Age Recommendation: 9-12
In this sequel to Sunni Snowstorm, follow the adventures of a roboticist and an artist, Karee & Talia, as they try to solve mysteries, explore science, and go to the moon!
In this interactive fiction, you make the choices. You make the decisions. How will the adventure play out? There are no bad endings, no wrong choices.
"... And then when we got to the top of the tree, there was this other crazy world! Filled with trains and rubber ducks!"
Karee rolled her eyes.
Talia was always telling crazy stories about what she got up to on the weekend. Things like going to the aquarium, and then getting stuck overnight. Or going to the movies, and being pulled into another world.
Today, she was all about some magical treehouse in a far off land.
It was all bunk!
Nearby, Sunni made a face, "So? I saw the bunyip in Saint Kilda. It's not a big deal."
"Bunyips aren't real." Talia glared, "I've met a lot of fairies, and they can't lie. They've never seen a bunyip, so they don't exist."
Sunni's best friend, Kateline Jennifer Jones, timidly raised her hand, before whispering, "I saw it, too."
Talia's hand hit her desk, and she gave a seething glare at both girls, before slowly saying, "Both of you are so... Full of... Fertiliser!"
Sunni stood up, "Take that back."
Karee stopped paying attention, and pulled a book out of the drawer beneath her desk. She couldn't care less about the way Talia walked around like she was the heroine ^[A heroine is an old-fashioned word for a woman hero.] of some novel.
If that was the ridiculous way she wanted to live her life, then that was fine. It didn't mean that Karee needed to pay any attention.
She opened up her sketchbook, and flipped idly through all of her secret designs that were inside. These were the things that made Karee's day. Her favourite things in the world.
She paused to look at her hot air balloon. That one had required a little more gas than she could find, so she hadn't been able to test it. One day.
The next page proudly displayed a submarine. All she needed to finish building that one was plotting the algorithm for Niles. The instructions for a big program like that one were hard.
Computers always did exactly what you told them - even if it was to jump off a cliff.
She had a few sketches for the instructions on the page, but she'd got distracted and started to write a new, better, programming language. Computers made it way too easy for someone like her to get distracted.
Karee quickly turned to a blank page, trying not to get absorbed by that idea again. Instead, she tried to think of a new invention.
She'd designed something for flying, and another thing for sinking, or swimming really. Then she turned the page to something she'd started recently, but hadn't really finished.
A smile inched across her face and she quickly started drawing.
So many people talk about the sky being the limit. Except, we know that it isn't. The sky might seem like it is a long way away, so high and big, but it isn't the limit.
People have broken through that boundary, flown up and beyond, to the moon. Gone so far as to plant flags, and leave behind robots.
Of course, designing something that could go that kind of distance needed a lot of careful maths and considerations. It was easier to make a spaceship that would orbit the moon, circling it, whilst a smaller pod went down and landed.
However, doing that, meant that the spaceship leaving the planet needed to keep some fuel, and needed to detach everything in a very careful order.
Too careful to let it be done by a normal computer, she'd need to use a robotics one, because they do things when you ask, not when they feel like.
Thankfully, other people having done it first, meant that the maths was already worked out. The formula for escape velocity was something that Karee had memorised.
Escape velocity is just calculated by taking the square root of two times the gravitational constant, multiplied by the mass of the celestial body, divided by the distance from the centre of the Earth to the point of where you're leaving the planet.
Lots of people thought that only NASA did space things, but they were an American government thing. Australia had their own one, and Karee absolutely loved the Australian Space Agency.
The name was a little uninventive, but they did good science.
Satellites for GPS and internet access were monitored and set up by the Australian Space Agency. They might need NASA's help to get it into space, without any rockets, but that's what friends were for.
They also tracked the weather, and bushfires, and all kinds of things people depended on knowing about every single day.
Karee hesitated for a moment, looking at the design of her space shuttle, and thinking about the agency. The world had a lot of rules. Some of those, were rules about who could go flying, how high, and to where.
The Australian Space Agency would probably get quite mad at her, if she were to fly a shuttle. Like last time.
She shrugged and kept sketching. They'd get over it.
Karee did have to admit that she wasn't quite a rocket scientist. They used mathematics and simulations, with a deep understanding of how the mechanics of the world worked.
She designed things the way she did, because it felt right.
This wasn't the first rocketry she'd tried, of course.
The school had them design their own water rockets. You take a plastic bottle, put some fins and a tail on it. Then you fill it partly with water, and use a bike pump to pressurise the air inside.
When you let go, it takes off flying.
