Today in our RE Family Check-In, we found simple silly costume elements at home to create a cast of characters, and then we wrote a story together about our characters.
TVUUC friends of all ages, our Learning Lab Creative Challenge for this week is to create your own story: give yourself five minutes to find silly objects/materials that become costume elements for three or more characters OR if you live with multiple people in your household, you could ask each person to help inspire you by creating their own characters. Then write a story featuring those characters and representing our UU values in some way. Remember: every good story needs a conflict. What do your characters want? How will they try to get it? What challenges them? What do they learn?
Here is what we came up with today – the debut of our TVUUC RE Family Writing Collective’s masterwork:
Cast of characters:
Evan the Mysterious
Unicorn the Unicorn
Dancing Princess Lily
The Wizard
Two Dinosaurs
A Ninja Turtle Cosplayer
Dancing Princess Lily and her two Dinosaur friends are trapped in a tower. Unfortunately, the arms of the dinosaurs are too short for escape.
Dancing Princess Lily must ALWAYS dance, because she was afflicted with a curse which causes her legs to continuously dance, no matter what. This is very uncomfortable and inconvenient when she is trying to sleep.
However, the rhythm of her dancing attracts the notice of a passerby.
The mysterious passerby is Evan the Mysterious, who is out for a stroll with his buddy the Unicorn, who is named Unicorn the Unicorn.
Dancing Princess Lily would like for all of them to escape the tower, but her friends the Dinosaurs want to protect her, and don’t know that the people who are trying to help are trying to help. They think they are robbers, and try to eat anyone who tries to enter the tower.
But Unicorn the Unicorn has magic poop. When Unicorn the Unicorn poops, as Unicorn the Unicorn often does, Unicorn the Unicorn can turn that poop into amazing things. Today, Unicorn the Unicorn turns that Unicorn poop into a GIANT TRAMPOLINE.
Dancing Princess Lily jumps out of the window of the tower to escape, and lands safely on the GIANT TRAMPOLINE. But, oh no! The window is too small for Dancing Princess Lily’s two dinosaur friends. They cannot get out. How will they escape?
Fear not! Evan the Mysterious has his own Mysterious Powers. Evan the Mysterious is able to make the tower become a GIANT TOWER. This means that the window is now plenty big enough for Dancing Princess Lily’s two dinosaur friends to escape! They jump out and land safely on the trampoline too.
But they bounce TOO HIGH because the trampoline is too bouncy. They are afraid that they will hit the ground eventually and get hurt. But then The Wizard comes out of nowhere and uses their magical powers to help the dinosaurs land safely on the ground. Yay!
However, while the dinosaurs are glad to have escaped the tower, they are also sad because they liked living in the tower. Maybe they can visit it still sometimes? But the Wizard does not realize that they liked the tower, and because it is now SO BIG, thanks to the powers of Evan the Mysterious, it is too big to fit where it was, so the Wizard makes it disappear.
“Stop!” says Dancing Princess Lily. “I, too, have amazing special powers. I can listen to my dinosaur friends’ thoughts. And they are telling me that they want to have our tower.”
Then the Ninja Turtle Cosplayer, who has been watching, unnoticed, nearby, arrives and says that he wants the Tower. He will make it into a Pizza Hut. And then sell it on Ebay. Apparently, there is a thriving market for large pizzerias on Ebay. This is, after all, a magical and surprising world.
What will they do? Then they remember that Evan the Mysterious made the Tower into a GIANT TOWER. The Wizard reassures everyone that the Tower has not gone away, but is just invisible. It is still here.
Everyone agrees that because the Tower is now a GIANT TOWER, there is room enough for everyone! They will make a Pizza Hut on the ground level, and everyone can live up above.
EVERYONE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
Except…
GIANT TOWERS also have GIANT cracks and gaps in places that once were tiny, so everyone has to be very careful not to fall in the holes, and spends much of their time practicing jumping over them.
THE END
Stay tuned for the sequel, when everyone finally remembers that Unicorn poop can become anything, and they can make stuff to fix the holes!
Post in the comments: What UU principles or values do you see at work in our RE Family Check-In collaborative story?
And we’d love to see the stories you come up with, too!