Royal Skies

By:

Captain Royal Keralyn Sky

(Inspired by Treasure Planet)

Shot One: Metal Harbor

I should probably tell you more about myself. My name is Keralyn Boldt. My father builds and repairs ships at a local Space Port called Metal Harbor. My mother stayed home and raised the children and kept the house from being torn apart. I have two brothers, one older and the other younger then I. My brothers and I are so different. First of all, my hair is a chestnut brown where as everyone else had black hair. They all have brown eyes while I have a silvery blue. And if that wasn't enough to convince you, my older brother Landon would always call me a stray mutt.

If that didn't get you then I don't know what will. It could have been that mother favors me over my brothers because I'm the only daughter. I don't know whether it was sibling rivalry or just plain hate.

At the age of four, I started trying to be like my older brother who at that time was six years old. I followed him and my father when they went to the harbor for work. Landon was learning the tricks of the trade. Now I'll be honest here, we weren't the richest of all families, but we got by. We were of the middle working class.

My father and my brother wouldn't want me at the harbor with them but for two completely different reasons. Landon didn't want me there because he thought I was a nuisance and my father just didn't want me to get hurt. So I had to spy on them. I actually learned a lot of things from just watching. I had to avoid some of the other mechanics there. They knew who I was and what I was doing.

That didn't stop me from trying though. My life was pretty routine until one day when I was seven years old; a Space Naval ship appeared at the Port, looking like it had just gone through an asteroid storm. When I heard the Captain of the ship speaking to my father I found out that they had gone through an asteroid storm and were lucky to have escaped with their lives. My father had to explain how extensive the damage was: Pretty damn bad.

The ship was in pretty bad shape. Some of the sails had giant holes pierced straight through them. As I inspected the side of the ship, there was a nice sizable crevice near the deck front. I was still poking around when something cold pressed against my back. I heard something click and I froze. It was a gun.

"Don't move!" came a voice from behind me, most likely the voice of my attacker. The funny thing was, the voice didn't belong to a man. It belonged to a child. It was high pitched and it sounded really confident. I thought it was a boy's voice at first but that's when you'd be surprised. I turned around and saw that it was a girl. She had shoulder length mahogany brown hair and amber colored eyes. "I said not to move!" she repeated. She sounded like she had been in command her whole life.

"Who are you?" I asked. She was dressed really high classed, wearing a red coat with gold trimmings and a red dress. She wasn't from around this area, that was for sure.

"I am Captain Plisken's daughter." She said. "My name is Viper."

"Cool." I answered. She lowered her gun, figuring that I wasn't a threat. "Viper is a pretty weird name." I said as we sat down on the dock.

Viper looked at her father's ship and pointed to the side of the ship where 'SRC VIPER' was visible against the charred wood. "My grandfather named this ship. My father then named me after it in remembrance of my Grandfather who was killed during a battle against Space Pirates."

"Oh." I said. She had an interesting history. My history was pretty plain. I liked her name too. It was different.

"So, what's your name? I told you mine." Viper asked, breaking my train of thoughts.

"My name is… Royal." I answer. I don't know where I got that from. It was the first thing that came to mind and if I took too long thinking about it then she'd know I was lying.

"And you thought my name was weird?" she laughed.

I'm not sure what happened then, but we became close friends. In fact, she was the only friend I ever had. Before, I was always concentrating on proving myself to my brother that I never bothered making any friends. Call me crazy if you want, but it had never occurred to me how important making a friend was.

My father may be the best mechanic at the Port but even he had trouble fixing the ship. He told Captain Plisken that it would take him a few weeks at the very least. So Captain Plisken and his crew stayed at a local inn while the repairs were made. Viper and I played at the docks often and tried to stall the repairing as much as we could but it was inevitable that she would have to leave eventually. She was my age. Perhaps a few months older.

While we played at the docks, a pair of boys kept picking on us. They were twins too. I knew who they were. They were troublemaking kids that lived near the Port. They had dark hair and dark eyes and looked exactly alike. I knew their names but I didn't know which name went with whom. Leonardo Saule Farrell and Theodore Houx Farrell. They had never bothered me before Viper came along, though I had seen them snooping around the docks like I did.

It was one foggy morning when Viper and I met at our usual secret pile of crates (our last secret pile of crates had been found out by the Farrell twins and the one before that had been loaded onto a ship). We knew that this would be the last time we'd be able to be in the company of one another. I heard my father telling Landon that the SRC VIPER would be leaving in the morning and that their payment would be sent to them when they got back to their Port.