Most people manage to send their rocket to about eighty metres up. Super high, and super fun. Though sometimes you had to run when it came falling down again.
Karee had never bragged about it but her rocket had reached one hundred and twenty eight metres. She was extremely proud of that, even if she never told anyone that she was.
Well... Almost no one.
Niles knew, because she told Niles absolutely everything. He also knew to never tell anyone about the things that they talked about. He was good at that - doing what he was told.
Her bottle rocket had broad wings, and a finned tail. That wasn't the way that she was designing her shuttle. She wanted the cockpit to be a kind of ball, so that it could detach and drift over the top of the moon.
Karee chewed thoughtfully on the end of her pencil, as she furrowed her brow and looked at what she was drawing. It was technical, and would probably take her a little while to build in her workshop.
Visiting the moon was something that a lot of people had dreamed about. Some people had imagined that it was made of cheese. Others thought it was practically a zoo of weird animals.
Only twelve people had actually been to the moon.
The last person who had been to the moon, had done so way back in the 1970s. Years and years had gone by, but no one else had been back.
Lots of people had been to space, and some even lived there on the International Space Station, but they hadn't been to the moon.
Karee made a note to check where the International Space Station was, before attempting a launch. No one wanted her to crash into them. Also to check for the other space stations. She couldn't remember the name of China's one.
On that note, she needed to give a lot more thought to crashing into things. The Earth had a lot of machines flying around it. Lots of satellites for GPS, and TV and Internet and all sorts of other things, too.
You also don't want to hurt any birds when you go flying.
Karee had thought about inventing a speaker-like thing that could go on planes, to tell birds to run away. Unfortunately, it turned out that different sounds work for different birds, and she had got bored with making something that would work everywhere.
The shuttle, though, that was exciting.
"Miss Lovelace!"
Her head jerked up and she stared in surprise at the teacher at the front of the room. A teacher who had one hand on their hip, and was waggling a whiteboard marker with irritation.
Karee swallowed nervously and tried to guess what she'd missed, distracted as she was by her inventions.
It looked like Talia and Sunni had been in a fight. Both girls were glaring at each other, and Talia's shirt was all ruffled. But it looked like that had happened a while ago, and so the teacher wasn't wanting an explanation.
Not that Karee would have been yelled at for not noticing a fight.
There was nothing written on the whiteboard. Well, the date was written in the corner, but that was it. So there was no English or Maths problems that the teacher was demonstrating.
Those always bored Karee - she could solve them without trying.
Usually on a Friday morning, the class would take the role, to note who was here, and who wasn't. That was the first thing they would do. Today, though was different.
Karee furrowed her brow and tried to remember why today was different. It might be important to the question she'd been asked but hadn't heard. Today... Was the overnight trip to the aquarium.
The teacher would probably still take the role.
She smiled pleasantly, and said, "Present, Miss Dobson."
Her teacher looked at her, and then slowly shook her head. "Good try, but no. I was asking you why we don't fight at school."
"Fighting is a boring way to solve problems." Karee said, turning up her nose.
"That's... Not what I was thinking. But... It works." Miss Dobson was surprised, "Fighting really isn't the best way to resolve an argument. It doesn't fix the problem, which means it can come back again."
"Then why do we have wars?" Kateline Jennifer Jones asked curiously.
"If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't have any." Miss Dobson replied.
"Wars are boring." Karee muttered under her breath, looking back down at her book and the shuttle she was designing. What was the point of taking something from someone else, when you had a universe as interesting as this one to explore?
Violence had never made much sense to Karee.
She could do the maths for a rocket, but she did not understand why people got so very upset over... Anything. Even if it was a big thing, getting upset didn't help solve the problem.
Everyone else always seemed to get upset, though. So maybe Karee was the weird one.
The trip she was about to go on didn't make much sense to her, either. They were going to the Melbourne Aquarium, and for some reason they were going to sleep there.
As if sleeping with the fishes ever made for a peaceful rest.
"War hurt a lot of the First Peoples. But other wars saved a lot of people from slavery. There's no good answer, when it comes to war." Sunni said.
Miss Dobson breathed a sigh of relief, "That's right. It is a hard and heavy topic. So, I think we can talk about something else now. But... I don't want any more fighting in my classroom."
"No, Miss Dobson." The class responded as one, Karee included.
The teacher clapped her hands together, "Now then, as I'm sure everyone is excited for tonight, I thought we might have a look at some of Australia's endangered animals."
Karee knew she should pay attention, but she didn't really like animals all that much... Though... Maybe she could design a better aquarium?
© Copyright 2025, James Milne