random writing half-a-prompt thing that popped into my brain and won't leave
i'm envisioning this as a high fantasy or medieval type setting (honestly my brain's got this as Ancient Rome but you could set it wherever/whenever, really)
what if there was some fancy, relatively well-respected lady courtesan somewhere, and she's doing well for herself
and one day, she's hired to go to some other city where her face isn't known (bonus points if people know her reputation but not what she looks like) and she goes off in a carriage or something
these people do not know what she looks like. and so what happens is she goes to meet whoever hired her, but it turns out there's been a mishap, and now this lady has been mistaken for a visiting princess (i imagine this would be bc some noble had a meeting with a princess and the courtesan was meant to be there afterward)
but the princess never showed up, and the guy who hired her thinks she's the princess, and suddenly before she can explain wait no, i'm not the princess, the courtesan is swept up into some kind of political intrigue. she's also strangely good at it, since she ends up just having to play along because at some point it went too long and now it would just be weird for her to say "so uh actually i'm, uh, not the princess..." so she just goes along with it
i feel like the natural progression of this is that she winds up accidentally stopping a war or something
and if you feel like it, as a bonus: the courtesan ends up having to save the princess and eventually has to admit that she was never the princess at all but she did such a good job that everyone's like nah keep doing what you're doing miss
bonus for the bonus: the princess doesn't want to deal with the politics either and she either makes the courtesan not tell anybody, or she just agrees with everyone else that the courtesan did such a good job ruling a city or stopping a war or whatever she did that she should just keep doing that
triple bonus: the princess and the courtesan fall in love (lesbians <3)