I am a Pirate, You are a Princess (Kaitlyn)

As Palmer stood guard at the top of the blue spiral slide, he heard a few bumps from below. Somebody was trying to climb up! "Who goes there?"

A red-headed girl in striped long sleeves revealed herself as she neared the end of her climb. She looked older than the seven-year old. "So, ye be callin' yourselves pirates." She wasn't asking him a question.

"Yeah, we're pirates." This earned him a sneer.

"Ahoy, then lad. I needs to talk to yer cap'n, mind if I be comin' aboard?"

She sure had the voice down, but that neither changed the rules nor softened the blow to his piratical pride. Lad? He couldn't have been a year or two younger than her! "Can't do that. You need to give us some treasure if you want on the boat... arr." The hastily added 'arr' definitely made him sound more like a pirate.

With a melodramatic sigh, the girl's hand dove into her pocket, and retrieved a coin the likes of which he had never seen before: silver around the edges, with a golden disc in the center, it was labeled '2 Euro.' "A silver and gold doubloon, picked from the pocket o' the King hisself." The 'King' in question being the loud foreigner from whose pocket the coin had fallen while Kaitlyn was on the subway. She only had to pick it up, no thievery required, but nobody needed to know about any of that.

The seven-year old snatched the coin from the girl's hand, and pretended to inspect it closely. He was impressed."Okay, you're in." He reluctantly scooted over to make way for the new addition to the pirate crew. And that was this was the last girl that was going to join, if he had anything to say about it. It was bad enough that he had to put up with his sister, whose pigtails he had greatly enjoyed messing up earlier that day.

"All right, you scallywags!" Kaitlyn shouted as she ascended onto the platform. "Who's the cap'n o' this crew?"

Did the captain ask why this girl wanted to see him? Did he welcome her aboard? No, on both counts. Instead, he tried to snatch her doubloon right out of her hands. Kaitlyn tried to keep it away from his reach, and he kept trying to reach for it. "It's a doubloon I took from the king. Quit it!"

>"Can't you see she iz royalty?"

Kaitlyn turned to look at the helmsman with the awesome accent. Who's he talking about? Me? The boy's bow was answered with a quizzical look from the girl, as well as the captain and several other members of the crew.

>"If she has ze King's coin of his pocket, she must have known ze King. What iz your name, Princess?"

That earned him a smile. She was a princess now. "Kaitlyn. What's yours?"

Thankfully, the captain had decided to stop trying to grab her coin. Now, what could she do with her new title? What do princesses do on pirate ships? The kid stood deep in thought for a few moments, weighing her options.

His name was Jude, and he described himself as her 'humble servant.' Kaitlyn now had a self-proclaimed servant with an exotic accent. She smirked, leaning on the railing that the steering wheel was attached to. As a princess, she was entirely above doing something as brutish as... pirate-stuff. Thus she excluded herself from helping the crew with their various swashbuckling duties.

>>"Zat coin is hard to come by here. Are you far from home?"

"...Yeah." The girl had to take the subway to get here. Anything further away from the Sanctuary than walking distance qualified as 'far from home.' And the money was just play money, right? She couldn't use it in any vending machines, so it probably wasn't actually worth much.

Now, what could a princess do on a pirate ship? Furthermore, why would a princess even be on a pirate ship in the first place? Leaning over the railing, she watched as dramatic battles unfolded around her, trying to assign meaning to the conflict.

Inspiration struck! Kaitlyn leaned in and whispered: "Jude, you said you were my servant, right?"

"Well, I stowed away on this ship so I could be safe from the evil king, my dad. But I didn't know the ship I chose would get attacked by sea monsters." She pointed at a group of kids who were trying to climb the rock wall thing, shouting that they just wanted to use the slide. The pirates in charge of defending the rock wall had little pity to spare. "If those sea monsters get on the ship, I'll need to run away to somewhere safe. But you have to come too, to protect me from the sea monsters. 'Cause you're my servant."

As Jude gallantly threw himself between the princess and another group of kids, Kaitlyn took a moment ro realize what was happening. They already needed to abandon ship, since they were being overrun by horrible sea monsters! Cue melodramatic gasp.

The girl was just about to start down the slide as told, but when Jude started helping himself to the treasure, she decided to grab a few leaves for herself. One of the wonderful things about being royalty was being entirely above the law.

Once the duo had escaped the pirate ship, the pirates were quick to react. Shouts of "Catch them!" and "Get the treasure back!" echoed throughout the playground while children mobilized themselves to give chase. Kaitlyn and Jude needed to get away, and fast. "Follow me!" the princess ordered her servant, attempting to lead him out of the playground area and onto the trails of central park. If they were fast enough, they could probably lose the pirates on the road.

Kaitlyn, unlike many other children, wasn't accustomed to staying within sight of some type of babysitter.

Older people were shouting, and the other children stopped pursuing. Princess Kaitlyn stopped running and looked behind her, seeing nothing but a vacant trail outlined with vegetation. What's going on?

>>"You are smart for your age."

This made Kaitlyn smile, even though she was afraid that she was missing something obvious.

Jude was probably making a reference to why all the other kids had stopped chasing them. Apparently, that big group of adults by the benches wanted to stop the kids from going... somewhere. Were they in some sort of off-limits part of the park? Whatever the case, asking would probably make the princess look bad. For all intents and purposes, everything was going according to plan. The rest of this amorphous "plan" would just have to get made up as they went along.

Sh!

Twigs broke under the weight of the two falling children, while the leaves of adjacent bushes rustled in protest. A jogger jogged by, blasting his ears with music from a tiny mp3 player. Jude looked prepared to chivalrously protect her from the nearly-deaf creature.

With the potential threat once again out of sight, the princess whispered, "Do you think they're still following us?"

So, the chase was still on; the other kids were probably just being sneaky about it. This was going to be fun. Princess Kaitlyn took her servant's hand to get back on her feet

>>"We should go back to tell my Ghost zat they didn't get us."

Blink

"You have a ghost?" Kaitlyn started walking the way where Jude was pointing before she even got an answer. It wasn't like she had any non-nebulous plans that would get in the way of her seeing somebody's ghost.

>"Don't you?"

Confusion warped Kaitlyn's face for a moment, but she soon regained her regal composure: "Oh, of course."

And with that, the brave servant led his princess through the thick treacherous forest, defending her from all sorts of threats along the way. That bush that Jude just thwacked with his stick sword? Obviously, this was not a bush, but a cleverly disguised, fiendish creature that surely would have eaten them if it hadn't just been slain. She kept a firm hold on his hand and followed closely, so they wouldn't get separated.

...Because it just wasn't safe for a princess to be running around by herself in such a thick, treacherous forest, of course.

She kept holding on even when they got closer to the benches.

>"Come meet my Ghost. She helped me save ze world once."

So, now he was some kind of world-saving super-hero? That sounded like a great springboard for more pretending. Kaitlyn might even be able to teach him how real super heroes operated along the way, being one herself. Because this was a pretend game, though, Kaitlyn reminded herself to look awed by this revelation. She had a questionable degree of success on that.

The "ghost" wasn't an actual ghost, it seemed; just a person who had to keep track of Jude and went by "ghost." What a name.

>"...Do you have a new friend?"

"I'm Kaitlyn," the redhead chimed in, then looked at the other kid for confirmation that they had, indeed, become friends earlier.