Hijinks were afoot.
And Barbossa did not permit hijinks on his ship.
This was a professional outfit, and maintaining professionalism was essential to the success of their operation.
The incidents had started small. Small enough that he could ignore them, take them as shows of jubilation in the face of the end of their curse.
A rifle and a pair of cannonballs arranged to resemble male genitalia? Annoying, but not a big deal.
A crude painting of himself in an exaggeratedly huge and fancy hat? Kind of flattering.
A box filled with every living rat on the ship, left unattended and unlabeled next to the helm? Obnoxious at worst, but also weirdly impressive.
He had to draw the line at this though.
He followed a trail of gunpowder, which started just outside the map room where he'd been spending his free time reading since his quarters were occupied by the Turner girl.
The rest of his crew hadn't seemed to notice it until he was onto it like a bloodhound tracking a scent. Blind fools.
As he followed it below deck, though, he started to have a funny feeling.
That funny feeling swiftly began to turn to horror as the trail grew closer and closer to the…
To the powder storage.
Barbossa threw the door open and scanned the room with hardened eyes. The perpetrator wasn't present in the room. That ruled out Ragetti and Pintel; those two were stupid enough to do this, but also stupid enough to stick around the scene giggling to themselves.
*Tsssssss*
Barbossa's eyes shot wide open as he spun to the source of the sizzling noise. The gunpowder trail had been lit!
"No no no nonononononoNONONONONO!!!" Barbossa jumped onto the floor and began to brush away the trail before the flame could reach the powder room.
He could admit that he had panicked a bit and forgot there was a big jug of water just in case of fire in the room with him. Fortunately he remembered it with seconds to spare and managed to douse the encroaching doom.
At this point, Barbossa was so livid that he could almost strap the legs of whoever did this to a cannon and let them rot at the bottom of the ocean. He'd learned his lesson after Bootstrap Bill, though, so he would have to think up an equally cruel punishment that left him with easy access to them, just in case.
Perhaps he'd nail them to the figurehead…
Barbossa stomped back up to the top deck on a mission.
"Gather round, you bunch of scurvy riddled dogs!" Barbossa shouted.
His crew was quick to do as he bade them, and soon he had all but one of them standing at attention for his inspection.
"Where's Ketchum?" Barbossa growled.
Everyone looked around, as if they too only just noticed one of them was missing. It was half a miracle that Barbossa himself had even noticed, given he had about a hundred men under his command.
It was only because he'd thought Ketchum might be responsible that he'd taken note of the absence.
"He must've gotten caught back at Port Royal, Captain," Bo'sun answered for the lot of them.
Barbossa clicked his tongue. "We'll have to reconstitute him when we get back."
There were a few flinches and cringes amongst the crowd, but Barbossa ignored them. Reconstitution wasn't a pleasant experience, according to the few they'd done it to. Not painful, since they no longer felt pain, but something worse that their language wasn't equipped to describe properly.
They'd only discovered it in an attempt to retrieve Bootstrap Bill from his watery grave. Sadly, this was years after they'd sunk him, and for one reason or another it had failed to work on that traitor.
"Nevermind him!" Barbossa silenced the muttering of his crew. "Which one of you idiots tried to blow up my ship?!"
Even the wind seemed to become quiet at that moment. Nobody fessed up, of course. Barbossa didn't expect a confession right off the bat.
"Maybe it was the Turner girl?" Pintel suggested.
"OH yes," Barbossa poured every ounce of sarcasm he possessed into the words. "It must have been the one person on this accursed boat who can die who tried to set off the powder room! The very same one who is locked in my quarters!"
Pintel shrunk into himself in shame.
"So which one of you was it, hm?" Barbossa glared at the sea of faces, searching for guilt. "Maybe if you come clean now, I won't string you up by the rigging the moment we're mortal again!"
They all shifted between trying to look as innocent as possible and searching for the culprit themselves.
To Barbossa's chagrin, still no one claimed the credit for the asinine idea of a prank.
"Huh?" Clubba grunted in confusion. He was looking up at the top of the mast.
Barbossa and everyone else followed his gaze and furrowed their brows at what they saw. Their black flag, once adorned with a skull and crossbones, now had some sort of writing on it instead?
"Scarus, bring that flag down here!" Barbossa commanded.
The man scurried up the rigging, being the fastest climber on the crew, and swiftly came back down with the flag in hand.
Barbossa snatched it from him and laid it out on the deck flat.
"'Get off my ship, or there'll be hell to pay!'" Ragetti read aloud.
"Yes, I have eyes, Ragetti!" Barbossa sneered.
"It must be Jack!" Koehler exclaimed.
Jack, the monkey, pointed at himself in shocked outrage.
"Not you, Jack!" Koehler clarified. "We saw Sparrow in Port Royal's prison! He must have slipped out somehow and stowed away on the ship!"
"I never knew Jack was so good at embroidery," Pintel admired the well sewn words in the flag.
"What, and not one of you has seen him?" Barbossa shot back. "I find that hard to believe. More likely, if he is on my ship, then some of you are helping him!"
Barbossa didn't outright accuse them, but the idea of a mutiny being conspired against him was forming within his mind.
It couldn't be a significant number of them. If it were, they'd have already made their move against him. Probably the more cowardly of the bunch.
Unfortunately, 'cowardly' didn't exactly narrow it down.
"Think you can wait until we're mortal and kill me in a surprise attack, eh?" Barbossa narrowed his eyes. "You think I'd let my guard down? I don't have my head in the clouds like Jack does, so it won't be that easy!"
*creeeaaak*
The ship started to change direction.
Barbossa, eager to prove his point, charged for the helm to catch the stowaway in the act!
Except, no one was there. The wheel was spinning to the right without stopping, but nobody was doing it.
"Hector…" a familiar voice whispered directly into his ear.
Barbossa drew his blade in a flash and cut through the empty air behind him. His eyes were wild with suspicion and disbelief.
"Where are you! Show yourself, coward!" Barbossa swung his sword blindly a few more times, as if expecting to hit something he couldn't see.
Down below, Ragetti and Pintel spared a glance at each other. ""The ship's haunted…""