The Princess and the Pirate

By Alexandra I. Spears

Author's Note: Any familiar characters are not owned by me, but by Mattel or whoever owns them now.

Instead of swords-and-sorcery, this is more swords-and-sci-fi. I've been kicking around this idea for quite some time. What if there were no He-Man and She-Ra, but rather just Adam and Adora? And how about a new and interesting origin for Eternia and Etheria? Yes, this is an alternative storyline. I personally grow a bit tired of the dual-identity bit after a while!

Prologue

In the thirteenth century, English Franciscan monk Roger Bacon wrote in his Epistola de Secretis Operibus that "cars can be made so that without animals they will move with unbelievable rapidity" and that "flying machines can be constructed so that a man sits in the midst of the machine revolving some engines by which artificial wings are made to beat the air like a flying bird." And those were only a couple of his predictions.

By the middle of the next century, there was a dedicated group of scholars in southern England working to make such things happen, and they were meeting with plenty of success. They had to work in secret, lest the Catholic church denounce them as heretics and sorcerers. Already they were making huge strides, as this group was comprised of some of the greatest intellectual minds of the century. By the time the Great Plague hit, they were experimenting with gates that tapped into wormholes. Special vehicles had been constructed, allowing travel through the wormholes. The scholars had discovered two worlds that were compatible with human life and had built gates, so now they had a way to not one, but two new worlds.

Some of the scholars were sure that the plague would wipe out the entire known world. Word had gone forth among the people that there was a way to escape Europe and the plague, and to start over on a new world. At the time the people were in a panic, as one never knew who would die next. Parents were burying all their children in one fell swoop in some cases. Others went to bed only to be found dead the next morning. It was quickly becoming apparent that "those who pray" could not save them, so even an idea so outlandish as what was being proposed sounded good-better than dying.

Thousands of people made their escape through the two gates, which were later destroyed, as a few of the scholars planned to stay behind and experiment further. In time, the two worlds were named Eternia and Etheria. In each case, a man descended from the Plantagenet kings was proclaimed king, and on Eternia it was a man named Ranulf Fitzroy.

After the mass exodus to the two new worlds, the scholars died during the Inquisition. Knowing that their time was limited, they destroyed their technology as well as their documents. As a result, over the next six hundred years, no one knew exactly how many died during the plague-or that a lot of Europeans had actually escaped the planet.

On each of the worlds, English, which was being spoken by more and more people in fourteenth-century England, continued to develop. Latin and French were still spoken by some, but in time, on each world, English came to be the dominant language.

In the late twentieth century, a young astronaut by the name of Marlena Glenn was piloting her ship, the Rainbow Explorer, through uncharted space. Unexpectedly, she found herself in a meteor shower-then in a wormhole. After emerging from the wormhole she lost contact with Earth and crash-landed onto Eternia.

By that time, Eternia was a well-populated and relatively peaceful planet. Over time, the House of Fitzroy had become the House of Kingston, due to a woman having acceded the throne four hundred years prior, and Eternia's king was a man by the name of Randor Kingston, who was a direct descendant of Ranulf Fitzroy. He and his best friend, Duncan Mann, who was an inventor and his man-at-arms, found Marlena wounded in her spacecraft.

After Marlena recovered, she and Randor fell in love and married, and two years after their wedding she gave birth to their twins, Prince Adam and Princess Adora. Duncan's wife Teelana gave birth to their daughter Teela a month after the twins' birth.

For their first eighteen years, the twins and their friend Teela had a fairly safe and happy life. Teela was like a sister to Adora, and rumor had it that it wouldn't be long before they became sisters-in-law.