You can't beat the classics.

  Brom stood there and watched Jonesy lose his mind. It was as though he had unleashed a kid in an amusement park, the Sergeant vibrating as he took in the whole of Yacht Sothoth's superstructure, running his hands along the steel before moving to stare up at the big guns. It was the same look as a particularly good Christmas morning shining in his eyes.

  "Uh, you want a minute alone with him? Not sure he's into that." Brom glanced down at the deck, raising an eyebrow. "You into that, buddy?"

  Yacht Sothoth was not into that.

  Brom shrugged. "To each their own." He ignored Jonesy's stink eye, moving instead toward the bow. "Alright, here's the plan, boys. We have a sailing ship full of cultists that are heading for deep water to perform some dark summoning ritual. We're going to stop them. With prejudice." He looked down at the deck, then realized there was a small problem. "Hey, Jonesy, do you know how to get to Meyer's Reef?"

  Jonesy, who had been leaning around to peer in one of the five inch gun mounts, froze and looked back at Brom. "Uh... no? I'm more of a hiking guy than a boating guy. I know about it from my trips to the local museum, and I'm pretty sure I've been out there fishing with some of the guys, but I wasn't the one driving to get there. I figured you knew where it was?"

  "Fuck no. I hate the ocean." That wasn't changing anytime soon, either, thanks to Greg.

  The ship shuddered under them, drawing both their eyes downward to him, though only Brom could understand the ship-shark through their link. Yacht Sothoth didn't know these waters either, but he did know what the power of the cultists felt like. After all, he had been ensnared by it not that long ago. With permission, he could find them. Just like a shark scenting blood in the water.

  "Okay then, it's all up to you. Take us away." Maybe Brom should have been more hesitant. Maybe this was all too good to be true, and the eldritch outer being was playing him for a fool. But the way the steel beast seemed to leap forward in joy, cutting through the water with a clean ripple of excitement, and made no attempt to dive and drown them? All that felt pretty positive to Brom.

  He glanced back, noting Jonesy standing there and staring at him.

  "You communicate with this thing?" The Sergeant's voice was casually questioning, but his gaze was sharp.

  "We have a bond. I call him, he shows up, I talk to him, and he sends impressions back. It's all thanks to this." He held up his arm, letting light glint off the whistle. "I admit, we haven't done this much. Last time I saw him, I was covered in trash and he looked like a garbage barge. So I told him to go eat some sunken warships to get the good steel and clean himself up, looks like he did."

  Jonesy blinked. "You sent him to eat war graves? Brom, that's just fucked up. I'm glad he didn't take your advice."

  Brom had the decency to flush. "Yeah, well, I didn't really think of it in that light. The world had changed, and I thought it was better for him to be consuming stuff that wouldn't hurt anyone." He looked down at the deck. "Sorry, buddy, you even said you didn't like eating the organic bits. Wait, what do you mean he didn't take my advice?"

  "There are only four Iowa-class battleships. They're all museum ships, not sunken wrecks. I'm going to go out on a limb and say your friend here is one of those 'you are what you eat' type guys, which means, in order to build himself up like this then he had to eat one to figure it out." Jonesy glanced down at the deck. "Am I right?"

  A big ripple went through the ship, and Brom felt the bright, burning pride from Yacht Sothoth. He appreciated his hard work being noticed! Images and impressions pressed into Brom, and he took a minute to digest before nodding. "Yeah. I guess he just prowled down the coast, looking for something that resembled what I had been talking about. He just started eating the big, well-maintained boats, and this one was particularly big and shiny."

  "Well he's got great taste. There are plenty of museum vessels between here and- wait." He cocked his head to the side. "If he went all the way to L.A. and ate the Iowa, did he eat the Hornet on the way past?! Can you be an aircraft carrier?"

  More images, some amusement, and Brom was starting to feel a little dizzy being a Sergeant to Ship translation service. "Slow down there, buddy! Okay, okay, I get it." Brom took a deep breath. "He says that yes, he ate it but no, the shape is all wrong. He'd be slow and have a hard time eating, so this is much better. He says he passed up a bunch of other ships in that area because they weren't as nice looking, he specifically went looking for the top quality bits."

  "That'd be the Mothball fleet, uh, the Reserve. There were probably some good ships in there he could have had. But I get it, and I personally think he made the right choice." Jonesy smiled brightly. "Man, this is something. My uncle almost served on one of these in the 80's, got hurt in an accident, and missed the deployment. My great-grandfather was assigned to one just as World War II ended. So here I am, third-generation Avery, and man, if they could see me now."

  Brom smiled, then smacked his thigh. "Shit, introductions. We got gabbing, and I forgot. Yacht Sothoth, this is Jonesy. Jonesy, this is Yacht Sothoth... do I have to say 'all hail'?" He made air quotes with his fingers.

