> The Pirate Captain's Revenge: "Hell's coming with me"
>
> "Let me tell you why you're here, since I'm sure you're wondering," the Buccaneer Senex Bar Sinister calmly informed the newest member of his crew. "You're here for the same reason as every other man on this ship; you're all the meanest sons of bitches ever to walk on two legs, and what I have to offer you is something that I can guarantee you won't be able to refuse."
>
> "Oh, really?" replied the still-fit Eastern Indian sexagenarian, who inexplicably spoke with a Mexican accent. "And what might that be?"
>
> "Revenge, Mr. Khan," snarled the pirate captain in his own mid-19th-century New York Bowery accent, as he smirked from behind his greasy black handlebar mustache. "We might each prefer it served at different temperatures, but it's the one dish on the menu that we can, all of us, enjoy."
>
> "Revenge," repeated Khan Noonien Singh, relishing the taste of the word on his tongue. "Against the man who marooned me on Ceti Alpha V?"
>
> "Against them what made you, then marooned you, on that ... Fantasy Island, where I found you and the dwarf," Senex clarified. "Look around you, and tell me what you see."
>
> Khan surveyed the decks of the Jolly Roger galleon.
>
> Two gigantic brutes, one who'd donned a hockey goalie mask and the other wearing a white rubber face mask with fake brown hair, manned the sails, while a third and equally enormous barbarian, decked out in dusty biker apparel and sporting a filthy beard, split up a shouting match between two expensively tailored gangsters, one a short, scarfaced Cuban and the other an even shorter, pompadoured Italian.
>
> A towering figure clad in an all-black, high-tech helmet, face mask and electronic chest plate ensemble crossed his arms, under his cape, as he supervised other crew members tending to the rigging, while a ghoulish, grinning character, with a burn-scarred face and a glove whose fingers were tipped with long blades, cackled as he raced past to go below decks.
>
> "I've got a dentally challenged Romanian royal using his mind-control powers to keep the creatures I've collected pacified," Senex explained. "He tends to get a bit sunburned on deck during the day. Still, with some of the stronger-willed ones, like ... the Alien, and the Predator, I feel more comfortable giving him some support, so every now and again, I send Mr. Krueger down to give them all ... bad dreams."
>
> "They're monsters," Khan gaped, his facial expression betraying equal amounts of admiration and aversion. "Your ship is crewed by horrors."
>
> "We are merely ourselves," countered a relatively compact, middle-aged gentleman with a quiet voice and a piercing, blue-eyed stare.
>
> "Dr. Lecter," Senex nodded curtly toward the newcomer, with his slicked-back hair and disquieting smile. "You made any progress with that momma's boy yet?"
>
> "Nurse Ratched has successfully developed quite the rapport with Mr. Bates, just as I suspected she would," Hannibal Lecter reported.
>
> "We won't have any time for hand-holding once we get where we're going," Senex warned. "Speaking of which, Mr. Smalls just had to break up yet another fight between Mr. Montana and Mr. Pesci. If you can't find some way of shrinking their heads enough to put an end to their pissing contests, I need to know now, so I can throw both their asses overboard, well before we reach our destination."
>
> "And what destination might that be?" Khan inquired.
>
> "We're literally going to meet our makers," Senex snorted at his own joke, and gestured expansively around him. "The ones who made all of us ... you, me, Dr. Lecter, Mr. Gruber in his tailor-made suit, Agent Smith in his mirrored sunglasses, Judge Doom in his ridiculous goggles ... hell, even the colored boxer, with the Mohawk hairstyle. We were, all of us, created to serve two purposes; we were born to be bad, and we were born to lose."
>
> "You'll forgive me if I remain skeptical of your ... religious vision," Khan sneered.
>
> "You never wondered how you lost, twice, to some ... ham, in a toupee and a girdle?" Senex demanded. "Mr. Voorhees and Mr. Myers don't even do conversations, but even they stayed their hands, once I pointed out to them that it made no sense that a couple of unstoppable killing machines, like them, could be stopped, so often, by nothing more than stupid, oversexed teenagers. Even the literal killing machine ... the Terminator, found it 'illogical' that he could be defeated by mere humans, after I'd asked him to consider it."
>
> Khan squinted sidelong at Senex. "Do you truly propose to convince me that ... the stories themselves are stacked against us?"
