The Crown Prince Thinks I'm a Guy

A Meeting to Remember: A Side Story

Charles- well, Kareem, as he would always call himself- found it weird. Rather, he recalled an odd encounter.

Not so long ago, he met a certain young girl. She was a tiny little thing. Well, he too wasn't so big, but he hadn't been as little as she had been then. He was on his merry way right after succeeding an escape from his mentors' oily grasps. While the old men were definitely bright enough to contribute some of the most significant magical and political books in the Empire, he found them both dull and lacking as tutors.

''Sides, they were too fond of speaking about themselves that it would have been better if I wasn't there to steal their spotlight,' Kareem thought with a small snicker.

Anyway, the prince believed that it was rather odd that while he was striding through the Black Caves, he would find a doll-sized girl. What was even curioser to the young prince was the fact that she travelled about the musty streets with a confidence unlike any other of her age or more.

Kareem, with a growing interest, trailed after her with no ulterior motive behind his actions. However, he would soon realize that following her had made for a poor choice, especially because he had ultimately left the castle to flee from the stressful learning environment in the first place.

More than just a few times, he would find his heart beating all too fast. One moment, he thought the tiny thing wouldn't notice the manhole right in front of her, and when he was just about to jump right in and save her from falling down through it, she simply hopped over it like it was perfectly normal. Another time, she passed through a stall selling poisonous wares, and he had almost shouted out when he saw her handling a vial of some nefarious mixture as though she was about to take a sip from it. When she quietly returned the vial onto the table, Kareem could almost swear he heard her mumble in praise, "Nice work on the bottle."

However, only a few moments later, when Kareem already had a thin layer of cold sweat lining his temples, the tiny girl seemed to have finally ran out of luck.

'Ah, finally, I could save her!' he had thought.

Although he did indeed save her, he thought that it was quite anticlimactic. The girl only became more peculiar up close. She was bundled up in a simple cloak, and while there was very little he could see beneath her hood, he could notice the soft, brown curls that littered around her like a halo. And while Kareem had no doubt she would look like an angel underneath her cloak, he had been simply astounded by the manner of her speech and her vibrant personality.

Pray tell, he thought, which child would go ahead and utter, "Solus bless my Papa's tiny Pudenda...", with much refined grace and meaning? And when he had loftily told her about his brave escape, she had instead treated him like he was a slave or a mere runner boy. In the end, in a state of utter frustration and hurt pride, he decided to tease her.

He would guide her to the exit, he said, but only if she could pay the price.

Of course, as a crown prince, Kareem would never do that, but somehow he found himself feeling mischievous in front of the girl, who was, to him, a bundle of utter confidence and sarcasm. When he saw how the girl's face, originally lit up in expectation, suddenly blur out into a dismissive demeanor, he found that he had regained some of the energy he had lost from following her around.

However, it wasn't even long before his demeanor was utterly broken by her again.

They had found a common scene, a noisy occurrence that most people would walk past through, paying little mind to it. A woman had been dragged out by a group of men, harking about a debt that has yet to be paid. In Kareem's mind, it was only right to pay back what a person owes. When a contract has been signed, the parties should always follow through.