Below is the opening part of my children's fantasy book/s: please feel free to supply feedback:
Vicki awoke early that fateful Saturday morning. The summer sun's gentle rays were shining welcomingly through the emerald green cretonne curtains. She got out of bed, shuffled her bronze feathers, put on her glasses, adjusted them on her beak and looked through the window. To the east of Forest Cottage, the horizon beyond the lake was glowing like molten gold and to the south, the forest, still in shadow, looked deeply inviting.
It had been raining steadily for the past two weeks, so Vicki reached for her comphone and called her three best friends on conference call, inviting them to a picnic in the woods.
"Do you know it's been nearly a whole month since we were last there?" remarked Moochelle the calf.
"Don't wear your best things, Moochelle," Rick the colt said. "We want to play hide and seek, and it'll be muddy."
Little did Vicki the earnest nine year old owl know that they would all be embarking on a much longer journey that day than any of them could have foreseen in a thousand years.
Passing Terry Stripe's cabin, they saw no sign of the vegetarian tiger who lived on the edge of the woods and helped Vicki’s dad with his work.
"Look," Rick Hoof said. "This part of the woods has been fenced off! That's new. We'll have to climb over the gate!"
"Who could have done that?" asked Moochelle Horns. The calf was feeling a bit off colour as she'd had a cold for a few days, but didn't want to waste the first sunny Saturday morning in a month hanging around at Moo Manor.
"There's no 'Keep Out' sign, and after all’s said and done, we've always been here," replied Tommy Woffles, a red panda. "So let's go!"
"Yes, this is all my dad’s land anyway," said Vicki.
They all climbed over the gate, which they managed quite well except that Moochelle tore a gaping hole in the seat of her jeans.
"I should have worn something older," she complained. “Why always me?”
“Because you're clumsy and don't always look where you're going,” replied Tommy.
The four friends live in Beaconville, a tiny village in the mountains of Radiant. Various types of people, animals, pixies, brownies, birds and numerous other creatures of all shapes, sizes and types live together more or less in harmony on Radiant, and have adapted to each other despite their physical differences. They are all considered equal. Animals can however, choose whether they want to live as people, wearing clothes and living in houses, or live as animals do on Earth, either wild or as pets. This has been so since the time of the Great Choice.
It was the adventurous colt Rick Hoof's turn to hide while the others closed their eyes and counted to 50.
"I bet Rick's picked a real smart hiding place as usual," remarked Moochelle.
"I'll find him!" said Tommy determinedly, rushing deeper into the woods.
Vicki and Moochelle stayed close together. The path entered a clearing in the woods. Suddenly Moochelle, with a shriek of fright, ran full-tilt into someone who was standing in the path with his back to her. He landed flat on his back, gasping for breath.
"Sorry!" she yelled as she screeched to a halt. "I didn't see you!"
"Dad!" exclaimed Vicki, when she saw who it was. Her father, Frank Forest, the brilliant and eccentric inventor, was lying there, his white lab coat full of mud and leaves.
"Vicki! Why aren't you in school?" asked Frank, when he got his breath back.
"It's Saturday today," Vicki replied. “Did you forget?”
"Oh, no! I thought it was Friday," said Frank, getting up and clapping a talon to his feathery forehead. "I wanted to be alone today. I thought you were all safely at school!" He dusted off his glasses with his equally muddy coat sleeve.
Then Tommy and Rick appeared on the scene.
"I found Rick in a hollow tree," Tommy puffed. "My turn to hide now!"
"What's that, Uncle Frank?" Rick asked suddenly, as his sharp eyes noticed a strange metallic object on one side of the clearing. It was a circular dome on stilts, about six meters in diameter and three metres high .
It had several round windows, equally spaced . The domed roof had a tall antenna in the centre, with four smaller ones spaced equally around it at an angle. A little ladder led to an arched door.
"It's a little hut," the senior owl replied. "Where I can work in peace!"
