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The Ferrous Fairy

500ish words in the style of The Clangers for #FanFicFriday

This is the planet Earth.
Round and blue and brown and green and wrapped in wispy whorls of white clouds.
From very high up, you would not know that anyone lives here at all.
But take a closer look and all manner of strange and wonderful beasts can be found.
Baboonicorns, Velociraptors, Goreybeasts and Storybeasts, sharp scribbly monsters and of course, the mighty Blampied.
The occasional goat. And look over there … Literally ! A Ge-eked.
Clearly this is a planet teeming with life, made by the power of a mighty imagination in only a hundred and forty four hours.
We would have to travel a very long way indeed to find a planet with quite such a strange array of fauna as this.
Far across the galaxy, past thousands of fiery pinprick stars we would venture, until we found one small, crater pocked ball of stone floating in the sky.
From far away, we would not know that anyone lived there at all.
But on closer inspection … who is this ?
Ah yes. Major Clanger. He’s rummaging around in his toolkit, and if I’m not very much mistaken, he’s about to make something really rather wonderful out of all those bits of metal he seems to have gathered in his wheelbarrow.
If there’s one thing we know about Clangers, it’s that they’re really very good indeed at putting things together.
Hammer and clatter. Spanner and potter. Slowly the thing is taking shape.
Whoo ! This is hard work.
Good job Little Clanger and Tiny Clanger are here to fetch soup. Just in time.
Off they trundle, taking their soup trolley and their copper soup jug with them – off to the soup wells to ask the Soup Dragon for some soup for the Major.
She’s there, bathed in the green glow of bubbling soup, a luminous leguminous pea soup I believe. She gives the Clangers just the right amount for their tea.
They thank her and trundle back home to the Major, thoughts of hot soup and Mother’s bread and butter hurrying them homeward.
But what is this ? The Major’s machine is ready ! No time now for crusty bread and butter knives.
We must see what he has made.
There it stands in all its glory. A magnificent, masterful, Major-made machine.
I have gathered together all the little bits of iron I could find on the planet and fashioned them into this …
A ferrous fairy.
Sure enough, standing in front of the Major, her iron wings outstretched, was a fairy made of nuts and bolts and sheets of metal.
In the very centre of her back was a key.
I will now, cried the Major, wind her up and set her free
He wound the key. Crank. Crank. Crank.
The fairy tilted her head, opened her metal eyelids and flapped her wings.
Up she shot into the air. Up, up and away.
Off to join the metal chicken who lived way up high in the sky.
Time for soup now little ones, said the Major and in they went for tea.

Roobarb, When the Fairytales Vanished

Roobarb woke up to the most terrible clattering cat in the garden.
“Hear Ye ! Hear Ye !” went the caterwauling feline,
“Today is Fan Fiction Friday ! Fairytale Friday has fleetingly flitted. It’s Fayn Fickshorn Fah-rydayee !”

“What horrible howling,” thought Roobarb, “and what sad news. I’m frightfully fond of Fairytale Friday, I’m afraid Fan Fiction Friday feels fearfully feeble next to fabulous fairytales.”
“I shall go outside and give that moggie a piece of my mind”

Roobarb opened the door and stepped into the garden.
There was Custard the Cat, stomping up and down the path, banging on a saucepan lid with his wooden spoon and yelling about fans and fairies and generally making what they call a disturbance of the peace.
Roobarb harrumphed and huffed and told Custard
“You can’t go around here making all that noise,” he said, “and you can’t go cancelling fairytales. A lot of us rely on the fairytales to keep our spirits up”
“Keep your spirits up ?” asked Custard, “That’s ghost stories isn’t it ?”
Custard laughed the kind of snorty snarf of a laugh that made you want to stroke his fur from tail to head, with an axe.
“I’ll thank you” said Roobarb huffily, “to keep your snarky snout out of my Friday”
and he threw open the door of the shed and swept dramatically inside.
Moments later a loud banging and crashing could be heard from the shed and it was clear to anyone with ears that something important was being created. Mainly out of metal things that made a satisfying kerlashing sound when hit with a hammer.
The birds in the branches were getting grumpier and grumpier – first they had had to contend with a clattery cat, and now they were having to put up with a canine Caractacus Potts.
After what seemed like an hour and forty five minutes, if you were the sort of person who owned a watch and kept tabs on that sort of thing, the shed door swung open and there was a loud “BANG! Churtle parp parp” followed by a steady “chuggerter-chuggerter” noise and an eight wheeled contraption came puttering onto the path.
“Behold the Hydraulic Automatic Fairyfactor !” declaimed Roobarb proudly.
At the front was a shiny knight’s arm wielding a broadsword, next to that was an iron dragon’s head, rhythmically belching smoke. Then a tall tower of tin cans and right at the very top a tin foil princess waving a frilly hanky and a recording (sounding a lot like a dog with a high voice) repeating “Help me ! Help me ! Set me free !”
The sword went swish, the dragon belched, the princess wailed. The fairyfactor shook alarmingly. The whole contraption was shuddering and chuntering and right there in the garden it shook itself to tiny little bits right in front of Roobard, Custard and all the birds.
Custard started chuckling to himself, snickeringly.
“Well that’s THAT fairytale fried eh ?” he muttered.

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