Knock Twice
In fog, people at the harbor knock before they step aboard. You pick a piling at the edge of the floats, rap it twice with your knuckles and listen. If something under the dock knocks back, you stay ashore.
The custom is said to be as old as the pilings at the harbor, and nobody can date it closer than that. The fishing crews keep it, and so do the harbor hands, the college's research crews and the students who go out with them. A newcomer usually raps too hard the first time.
Then everyone listens while the sound goes out into the fog. On a thick morning you cannot see the end of the dock, only mooring lines running off into gray. Water slops between the floats. A line creaks at a cleat. Old hands give it a slow count of ten. Students give it longer; some are still standing there when the skipper calls them aboard.
Most mornings nothing answers. When something does, it comes from under the boards: two knocks, sometimes one, dull and wet, and never quite below the piling that was knocked. Now and then it comes late, when someone already has a boot on the gunwale.
Crews that hear it do not talk it over on the floats. They carry the gear back up the ramp and go for coffee, and the boat stays tied up until the fog clears.
The arguing happens later, in town. The fishing crews blame the swell lifting a float and knocking its ring against a piling. The college crews blame a drift log worked in under the floats. A few will not guess at all, and they are not joking.
Harbor hands who have worked the floats for thirty years will swear they have never heard an answer, and they say it quickly. Most of them still knock. When somebody asks what happens to a crew that goes out after an answer, the old hands tell them the boat comes back with an empty hold and a day's fuel burned for nothing.
Out of character: in play.
- Keep the custom by knocking twice on a piling at the harbor before boarding in fog.
- Whether anything knocks back is the scene's call.
- Nobody in play ever sees or names what is under the dock.
- Your character can keep the custom, skip it or laugh at it.