Bending the Rules
Santa Chris Kringle stared into the swirl of green, watching the fine shimmer spiral within its sealed vial. It had taken weeks to extract and isolate the strange powder from the residue left behind when all the better-known fairy dusts had been separated. Not red, not yellow, not blue—this one pulsed with an uncanny verdant glow. Even the fairies had little to say about it, offering only a cryptic warning: “That one? Best not used in windy places.”
But Santa was not about to let mystery stop him.
He pinched a fleck of the Green Fairy Dust and carefully tapped it over a wooden block. “Change shape,” he muttered aloud, setting his intent clearly. A swirl of light fluttered around the block. Slowly, its stiff rectangular form softened—coiling and curling inward like a candy ribbon left out in the sun.
“Well, well…” he murmured, eyebrows lifting. “That’s different.”
He recorded his observation with a charcoal stub:
Test #1 – Wood: Structural flexibility. Maintains cohesion. Returns to original shape.
He watched as, sure enough, the wooden block uncurled and resumed its proper blockiness.
Test #2 involved a porcelain teacup. When dusted, the cup shivered slightly, sagging down like warm wax. The handle drooped, the rim slumped—until the whole thing resembled a puddle of clay. But then, as if remembering its purpose, the mass slowly lifted, wobbled, and reshaped itself—reforming perfectly into the same teacup Santa had started with.
“Marvelous,” Chris breathed. “It remembers!”
By midday, he was giddy with possibilities. The implications were tremendous. Chimneys. Tight alleyways. Even narrow cracks in castle walls. If the dust worked on objects and living beings…
He dusted a leather boot and pushed it through a wooden hoop barely wider than his wrist. It squished flat like dough, then re-inflated with a pop on the other side. Not a scratch.
He ran to the old fireplace in the test wing and threw dust on a fire iron. It slithered through the grate like a snake, then snapped back into place with a flourish. Santa laughed, breath steaming in the cool spring air of the lab.
He called Bernard, Rudy Winters, and Penny Tootle to observe a demonstration involving himself.
“Now, this might look strange,” Chris warned, coating his shoulders, hat, and beltline with the lightest shimmer of green. “But if this works, I can finally stop worrying about chimney width.”
“Or stairwells,” Bernard added dryly.
Santa approached a test wall with a narrow, twelve-inch-wide frame cut into it. With a deep breath and a focused thought—small, narrow, pass through—his form shimmered faintly green. Beard and belly compressed. His limbs elongated, his boots seemed to pour forward like thick syrup, and—zip!—he slid through the gap like butter through a cheese slicer.
On the other side, he popped back into shape with a brief elastic wobble.
Tandy squealed and clapped. “You bent the rules!”
Santa winked. “That’s exactly what we’ll call it.”
But no great discovery comes without a hiccup.
Later that afternoon, Chris tested the dust’s use in delivery scenarios. He built a narrow transparent delivery tube—one of the prototype “chute drop” systems being considered for the sleigh’s toy sorting. A small doll, barely dusted with green, was squeezed into the chute entrance and sent downward.
“Shape-shift on descent, return on exit,” Santa instructed aloud, watching it snake down the pipe like soft putty.
The exit hole at the bottom was precisely ten inches wide—more than enough for a squeezed-down toy.
Except… about halfway through the descent, something happened. The green shimmer wore off too early.
POP.
The doll suddenly re-expanded to full size inside the narrow tube with a loud ka-chunk and jammed the whole mechanism. The entire chute buckled with pressure. The tube groaned.
“Oh no,” said Bernard.
Chris, who had just begun inserting another gift into the top of the chute, froze as his gloved hand touched the dusted toy. He felt the warm tingle of reversion.
“BACKING OUT!” he shouted, yanking his hand free just as the toy in his grip snapped back to full size with a puff of green dust.
The second toy rebounded off the jammed one, shot backward out of the tube, and struck Rudy square in the chest. He staggered, caught it, and glared at it.
“I liked it better when toys didn’t fight back,” he muttered.
Tnady laughed so hard she fell off her crate.
Santa coughed, brushing soot and glitter from his coat. “Well then. Clearly, a few more safety tests are in order before I start dropping anything—or anyone—down a chimney.”
Bernard, unamused, began scribbling notes in his field book:
Test #12 – Toy expansion timing must be precise. Avoid premature restoration. Consider internal delay enchantments or staged reversion triggers.
Also: Do not use on living creatures until system is fully stabilized. Underlined. Twice.
Chris walked slowly back to the table where the vial of green shimmer still pulsed faintly under glass. He turned the container in his fingers, watching the motes swirl like fireflies in a jar.
This new dust bent more than just the rules of shape—it bent the boundaries of what was possible. It gave permission, not instruction. Suggestion, not force. And that made it trickier… and far more interesting.
Penny peeked into the collapsed chute. “Should we build another one?”
“In time,” Chris said. “For now, let's keep the next few tests small. Very small.”
Rudy handed him back the toy that had launched out of the tube. Its seams still glowed faintly green.
“Maybe don’t use it on juggling balls either,” he said. “Unless you want them turning into soup midair.”
Santa grinned. “Now that’s an idea for the Reindeer Games.”
Bernard groaned. “Please don’t.”
Santa laughed, pocketing the toy and wiping green shimmer from his hands. “Alright, team. We bent the rules today. Tomorrow, let’s make sure they don’t snap.”
Outside, the wind caught a scattering of fairy dust and carried it into the sky like pollen. Somewhere, in a dimension only partly seen, a ripple of attention flickered… and something smiled.