Pirates!

Beckyann smiled and nodded her thanks as the gnome opened the portal for her. She checked her armor one last time before stepping towards the glimmering opening. She'd heard that there were Horde marauders roaming near Ironforge and, with no duties to attend to at the moment, it gave her the perfect opportunity to use her runeblade on something. Unlike the other Knights, she had very little control over her urges and usually needed to inflict agony on things every few days, perhaps a week at maximum before she started to feel physically ill. Horde gave her the perfect opportunity to do so without creating an embarrassing incident that the others would need to cover for; a win-win for everyone!

She stepped forward, passing into the magical portal and feeling the magic flowing around her, coating her skin as if she had dunked herself in water. At the last moment, right before she was about to teleport to her destination, the sound of a goblin's voice echoed faintly in her ears.

“Now you're going to get it Coppergear! Have fun on your little trip!”

Beckyann's last thought was wry amusement at the fact that she was about to experience some sort of revenge that was aimed at the gnome who was providing her with free transportation. It seemed that nothing in life was truly free. With that her mind blanked out and magic exploded around her as the goblin's trap was sprung and the portal was torn from its original destination. In the blink of an eye, Beckyann was gone.

She reappeared a moment later, a cloud of acrid smoke lingering in the air around her as she rematerialized; the leftover remains of the offensive spell that had altered her teleport it seemed. Although she had no need to breathe and wasn't coughing, Beckyann waved her hand to clear the lingering haze so that she could see clearly. As it dissipated, she saw something like thirty people staring at her stupidly. Her eyes widened, meeting their dumbfounded expressions with a idiotic half-shrug as if to say, “Fel if I know...”

They were pirates of course. And she was on a pirate ship of course. It had to be pirates in the middle of the ocean. She couldn't have gone somewhere pleasant like a vacation resort or perhaps the top of a scenic mountain. Nope, it was about twenty five pirates in various states of piratey dress with dirty, ill-maintained rifles and sabers on them and about five prisoners tied up as well. Two of the prisoners looked to be Alliance military personnel and the other three were women who must have been taken in a recent raid as their clothing was only HALF torn off.

All of this sensory input came to Beckyann in less than a second. Beyond her understanding of the people around her, she also saw a pillar of smoke off the bow of the ship and the mast of another vessel slowly slipping beneath the waves, wreckage floating around it. Clearly the pirates had just taken an Alliance vessel.

And then the time for thinking was over.

In the blink of an eye, one of the pirates brought up his poorly maintained rifle and fired round shot directly at Beckyann. The high-speed projectile hit her breastplate and went through it like it was paper, the round ball coming out her back in a deformed state and ruining her armor. The deck behind her was spattered with black gore. Unfortunately for the pirates, Beckyann was not alive and the shot simply passed through a lung.

It also made her angry.

Faster than a living woman would move, her hand came up and pulled her runeblade. She dove forward even as more pirates brought their weapons up. Shots rang out from several points but missed as the dead woman moved, the projectiles striking the deck and one even hitting another of the pirates who had been unfortunate enough to be in the crossfire.

Beckyann reached the first of the pirates and her blade arced out, sheering neatly through his throat in a shower of gore. The man tumbled backwards, his lifeblood pumping out and pouring onto the deck as Beckyann ducked the cut of another of the pirates and slashed clean through one of his thighs. The second pirate tumbled to the deck and Beckyann rolled as more shots rang out. This time one sparked off of the armor covering her thigh but failed to penetrate, and another put a hole in the deck beside her.

With a roar, Beckyann rolled to her feet, pointing at one of the prisoners. A tendril of dark magic arced out and picked him up, hurling him towards the death knight. She caught him, spinning the man and slamming him into one of the pirates as her runeblade lashed out and slashed the bindings that had tied his hands. The man, one of the Alliance soldiers, landed on top of a pirate in a heap of struggling limbs, tripping another of the combatants. Beckyann strode forward, mercilessly executing the fallen pirate and then bringing her blade up to deflect a saber that cut at her head.

“You're all dead do you hear me?” she growled. “DEAD! I'LL SEE ALL OF YOUR BLOOD SPILLED!”

Beckyann really didn't care for pirates. Stealing was wrong after all.

Two more pirates brought their weapons up and aimed at the blonde woman as she turned. One of the weapons misfired, the explosion of the poorly made goblin black powder blinding the pirate and taking him out of the fight. The second man fired, the round striking Beckyann in the abdomen and again piercing her armor. She merely grunted and pointed at him, freezing cold air howling around him and rending his flesh from the right side of his body. Even as she did this, Beckyann had to turn to dodge another cut from a pirate that had come up behind her; she was slowly being surrounded by the large numbers of them remaining. Her attacker grunted as he was stabbed behind by the prisoner she had freed before that man, in turn, was cut down.

