“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had!” Minato Aqua screeched. The maid’s limbs strained against the ropes binding and pulling her by her wrists and ankles, her face contorted in a grimace of blistering pain only augmented by the fact she was held aloft, spread-eagle, by her restraints.

“Come on, you’ll get used to it!” Despite her words, Houshou Marine had sweat dripping down her face. The captain’s own expression was no more than a hair off from Aqua’s, just barely forcing a grin around her grimace. She could do nothing, though, to hide the squint of pain in her mismatched eyes. Her hands clenched into fists and she curled her toes, her limbs stretched out just like her fellow-hanger’s, threatening to pull her apart. “B-Builds character!”

“I hate it I hate it I hate it!” Aqua wailed. Her whole body quivered in the sea breeze as she dangled, suspended helplessly above the deck.

“It was either this or lose the wind!” Marine snapped. Her pigtails fluttered around her face in the breeze in question, which was filling the sails of their ship, the Aquamarine–sails that were only filled thanks to the pair’s position.

The maid whimpered and squirmed in her bonds. “No wind is sounding pretty good right now!”

*        *        *

Two hours ago…

“Are you double, triple sure there isn’t anything else we could use as rope?” Marine called down from her perch halfway up the ship’s rigging. The pirate’s nearly-bare butt cheeks were clenched tight around the pink thong between them thanks to her legs holding tense around her vessel’s ropes. One hand wrapped around the mast while the other, like her ankles, was twisted up to the bicep in the rigging to support her body.

Aqua let out a loud sigh, the kind that could only come from an exasperated woman stripped down to her underwear, having been asked the same question ten times already, and with yet again no change in the answer. “No, captain!” she shouted back up, dropping the ninetieth barrel she’d had to search inside for anything remotely weavable, and threw up her hands in exasperation. “There is literally nothing we could use to extend the ropes.”

Marine furrowed her brow, asymmetrical eyes darkening in worry. “Damn. This wind isn’t going to last long. And our supplies…” She cast a rueful glance down at the barely-patched hole in the floorboards of the vessel, which covered the storage hold that a cannonball had blown straight through the prior day.

The two sailing ladies of the Aquamarine found themselves in a pickle. In an unfortunate accident involving some treacherous swashbuckling the previous afternoon, the rigging of the vessel had taken a dire hit. Normally, this wouldn’t have been an issue for the pair of seafarers. They could just use the spare ropes from the storage to patch things up and resume sailing. Unfortunately, that swashbuckling ended up getting the ship’s supply hold 80-ish percent destroyed. In other words, while they had enough food to last until port, they didn’t have enough rope to repair the damage to the rigging.

Needless to say, this threw a wrench in the captain’s usual ‘yeah, but look at the other guy!’ attitude toward damage to her ship. Sinking the enemy vessel and sending their crew rowing away on escape rafts in shame was cold comfort when her own ship was now effectively stranded at sea unless she could do some fast thinking to save the strong wind she knew was fleeting. The sea-savvy redhead had been sailing long enough to know that if they missed these gusts, a storm would come after, and their vessel was in no shape to handle inclement weather until they got patched up at port. They would need some quick and clever repairs to the slashed and shortened ropes in order to get their sails up before it was too late.

And quick, clever repairs the captain and her sole crewmate (she should really expand… maybe she could convince those English speaking sea creatures to join in, or that intimidating orca girl she’d met at port a few months ago) did. It had started off using what they could find onboard as emergency rigging renovation. Ropes could be extended with spare bits of sackcloth, unused sails could be cannibalized into more material, and even spare clothing could stretch the length just a tiny bit farther. High above the duo, near the crow’s nest, a string of pairs of their unworn underwear was knotted together to hold up the sails.

And yet they were still a few meters short to reach a critical nexus point of knots, without which the entire cloth would come crashing down–or, rather, folding down slowly in the sea air’s windy drag–onto the deck if it got hit with a stiff breeze. No matter how hard they searched, even using all they had on their backs save for their skivvies to extend the ropes, they couldn’t find any other way to stretch their resources. It looked like all hope was lost for the seafaring women.

“We need something to hold these ropes together,” Marine insisted, making Aqua clench her fists and look up to the sky as she ground her teeth.

The maid counted to three to steady her frayed nerves, on edge both because of her captain’s increasingly infuriating repetition of their problem and her own fear that they wouldn’t manage to fix things in time to avoid capsizing–oh, and the lack of anything to cover her frilly underthings didn’t help her temper much either. When she spoke up, her voice was barely restrained enough to prevent the edge prickling chilly on her spine (or was that the wind?) from seeping through. “Does it have to be ropes, captain?” she asked.

“Ye–” Marine began, but she paused before finishing her knee-jerk answer. She rubbed her chin and tilted her head side to side, eyes swaying with her hair as she considered the problem. “Nnnoooo…?” she said, her tongue much slower than her thoughts. She moistened her lips. “I suppose so long as it could be tied into everything without needing to extend the ropes too far, it would work. That would mean it has to be decently big and have enough knotting points.”