>
> Senex scowled. "It makes one hell of a lot more sense than believing an eternal youth could ever best the scourge of the Seven Seas," he seethed. "How else, besides ... authorial fiat, could a mere boy beat me in swordplay, and then take my eye?" he tapped the tip of his knife against the glass of his false left eye, creating an unsettling clinking sound.
>
> "Ah," Khan smiled in recognition. "Now I understand your motivation ... and, perhaps, your identity as well. And yet, in all the versions of the story that I've read, it was your hand that he took ... Captain Hook."
>
> "You're an educated man, Mr. Khan," Senex acknowledged. "If not for your racial handicap, you might have noticed another way in which my modern self differs from my written origins, since I used to be an Englishman, rather than an American ... then again, so did the boy." He shrugged simply. "Call it 'adaptation fatigue' ... live long enough, and we all suffer through some measure of it. Our aforementioned blood-sucking count has weathered more of it than most of us put together. To hear him tell it, 'being American' has become something of a cultural lingua franca for central characters in stories, a sea change which seems to have coincided with the watershed moment when more people started watching talking pictures than reading books."
>
> "And how did you come to such ... self-awareness?" Khan had grown genuinely curious.
>
> "I suppose it's the one thing I can thank the boy for," Senex chuckled ruefully. "After he left Neverland, I called off the war against his Lost Boys, since they weren't worth the trouble of hunting down, if even he didn't care about their welfare any longer, and I spared his woman's life, because I couldn't imagine a crueler fate than letting her live, after she'd been abandoned by the only man she'd ever loved. True, my day-to-day existence grew less eventful, but seeing the Lost Boy's own Lost Boys grow up, and his bitch grow old, with all their innocent hopes and dreams dashed, made my boredom worthwhile."
>
> Senex then gritted his teeth. "But then, the little bastard had the gall to come back ... not long enough to face up to me, like a man, but just long enough to sweep his old lady off her feet, and make her feel young again, before they left Faerie together, a happy couple in love once more," he practically spat out the last words. "As soon as I heard the news - from a hobgoblin commander in my Black Brethren Elite, whom I put to death for dishonoring the honorary title I had so graciously bestowed upon him - I set sail for the ends of my world, and beyond." He clapped his hands together. "And that's how I found all of you, because sometime during my voyage, I crossed over that nebulous border, from the Mythlands of Neverland and Faerie, into the territory of flat-out fiction."
>
> Khan rubbed his temples. "I must admit, I don't even recall how I came to believe I was this ... 'Mister Roarke,'" he shook his head.
>
> "Adaptation fatigue," Senex reiterated, as he draped an arm reassuringly around Khan's shoulders, finalizing the star-trekking superhuman tyrant's recruitment as a fellow pirate. "You were so out of it, when we first hauled you on board, that you took the time to compliment the 'soft Corinthian leather' of our ship's upholstery. The ones what made you, they're the ones what did that to you, and they've done just as wrong, if not worse, to every motherless one of us on this ship. They do it to us because they're pathetic wretches, who need to believe that there's a world out there where the bad men are guaranteed to lose, because in their world? The 'bad guys' get to win. But we're gonna get ours back ... ain't we, Mr. Khan?"
>
> Khan straightened his shoulders, and fixed Senex with a steely gaze. "I have never served another man," the veteran warrior of a future long past insisted, before extending his hand toward the metafictionally aware character who would be his captain, "but if you can deliver on your promise, I shall follow you."
>
> "Fair enough," the Buccaneer Senex Bar Sinister agreed, gripping Khan's hand warmly in his own, before he turned to address the rest of his crew. "Allow me to present your newest OFFICER, Mr. KHAN!" Senex bellowed. "He's the latest man to SEE THE LIGHT, as ALL OF YOU have done, because HE wants what WE ALL WANT! And what WE WANT, WE WILL HAVE, because where WE'RE GOING, THE BAD GUYS GET TO WIN!!!"
>
> "Cheer LOUDER!" Khan ordered sternly, even as the crew was already chorusing with savage cries of bloodthirsty approval. "You HEARD your captain! This should be the BEST MOMENT of your LIVES! SMILES, EVERYONE! SMILES!!!"
>
> "You won't be smiling anymore, by the time I'm through with you and yours," Senex muttered bitterly under his breath, almost wishing that the target of his revenge could hear him, as he peered into the distant horizon ahead. "I knew you as Robyn Reynard, and the ones what read the stories about us know you as Peter Pan, but changing your name won't save you from my wrath. I'm coming for you, Dreamcatcher Foxglove, and Hell's coming with me."
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