NeverThatBored
Synopsis
A girl tells the story of the first Trash Pirate, an orphan named Trash. After acquiring some magical puppies, Trash sets out from the planet Port on a ship made of trash to gather a crew to help take care of the puppies. As the crew expands, it travels around the galaxy in search of the ultimate treasure chest, but clashes with the interplanetary Travel Association along the way. The TA's evil monopoly on space travel affects even the smallest, most distant planets that they visit. The only way to reach their destination is to work together with their magical puppies and liberate these planets, but the squabbling crew can only do that if they learn to get along first.
Excerpt
Whenever Trash decided to die, Keely decided to cuddle. There are a lot of false stories about Trash, but this I know is true. I witnessed the spectacle myself once, and Trash told me the stories of the other times it happened.
The particular occasion that begins this tale occurred on Port, the planet smack dab in the middle of the galaxy. Trash was born there, and had always lived there in a cargo workhouse full of orphaned children. The Travel Association employed the children unloading cargo from ships outside the atmosphere when they didn’t feel like landing. They paid them very little, and certainly didn’t love them, and it was all very sad and dreary, but Trash made the most of it.
Probably the most important thing to know about the first trash pirate is that no one has ever known whether Trash is a boy or a girl. Everyone on Port is androgynous, because its people have adapted to become whatever they need to be to please visitors, but Trash’s gender especially has always been a mystery. Unlike the other residents of Port, Trash wore both blue and pink. On the day Keely met Trash, it seems that Trash was being a girl. She was 9 years old, and had been entertaining herself by playing with some of the other orphans’ dolls, narrating out loud as she went.
“I’m a stupid evil jerk,” announced one doll.
“And I’m a sad orphan,” said the other.
Trash made the two dolls dance around in her hands like they were walking, then slammed the jerk into the orphan, apparently illustrating the treatment she was accustomed to at the workhouse.
“Oh, it hurts!” the orphan doll cried.
The children weren’t beaten, exactly, but they were pushed around, and Trash in particular was disciplined heavily. She couldn’t help it if she was restless when the other orphans wouldn’t play with her, but the workhouse boss had little patience for Trash’s energy, and often punished her or sent her to be by herself when she got creative to keep herself amused.
Accurate or not, the other orphans liked Trash’s show very much, and all laughed appreciatively as the orphan doll fought back against its oppressor.
Unfortunately for Trash, the workhouse manager had returned from his meeting early. As he walked past the open doorway to the sleeping room where the orphans had gathered, he stopped to prove that he was, as Trash had been demonstrating, a stupid evil jerk. It’s possible that he just didn’t like the sound of children laughing, or that he was insulted that Trash had captured his personality so accurately. Either way, the coincidence didn’t work in Trash’s favor.
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Adventure 3 - A Tale of Contradictions
They wandered the galaxy for days. Trash got so hungry that she thought her stomach would disappear, but she never once considered eating her dogs, who had grown enough that they could walk around on their own now. They had left too quickly to bring any provisions with them, and Trash knew nothing of the geography of the galaxy. All she could do was hope that she would find someone living before her body gave in.
Her first experiences with space travel were completely different than she had dreamed. The galaxy was huge — vast and dark and lonely. She thought she had known loneliness before, but even with the orphans she had people who talked to her. Being alone was exhausting, Trash found, and she wondered whether she would even remember how to speak when she finally found life again.
When she was on her last legs, Trash saw Leyes for the first time. It was a pale blue planet surrounded by clouds, even smaller than Port. Trash could feel how cold the place was even from far away, but the pirate had never been happier to see anything in her whole life. She descended into its atmosphere, praying that she would find someone to talk to, or at the least something to eat.
When she passed through the atmosphere, Trash expected to see a world something like her own beyond the clouds. Instead, the clouds never cleared. Trash could see forest and land and water, but the whole planet appeared to be covered by a heavy white mist.
She climbed through the door on the roof and used the anchor hook to catch a tree and pull the ship down fully to the ground. Keely whined at her from below, likely relieved to have a break from powering the magical ship.
“Well,” Trash told the dogs wearily. “At least you seem to have some energy. Let’s go see what’s out there.”
They descended to the ship’s bottom floor and left through the ground door. The first thing Trash noticed when she stepped onto Leyes was that the mist was colder than she’d realized. It would have been tolerable, though damp, with a coat, but with only a shirt and vest, it wasn’t long before the starving pirate began to feel her limbs go numb. She really should have kept those boots instead of throwing them out the window the first chance she got.
That was the first thing Trash learned about Leyes. The second was that everything on the planet was out to trick her. She saw what appeared to be a short tree with vibrant red fruit, and her hunger got the better of her. Just as she was reaching up to pluck the fruit from the nearest branch, the ground burst up under her. She found herself on the back of a giant turtle, who had been using the trees growing on its shell as bait.
She jumped out of the way as the turtle twisted its long neck to snap at her, making a sound with its lips that was as loud as any clash of metal Trash had ever heard. Keely had caught one of the puppies in her teeth and had another pinned to the turtle’s back with her paws, but the other two slid down the turtle’s back as it rose up out of the ground where it had buried itself.
