You awake with a pounding headache face-down on a sun-blinded beach. As you push yourself up, the overwhelming reality of Nassau hits your senses. The air is thick with the putrid stench of rotting fish, open latrines, and the sweet, cloying aroma of West Indies rum. A few hundred yards away, a chaotic sprawl of canvas tents, driftwood shacks, and overturned longboats forms a miserable town. Pirates, runaway slaves, and bedraggled camp followers mill about the shore, while the hulls of a dozen plundered merchant ships bob lazily in the turquoise bay.

Standing over you is a group of figures who hold your life in their hands.

In the center is Captain Benjamin Hornigold, a stern man wearing a stained, high-collared British privateer's coat, his hand resting on a heavy cutlass. To his right, leaning against a weathered barrel, is a towering man with a coal-black beard braided into wicked cords—Edward Teach—watching you with sharp, unnervingly intelligent eyes. To Hornigold's left stands Captain Charles Vane, spitting tobacco onto the sand, his sneer making it clear he would rather see you hanging from a yardarm.

But your eyes also drift to two women standing just outside the circle of captains.

One is Maeve MacCarthy, a woman with sun-bronzed skin and a wild mane of dark red hair tied back with leather. She wears a faded blue sailor's jacket and a brace of pistols slung across her chest, eyeing you like a wolf sizing up a stray sheep. Beside her, shielded beneath a silk parasol held by a young cabin boy, is Catalina Vega. Dressed in fine, salt-stained European silks, her dark eyes spark with amusement as she sips from a silver goblet, watching you face-down in the sand.

Hornigold kicks your boot to see if you are truly conscious.

"Up, Doctor," Hornigold barks in a gravelly English drawl. "You're in Nassau now, well outside the reach of King George’s noose and the Admiralty courts. My men tell me you know how to sew a flap of flesh and stop the yellow jack from rotting a crew from the inside out."

"He looks soft to me, Benjamin," Maeve MacCarthy drawls, her sharp Irish accent cutting through the humid air. "The first time a man starts screaming under his bone-saw, this high-born gentleman will likely faint into his own linens. We need a surgeon, not a schoolboy."

"Oh, have some faith, Maeve," Catalina Vega interjects, her voice smooth, heavily accented, and dripping with mocking charm. "A real, educated doctor is a luxury this wretched sandbox desperately needs. I, for one, find his manners... promising. Assuming he survives the week."

"He'll survive if I say he survives," Charles Vane snaps, stepping forward and looming over you. "But if he wastes our supplies or tries to steal a longboat for Jamaica, I'll personally tie him to a reef at low tide."

Hornigold ignores them all, pointing a calloused finger toward a long, low-slung wooden shack near the edge of the squalid wharf. "That is your new infirmary. My quartermaster managed to salvage your bone-saw, some lancets, and a few vials of laudanum from the wreck. You work for the Brethren of the Coast now. We've a dozen of Jennings' men burning up with fever in the tents, and Maeve's own gunner's mate has an arm crushed by a recoiling cannon. Who do you attend to first, Doctor? Or do you intend to refuse us right here on the sand?"

What do you do?

Inventory: A standard pocket case of lancets, a rusted tourniquet, a half-empty vial of laudanum.

Status: Minor concussion, sunburnt, entirely captive.

Relationships: Hornigold (Demanding), Teach (Observant), Vane (Hostile), Maeve (Skeptical), Catalina (Amused).