The House That Hummed

Fairy Tale City never truly slept.

Even past midnight, the skyline buzzed with delivery drones, glowing billboard ads for Giant's Beanstalk Coffee, and the distant hum of mag-rail trains carrying night-shift workers home.

Right in the center of it all stood the Mega Mansion — tall, teal-trimmed, and impossible to miss. It had fourteen floors, a rooftop garden, a training hall on the ninth floor, and a kitchen big enough to feed a small village. Most people in the city knew it. Many had opinions about it.

Mega Mother Goat stood on the rooftop terrace, arms crossed, amber eyes scanning the skyline. Her blue dress shifted in the night breeze. The teal kerchief around her neck flicked up once, then settled.

Behind her, the kitchen light was on. She could hear her three kids arguing about who finished the last of the cloud-berry juice.

She almost smiled.

Almost — because somewhere beneath her hooves, deep inside the walls, something went

*thunk.*

What the Walls Swallowed

The thunk came again — louder this time, from directly below the floor.

Mega Mother Goat dropped to one knee and pressed her palm flat against the rooftop tiles. She let her x-ray vision click on like switching a lamp. Through fourteen floors of steel and tile and insulation, she scanned the building's skeleton floor by floor.

Nothing unusual.

Nothing until floor six — where there was a room that had no right being there.

It was big. Bigger than big. The size of the entire sixth-floor training wing, and it was filled with machines she had never ordered, never approved, and absolutely never seen before: dozens of small robots — squat, four-armed, and completely silent now — standing motionless in rows like a store that had closed for the night.

In the center of the room stood an elderly parrot. A large bird, hunched slightly, his copper-green feathers ruffled, his golden eyes very bright. He held a rolled-up blueprint in one wing.

He looked up.

Directly at the ceiling.

Directly at her.

"Oh dear," he said, very quietly.