Lia floated back to the airlock, her bunny ears askew, still chuckling. She had no data, no specimen, and no proof. But when she got back to the ship, she found Aris Thorne dressed in a chicken costume, performing a mime routine for the bridge crew.
A small, crescent-shaped platform glowed under a single spotlight. On it sat a top hat, a pair of white gloves, and a carrot-shaped wand. And behind the stage, trapped inside a glass cylinder filled with a bubbling, cotton-candy-pink fluid, was a creature that looked exactly like a giant, two-foot-tall plush bunny. Its button eyes were dark, its fur was pristine, and its stitched-on smile was frozen in perpetual cheer.
“The stars… get sad?”
Floppy’s stitched smile widened into something genuine. THAT IS MY FAVORITE SET LIST. Bunny Girl--39-s Strange Alien Adventure.rar
The end.
The carrot dissolved into light and was absorbed into the bunny’s fur. The pink fluid in the cylinder began to drain.
No one ever remembered why they started laughing. They just did. And that, Floppy had told her, was the purest kind of magic. Lia floated back to the airlock, her bunny
She was the ship’s anthropologist and, by strange coincidence, the only crew member currently wearing a pair of fluffy white bunny ears. It was a bet she’d lost during the last hyperspace jump. The ears, embarrassingly, were magnetized to her headband. “Don’t say a word, Aris.”
When it stopped, Floppy was glowing faintly. THANK YOU. NOW I HAVE ONE JUMP LEFT. WHERE DO YOU NEED A LAUGH?
The energy signature was coming from the bunny. A small, crescent-shaped platform glowed under a single
“The whole ship,” she said.
And for the first time in three hundred years, the stars in that sector of space—even the grumpy red dwarfs—felt something tickle their ancient cores. A few of the younger, hotter blue giants even twinkled, which is the cosmic equivalent of a belly laugh.