Disclaimer: I acknowledge that Disney Fairies & associated content are owned by Walt Disney Company. I am not interested in profiting from this document. It is for the enjoyment of fans only.
Author's Note: Hang on to your thinking cap! There are fairy science lessons coming up.
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The Garden of France - Chapter 8 - Clochette the Consultant
Beitris and Tinker Bell Apparated into the Pictone village before the Pixie Dust Tree. Tink twirled to take it all in.
"Wow." Tink gasped, "I can't believe it. We're in France?"
"Aye. Isn't it wonderful? I'll take you to our associates." Beitris led Tink to the local tearoom, where the Armorican tinker and dust-keeper were waiting.
After a round of introductions, Charnière suggested "Since we are here, would you like some lunch?" Everyone agreed, so they found seats inside the tearoom.
Tinker Bell didn't know what French fairies ate, so she just told the serving-talent, "Surprise me." She was not disappointed. The food was different than Dulsie's, but very tasty.
Part way through the meal, while Édouard was explaining the red-dust problem, they heard a crash of kitchen doors behind Tinker Bell. There, hovered a cooking-talent with a tray of dishes at her shoulder, scanning the dining room.
Charnière looked startled and whispered "Zut alors! C'est Mélissa.", as the cooking-talent glided toward them...
After lunch, the 4 fairies flew to the Armorican village, where clean-up was under way. Large wash tubs were set up in the main square, and each building & cottage was being systematically stripped of contents for cleaning.
"As you can see," Édouard explained, "We are making some progress, but we do not know what to do with our pixie dust supply."
"You will probably want to see for yourself." Charnière led them to racks of protective suits. "You both look like smalls." she said to Tink and Beitiris, handing a suit to each of them. Tink checked the suit as she pulled it on. Light-weight but tightly woven fabric, attached boots & gloves, and enough room for tucked-down wings inside the back. A thin glass face-plate was glued to the hood, and the openings had double seals to keep dust out.
When they were all suited-up, they trudged their way into the main lobby of the Pixie Dust Tree. Tink and Beitris stood for a moment, taking in the clutter and rubble. A wave of sadness filled them for the center of this fairy community, then they saw the massive cone-like growth, glowing with evil redness.
"What is that?" Tink asked in concern.
"That is our pixie dust." Édouard disclosed, his voice slightly muffled by the suit.
Tinker Bell marched over to the base of the cone and gazed up at it. The growth was over 20 feet high, and filled most of the floor space to the walls. "Terence would have fits." she thought. She gave the cone base a light kick. "You know pixie dust in large quantities must be kept in motion, right? Otherwise it hardens like concrete."
"I know." Édouard sounded discouraged. "Our colony was ill."
They looked toward the peak again. "The source is up there. Have you seen it?"
"Non."
"I think we should have a look." Tink prompted.
"I shall get ropes." called Charnière, and trotted to the entrance. She was back moments later with ropes, climbing pitons, and hammers.
The 4 fairies began their scale of the huge red growth. Climbing in the protective suits was awkward, but they had plenty of rough surface in the hardened pixie dust to grip. The 2 tinkers hammered-in pitons at regular intervals, and looped their rope through the rings. About 20 minutes later, they were at the top, which was almost level. Édouard found the pixie dust outlet practically buried in soft red dust, a pathetic golden trickle of its normal flow.
"That's a good sign, isn't it?" Tink asked.
"Oui!" Édouard sounded happier. "It means the Tree is still well."
Charnière hammered a new set of pitons into the top of the pixie dust mass, tied ropes on, and flung the ends over the side. The fairies then quickly rappelled to the floor again. Tinker Bell squatted and brushed some of the red dust with her glove.
"It's sticky." she observed. "Why is it red?"
"Evil magic?" Charnière offered.
"You don't really believe that." Tink glanced at her.
"Non."
Tink picked up a leaf from the floor, sprinkled a pinch of the red dust onto it, then carefully folded the leaf into a small, secure package. Outside, laundry fairies with gloves cautiously pulled the protective suits off them for immediate cleaning. The group stood in the square, staring at the Pixie Dust Tree and stretching their wings.
"Well." Tink stated, "You sure have a mess there."
