Marvin Parsons is just happy to be on land again.

It’s been months… MONTHS… since everything came to a head on the Parsons Cruise Liner. The Hacker’s ruse to get everyone off the boat by setting off fire alarms and pulling a Star Trek-esque countdown to self-destruct had worked, except for Marvin. He had been overcome by the real-but-limited smoke. When he came to, everyone he knew was gone.

The first month had been the worst. Confined to the Red Midget’s small lair underdecks, he had little except a computer setup and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Propel water and Powerbars, apparently a favorite of the midget’s. Using Red’s video surveillance setup, he was able to get a sense of who he shared the boat with, and even make terrifying runs to the galley in the middle of the night, or just to the nearest bathroom.

As near as he could make out, there were somewhere between 20 and 30 men on the ship, all “security” for the Hacker. As he learned names from his surveillance, he realized that not one of them ever spoke of their boss in any terms other than that… nothing that gave away who he might be or what his plans were.

Then came the first break. They docked at an island, restocking food, water and doing maintenance to the huge ship. Marvin had thoughts of escaping, running furiously off the boat and finding the first phone he could to let someone know where he was… but the gangplank on and off was clearly guarded. So he stayed in his hidey-hole, still trying to get a sense of the routine of the ship, and to plan…

The plan came easily after he saw how the crew swapped out just before they left the island. Almost half the crew left, replaced by another group on the island. They all wore the same approximate “uniform” as if they were a legitimate cruise ship crew. Over the next two weeks, Marvin used his surveillance and his growing knowledge of the maintenance decks and ducts to steal a “uniform” that would fit him. The next time they stopped at an island, he chose his moment… Causing a diversion with the help of Red’s system was easy – he simply set off an alarm, then jammed the walkie-talkies of the guards. The gangplank guard went up to the bridge to see what was happening, and Marvin took advantage, leaving the ship in his uniform.

He spent the next hour looking around furiously for a phone he could use, but no one seemed to want to have anything to do with him. They knew he had a come from “that ship,” the one that was a small cruise liner but didn’t have any cruise ship passengers. He headed back to the docks, just in time, it turned out, as the “replacement” crew was making it’s way to the ship. He joined in behind them – to them, he was one of the old crew coming back on board; to the guard on the gangplank, he was one of the new crew. His name was even on the new manifest… thanks to some more ‘hacking’ using the Hacker’s little midget’s own system.

He settled in as part of the crew for the next several weeks. For two weeks at a time he was a crewman, for the two weeks when he was supposed to be off the ship, he simply went back to his hidey-hole. He learned that the crew was made up of basically mercenary sailors – not pirates so to speak, but guys who couldn’t cut it in the merchant marine or the navy of their home country. All they knew was that they were supposed to keep this ship riding around the Caribbean, with several pre-determined stops on the calendar.

Oh, and they were never, ever supposed to bother the man in the Presidential Suite.