Strange Magic Week is a tumblr event, which this year lasts from Monday August 15th to Sunday August 21st. The challenges/prompts (and what I did with them) are as follows:
1. Fairy Tale of creator's choice AU (I did a crossover with Thumbelina, where the two fairy kingdoms have diplomatic ties)
2. Wedding/Arranged Marriage (Bog shows up at Marianne's wedding to Roland, and meets her for the first time after she cancels it)
3. Tiny People in Jars (Pare finds a snow globe and everyone is creeped out by it)
4. Dark Fantasy AU (What if feels like to be love-dusted)
5. Role Reversal (Dawn is the Crown Princess, Marianne is her little sister)
6. Babies/Next Generation (Goblins do not know where fairy babies come from)
7. SciFi AU (In a world of ever-singing magical beings, a music box is the equivalent of an A.I.)
It looked like a hybrid between a piano and a waterwheel. She would find a way to streamline the design later. Aesthetics could be addressed after she got it to work.
Louise took a deep breath and turned the key three times.
Carefully calibrated clockwork ticked. The wheel began to turn. The first peg hit the piano key …
Ting!
It was a single note, but it was in tune!
Ting! Ting-Ting! Ting! Ting-ting-ting! Ting!
It was a simple song and a popular one; a children's lullaby so old no one knew who had written it. It was said the music one could make was an expression of one's soul. Louise had chosen something she hoped would help everyone love her machine as much as she did.
All those months of work, the careful budgeting to gather the right materials and tools, the sour notes, the broken springs flying at her eyes, her sleepless nights calculating and recalculating what went wrong, how do I make it right, all of that was worth it for this golden moment! Her invention was a success!
Louise hugged one of the non-moving parts of her beautiful machine. She'd have to get glass or a cabinet to cover the moving parts. It would be terrible to jolt a cog out of place, or get her coppery fur caught in the mechanism. Perhaps the covering could act as a sound box and make it louder.
She would need to create more wheels to play different songs, and arrange an easy exchange of wheels. She ought to make it look more elegant before presenting it to the royal family, too – Princess Marianne was usually casual, even more so now that she was spending so much time amongst goblins, but most fairies were finicky about appearances. And Louise should probably put wheels on the bottom of the next version as well, so it could be moved. This prototype, her proof of concept, would be living in her workshop.
But she had done it! Louise had created a device that could produce music with neither musician nor magical aid! Even someone clumsy and half-deaf and near-powerless could have music in their homes with which to welcome guests. Louise would go down in history as the brownie who changed the world.
"I'm so proud of you," she told her invention and herself.
Lulled by her late nights of work and the soothing song, Louise settled down on her cot. She'd set up a bedroom nook right in her workroom for those times she was too tired to head upstairs.
The device continued to play after she'd fallen asleep. Maybe, just maybe, the music lasted a bit longer it should have …
Perhaps she'd wound the key just a hair too far and the spring needed to finish its release. Perhaps some of the gears weren't the right size after all, and turned the wheel more times than had been intended.
It hardly mattered. No one was there to hear except the inventor and her invention, and the inventor was asleep.