Not down on any map

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There’s no helping it. Hank is Captain and they are his subjects. If only someone else was playing Ahab, someone easier to rebel against…

“Hey, Gavin! Don’t you think it’s unfair that Hank gets to play Captain Ahab, when in truth you and me are the Captains of Detroit central station?”

“What’s gotten into… oh, I get it! The roles are fixed, but the actors are variable!”

“Right! I was your “white whale”, starting the day I came to the DPD. I even broke your leg once, that adds to your Ahab-ness. And you were thoroughly hated for years. If YOU ordered us to attack the whale, we could resist better. Plus, we’d get Hank’s head clear to think about a way out of this mess.”

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“I’m not hated, Ishmael!” Gavin Ahab protests. “I may be a bit cursed, that’s all.”

“Whoa, that was quick! But what was that about you being cursed?”

Yes, what? Gavin has trouble sorting through the plethora of information the setting has just dumped into his mind to enable him to get into character. Scenes are popping out of the ocean of Ahab’s memory and vanish beneath the surface again, not connected in any way.

“Oh, just the trifle of spitting on an altar, getting hit by lightning and conjuring evil spirits on the ship by using a sacred tree as replacement mast, after the old one broke from my cursing. Stuff like that.”

“That’s… not in the book, no?” Connor ventures.

“Of course not”, Sigstein claims. “Not in the original, at least. Remember we’re in the fantasy version!”

“Actually it sounds like a Gavin-version. But in any case…”

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“In any case this ends here!” the Captain’s voice rises up.

It has quite a long way to rise, on account of the Captain being played by Pip now.

“Please, Starbuck”, Pip Ahab says, not unfriendly in the least, “I can see your point. You do not support my revenge, you do not care for a single whale, only for many, many whales, that will get us rich. But we can still fill the hold with fat and whalebone after we finished our mission! We don’t have to be enemies!”

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“What’s happening?” Connor gasps.

“Looks like Gavin is Starbuck now”, Hank replies. “I wondered where Starbuck was. Well, actually, I didn’t wonder while I was Ahab. As Ahab I was… surprisingly content, actually. But the moment I snapped out of it, the question came to mind.”

Ah, Starbuck, Connor thinks, finally familiar territory! Captain Ahab hunts the White Whale and everyone drowns, that is about everything the police officers know about the story. And that at some point someone named Starbuck plays a role.

“Could you become Starbuck?” Connor prods.

“That wouldn’t help us. Starbuck is unable to stop Ahab”, Hank explains. “In the book he pondered killing the Captain, but could not bring himself to do it.”

“But he can buy us time. Gavin is good at annoying people!”

“Right. Let me think… Mhm… I’d say if anybody has a chance to persuade Ahab to stop his mad crusade, then that would be Captain Peleg. Him and Ahab are friends of sorts, going back real far.”