Risteard’s Unwilling Empress

Chapter 3-1

Chapter Three

Ricki scanned the tent, looking for her father. A smile curved her lips when she saw he was talking with Stan, the computer genius behind many of their shows. Stan was a very nice man and had been trying to get her to go out with him for the past year.

The problem with that was she had a very strict rule about dating members of the circus. She wanted to make sure that anyone she dated was interested in her and not in her father and mother’s wealth. It would also make life difficult if things did not work out. Since she had no intentions of leaving the circus, it would mean either living with the person or they would have to leave.

Ricki considered herself a very calm, logical person who looked at all possible scenarios. Based on the probability of such a relationship not working out, she had decided the best avenue to maintain a happy and healthy work and home environment was to avoid any type of personal relationships with those that traveled with them. Since that only left dating those not associated with the circus, which was constantly on the move, it meant that she had not had any relationships to speak of. Oh, she had gone out on the occasional date with someone she had met during their travels, but she quickly found they were more enamored with her lifestyle than with her. That realization often turned into death for any promise of a second date.

Now, well… now, she might have to rethink her strict guidelines since they were no longer on Earth. Her gaze moved around the tent, taking in the familiar faces mixed with not so familiar ones. A light blush rose in her cheeks when she saw one of the Kassisan guards she had grown used to being around looking at her with interest.

No, she thought, schooling her face into the serene mask that she always wore when she felt self-conscious, things were not the same as they had been before.

Turning, she smiled at Jo Strauss, or Jo Ja Kel Coradon, as she was now called. Jo was her best friend and the only one who really knew and understood how inadequate Ricki often felt. She wasn’t talented like Jo and her younger sister, Star. She couldn’t fly through the air, or throw knives like River Knight-Ja Kel Coradon, or write complex programs like Stan, or make people laugh, or the hundreds of other things that her friends and surrogate circus family could do. She was good at two things, organizing things and dealing with the hundreds of complex problems that came with moving a circus the size of Cirque de Magik from one place to the other.

The smile on her face grew as she watched Marvin and Martin, the two Mimes who turned out to be aliens, stop Manota Ja Kel Coradon, Jo’s husband. She had always been fascinated by them. They were just so good at what they did that even she often got caught up in their antics. The discovery that they were not human didn’t make her think differently about them. If anything, it made them fit in even more. Her father and mother had welcomed such a variety of misfits and lost souls over the years that they were just part of the norm.

Who am I kidding, Ricki thought with a sigh. I’m just as much a misfit as the rest. Maybe that is why I never want to leave.

Her mom and dad had sat down with her when she was five years old and explained how she had come to be a part of their life. By then, she was almost as tall as her mom. She remembered asking her mom why she looked so different from them.