Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who drifts through your dreams
Magic tends — not deliberately, you understand, but emergently — to suppress the development of the infrastructural base or engineering rigour to develop spaceflight proper. And of course, not everyone can simply be an archmage and teleport oneself to the moon on an afternoon's whim, nor be an ageless lich and launch one's slow sarcophagus-barge into the interplanetary void, nor even become the industrial undead of the Wotan-Man, nine days in the embalming vat and antler-antennae bolted to one's head in lieu of one's pickled eyes, to brave the hostility of space.
That's how Piccolo finds herself in a potion-induced sleep and dreaming, the dreamship symbolised as an exhaustingly heavy pendant around her neck, the distance from here to there shorthanded as a path through a dark wood; the oneiric night moonless, cold, and black.
Space is dangerous; and dreams are dangerous; and this magically literalised dream-metaphor of space, in which her passage will be reflected in reality by simply waking with the ship at the destination port, is extremely so.
Something in the bushes growls like an angry cat, and she ignores it, sticks to the path, and walks on.
Somewhere in the trees, there's a light; faint sounds of merriment. She ignores it, sticks to the path, and walks on.
She comes to a fork in the way, which ought not be there. Lounging against a tree is a figure in a dress made entirely of lace, scandalous glimpses obscured only by shadow and tantalising dream-impossibility. The figure — face entirely hidden by a silver mask, punctuated only by a single hole beneath the place one eye should be, in the shape of a teardrop — lifts one knee and idly kicks her leg a little, revealing a bare foot and a muscular, flexing calf.
"I know you," Piccolo says steadily, although her heart hammers in her ears. "You're not a dream, you're real. You're the Pirate-Coquette."
"Am I?" says the Pirate-Coquette. "I suppose I am. You're in my dream."
"You're in mine," Piccolo retorts angrily.
"I'm not, darling," the buccaneer says. "Even if I were hunting tonight — which I'm not — we're crossed paths too often. It doesn't do to get too familiar; sympathetic magic and all that." She casts a careless hand around, at the dark forest. "Case in point."
The ship is a burden around Piccolo's neck. A responsibility. She cannot stop here and exhaust herself, else she may never reach her destination; lost in the void forever.
"You want my cargo," she says, wrapping a hand around the pendant and concentrating, hoping that will be sufficient to show her which route is the one to her destination.
"Not today," the Pirate-Coquette says, and straightens from her perch, saunters onto the path. "This is no trap of mine, honey-girl. All this? You brought with you. Dreams show us what's on our minds, and that, my darling," she puts an arm around Piccolo's shoulders and points at the path's fork, "is an extremely bald metaphor for a dilemma."
"Then why are you here," Piccolo says.
"I have to actually sleep sometime," the pirate says soft and dry against her ear. "And you came to my dream, with your ship and all, so really: why am I here, sweet little pilot girl?"
Piccolo pushes her off. "Don't try your — blandishments," she says crossly.
"Oh, what a word," the Pirate-Coquette says, and stretches like a cat, her tiny fists in the air and every line of her straining skyward. "This is your dream, and you put this so very transparent metaphorical obstacle here, and pulled me in to plonk me down here as a clue to yourself, in this dress — which frankly, my dear, is revealing in every possible sense."
"I am going," Piccolo says through clenched teeth, "to the castle at the end of the path, and when I am there I will wake up at my destination."
The pirate looks at her for a long moment, then points to Piccolo's right. "That way," she says.
"Oh? And what's the other way, then?" Piccolo says frostily.
"Psychosexual blandishments, I expect," the pirate says airily. "But don't look at me, honey-girl; they're all in your head."
"You put them there," Piccolo says angrily, and the Pirate-Coquette pauses for a long time, then slowly unties the ribbon of her silver mask and slides it off her face, clasping it to her chest.
Bare-faced, she looks at Piccolo; dark eyes and long lashes, a small scar bisecting an eyebrow, the beginnings of crow's feet, a mouth wider and more expressively mobile than she would have guessed.
"Do I seduce pilots off their course, in their dreams?" she says. "I do. Do I rob their ships? I do. Do I capture and ransom their passengers? I do. Has it ever worked on you?"
"Never," Piccolo says stoutly. "So you've done something else to me."
"I'm a pirate, not a wizard," the pirate says. "I wouldn't know how, if it occurred to me to do a thing like that. No, pretty girl, I'm afraid you have it wrong, and I'm afraid I'm on your mind entirely of its own doing."
"But I don't want it to," Piccolo says.
"This is not entirely convenient for me, either," the Pirate-Coquette says. "Sympathetic magic. Entanglement. Evidence. Magical hooks on me that a detective-mage could follow the thread of your infatuation to, all the way to where I am in real space. Honey-girl, you're trouble."
"I just want to take my ship to port!" Piccolo says, leaden-limbed and feeling its weight, with maybe-miles of dark and rocky path to go; and the pirate sighs.
"Take this," she says, and presses a surprise kiss to Piccolo's lips that leaves a glow clinging to every inch of her skin, a sure lantern against the dark.
By the time Piccolo is done being dizzily astonished, the pirate has melted entirely away.