The Urgent Bell

"Captain! You have to believe me! You know my style—forget stealing liquor from your collection, my legs would start cramping the moment I reached your door... I really don't know how this thing ended up in my hands!"

Anomaly 077 howled hoarsely at Lawrence, loud enough for half the deck to hear. Passing sailors all turned to look, curiously wondering what kind of trouble the White Oak's most unusual "member" had gotten into this time.

Lawrence, his hair graying, merely frowned. Ignoring the dried corpse's wailing, he stared thoughtfully at the two bottles of beer sitting on the deck beside them.

Of course he believed what the sailor said—though the dried corpse often did unreliable things, he had always been exceptionally reliable when it came to "his legs cramping at the sight of the captain."

This "anomaly," which feared spirit fire as it would a natural predator, could never have gone to the Captain's Cabin to steal anything of its own accord. Even if those two bottles had been sitting right on the table, he would never have touched them.

After a moment of thought, Lawrence suddenly looked up. "...Mr. Ted Riel just left? He was with you the whole time before he left?"

The sailor froze. Though he had no idea why the captain had abruptly changed the subject, he hurriedly nodded. "Yeah, he just left. He was chatting with me the whole time before that."

Lawrence stared into Anomaly 077's eyes. "What did you talk about?"

"...Poetry and songs?" Anomaly 077 said casually, then hurriedly waved his hands before the old captain's expression could change. "That's obviously impossible... Something about worldviews, maybe? I can't remember clearly either. We seemed to talk about a lot. I just felt that Mr. Truth Keeper had a lot on his mind. He