Prompt: Inspired by your favorite movie. I couldn't choose a favorite, but I decided on Treasure Planet :)

The sailors don't think the Mistral is real, but who's to believe them? They just hunch over their bowls of brandy, tubs if they've had a rough Frostfern, and grumble about treasure and the like. Treasure to sailors is more addicting than the stuff they're chugging down their gullets. The very smell of those cobswallows would send any right man in a drunken stupor.

But I'm no man, so I crouch over their shoulders, knees tucked to my chest and boots perched on the back of timeworn chairs, and listen to them spin tales of space. Dingy barstools and moth-laden lamps disappear in the brush of a galaxy, the explosion of a supernova, while battle-hardened sailors fight the squalls of the universe. They fend off carnivorous creatures and nearly always come in contact with a black hole. I had no idea black holes were so proficient in our dusty pocket of the universe, but you'd be surprised hearing their ramblings.

I know their stories are mostly false - everyone this side of Planetshine knows a hinkypunk has ten horns, not ten thousand, as Midshipman Evans tried to convince me once - but I listen all the same. Mostly to laugh, because the yarns are downright amusing, but also to greedily gobble up the little details of the vast world that lies before me. Sailors know details about the universe that the god-spanking deep night don't know about herself, and it fascinates me.

So every spare moment I can I hitch it down to the tavern, pulling my lousy hover behind me by a rope, and fill myself with tales of trawlers and doubloons. Rubies the size of my fist, my heart, my head that pour from the moons of Iegens like rain. Beautiful ladies from Taratulla with extra limbs who old Archie has a particular fascination with. The fastest schooners in the world zip before my eyes, and beyond the murky windows I can catch sight of the vast port that dovetails that tavern.

Archie's going on about the time he met Lady Mauvern from Taratulla for the fiftieth time, much to the enjoyment of the old frogs he perches next to, so I amuse myself by picking at the soles of my boots. They're AntiGrav, the real deal, like the real sailors wear. Only a few decades older, and they couldn't pull a fly back to the deck of the ship in the heaviest gravity anywhere. I bought them in hopes my mam would take my whole "space shenanigans" seriously, but she just whooped my hide for wasting our weekly budget. It was a hungry and painful week, but it was worth it. 

One of the veterans, Old Man Stevens, interrupts Archie's personal tale to regale the steadily growing crowd with one of his stories from the Great War, moving his massive girth closer to the wooden tabletops. I take the opportunity to weasel past him and stand closer to the window, which rattles as a particularly large barge lands with a thud on the dock. It's painted bright for the regatta, but with a pilot like that I can't imagine it's going to win anything. I spent three months learning the inner workings of barges just like it, and that pilot might as well have clamps for hands if his piloting skills have anything to say about him. Barges aren't the most lithe spacecraft out there, but they're certainly not the type to thump around the docks.

I'm jolted from my daydreaming when Old Man Stevens gives a wheezing laugh, dropping his fat fist on the table. The holoprojectors are disrupted and the swirling galaxy patterns on the ceiling flicker. Only this table is displaying anything worthwhile - the invisible camera swoops past Andromeda and Callus as I watch. The other tables and the bar are vidfeeding various beast fights, and the table in the far corner is showing something my young eyes should never be seeing. But I'm used to it now, surrounded by drink-loosened sailors. You learn a few things from the drunk and desperate.

If mam knew where I was she'd flip, but she's probably too busy with getting the Silensian wine out of Mrs. Fink's bloomers to worry. How a square like Mrs. Fink got hallucinogen wine on her undergarments is any guess of mine. Last I heard of her, the old fart was trying to buy whalebone skirts. I swear she's older than the goddy Queen. Maybe she's seen Planetshine form, I wouldn't doubt it with that collection of wrinkles she nurses so well.

"Go on, look a little more wistful." An elbow jams into my ribs and I scowl, turning to see Ro's familiar grin beaming down at me. I shouldn't say familiar, because Ro can shapeshift better than any Sindar I've ever met, but he keeps up a human appearance around me. Baggy clothes, raggedy spaceboots, and an infectious grin to boot. Ro's the only one on this lousy excuse for a spaceport that doesn't think I'm absolutely loony for wanting to get out there one day, to feel the solar currents tossing my locks and the light of Planetshine beaming down on me.

"Bugger off, will you?" I shove him away playfully. "I'm busy listening to Stevens' tales of woe."

"Yes, fascinating. His mother's died twice already." Ro replies, leaning back against a wilted-looking bamboo shoot. "How goes the war effort?"

"Many casualties." I hold up my hands, which are peppered with small burns. "Betsy isn't giving in so easily."

Betsy is my ugly honking trawler that mam inherited from some relative about the age of Mrs. Fink. I bet the brute of a ship hasn't seen the starlight since it was slapped together. Worthless, slower than my busted hover, and rusted to boot, she's been my project since I knew that people could go to space and never come back. She's got a nasty temper as well, such as belching hot coals at you when you're not looking. Ro's face morphs into one of sympathy.

"You ever going to get that thing up and running, Jade? Ever think about just buying a boat outta here?" Ro gets my need to go, and he helps as much as he can, but as long as Betsy's still got some spunk in here we're stranded planetside.

"You can be damn well sure I'm gonna." I bite back, shoving my hands in my pockets. "Sure as my spaceboots I am."

Ro smiles, but not unkindly. Like he always does. "I'll be hearing about your loads of treasure when you come back to port dressed like a queen."

"A king." I fire back. "Queens have to wear those ugly whalebone skirts like Mrs. Fink does, and have fans and act like a lady. I'm gonna wear pants with pride, you'll see. And my mam won't be able to say nothing about it, because I'll be too rich to put up with her."

"And we'll burn Betsy once you get a better ship." Ro nods solemnly, a flash of anger twinkling in his midnight-black eyes. He's seen the rotten nature of my ship, and I'm sure he's as ready as me to set her alight like she's set us every once and a while. 

In a way we're no different to the drunken old sailors, spinning tales that'll never happen. Getting Betsy up and running, being free of my mam - all dreams, just like the wild fantasies Archie warbles about in his half-sober stupor. A dark feeling settles in my stomach and I wonder if, like the stories of the sailors, my own story will ever come true. Ro seems to believe so, him and nobody else. The stink of planetside makes me sick, and I long for the taste of the stars on my tongue.

Maybe someday, I think as I survey the bar before me. Maybe someday, but not today.