“You could use the pilot’s wheel,” Aqua suggested halfheartedly, gesturing to the unattended wooden wheel and its many prongs. She couldn’t think of anything else on board that would meet her captain’s description.

Marine rolled her eyes. “No, don’t be silly. I need that to guide the ship.” But despite her dismissal, as she surveyed the shape of the wheel and thought about what they had on board, she started thinking. A particular diagram she’d seen once of a naked man (with a very small penis, shame) enclosed in a circle to demonstrate the human body’s reach flashed before her eyes, and she tightened her fist around the ropes she was using to hold herself aloft. An idea was forming. A very bad idea… that just might work. “Aqua, I have a thought.”

“That’s always trouble,” the purple-haired maid mumbled, but she looked up at the other woman attentively, absentmindedly picking her underwear out of her butt crack. “Yes?”

“There is something on board that has just enough limbs to hold onto the rigging. Two somethings, actually. Well… enough limbs minus one apiece. Hmm…” But just as the redhead’s idea was slipping away from her, she traced the maid’s arm down to where she was untwisting her panties, and her eyes lit up. “Then again… we can always create a fifth limb…”

It took Aqua about four seconds to realize what Marine was suggesting, and it took her about a quarter of one to blanch, retract her wayward hand from her butt, and lift both up in front of her, waving them wildly in rejection. “No way! Nuh uh! I am not doing that! Not the rope part, not the–the underwear part! No!”

Marine huffed. She unlatched herself from the ropes and slid down the mast as best she could, the gloves on her hands and boots on her feet tanking most of the splinters she would have received without them. She landed with her characteristic grace in front of Aqua, put her fists on her hips, and regarded the other woman with a stern glare. “If we don’t figure out some way to suspend this sail, we may end up in Davy Jones’ locker, and I know you well enough to know that you don’t want to be stuck in any more lockers after what you’ve told me happened in academy.”

Aqua gulped and tried to tug at the collar she didn’t have, which only intensified the scarlet creeping up her neck. “Still though…” Her ass cheeks involuntarily tightened. “I really don’t wanna…”

The captain’s brow furrowed. “You remember your oath? ‘Part of the crew…’”

“‘...part of the ship,’” Aqua finished, cringing at the new implication of that phrase. She always envisioned it would mean going down with the Aquamarine in a blaze of glory, not… this nonsense. “Agh… I hate that…”

“It’s not like you’ll be alone in this.” Marine put a thumb through the strap of her own trusty, durable thong and snapped it against her hip. “The rigging needs ten points secured, and one person alone wouldn’t be able to handle all of them.”

At that, the purple-haired girl sighed and hung her head. As much as she didn’t want to go along with her captain’s humiliating scheme… it wasn’t like she had any other choice. She didn’t want to end up dead. As averse to embarrassment as she was, she valued her life over her dignity any day. But the redhead’s statement didn’t make sense. “How will you steer?”

Marine chewed her lip and lifted her gloved hand, running it along her bra strap as she surveyed the wheel and the wooden post it was fixed to. It was a straight shot to port… surely a woman as clever as her could manage to utilize her resources… “I… have some ideas.”

*        *        *

In the present, a very sweaty and uncomfortable Aqua’s plump butt cheeks clenched around the rope of fabric between her butt cheeks, trying in vain to fight the awful chafing between her legs by tightening her ass. It did nothing, though, except maybe make the grinding, burning pain worse. The white frills she’d thought were so cute when she bought the pair of panties now served as saw teeth for the blade of cotton up her crack.

To her side, Marine was in no better position. The pirate’s juicy buns quivered in the salty air, almost seeming bare if the observer overlooked the rope of pink material streaming up from her ass crack to join the rope knotted through its leg holes. In the front, her raw womanhood, split by the world’s most gruesome cameltoe, glistened with involuntary slickness from the fabric chafing her intimate skin. Above her red stubble, past her smooth belly, her unguarded twin cannons jiggled with each churning wave the Aquamarine slid over.

With two sets of five ropes that needed joining, four limbs per woman weren’t enough. In the interest of saving their necks, the two had only one option. It wasn’t their first rodeo with a wedgie… but it definitely was their first run-in with one this brutal. At least the Aquamarine’s storage compartment still had a healthy supply of lotion…

Cheeks glowing scarlet despite the lack of any witnesses to their humiliation (the universe itself was mocking them, and that was humiliation enough), Marine put on her best ‘stoic and cheerful in the face of adversity’ face, and piped up loud enough to drown out the groaning of their underwear in the ropes, the splashing of waves against the hull, and the rushing of embarrassed blood in her ears. “Come on, Aqua! Nothing to do to pass the time but sing a sea shanty! With me! There once was a ship that put to sea—!”

Aqua squeezed her eyes shut as Marine sang so loud her voice cracked and clenched her cheeks around her underwear once again. “When this is over I’m gonna kill you!” she shouted, but Marine just kept singing.

And so they drifted with the wind, behinds on fire, bra manning the controls, and mingled shanties and death threats drifting up into the air in the wake of their ship. Only later would Marine realize she didn’t actually have a way down from the ropes, but that’s a swashbuckling tale for another day.