"We sure do." Charnière admitted.
"Can you help us?" asked Édouard.
"Maybe." Tink brushed her fingers through her bangs for a moment, then turned to Beitris. "Can you move a piece of equipment?"
"How big?"
"Bigger than a fairy, smaller than a wagon. It's in my tinker shop."
"Aye, I've done that."
Tink gave the red-dust sample to Édouard for safe-keeping, then offered her arm to Beitris. "We'll be back shortly!" she told the pair, as the fairies vanished.
"We need one of those mainland-visiting-talents." Charnière suggested to her friend.
Beitris appeared moments later, her arms around a bulky object. She immediately vanished, and re-appeared with Tinker Bell on her arm. Tink smiled at Charnière, who was nosing about the object.
"You're a tinker," Tink grinned, "Tell me what this is."
Charnière examined the cast metal base, the work-table at fairy waist-height, the mirror system below it, and the lens system above. "It's a magnifying device."
"A microscope." confirmed Tink. "Based on human microscope designs, but this one has a folded optical path so a fairy can stand in front and work on the sample table, while watching the eye-piece." She turned controls under the table to collect light from the mirrors, then pulled a glass slide out of a lower drawer, and asked Édouard for a bit of pixie dust. Tink pushed the slide onto the table, asking "Ever seen pixie dust up-close?"
"Non." Édouard admitted.
Tink adjusted the controls for a dark field and focused the image at 10-times power. The group crowded around the human-sized eye-piece. "It looks a bit like golden snow-flakes, or broken glass." Tink went to 20-power, then 50, then 100. "Notice the recursive self-similar structure." she told them, "The tiny features look the same as the large features, when you zoom in." (Tink is talking about fractals, a word that wouldn't exist until the mid-1970s.)
She went to 200-power, then 500. "Pixie dust is partly crystal, partly organic, and partly something else. Here it is with the polarizing filter." Tink flipped a lever, but the image of golden snow-flakes looked much the same. "Now watch what happens when I crank the strobe wheel." As she increased her crank speed, rainbow colors played over the crystal image, until she reached a particular speed where the colors shook.
"It's vibrating!" Charnière cried.
"Very interesting stuff, pixie dust." Tink smiled intriguingly, as she reset the controls. "A dust-keeper friend of mine spent days looking at it when we first built this microscope." She pulled out the glass slide and wiped it clean. "Now where's that red dust?"
Édouard carefully opened the leaf packet, and sprinkled the red dust onto the slide. Tink once again began at 10-power, and stepped up. At 200, she moved the sample image to a thinner section, noticing some clumps on the pixie dust.
At 1000-power she cried "Ah-ha! See that?"
"What are we looking at?" Édouard inquired.
"Bacteria." She selected 1500-power, the highest on the instrument. They watched reddish-brown blobs slowly wiggling over the golden crystal. "They seem to like your pixie dust. Now we know what we're dealing with. You might want to let your healing-talents know."
"So we're going to need a lot of fairy soap." Édouard decided.
"Not so fast." Tink declared. "Even fairy laundry soap is too slow for this job. You need to plan ahead, too. You'll need a large, temporary container to safely store clean dust in. Something like a pond."
"The tinkers and miners can build that." Charnière said, excitedly.
"Once that's ready, you'll need to pull apart the conduits and Pixie Dust Mill. Might as well use the Tree's main lobby for cleaning. When the Mill is back together and connected to your temporary pond, then you can start on the pile inside the Tree."
"How do we keep the lobby space clean?" Édouard asked.
"There's more than one way to kill bacteria." Tink gave a sly grin. "Can you get me a lightning-talent, a water-talent, and a fast-flyer?"
Minutes later, Tinker Bell was hovering over an upper entrance to the Pixie Dust Tree lobby, with the 3 talents she requested. Beitris and Édouard hovered nearby, while Charnière was busy relaying tasks to the tinkers and miner-talents.
"Today, we're going to be making ozone." Tink announced, with an enthusiastic smile. "You create the ball-lightning." she said to the lightning-talent. "You keep water vapor away from the lightning, so it doesn't make nitric acid." she said to the water-talent. "And you collect the ozone, and gently blow it into the Tree's lobby." she said to the fast-flyer.
