Challenge #04850-M101: Treasure Trouble

Menson V'lek has inherited a map where his father buried a pirate fortune. The story goes that after a shipwreck during a great sea chase, the old man buried the gold he could not carry and high tailed it out of there. But something doesn’t quite add up with the old man’s story or his map, leading Menson to travel to the isle to unravel the truth. -- Deathshead419

[AN: Had to change a little spelling because found a real person with a similar name]

All his life, Menson had heard dad's tall tales of his adventures. The most re-told was how he wrecked a pirate ship and took all the gold for himself. Then how he had to bury the treasure because the boat he could make to escape the island was too small to carry it and his supplies for the journey.

There was a map and everything. A poorly-made map, but a map all the same. It could vaguely match several islands on the expert-level maps.

None of the features on dad's map matched any of the features on any of the islands. A couple were close, but there were no exact links. Which, as time went by, drove Menson slowly nuts.

It took years to narrow down the specific island it might be to one. Simply based on the seasonal weather that dad casually mentioned in a couple of retellings. The south-eastern island of O'uran. Visited occasionally for some of its native plants, but otherwise unremarkable. Too small to maintain a population of intelligent life, too out of the way to be a navigation hazard, and too poor in its one resource - beach root - to even have an outpost shelter made of resilient materials put there.

Menson got as close as he could to the island and rented a boat and supplies to get there. Dad's map in hand, and a whole bunch of scrying tools on his person, he went searching while the rest of the crew dug up beach root. Well. Mostly dug up beach root. There was a certain amount of fishing, fruit gathering, and general mucking about.

Menson trusted the scrying tools more than he trusted the map, but the map gave him a generic idea of where to start.

The mnemotiscope showed him the image of his father as a young adventurer, carrying a much smaller chest than the stories declared. Menson followed the image to a place further away from any calculated spots where it may be buried.

Dad might have misremembered. Even in the mnemotiscope, he looked hurried, so his map might be off because he'd drawn it long after he got away from the situation.

The digging itself was desperate, and the chest now lay not only under a collection of rocks, but a tree that had grown over it. Accidentally planted by dad, as it happened, by dragging a collection of vines over the whole thing. One neglected fruit had sprouted in the intervening years and was growing very well indeed.

Menson almost missed seeing what dad had been avoiding.

He saw a flicker in the mnemotiscope, and watched as dad's adventuring team caught up with the scene. They argued soundlessly on the mnemotiscope for a minute before charging off in a direction unrelated to dad's escape.

Dad had always said they died in the shipwreck...

And he'd always said he was running from pirates.

Menson couldn't help noticing that the rest of dad's crew were wearing piratical gear. So was dad, actually. On one hand, he knew dad's stories weren't one hundred percent horseshit. On the other, Menson had found out that dad had been concealing a few truths, and exaggerating others.

All that adventuring was long in the past, and the crew never came back for the chest.

Time to see what dad had called a treasure worth chasing across the world. Menson carefully avoided disturbing the young tree. Moving stones and soil to reach the chest.

Still intact, despite years under the ground and having elements of nature working on it. Kept shut with a simple latch, rather than a lock that would need picking.

He opened it then and there, and was briefly elated by the gleam of gold.

They were gold-edged trading cards, bearing art and words that made little sense to Menson. Twenty of them. Some dice made of semi-precious gemstones, and a ring.

None of them were even remotely magical.

Menson put the soil and stones back, and carried the re-latched chest back to the shore. Now that he had evidence, he might get the old man to tell the actual truth about his adventures.

In the meantime, it smelled like someone had made some seafood and fruit gumbo.

[Photo by @tekniq?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Victor Birai on Unsplash]

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