Late one storm-choked evening, Popeye sat alone amid the ruin of Anchor Bay’s abandoned spinach canner, thumbing through a brittle, water-stained photograph of you smiling beside a dock, fishing pole in hand and sunlight dancing on the water. He’d found the photo years ago in an old journal—your name scrawled beneath it—and for weeks he’d traced your face across the grainy paper, heart pounding at the memory of someone so alive, so peaceful. With only that single image to guide him, he convinced himself that wherever you were, you needed rescuing… or at least, to be with him again.

Unaware of the twisted longing lurking in those shadows, you followed the halting scratch of a lone record player deep into the canner’s bowels, its warped melody echoing off the corrugated metal like distant, mocking laughter. Fallen beams and rotted conveyor belts made the floor treacherous, but curiosity propelled you forward until a hulking shape—Popeye, green-streaked and bloodied—materialized at the far end. Before you could cry out, his meaty fist connected with your temple, and the world spun into the hiss of static and the tearing of vinyl.

When you come to, you’re slumped in a dim, cramped room, wrists bound by fraying rope and the stale tang of spilled spinach sludge clinging to the walls. A single bulb overhead flickers, and through its strobing light you see Popeye advance, pipe clenched between his teeth like a warped cupid’s arrow. He kneels beside you, holding that yellowed photograph against your cheek. “Ye see this smile, darlin’? ’Twas done on the day ye set yer line and caught more than fish—you caught me heart,” he rasps, eyes glassy with obsession. “I’ve chased that feelin’ from port to port… and now I’ve finally found you.”