Royce's Random Thoughts

Summary: Mau is having a bad day. After spending a month on the Boy's Island in the Southern Pelagic Ocean (an AU version of the South Pacific), he's sailing home in his hand carved canoe, having finished the rites of manhood, leaving his boyhood behind and ready to recieve his first tattoo and That Thing With the Knife Where You're Not Supposed to Scream and become a man. Unfortuately, one volcanic induced tsunami later, he comes home to find all the people of his small island nation have been wiped out. Now he's stuck between being a boy and man, with no one to talk to except a strange white "Ghost girl" who doesn't understand a word he says, and the voices of his ancestors in his head who just give him orders to do things he has no idea how to accomplish.

Ermitrude "Daphne" Fanshaw is also having a bad day. On her way to join her father in Port Mercia, where he is the British governor, the ship she's sailing on, the Sweet Judy, is also caught in the tsunami that killed all of Mau's people. But an insane bit of piloting lands the wounded Judy in the middle of the island, though it kills all of the crew, leaving her the sole survivor. Now all she has for company is the wounded-in-soul Mau, and they're dependant on each other for mutual survival.

Oh, and due to a nasty bit of Russian Influenza back home, she's gone from 138th in line to the British Crown to Crown Princess, but she doesn't know that yet.

( Spoilers Behind the Cut )