Tink left the 3 fairies happily to their tasks, as others fluttered up and copied them. "Next, we'll need light-talents."
The light-talents gathered about Tinker Bell, eager for something useful to do.
"All of you can turn sunlight into rainbows, right?" Tink asked them. She got a round of "Oui"s. "How many of you know there is invisible light beyond the red, and also beyond the violet?"
"We can see it." one of them spoke up, and the others nodded.
"Good. Beyond the red is called infra-red, which can be used for cooking. Beyond the violet is ultraviolet, which can be used for sterilizing and bleaching. That will be your job; to cook and bleach the bacteria on the parts the dust-keepers and tinkers will bring into the Tree's lobby."
The light-talents giggled and chattered amongst themselves as they fluttered to the Pixie Dust Tree. It took them a bit of tuning, but they soon had the inside lobby glowing with a hot, blue-white light.
Tinker Bell and Beitris flew to check on the temporary pond. It was progressing well, so Tink suggested to Charnière it was time to start dismantling the Pixie Dust Mill for cleaning.
"You should use some of the ozone teams and light-talents at the Mill. We could also use some type of wet disinfectant." She thought of possible liquids:
"Fairy soap? Too weak."
"Herbal antiseptics? Too messy."
"Alcohol? Too flammable."
"Sodium hypochlorite bleach? An environmental hazard in the quantities we need."
"Hydrogen peroxide?" Tink's eyebrows rose.
"That could work." Tink said to herself, but then she thought of the process involved in producing hydrogen peroxide; certainly beyond the present capabilities of a fairy colony. "Maybe we could purchase it from humans...", but then she remembered the problems & delays in dealing with humans. It could be weeks before the peroxide arrived. Which brought her back to option 1 again: Making the peroxide on-site.
"Too bad." she grumbled to Charnière, "It's such a simple molecule. Why, it's practically water." Tink's face went blank. "...practically water." Tinker Bell slowly smiled, and looked at Charnière. "Get me a water-talent, a dust-keeper, and a large glass basin of water. I'll be back in a minute."
When Tinker Bell returned to Charnière and Beitris, she had in each hand a large pea, with a pair of small blueberries stuck to each pea. She spoke to the dust-keeper and water-talent.
"I don't know if this will work, but we're going to try." She looked at the dust-keeper. "I'd like you to drop some pixie dust into the water, and slowly stir it with a stick." Then she asked the water-talent, "Did you know that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms?" She held up the objects in her hands. "This what water looks like. The pea is the oxygen, and the blueberries are the hydrogen, all floating in the bowl." Tink waved them around convincingly.
"Here's what I'd like you to try: Using the pixie dust as a catalyst, pull one hydrogen atom off of 2 water molecules, and throw them away." She removed a blueberry from each of her props and dropped them. "Then stick the 2 oxygen atoms together." Tink stuck the peas together.
Once they got set up, the water-talent dipped her fingers into the water, as the dust-keeper stirred. At first, nothing happened. The water-talent closed her eyes and focused harder. Tiny fizzy bubbles appeared in the swirling water, and floated to the surface.
"I think it's working." whispered Tink to Beitris and Charnière. The water became cloudy with tiny bubbles as minutes passed.
"The water is getting colder." mentioned the water-talent.
"Yes, it'll do that." replied Tink.
"This stick is turning white." noted the dust-keeper, lifting it for them to see.
"Congratulations," Tink beamed, "You're making hydrogen peroxide!"
More water-talents joined in the peroxide production, which was used for sterilizing and soaking parts.
As the days passed, Tinker Bell's and Beitris' help was needed less and less. They returned to their own colonies, proud to have served the Armorican fairies.
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Author's Post Note:
"Clochette" is the French name for Tinker Bell.
Sorry if this chapter seemed a bit dry. Tinker Bell had a lot of explaining to do.
If you're interested: The reason why Tink's microscope is human-sized (instead of fairy-sized) is a laws-of-physics thing. Larger lenses collect more light, long focal lengths are easier to focus, and a fairy-sized microscope would have to be built with a degree of magnitude more precision.
-Not that tinkers couldn't do it...
Next: What happened to Prilla?
