One day, while out looking for a nice bakery that carried some good macarons, her poor sense of direction left her exploring the outer reaches of interstellar space. Due to poor spatial sense and a mistaken impression that she’d found a nice looking pâtisserie, she inadvertently made an unplanned landing of her ship, the Atelerix, on the surface of a mysterious planet in the middle of a theater of a primitive species of dinosaur dramatists. Fortunately it was a surprisingly soft theater so there were no injuries or damages besides the theater being a bit askew.

“Rawr” said an offended lead actor dinosaur, who appeared to have briefly forgotten his manners. Princess took a moment to compose herself.

She glared the best prima donna glare she could muster. The occasionally appearing director on a stick began to attempt to direct the scene. “Rawr!”

“I must think of a clever, yet plausible solution to this strange predicament,” thought Princess. She briefly wondered how her life had somehow reached the point that she was a royal hedgehog princess sitting in a spacecraft in the middle of an alien theatrical production being yelled at by a director on a stick, surrounded by strange alien relics of an ancient past that still practiced live dramatic arts. She remembered that this was no the time for that kind of meandering reflection – it was time to act.

She called out to her trusty translator droid, 2BORNOT2B, “Quick, translate those lines the director said.” The droid used its highly advanced compu-matic circuits to produce a translation – “Rawr.”

Unfortunately, there are subtle inflections in dino-speak, so she wound up saying, “Your mother is a hamster,” to a Spinosaurus supporting actor. This was not taken well on a planet where, due to monitoring the distant radiation transmissions from Earth, the dinosaurs were all too aware that in millions of years hamsters would evolve into sophisticated talking apes with iPhones, while their descendants would be sparrows, chickens, and parakeets enslaved by the evil ape-overlords.

The droid translated the dino-alien’s reply, “Gosh, that’s really impolite, space tourist hedgehog, you’ve hurt my feelings, also crashing space-ships into our theater is highly inappropriate.” Princess was mortified. She was an expert on manners, yet as the first emissary to the planet of the Thespisaurs she’d managed to make a faux pas. More than one, really, but she didn’t know how to pluralize that word.

She roused up her most dramatic pose, and recited a majestic soliloquy in dino-speak. Her dialogue and delivery were so rousing, wonderful, polite, moving, and dramatic that the dinosaurs forgave her disruption to their production of Othellosaurus and also forgave her previous hamster-related insult. They were so moved at her theatrical talents and refined manners that they declared her Princess Pricklepants, Queen of the Dino Planet, Prima Donna par excellence, and also said she was remarkably nice for a mammal. They began the revels.

“Wait, please, these revels are full of wonderful frolicking delight, and are truly extraordinary, but my noble bearing requires a level of seriousness, artfulness, and subtlety. Perhaps we could play Scrabble?” The dino-dramatists agreed, and she scored 128 points with ZLOTIES on a triple word score with the Z on a double letter, and they lived delightfully and politely ever after.

Next: Princess Pricklepants and the Surprising Set of Events