A Song of Stars

Eight

Time shall pass,
No more looking back.
Our future is bright and beautiful!
Or so we thought.

There was a flash as the stardust fused the machine into the rabbit. Adam paid close attention to the look on the rabbit's face. It made no sound, but Adam saw the look of pain in its eyes for a brief moment. He felt kind of bad, but he remembered that it was for the greater good... Right?

And there it was, the first ever animachine. At first, it didn't move, staring blankly out at Adam and Mother Goose. But then, it suddenly thrashed around in the area it was contained in. After seeing the rabbit violently thrashing in the cage, Mother Goose and Boggen exchanged a strange look. She quickly turned around to face Adam after that.

"Don't worry about it's first reaction. I assumed there would be some sort of side effect at first." She quickly told him.

"Really?" Adam asked. "Are you sure? Is it going to be okay?" Adam didn't think this would happen based on the rhyme. But he should really trust Mother Goose and Boggen, since they're leading the project, after all.

"Didn't I just say that?" Mother Goose sounded annoyed now. She paused. "Give it a day or so and it should return to normal behavior."

Adam breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay then, but what's the plan now? Where are we taking this project next?" If this experiment succeeded, he couldn't wait to see where the project went next. Boggen suddenly ran over to them from by the cage.

"Well, Adam, Mother Goose and I would like to discuss that with you." He said.

Mother Goose quickly took over for him. "Now that you have fulfilled your use and written us a rhyme, we can take over from here. You are dismissed from this project."

"What?" Adam was shocked. He did all of this to help them and now he wasn't a part of the project anymore? "What do you mean? I thought we were doing this project together!" It wasn't fair that he had put all that work in just to be turned away from helping!

"You've done your part, Adam." Boggen told him. "Thank you for your help. You can leave and go back to your normal duties." Adam was furious. He spent so much time writing that rhyme.

"No! You can't just kick me out!" He lashed out at them. Mother Goose turned towards him with an angry stare.

"Leave." She said. "It's nothing against you, you just aren't needed here anymore."

"Fine." Adam took a deep breath, realizing this would give him more time for music. "I apologize for raising my voice." He grabbed his books and walked out of the room in silence as Mother Goose and Boggen watch him. He felt their stares on his back as he slowly closed the huge lab room door. Boggen would probably be mad at him for lashing out. Why did he get so upset at Boggen himself, what was he thinking?

Even though he was still a little upset about not being a part of the animachine project anymore, he was still happy that his rhyme worked. Though the violent behavior of the thing made him a little uneasy. But he had to trust that Mother Goose knew what she was doing, since he no longer had any input.

Adam walked along the cobblestone paths of the nearly finished city on his way back to his tent. He should be getting a permanent home soon, or at least he hoped. It was a nice day out, the sun- or, whatever the nearest star was called, was shining bright in the sky. Adam took a deep breath of Nod's air. It definitely calmed him down after his outburst in the lab. A few people passing said hi to him, but he didn't feel like talking to anyone, he just wanted to get back to clean up his tent and play his keyboard.

He could barely crawl inside his tent, it was such a mess. His mind has been so fogged with working on the rhyme that he had completely ignored anything else. Books, papers, even a few plates from meals lay everywhere around the cramped tent. Somewhere, underneath all of it, was his keyboard. That was really his main motivation to clean up.

Adam started to clean up, but he suddenly got an idea. He could just use stardust! He grabbed his pouch of the colorful dust and poured some in his hand. He molded it in his hands and slowly sprinkled it onto the books and trash. He recited a rhyme while doing so, and everything began to move into place. Slowly, his keyboard was revealed underneath the piles.

He ran to grab it. He was so curious to find out what was going on with it. He hadn't played it once since before the animachine project started.

Adam pressed down on a key. As the wonderful sound came out, a book on his desk began to hover above the surface. He kept playing, creating a melody as he went. All the things he had just put back into place we're moving around the room and floating. He figured out that he could control the movements of the objects by pitch and length of the notes he played. It was amazing, stardust and music and floating books filled the air around him.

He hadn't just made a keyboard, he had made a stardust powered machine to be able to move anything as he wished.