  It was clear from the way the ship groaned that no, he did not.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Wait..." Johannes eyes went wide. "Bones, this is that dungeon boss? Are you kidding me?" He staggered a bit before just sitting down on the deck, his legs telling him he needed time out. Jonesy just stared up at Brom, framed by the morning sun with his hair rippling in the chill wind. "You- He- Explain."

  So Brom did. Well, the cliff notes version. It wasn't like he fully understood the mechanics of it either. Plus, he wasn't sure he wanted Johannes to know about the Viewers just yet. They were off on a sailing adventure to intercept a cult and stop an evil cult ritual. He had zero doubts in his mind that the Viewers were tuning in right now, listening to everything they said, and watching everything they did. At the end of it, Brom chose to sit down right next to the Sergeant, it wasn't like he was steering the vessel after all. Yacht Sothoth was perfectly capable of taking himself where he needed to go.

  For a long time, Johannes said nothing. Just processing with a brain that didn't have enough fuel to really do so. Finally, he slapped both his thighs and nodded. "Alright. I get it. But you can't keep calling him Yacht Sothoth. One, it's a mouthful, and two, it's going to remind people of his worst moments. So you need something different." He patted the deck. "What do you think, you okay getting a nickname?"

  Brom leaned back, arms folded behind his head, watching the clouds go past. It was a pretty day to kick someone's ass. "He doesn't mind. He says we can't say his real name anyway, our bodies aren't meant to handle the vibration. So it's all nicknames to him." His foot swayed, eyes slowly closing, and he realized that he was pretty comfortable for laying on the solid wooden planks, proof that when you got tired enough, you could sleep anywhere.

  "Okay, makes sense. Well then," Jonesy paused, glancing around as his face scrunched up in thought, "despite eating the Iowa, I don't think it's polite to reference that at all. Respect to its service and the men who were aboard her." His blue gaze swept the deck again, as if looking for inspiration. "Man, this is harder than I thought."

  "What about Jaws? If you can't think of a ship, why not a shark?" Brom cracked an eye open.

  Jonesy snorted. "Might as well call him anything. Why not call him Boss since he used to be a boss?"

  "I'm cool with that, what do you think, Boss?' His head tilted toward the deck, and he waited for a moment. There was no flex, no shudder, there was only an increase of speed and a preening sense in the back of Brom's mind. "Boss it is. Now, with all that settled, I'm going to catch a nap. It's been a really long twenty-four hours. Wake me up when we get close." He was asleep almost before he finished saying the words.

  For a second, Jonesy just stared at Brom, his eyebrows raised. "...fuck it. Me too." He lay back, arms behind his head, the cold wind somehow not that cold right down on the deck. Likely, Boss was doing something to help them out, a little pocket of protected air. Whatever the case, for just a moment, it was comfortable enough to pass out.

  Brom's nap proved to be anything but restful though. It wasn't a nightmare precisely, he always expected those but never had them. This was something entirely different, something his brain had never been built to understand. Knowledge or maybe power of some kind. It was from Boss, bleeding in through their bond as the eldritch ship-shark deepened their connection to his unguarded mind. A fortification started taking shape, an acknowledgement that they were tied together through whatever the System had done.

  The reason was simple. Brom had command over the being from the outer realms. Boss was at his beck and call as long as he possessed that whistle. While it wasn't total control, Boss wasn't a mindless entity that obeyed without question, he could and likely would tell Brom to fuck off if the situation called for it. But most of the time, when that whistle was blown, all the capabilities of the eldritch ship-shark could be brought to bear. Right now, that was a lot of firepower, and in the future, who knew what it could possibly end up being?

  Boss recognized that Brom was an acceptable human being. Brom wasn't going to make him eat organic matter all the time. Wasn't going to make him smash up perfectly good meals like a petulant toddler throwing cake around. This was a whole new world that Boss had never been to before, there was so much to be seen and experienced, and this person was willing to let Boss get out there and see it. That might not be true if someone else got their hands on the whistle or if someone took over the man currently holding it.

  By deepening this bond, Boss was investing a part of himself in the man who held his freedom, whether Brom wanted it or not. It wasn't a new passive. It wasn't an active skill. More like a benefit provided by the item around his wrist. As long as he was tied to Boss, Boss would keep the creeps out of his skull.

  He woke all at once, gasping for breath and possessing a splitting migraine. It felt like someone had been pounding on his head with a steel hammer, which was probably accurate in a metaphysical way. The sun was gone, a thick fog having wrapped around them at some point. Boss had slowed his speed, coming nearly to idle, using inertia to push his massive tonnage through the water. A prickle ran through the air, causing the hair on Brom's arms to rise up. He reached down, gently shaking Jonesy awake.

  The other man had rolled into Brom during his sleep, snoring softly as drool puddled under him. At Brom's shake, his eyes snapped open, taking a moment to focus as he sat up, hair going every direction.

  "Battle stations, Sarge. I think we're close."