Beckyann rolled again, bringing her runeblade up to block another blow as she looked around for a way out of the situation. The deck was covered with gore now and a mob of angry pirates was descending on her from all sides. In desperation, she brought her runeblade up above her head and uttered the words to a spell, grunting as a saber stabbed her. The damage to her physical form was starting to add up and she knew she had limited time to act.

A rush of freezing cold air descended from her sword and flowed all around her. Several of the pirates froze to death instantly, their bodies turning into almost beautiful ice sculptures from the power of the spell they'd been struck with. Although the spell didn't hit all of the pirates, it removed four more from the battle and gave Beckyann enough time to begin another chant. Regrettably it also struck two of the prisoners, freezing them to death alongside their captors. The fact meant little to Beckyann though; she hadn't been hired to rescue them in the first place!

This time her blade glowed black, runes expiring on it as she poured her magical energy into the spell. She was an expert at the magic she was using now, and the foul words of the spell flowed from her black lips almost casually. All around her, tendrils of black magic arced out and struck the newly dead, causing the bodies to twitch as they began to rise to the call of their mistress. Almost instantly they turned on their former companions, and the battle shifted from a mass of men descending on the blonde death knight to a swirling melee as now-frightened pirates battled the enraged ghouls that were once their companions.

Beckyann used the confusion as an opportunity to slip from the center of the battle. She cut down another pirate that stood in her way as she rushed to one side of the ship, heading towards where the battery of cannons were located. She slammed her runeblade down into the deck to secure it and grabbed one of the cannons, using her unnatural strength to move the object around. Normally it would have taken a crew of men to reposition it and aim it, but she wasn't going for finesse at the moment and simply sliding it sideways was enough. As she'd hoped, the weapon was still loaded from its engagement with the alliance vessel.

Five pirates rushed towards Beckyann and then skidded to a halt as she looked at them over the barrel of the cannon. She offered them a sweet smile and a little wave before holding one of the cannon's torches to its fuse.

The weapon discharged with a roar, nearly knocking Beckyann over from the recoil as it rolled past her and slammed into the gunwale of the ship, shattering it and falling into the sea. But this was not the most interesting effect of the cannon's firing. The cannonball within it flew out, slamming into the deck of the ship with a shower of splinters and plunging into the depths below, just as Beckyann had planned. Pirates and ghouls alike fell to the deck from the force of the concussion, but unfortunately there was one more ill-effect that Beckyann had not counted on at all.

The shot struck the ship's powder room.

Before Beckyann could even move, the ship bucked and shattered in the center from the force of a massive explosion deep within it. She found herself being hurled through the air and far out over the side of the ship, the force of the blast almost enough to render even a death knight unconscious from the sheer impact. In the distance, she saw other people flying in similar trajectories off of the wreckage of a ship that had just been torn in half by a horrifying blast. Burning wood rained down around a mushroom cloud of fire, the doomed vessel already taking on water.

At that point, Beckyann struck the water and was plunged into blackness as the weight of her plate armor began to drag her down like a rock. She rolled her eyes in irritation, knowing that if she sank too low she'd be crushed by the pressure of the water. Her fingers began to move almost of their own will, grabbing straps and slowly divesting herself of her armor one piece at a time, each piece slowing her descent as she became more buoyant. A living person would have drown in the time it took her to remove the last piece of armor, but then, breathing was not something Beckyann was seriously concerned with any longer.

Finally, the last piece had been removed and she began to ascend back up to the water's surface. When her head broke through the water, she began swimming, looking around to see twin pillars of smoke rising into the air where both ships were sinking. In the distance, the cries of pirates could be heard as sharks circled, looking for their next meal. All of it was irrelevant to Beckyann however, and she merely shook her head as she tread water.

“Ooops...” she murmured. With a sigh she muttered the words to a spell, making the water in front of her solid as ice. Slowly she climbed onto the floating ice before using another spell to open a death gate and stumble through.

She reappeared in Acherus, standing in front of two death knight initiates. For a moment, she looked at them curiously, wondering why they were staring at her. That was when she realized that she was wearing only her underthings, completely soaked, covered in small wounds that oozed her brackish blood and bereft of her runeblade.

She offered the initiates a glare and growled at them, “Not. A. Word.”

The two initiates quickly stood at attention, nodding at her, “Yes Ma'am. We haven't seen anything Ma'am.”

Beckyann merely nodded once, walking away with her nose up as if it was perfectly normal for her to appear in such a state in Acherus. Her bare feet left wet footprints on the moldy stones of the place as she headed back towards her quarters.

She really really hated pirates.