Tag Archives: islands

Captain Macko Castleton

After some recent experiments, it’s becoming apparent that leaving the island is much more feasible than it used to be. Parties have successfully reached The Devil’s Fingers on numerous occasions now – only to turn straight back because there’s nothing out there except seaweed and angry birds.

Intrepid explorers have now successfully reached other nearby islands. Bloodly Useless is described as a big, slippery rock with absolutely nothing to recommend it. Mermaid Island does indeed have a large mermaid population, so no one disembarked there.

In light of these exciting discoveries, Captain Macko Castleton suggests that we revive piracy. “It’s a good old tradition,” he told the Vendetta, “and I think it’s really important that we keep our folk customs alive. They give a community a real sense of coherence.”

The island’s folklorists have been wholly supportive of this plan and are also investigating the possibility of starting up some smuggling rings. What exactly we could hope to smuggle from where is an interesting question, and if this is to be of any fun at all we’d really need someone to oppose it in some way. Discussions continue.

Meanwhile, Captain Macko has re-purposed one of the larger fishing boats for piracy and is looking to recruit a crew. You don’t have to make a full time commitment as the intention is to live on the island most of the time and go pirating when the weather isn’t too bad.

Captain Macko said, “I reckon the trick will be to get to ships before they wreck on the rocks, we’d get far more stuff off them that way and it wouldn’t all be so wet. We might not get so many people drowning, too.”

I pointed out to him that this sounded more like having a lifeboat than like piracy, but he assured me that the important bit was nicking people’s gear, and that the benevolent bit would just be a side effect of that.

Cosplay by Max Rueda, story by Nimue.

The Mystery of Erik

If you’ve read Hopeless Maine, Sinners, you may have noticed the two page spreads. Being the clever sort of people you are, you will have noticed that the two page spreads tell a story that has nothing to do with the main story. The super-attentive will have recognised Melisandra – mother of Salamandra, and will have figured out that she’s collecting a young man and drawing him into her underground, night time lifestyle.

A note about vampires on Hopeless, Maine. Some of them really are vampires in all the traditional senses of the word. Some are energy vampires. Some are lifestylers. The lifestylers take up living underground – for the glamour, the excitement, to get away from the voices, because they cannot bear the attention of the eyes in the sky, and so forth. They are not vampires, even though they act like vampires. The consequence of this is a slow death from malnutrition – which is quite likely what would have happened to them over a Hopeless winter anyway, only with less romance.

Back to Erik. As there’s no text in the two page spreads, you had no way of knowing that his name is Erik, but it is. The reason his name is Erik, is that we borrowed the face for this character from actor Erik Moody, who we met through the awesome Ragged Isle project.

A bit of back history on that score – some years ago, director of Ragged Isle Barry Dodd made contact with us online. He suggested that as we are both spooky islands off the coast of Maine, that perhaps we could be friends. We love Ragged Isle, and have huge love and respect for the many brilliant people involved with it. You can find out more about Ragged Isle here – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1870996/

And you can find Erik Moody on youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/theemptycinema/featured

As for Erik the would-be vampire? What happened to him? If you know, drop us a line…