The Sandbox Saga, Part 3

The slavers took The Princess and her Friend, now semi-immortal and a hundred years away from home, to Treetown, after cruelly shaving their heads* and tattooing them**.  Treetown, you may remember, was a decorative crabapple in the middle of my back yard, about midway between the back door and the sandbox, making it the perfect trading outpost. The tree had a lot of chest-height limbs that were big enough to make into roads, and I was able to construct a number of nests and platforms that served as homes and public businesses. The general concept was straight-up lifted from Zilpha Keatly Snyder's Green Sky trilogy, but it worked.

The girls were sold to the feral children (yes, that is how I referred to them. The Feral Children would be an excellent band name, just so you know), the cabbage patch minis descended from Lizzie and her gang of orphan runaways. The tribe was in Treetown stocking up on the fruit--which were as big as the dolls' heads--which was crucial to their survival over the winter. They took the Princess and Her Friend back to the desert--a long and perilous journey--and eventually the group arrived at Summercastle.

Summercastle was extremely cool. Originally it was named because it was a castle that was rebuilt every summer, since it is tricky for a sandcastle to stand up to several feet of snow for more than a month. Eventually though, I discovered the proper balance of clay, sand, and straw to build a sandcastle that would last for years. It was pretty simple--a big pile of mud with a  big cave dug out of the front and two smaller ones up on the sides. Once the basic structure was dry, I was able to add walls and a few embellishments, but for the most part it was a solid sun-brick fortress that took up an entire corner of the sandbox.

It was the feral children's stronghold. The dolls with speaking parts lived there. To one side there was a temple, a similar, if smaller, building with a flat rock alter in the front so that sacrifices could be made. Across from the temple were the slave barracks--a literal hole in the ground which was occupied when the girls arrived by a full sized Barbie who had been captured by the feral children a few years before.

In a wacky coincidence of the sort eight-year-olds are full of, this doll was also deposed royalty. She was the former queen of a small country to the west of the desert, who had escaped after a coup lead by her son. She planned to go to Treetown to look for help, but the feral children found her first.

The next few days were fairly uneventful, until the Queen told the Princess and her Friend about her plans for escape.



*There was nothing more satisfying than shaving a barbie's head. Nothing. I think I had one who managed to avoid this fate, but she was a prostitute. All the others were soldiers, or assassins, or captured royalty--occupations that clearly called for a shaved head.
**Tattooing was also very exciting. It involved using a needle to punch holes in barbie faces and legs and then pushing chalk or charcoal in with a toothpick. I was also very into branding them--pull the copper strip out of a ruler and bend it into a pattern, then heat it up in a candle and apply to a Barbie leg. It smelled awful, but made my dolls look hardcore.***
***Don't try this at home.