The ‘internet’, as it was called, this amorphous space somewhere inside the computer (whether it was in the body of it or the screen, she could barely begin to guess) where she could converse with others and see what others had to say had taken a strange hold of Anne. It wasn’t as if she’d given up on Jack and accepted life as a hermit in the shack she’d acquired and fixed up to provide her with a barely-passable house to stay in for a little while, no. She could almost feel him and when she went to the sea to look at the ships, which were apparently used for tours or sailing lessons of all things, vessels like that being wasted for show and scenery (which agitated her to no end and encouraged her to imagine a whole host of scenarios in which she took them by surprise and showed them how they were truly meant to be used), she could almost smell him in the salty, misty air. She rested her hands on the hilts of her swords and sighed deeply, wondering when. When she’d get to touch his arms again. Tell him his hair looked ridiculous. When he would look at her like she was a lone star in a sky that guided him home. It was sentimental and soft and strange because of all that, but Jack was her home too. He just had a better way with words, so she liked to hear him say it. That was something she missed too… his way with words, his clever tongue. Perhaps quite literally in the sense of the latter.
But she busied herself with procuring enough rum to last her for days, so she didn’t have to visit the markets much, hunting small game and large, when it was quiet and dark. Lining her blankets with pelts with a wretched attempt at sewing them together with a needle she’d carved from bone. There was many a finger pricked that day, many a curse uttered, but she didn’t wake up shivering in the morning so she had to admit it was worth it in the end. She bathed just around the corner of the shack so that no one might come across her, but if anyone did, she had her pistols near. The small shack had no hot water and she was surprised when she explored the taps of the sink and realized it produced running water…but it was rusty and loud, due to the ancient pipes.
This life, a life on land, was not for her. Anne had come to learn that quickly and dreamed of being back on the gentle waves of the sea in her best dreams and in her worst, remembered being locked on land before she’d earned her sea-legs with her husband. Those awful remembrances made her exhausted and petulant about the upkeep she had to do, but going through the motions reminded her it was nothing but a vision. A ghost. Ghosts didn’t hurt anyone, at least not the ghosts of her past. But in this time, she had really taken to the internet. It was a new world to traverse, a new way to speak, people phrased things differently from her, they thought different things, they talked about their lives… and strangely enough, when she spoke enough with one person, even Black, whom she argued incessantly with, she felt as if they were somehow near her. Receiving letters only highlighted how far she was from someone, passing them in Nassau was a fleeting glance and nod at most under Vane’s command, but somehow, she felt close to these people on her computer.
Often times, she didn’t have much to say, but she checked on it often, read the newest information and had learned how to open up a blank page and started to experiment with which keys did what. The only annoying thing that had happened was she had somehow activated a narrator inside the computer that spoke her commands out loud and detailed them in a little black box in the corner of it and couldn’t turn it off. Luckily, she found the sound button and tried to ignore the text that popped up.
She knew Jack would be fascinated with the thing, but would he feel the same way she did? In fact, just messaging someone had led her into Ravenmoore to a man’s bar and a free drink. How could a machine make such a difference in her reality and her perception of it?