Poor S.O.B.
The swirling black spot on his hand vexed him. It became an obsession for Mendoza, really; it is all he thinks about these days. It appeared on his hand not even a day after the heist - was the loot cursed? He visited a variety of alleyway doctors who knew not to ask questions, but none of them were able to come up with anything besides it being magical in nature. So, Mendoza sat in the office of an abandoned warehouse his crew have been using as a base of operations, staring at the mark on his hand in a similar fashion as one who would obsess over a possibly cancerous mole on their body.
His crew of six others were becoming more and more restless, having already spent their share of the cut from the last operation. Mendoza can see how they murmur to each other, trying to keep their voices down during the few times he would leave his den. But this damn mark, casting a cloud of uncertainty over his mind, making him more worried about the potential of a possible curse over the very real threat of a mutiny...
A shot rang out just outside his door, startling the man. A sound of gushing water followed immediately after. Mendoza jumped from his seat and approached the door, nearly slipping on the liquid that was now seeping in from underneath the entryway.
Opening the office door, Mendoza saw that the warehouse was being flooded by a downpour of water. "Which one of you dumbasses shot the goddamn water sprinklers?!" He shouted.
"I did." An unfamiliar voice came from the corner.
Before Mendoza could turn around, something slammed against the back of his head. His ears were ringing as he fell to the ground. The last thing he saw were multiple humanoid shapes emerging from the water and overtaking his gang of thieves...
"-our survived. The rest were taken by the Deep."
Mendoza cracked his eyes open. Dazed, he tried to move, but found that he was tied up with a gag in his mouth. He tried his best to look up, but only was able to see two pairs of inhuman legs in front of him. Is that a crab leg?
"Looks like he's comin' to," A feminine voice.
The boot-and-crab foot combo approached his prone body, sloshing through the inch of water that now completely covers the floor. A hand roughly pulls him up into a sitting position, bringing him face to face with one of his captors - a stern-faced woman with a small frown curling her lip. She could be called beautiful were it not for her pink hair also being bizarre tentacles and a grotesque crab claw for a left arm. "The bounty calls fer ya to be alive," the stranger said evenly, "Kira must be plannin' somethin' special fer ya."
Oh, fuck...
"Whattabout the others, Captain?"
The woman turned her head to face her compatriot. Mendoza did the same, seeing four...fishmen standing over the remaining, tied-up members of his gang. They were monsters, truly! The one who spoke to the woman was some sort of shark hybrid, while the other three some sort of mishmash between fish and coral. Each wearing a pirate get-up and wielding either a curved sword, ax or one of those old style guns you'd find in a museum. It would actually be kind of comical if they weren't poised to execute his guys. The woman, who was apparently their leader, merely stood up strait and said "Ungag them."
The pirate captain gimp-walked over to the captured men, coming to a stop in front of the orange-haired man named Richard, "None of y'all have bounties, but yer not gonna walk out of here, either. No one escapes my net. I offer all survivors a choice: a hundred years serving as crew on me ship," She bends over, coming down to Richard's eye level, "Or to join yer brothers in the Abyss. What'll it be?"
Her answer came in the form of spit, courtesy of Richard. Things came to a dead standstill, the fishmen flinching and driving their weapons just that much closer to the prisoners. The Captain, however, didn't even react. Then, in a quiet voice that barely hid her fury, the woman said "So be it. There are no other survivors besides Mendoza."
