in the end it was too late. The orb grew one last time, nearly doubling in size, and then the space around them began to darken and change.

The buildings around the plinth began to warp and change, growing grotesquely wrong as if they had been soaked in a swamp for years and years. The ground darkened. Everything took on a sense of wrongness that radiated out from the plinth. It was so thick in the air that it didn't have to be seen to be verified as wrong. And that was just Marco and his crew. They had resistances to that kind of thing. Most people didn't.

The crowd’s hush broke into panic and confusion. Some backed away, others pressed closer. Redd broke free from his melee and barked for order, but his voice was drowned beneath the rising sound of fear.

Marco exchanged a look with his crew. Whatever danger the plinth had been was now realized. It was just a question of what it would do, not if it would do it.

"Break it!" Towe said. "I give up! Just break it!"

Weapons were pulled from scabbards and guns were drawn in an instant, but nobody was more ready than Marco. He dove towards the energy with his sword out and his gun blazing, but before he could so much as scratch it, the entire mass exploded outwards, splashing the entire area with a thick curtain of energy that just as quickly cleared, leaving a warped, ruined town in its wake.