Little Thief

Chapter 4

I was barely granted any time to soak in the news. After Will took me up to the servants entrance, I was whisked away in a cloud of chores to complete. Like, I understood a hands-on approach to work, but seriously? It had been a grand total of 3 minutes.

I think my official job title was "scullery maid", it was thrown around me a fair bit.
And even though I couldn't google to see where that left me on the social hierarchy within the house, I was fairly certain I was left smack dab at the bottom. I didn't enquire about it.

"Mm, away with the fairies, that one. Soft in the head," the cook had tutted in my general direction after handing me a generous armful of dirty pans. 

I felt it was hardly my fault if I seemed a bit dazed, considering how I had just recently found out that I was supposedly within a fictional story. I didn't think too hard about the logistics. If there could be a teleporting titan, an as-of-yet useless magic bag, then sure, why not. I was in a family friendly pirate blockbuster.
But it wasn't everyday you were thrown into one, so forgive me if I seemed a little distracted.

What I was particularly concerned about was I only had a vague recollection on what happened. It had been easily ten years, if not longer, since I had seen the first film, and the details were pretty hazy.

I could kinda remember the beginning; someone proposes to Keira Knightly, she falls into water with a pirate necklace on, is fished out and then threatened by Johnny Depp impersonating Keith Richards, some other pirates who are actually zombie pirates trash the place, and Orlando Bloom commits piracy in the name of love. 

And that was pretty much it. 

More than I expected to remember, but still. Not a lot.

I certainly didn't remember any character named Calypso. In fact, the whole Greek mythology tie-in was news to me.
So, what was I supposed to do, guess? Wave something sharp and pointy at anyone who could be a Greek goddess in a human body? 

Weirdly, I didn't see that going over well. I didn't even know if I was at the start of canon, if we were to use professional terms, but I did distinctly recall that Elizabeth Swann had mostly converted to being a shiver me timbers pirate after the first one (which may or may not have attributed to my bisexual awakening at age twelve), and she was most certainly not there yet.

Rule of thumb - if she was still in a poofy dress, it was most likely before she finds out that pirates can actually be kinda fun and sexy, sometimes.

Days whizzed by at a hyper speed, yet also felt exhaustingly long. Sure, I had worked long days before. It was common knowledge on a film crew that if you were a makeup artist, you would be the first to come in and last to leave, the average day clocking in around 12 hours on the go.

This put everything else I had ever known as "work" to shame.

Every morning around 5:30 or 6:00, I would be dragged out of a lumpy cot bed by Martha, the lady's maid who I shared a room with.
I would then proceed to be berated for not waking up on my own, while she scraped my hair back under a plain cap, in a truly 8-maids-a-milking likeness.

Then, I was sent on my merry little way to clean pretty much all of the kitchen and surrounding area, which I was told had to be done before breakfast. 

God forbid the pantry having a bit of dust on the floor before breakfast.

Again, I wasn't all too unfamiliar with cleaning and working on full steam early in the morning. The only glaring differences was that:

a) makeup artists for film spent around 80% of the day sitting around on set for touch-ups, and

b) you worked for maybe 2 weeks straight, conked out for the next week, rinse and repeat for a month or two, and that's a wrap, folks!