The Sandbox Saga, Part 4

So, returning to a story that I have been neglecting. When last we saw our heroes--the Princess of the Downstairs Bathroom (now deposed) and her Bodyguardin' Friend, immortal due to a freak military accident, and slaves of a tribe of feral children due to really terrible luck--they had just been introduced to another slave in the desert, the former queen of a nearby country who had been captured by the feral children several years previously.

The Feral Children were many things--excellent fighters, wielders of enormous power gathered through the ritual sacrifice of giant ants, and remarkably good architects. However, they were still children. Lizzie, the leader was somewhere between eight and ten. She was the oldest by a year or so. Most of the others were a bit younger, and the two plastic babies were...babies. Afternoon naps were common in the halls of Summercastle, and even those who felt they were too old for naps often dozed off over their books of ancient ant-lore.


The Queen--like all the non-feral players, she didn't get a name--did not look like much of a ruler. Like the girls, her head was shaved and she was dressed in sand-stained rags. She was also batshit insane, due to living in a hole for years while subject to the whims of feral children. Still, the Queen was cunning, and had managed to build up a bit of power through covert sacrifices--the ant-gods didn't care who did the sacrificing, after all. She thought that within another month or so she would be able to break the bindings that the children had placed around their part of the desert.

The great thing about being an eight year old in a sandbox is that the stories you make  up for yourself don't have to follow story rules. The story I am telling here is such a small part of all that went on, with none of the side plots or random adventures, or any of the hours and hours of tedious plant gathering and mashing that was for some reason fascinating to me at the time.

The Queen's plan didn't quite work out. The Princess and her Friend agreed to the escape attempt, but it was delayed by storms and the problem of supplies. Treetown was at least a month away from the desert, and the grassland that separated them was an empty waste, with no food and very little water. The Queen probably would never have offered to take the girls with her, except that the grassland was populated by strange and savage beasts, and three people would have a greater chance of survival than one. It would just take time to gather supplies.

The one thing that no one saw coming was the Princess deciding to stay behind.

In the months it took to gather power and stash supplies, the Princess was working in the halls of Summercastle. The Princess had been raised to care deeply about her people. She was always expected to go out and meet her subjects, work in their villages, monitor conditions in the country, and ensure that her people had the best lives possible. When the war started and the Princess lost her power she also lost much of her identity. Her Friend knew it and had done the best she could to help, but it hadn't done much good.

The Feral Children changed all that. The Princess found peace in caring for them, and Lizzy realize early on that she had the capacity for real loyalty. It didn't take long before the Princess was moved out of the slave barracks and into her own room in the castle, where she worked as Lizzie's personal adviser, as a sort of big sister. By the time her Friend and the Queen were ready to run, the Princess informed them that she would be staying behind.

The Sandbox Saga, part 2

Miniature cabbage patch dolls were kind of a thing. I had six. Three girls, a boy, and two indeterminate crawling babies, which I more or less randomly decided were also boys. They lived in a shoebox orphanage full of thin Kleenex bedding and general squalor. 

It wasn't long after Lizzie joined the crew that they broke out. A tissue-filled shoebox was no home for dolls like these. Lizzie's mind may have broken somewhere during the elaborate funerals of her family, but she was still a charismatic leader, able to convince the others that a desert castle was waiting. They broke from the box, out the door, across the yard and into the sandy waste, where they lived in a straw and earwig filled hole, surviving on fruit stolen from Treetown, a decorative crab apple that was the nearest outpost of civilization .

While generations (all represented by the same dolls, and mostly with the same names) of feral children scraped out their lives in the desert, a different struggle was underway in the land of the downstairs bathroom.

The bathroom held a great civilization, most of which was not represented in any physical sense, as it was not entirely my room. There was a shelf that held old magazines, which could be pushed to the side to make a living area for a couple of miniature barbies that were known as The Princess and Her Friend. I'm not sure why these two never got real names--this story went on for over two years, and their names just never came up. The Princess was, well, a princess, of the bathroom kingdom. Her Friend was a combination bodyguard and buddy, who got to carry all the weapons--a bow made of  a bamboo skewer and dental floss, tinfoil swords, a staff made from half a chopstick--and the food, and bedding, and anything else I could cobble together.

The thing you have to understand is that playing dolls wasn't about moving dolls around and making them talk in funny voices. It was about building props and making little homes for dolls, arranging them, and then sitting and staring at them as the story played out in my head, until eventually more props or a different location were needed.

The Princess and Her Friend were sent by the king to measure the flooding in the lowlands. The floods were very bad that year, and people were starving and dying of various flood related illnesses. I am really not sure where my childhood obsession with horrible diseases and tragedy came from, but most of my long running games were equal parts bits I stole from books, things I made up, and villages dying from plague.

The floods weakened the country, and opportunistic neighbors moved in with swords and chemical weapons. The Princess and Her Friend were caught in a raid, the cave they were hiding in was filled with an experimental foam that knocked them out. When they woke up it was a hundred years later and they were more or less immortal.

They were captured by a roving band of slavers about two hours after emerging from the cave, before even managing to find a decent meal. Tragedy!

The Sandbox Saga part 1

I did my share of playing with dolls as a kid. I had the rag doll with the fancy pioneer dresses. She got a wasting disease, cleverly illustrated by my cutting open her limbs and removing her stuffing a little at a time. Eventually she had to use a cane to walk, and she took up begging in my closet. Somehow I managed to acquire a to-scale baby doll, and single motherhood compounded the tragedy of disease. I think she probably died, though I don't remember any specific end to her story.

There was a family of assorted action figures, happy meal prizes, and homemade clothespin dolls who lived in one room of my magnificent doll mansion. They had to keep to one room due to a rotating series of disasters: floods, zombies, poverty that forced them to rent out the majority of the house and live as virtual slaves, and any other bit of trauma that I could steal from whatever I was reading at the time. Eventually the family escaped to the wilds, where they all died in the desert and were given elaborate funerals.

I should probably talk about the desert before I go on.  My sandbox was a 4x6 board rectangle that was set in the ground and filled with dirt. There was no limit to how deep I could dig, and once I got down through the superficial layers of soil there was solid clay that, when mixed with water and grass, was perfect for building nearly indestructible sand castles.  Castles, and huts, and tombs, and barracks, and elaborate temples with flat stone alters perfect for sacrificing ants.

That was really the only down side. The sandbox was absolutely infested with the sort of giant red ants that require serious stomping to kill. The desert people developed an entire religious system based on sacrificing ants.

More on that later.

The dollhouse people died in the desert, and were buried with elaborate ceremonies, and many sacrifices. The only survivor was a happy meal prize, a miniature cabbage patch doll with yellow pigtails and a pink plastic nightgown. I called her Lizzie. She made it back to civilization, but her mind had been damaged in the tragedy. It was only a matter of time before she returned to the desert.