A Song of Stars

Six

Earth's rules, Nod's rules, which rules are right?
But I understand one thing:
These plans aren't picturesque.

"Companions?" Adam asked. "I already saw some animals out in the forest where the other Magicians were getting the materials for the city. It shouldn't be too hard to tame some of the creatures there, especially with a simple rhyme." He paused, recalling the odd wording Mother Goose had used. "What do you mean by 'create'?"

Mother Goose laughed. "Oh, come on, did you really think we were just going to take some of the boring forest animals?" Her laughter frightened Adam a bit. He squirmed in his seat as Mother Goose stood up to present her ideas. "What I mean by 'create' is this: with our unrestrained use of stardust, we can create machines that can do things for us!"

"We can also use the stardust to combine them with animals to give the machines their ability to think on their own and have the perks of being that animal." Boggen added. "We called you here so you could help us with building them."

"Let me guess, you need me to write another rhyme?" Adam sighed. He never seemed to get much free time, since he was always being given tasks to write rhymes for anything and everything. Although there were other people who could write rhymes, he was usually the one called to the job, since he was usually able to write rhymes pretty quickly and accurately. This job seemed like it was going to be harder, though, since Mother Goose and Boggen planned on creating things that had never been created before. And harder most likely meant more time consuming. Adam would much rather be getting back to using his keyboard, and finding out what was causing the things in his room to float.

"Yes. We will take care of the construction of the machines. It's up to you to write a rhyme that will fuse these machines with animals of any type." Mother Goose told him. Adam froze. He wasn't sure how he was going to make that work. This kind of magic had barley been studied before.

"But Mother Goose, I don't know if that is possible." Adam replied quietly. Both Mother Goose and Boggen seemed very intent on making this project work.

"You will find a way to make it work!" Mother Goose raised her voice. Adam decided that it would be best not to object. He nodded quickly.

"Go on, get started. Now." Boggen commanded. Adam nodded again and jumped out of his seat. He scrambled to grab his notebook and rushed out without a word. As soon as the door had closed behind him, he burst into a run. His heart pounded as he ran down the street to his tent. He took a moment to catch his breath, but his mind was racing with worries. Boggen is known not to go easy on Fiddlers who do him wrong, or in Adam's case, fail to meet his expectations.

Adam collected himself and caught his breath. He looked at his keyboard underneath the stacks of paper and books he had placed on top. He wanted so badly to take it out and play it again, but he knew he had no time to spare.

He began looking through his notes. Flipping through the pages of his book, he tried to find as much information as he could about animals, machines, and fusing things together.

"Animal training rhymes, rhymes to summon animals, object fusion rhymes..." He muttered to himself while quickly bouncing between pages. He could try to use the object fusion rhymes directly, but doing so could easily kill the animals in the process, which obviously wouldn't work. He had to re-write the fusion rhymes to work on animals and objects both together, but it wasn't as easy as it sounds.

Using stardust on living things versus inanimate objects was very different. He could get two objects to fuse quite easily, and he could probably fuse two animals quite easily too, although it had never been tested before. But fusing a machine into a living thing was not only untested and dangerous, but also very difficult to pull off.

For a minute, he caught himself thinking about Earth. There was no way the Alchemists would have allowed a project like this to happen back on Earth. If he were on Earth, he would have been writing rhymes for small tasks and easy spells, leaving him with more free time for music. But he wasn't on Earth, and this was his new reality.

Over the next few days, Adam devoted all his time to writing a rhyme for Mother Goose and Boggen's project. He would spend his days at the library, (AKA the boxes of unpacked books, since no building had been built yet for the library,) studying anything and everything he might need to know for the rhyme. He was so worried about getting the project done, that when a thought would come into his mind at night, he couldn't sleep, leaving him to spend the nights writing under the light of a small lantern. He started each day with a little less sleep than the last.