Isana laughed cheerfully, then suddenly seemed to remember something and patted my arm. "Oh, right, Your Majesty, have you heard about the Ghost Ship?"
"Ghost Ship?" Her abrupt question caught me off guard, but then I immediately thought of her race and nodded in understanding. "Oh, you mean those legends about ancient wrecks drifting unpredictably across the sea, battered and unmanned? Humans have quite a few Ghost Ship legends. Merfolk care about that too? Don't tell me you were behind those ships?"
"No, not that kind of Ghost Ship," Isana said. Whenever she got anxious, she had a habit of swishing her tail, so I heard it slapping against the floor. "Though I did love exploring shipwrecks for treasure when I was little... Hey, that has nothing to do with this. I mean the popular legend that's been going around the Macro World lately. They say an Empire Warship retreating from a battlefield got separated from its fleet. The generals and soldiers aboard all vanished, and the ship drifted back to the Empire Zone under its mainframe's control. Since it couldn't find a port, it kept wandering through different universes and became a Ghost Ship. People traveling through space occasionally spot that enormous vessel. They say it looks dead, with only a few faint lights across its entire hull, its engines so dim they look ready to go out. The ship is covered in battered scars, and if you get close enough, you can even see dark corridors through its torn-open breaches. But nobody can board it, because nobody dares approach it, and the Ghost Ship always suddenly disappears, as if its mainframe is still trying to find a military harbor. Lots of people say they've seen it, especially old sailors from merchant fleets that transport supplies for the Minion