The English Pilot

📖 The English Pilot's Story

The English Pilot came across the sea on a mission from his queen, and somewhere between the ocean and the onset of the dojo's better sake he simply stopped going home. He stayed for a life of fighting and drinking with Legless Tom, which he maintains was the true mission all along, and which he pursues with the specific enthusiasm of a man who has burned his return ticket. He is foreign in every way that matters and it has never once slowed him down. When the wars ended, the men who belonged here mourned; the Pilot, who belonged nowhere, felt right at home, because a rootless man is never more comfortable than in a room full of the recently unmoored. He tells long stories in an accent nobody fully trusts. He is having, by a wide margin, the best time of anyone in the building. He arrived with a crisp foreign notion of discipline and lost it to the local sake inside a week, keeping only the accent, which he now uses to sound disciplined while being nothing of the sort.