Springing to action, Trash slid down the turtle’s shell, rolling out of the way as the turtle snapped at her again. The puppies whimpered as they tried to scramble back up the shell, but the texture was too hard for them to grab onto. Trash caught up to them in the nick of time, right as they were about to slip onto the ground. Getting them away from the turtle would not have been such a bad thing, but the turtle was so tall that the fall would have hurt them.
With the puppies momentarily safe, Trash considered fleeing back to the safety of the ship and landing somewhere else. As the turtle twisted its head back around, Trash’s stomach growled. Hungry turtle or no, that fruit on its back looked inviting.
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(Adventure 4 - The Tower Between Tumultuous Seas)
Renaldo agreed to go with Trash to the tower to find out what they could, even though Lucy insisted that it was a stupid idea. When they set out the following morning, Trash explained more about her travels.
“So, these puppies all have magical powers and you need to find people who can bond with them and activate their powers to join your crew,” Renaldo summarized.
“You don’t believe me,” Trash said.
“No, that’s not it,” Renaldo said. “I, well, I — no, not really. It all sounds a little crazy.”
“Just like your whole life,” Lucy said with malicious glee.
Renaldo glared at her, and she glared right back until he looked away. The puppies paced around the two restlessly, clearly disturbed by the tension between them.
“Don’t mind her,” Trash told the mouse boy. “She’s just not used to people, so she’s really excited that she actually has somebody to talk to. She likes you, really.”
“Funny way to show it,” Renaldo said, avoiding looking at the first mate.
“Let’s pick code names.” Trash said, cleverly diffusing the situation. “You can be Mouse, Renaldo. And Lucy, you can be L.”
“Huh, I wonder where you got those names from?” Lucy asked.
“Well,” Trash said. “Mouse obviously looks like a mouse, with his ears and eyes and tail, and Cricket likes things that start with L, like your name, so L makes sense for you.”
“I don’t think she really wanted you to answer that question, Trash,” Mouse said.
“Then why did she ask?”
Unsure how to explain rhetorical questions to someone like Trash, Mouse just changed the subject. “So, what’s your code name?”
“You can just call me Captain,” Trash said.
“Oh, this is going to go so well,” Lucy muttered.
“I think so too,” Trash said.
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“What’s wrong, Angelica?” the sparrow asked. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s warm,” the young princess said. “I can feel where all of the power came from. From the water and the fish and the plants and us too. From the sun. I’ve never seen it before, but I can feel what it’s like. It’s like something warm is rising in my chest.”
“Go ahead,” the king urged. “Soon you’ll be able to see it for yourself.”
Angelica cradled the gem in both hands and lifted it from the chest. As she did so, it started to crackle, its glow visibly expanding and heating up the deck as the energy built up inside of it. As instructed, Angelica thrust the stone over her head towards the window in the ceiling.
“Go go go,” she said, gazing up at the clouds. “Bring the sun back to me.”
The stone’s crackling intensified, its energy raising beads of sweat on the onlookers’ skin. Its light shot up and out, like lightning rolling through the clouds. The stone dimmed, and in the instant it took for their eyes to adjust to the suddenly darker lighthouse, it seemed as though the stone hadn’t worked.
Then the first beam of light broke through.
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(Adventure 5 - The Land of Insatiable Hunger)
“Poor Luum,” Angelica said.
“Poor Luum,” the chimera echoed, agreeing with the princess’s sentiment. “I’m done. I can’t go on like this. Take your treasure and leave.”
“But aren’t you still hungry?” Mouse asked.
“It’s not food that I wanted. I never used to be empty like this,” Luum said. “When I first came here, I didn’t remember what had been done to me. I was happy to have a duty, to have treasure to protect.”
“What happened?” Angelica asked.
“I’m not supposed to be like this. As time passed, I started to feel that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. I got emptier and emptier and soon I didn’t feel proud of my job anymore. I started eating everything I could to try to fill this hole.”
“Aren’t you better now that you remember?” Mouse asked.
“I’m not supposed to exist,” Luumair said. “I have three different sets of memories inside me. I remember three different homes, three different families. I’m going to hurt for the rest of my life, and I can never go back to what I was.”
The chimera cried out, and his voice resounded throughout the cave. It was the cry of a creature who had lost everything, who had lived for years and years in misery and finally realized that there was no chance to ever be happy again. Angelica began sobbing when she heard the cry, burying herself in Dennis’s arms. The dogs whimpered restlessly, responding to the animal pain in its cry.
“Luumair,” Lucy said, overcome by grief and sympathy for him.
Chest heaving with muffled sobs, she stumbled closer to the chimera, holding out a shaky hand. As she got closer to him, her hand came to rest against Luumair’s flank, and her forehead came to rest beside it.
“Luumair, I’m sorry,” she said, her voice faint and trembling. “I’m so so sorry.”
Mouse was ashen. He looked at Trash pleadingly, his watery red eyes begging the captain to do something. For once, Trash had nothing to say. There was nothing they could do for the chimera, no way to save it or make it hurt any less. Shore had decided that killing all of the chimeras was an act of mercy when he and the other rebels tried to stop The Chimera Experiments. Trash understood now why they had made that decision.
But to kill an innocent creature was more than Trash could handle. His fingers curled until they hurt as he took a step closer and said, “I’m sorry. Even with all of our magic, there’s nothing we can do to change you back.”
“Sorry, Luumair,” Lucy said again. “I’m so sorry.”
Soon, they were all wailing.
