Maverick (FCRAs Winner)

Prologue

The Big Idea was a bad one.

Sure, at the time it had seemed great. Flawless in fact. And in a world where ideas where all the rage and improvement was fashionable, it fitted in just fine. Scientists were in their golden age and this propelled them to a whole new level of Godly reverence. People could not believe their luck. This kind of solution; this idea; was assumed to be the stuff of science fiction and fairytales. And yet here they were: alive, happy and hardly believing their luck on the day it was announced that fairytales were in fact reality.

That should have been the case.

For there was a flaw. A flaw that would turn deadly and change the face of the Earth. It started small; in the elderly and the young. Then it spread through the cities like wildfire. When people fled to the country, it followed. It changed the atmosphere, triggering volcanoes and tidal waves which brought another disastrous wave of execution to the people of Earth. No one survived.

That is, no one survived except Class Gamma B, who were on a school field trip to the moon. After an exciting week discovering the seas and the organic Lunar farms for themselves, they looked forward to telling their parents all about it. Instead, they stood and watched in horror as over a period of 48 hours the Earth changed from lush green and blue to an angry spitting ball of fire and gas. No one was going home yet.

Days passed. In a bid to settle the children in the circumstances, their teacher told them the only stories she could. Fairy stories. One every night for three and a half years, until her lungs, along with the other adults, were unable to cope with the fabricated oxygen levels. She retired to the small Lunar infirmary to spend the rest of her days. The children; their young lungs able to adapt to the Lunar atmosphere; continued the tradition.

Weeks passed. Every night they would tell a fairy story. After a while, they wrote them down and made a book of all the stories they had been told. And every night, a story was told.

Years passed. Class Gamma B grew up, and had children of their own. The Lunar base and Lunar fields expanded with the population, and generations grew to forget the Earth as it once was, but simply gaze at it on a clear day as the anger and the fire subsided to calm to green and blue once more. And every night, a story was told.

Decades passed. Parents told their children of the Big Idea, and what disaster it brought. Over time, the very notion of an idea brought fear and terror amongst the Lunar wanderers. Ideas were dangerous, and to be avoided at all costs, they said.

And every night, the stories were told.

Centuries passed. The Lunar wanderers finally came to gather and precariously flew back to Earth in the old rickety ship that brought their Gamma B ancestors to their unwitting safety. They landed in lush green fields and wondered at the thick blue atmosphere; the fertile soils and the warm, bright sunlight. A perfect place to start again. But with what? Ideas led to destruction, which their forefathers had witnessed first hand.

They needed a blueprint that was safe. That would not lead them the same way they had been led before. That had a happy ending.

They needed fairytales.

That night, and every night from then on, the stories were lived.