His last words were interrupted by a loud clap of thunder. A flash of lightning lit the clearing eerily. The children looked up at the sky. It was no longer blue.
"It's going to pour! We'd better get back to Forest Cottage at once!" exclaimed Vicki. "None of us noticed the weather was changing.”
"We'll never make it back in time," replied Tommy.
There was another much louder crash of thunder and as if on cue, the heavens opened in a deluge.
"It's much too dangerous to run through the woods now," remarked Moochelle, blowing her nose on a dainty hanky. "We could get struck by lightning!"
The rain changed to hail and Tommy yelped as a large hailstone stung his ear.
"Quick," said Rick, "into the hut at once!"
“No!” yelled Frank, but they all ignored him. They raced for the little metallic building and up the steps. Moochelle stumbled over the bottom step, landing on her knees in a puddle. Tommy and Rick pulled her up again and dragged her in, buffeted by the cold hard hailstones. Frank, still protesting, launched himself at the steps. A huge hailstone pelted him on the side of his head, stunning him. Tommy and Moochelle pulled him in as Rick closed the door and bolted it. They peered through the window at the gathering storm.
"My best jeans!" moaned Moochelle. "They're all dirty now as well as torn!"
"Does it really matter?" Rick asked.
There was another deafening crack of thunder accompanied by a blinding flash, and a tree next to the clearing came crashing down, split in two by the lightning. It fell where they'd been standing moments before.
Moochelle slipped on a stray hailstone that had landed inside, and reached out with a hoof to steady herself. She bumped against a lever. Lights of all colours began flashing on and off and the little hut began spinning wildly. The whole "hut" rose abruptly into the air and was soon up among the storm clouds, Beaconville and the surrounding woods appearing tiny below them.
Vicki and Tommy tried to rouse Frank, who was lying still and groaning softly. Suddenly he sat up and rubbed his head.
"Oh, no!" he cried. Sitting up groggily, he reached up for the lever and tried to pull it back, but it refused to budge. He tried several times but nothing happened. By now a large part of Radiant could be seen through the windows, and they could see oceans and continents spread out below them.
"Where are we going?" asked Moochelle. "Is this a type of helicopter?"
"We're aboard my space machine," said Frank. "It was supposed to be a secret for the time being. You accidentally pressed the take-off lever. Now it's stuck and I can't get us back on land!"
Frank went to sit at a console full of screens with complicated figures and dials. Vicki went across to join him.
"Can this thing travel in time too, Dad?" she asked excitedly.
"It's supposed to," her father said. "But is it safe? I never meant you to be aboard when I took my first test flight. I meant to test it later today. It's too dangerous!"
"Oh, come on, Dad! If anything happened to you up here, we'd never know," remarked Vicki.
"You've got a point," admitted Frank. "When I was your age, I looked up at the stars and wondered how I could get there. Ever since I was at college in Seacastle, I began working on space travel theory. Eighteen months ago, I started building this spacecraft with Terry's help. It was hidden until this morning."
"Look, there's Elebar!" remarked Rick, looking out of one of the portholes. Elebar was one of Radiant's three moons.
"By the way, how did you get over the locked gate? Terry should have stopped you!" remarked Frank suddenly. "I told him to keep people out, today.”
"Terry wasn't home," said Tommy. "We thought it OK to climb over, as these woods belong to you."
"I've a bone to pick with Terry then! What if Julius Flutterflap had come along?" asked Frank, still fiddling vainly with the controls. Radiant was now so far away that it looked like a small star among all the other stars around them in space. Rick, Tommy and Moochelle kept their eyes glued to the windows as they revealed more wonderful sights to them.
Julius, who was also an inventor, lived at Darkflight Manor in the neighbouring village of Ratford-upon-Craven. A sinister-looking vulture, he had been in Frank's class at the University of Seacastle. His ambition was to be President of Radiant and enjoy the accompanying power and prestige. He would stop at nothing to achieve his goal.
25 Oct 2015, 2:33 pm