"What do you want to do when you're older?" Viper asked me while we sat and watched the supplies being loaded onto her ship.

"I'd liked to explore the galaxy." I answered.

"Really? You don't have to be something that you don't want to, right?" Viper asked. I didn't know what she was getting at so I looked at her with 'What are you trying to tell me?' plastered on my forehead.

"You're lucky." She said. "My father kept telling me how great of a Space officer I'd make when I'm older. I think he wants me to take over for him after he retires." She explained.

"Why?" I asked. My father never pushed me to do anything like that.

"You see, I don't have any brothers or sisters and my mother disappeared a long time ago." She sighed. I screwed my face up trying to look sad. I personally thought my mother was lovely, but extremely annoying. When I wasn't home when she called for me, she'd freak out and have a heart attack until father dragged me home. She'd fuss over every little thing, all the way from a scrapped knee to a paper cut, so having sympathy for someone else was pretty hard. I mean, they didn't have to go through all that crap. Why are they complaining?

"Oh." Was all I could say. "I think Landon is going to take over for my father. And maybe Lawrence too." Lawrence was my younger brother. Unlike Landon, he actually seemed to like me. Lawrence is four years younger then me.

"You're lucky." Viper repeated as Captain Plisken waved and called out to her from the dock.

"What are the chances that we'll meet up somewhere?" I asked as she got up to leave.

"Pretty slim." Viper said grimly. She patted my head and waved goodbye to me as she boarded the ship. I watched as she leaned over the side of the ship and waved to me again. The ship lift slowly into the air and the launch throttles on the sides burst to life. Within a few minutes, the SRC VIPER had drifted into space.

My day went straight downhill from there. My life seemed so boring. That's when I did the unthinkable. I went to find the Farrell twins. I knew exactly where to find them. I went to the warehouse where all of our equipments were stored. I had seen them here before, digging around trying to build their own Solar Cruiser.

They were still at it.

They heard my boot heels against the stone floor and turned around in a hurry to hide their mischief. When they saw that it was only me they glowered.

"What's the big idea scaring us for?" the one bent over the tool box asked, with a hint of aggression in his tone.

"Well, you're stealing my father's equipment." I answered.

"Hah!, your dad has crates full of these things. I'm sure a few missing nails aren't going to kill him." the other one said. They then proceeded in ignoring me and continued their project. I walked till I was right in front of them. They both looked up at me with a cocked brow. They really were identical.

"Need help?" I asked. They both glanced at each other, then at me in suspicion.

"Run along Little Princess, we don't need help from a girl." they said and went back to pounding a nail into a piece of metal plate with a wrench.

"You're messing it up." I said. The one that was doing the pounding glared up at me.

"Yeah? What do you know?" he questioned. I supposed he wasn't expecting an answer seeing as he went back to pounding.

"Here," I grabbed the wrench from his hand and shoved him out of the way. "You should weld the pieces of metal together, not pound on it with a wrench and make dents."

I didn't look up at them but I knew they were sending messages to each other through facial expressions. After a few seconds, I looked up, wondering why they didn't stop me from messing up their project. That's when I saw Landon glaring down at me with my father standing behind him, holding the twins by the neck of their shirts.

My father grabbed the welding torch out of my hand and pulled me to me feet. Landon kept the twins in sight. Though they hadn't as even moved a muscle, Landon looked like he was ready to wrestle them to the ground. I turned my attention back to my father who was watching me carefully. He bent and picked up the pieces of metal that I had welded together. I knew that he had trouble with the twins before and was probably wondering how why his daughter was hanging around them.

"Keralyn, what were you doing?" he asked in a kind tone. I saw Landon's eye twitch.

"I was trying to make a Solar Cruiser." I answered.

"Aren't you afraid of falling off or crashing?" he asked, sounding a bit like my mother.

"No." I answered without a hint of fear. I hadn't really planned on riding it myself. I was just using it to make a peace treaty with the twins.

"Of course you're not." My father nodded for the twins to take their leave. They headed straight for the door, though they did glance nervously back at me. Was that a look of thanks I just saw?

(I don't know where this is going or if it's ever going to have a run in with the Treasure Planet story-line. The chances of that happening is...around 80 at this point.)

(I should probably mention that I have this really bad habit of never finishing my stories...) T-T