A Tale Of Perpetual Motion

Once there lived, in a little village in Switzerland, a man named Cedric and his daughter Margiana and the man was an inventor.
Unfortunately what the man was trying to invent was something that nobody believed in, a perpetual motion machine; a machine that, because it powered itself, would never stop running.
And because of this everybody thought the man was mad and often they would stand outside the mans house and shout things  or break his windows.
"Oh why are people so mean, papa", his daughter asked one day as she was helping him to sweep up the glass of a broken window.
"Because people always have a need to feel superior to someone", said Cedric, "And now that the slaves are all free and the women have the vote, they need to find someone else to look down on. Hate is always reinventing itself".
"Well I wish they would look down on someone else for change", said his daughter, "We cannot afford to keep replacing our windows".
But then the man hugged his daughter.
"Why you are such a treasure", he said to her, "Most people would tell me to give up my foolish dreams. They would tell me I was bringing all this hate upon myself by being different and that I should just conform but you have stood by me".
"But why should you conform, papa? You don't hurt anyone. The most anyone can say against you is that you are a harmless eccentric", said his daughter, "And that is no crime".
But then, not long afterwards something awful happened. The girls father was kidnapped by two mechanical tin men and taken away to the Kingdom of the Tin men.
The queen of the mechanical Kingdom, you see, had heard about Cedrics attempts to build a perpetual motion machine and she was very interested in it.
"Every Tin Person has a clockwork heart that eventually stops ticking", she told him when he was brought before her, "But if you can build me a perpetual clockwork heart then I could live forever".
Then the Tin queen had poor Cedric locked up in her dungeon and he was told that he would never be released until he had built her a perpetual heart.
Oh and poor Margiana. Because her father was missing and she was still a child she was forced to go and live with a cruel and wicked foster parent, called Ms Brickenbracher who recieved money from the state to raise her but instead neglected her and only spent the money on herself; buying fancy clothes while Margiana dressed in rags and fattening cakes and pies while Margiana went hungry.
"How clever I am!", she would say to Margiana as she was stuffing her fat face with cake, "Finding a way to get something for nothing. Some people think it impossible and so they work for a living. More fool them".
And hearing this, Margiana would remember her father, always trying to get energy for free.
"But he was never mean like Ms Brickenbacher is", she thought.
And her father had worked very hard too.
She remembered all the late nights her father had spent in his laboratory trying to make his machine work, saying to himself, "I will make a machine that works forever even if I have to work forever to make it".
"Oh father", she said, weeping, as she lay in the cold empty attic room where she was forced by Ms Brickenbacher to sleep upon the floor, "Where have you gone? If only you would come back then I wouldn't have to live in this terrible place".
Fortunately, however, her father, while he had been a prisoner of the Tin queen had hatched a plan of escape.
You see, in order to supply him with the materials that he needed to build her a perpetual clock work heart, the Tin Queen had had to give him what ever parts he asked for and so Cedric asked her to bring him all the parts he needed to secretly build a flying ship.
But it was not like any flying ship that had ever been built before. It was a magnetic levitation ship, lifted by the power of magnetic repulsion.
And when he thought the device was ready her father flew out of the window of his prison in it.
"Stop him escaping", cried the Tin Queen, seeing him through her telescopic eyes, floating high over her tin castle.
And as soon as she said this her tin soldiers started to shoot at him with cannons mounted upon her castle walls.
Three times, cannon balls went whizzing towards his ship but the same magnetic force that lifted his ship pushed the iron cannonballs away so that, instead of knocking him out of the sky, they simply came crashing down again upon the heads of the tin artillery men who had fired them.
Then, a strong gust of wind catching hold of his magnetic ship, it blew him far out of their range.
For four days he drifted in his marvellous magnetic ship, unable to navigate because, the magnets that lifted it made his compass spin round and  round rather than pointing north.
Eventually however, Cedric saw the snowy Alps come into view and, stopping to ask a bearded mountain goat for directions, he found his way back home to Switzerland
And when Cedric got back home he went to the house of the vile Ms Brickenbracher to free his daughter.
"Oh father", she said as, rushing out of Ms Brichenbrachers house she was finally reunited with him, hugging him tightly, "I knew you would come back. Even when I had no evidence to fuel my hopes, I never stopped believing. Now we can both go back home".
"Oh no", said her father, "Not now that I have my magnetic flying ship. No, we're going on a marvellous adventure around the world and we won't stop travelling until we've found a better place than this; a place of open minded people without hate in their hearts".
And so thats what they did. They both flew around the world in Cedrics amazing magnetic ship until finally they landed upon a little island where people were open minded and peaceful and loving and, building a little house there they both lived happily ever after.