One Piece (Part 1 of [TBD])

Once upon a time, in a very shiny valley, there was a Kingdom of Glass called Onething.

And it was oh-so-tidy! In Onething, everybody did exactly one thing, and they did it perfectly.
The Baker baked the bread, but he had no idea what a "wheat" looked like.
The Miller ground the flour, but he thought the handle was what made the powder come out.
The Builder stacked the blocks, but he didn't know why they stuck together.
And the Kings sat at the very tippy-top of the highest, pointiest glass towers. Their "one thing" was to keep Onething as one thing.

It was a magnificent machine. Every One held hands in a great, big chain. As long as the sun was shining and nobody let go, the glass towers sparkled, and the music could grow!

The people of Onething thought their Kingdom was the whooooole world. They thought they lived inside a big bubbly ball of light.
What the people of Onething didn’t know was that their bubbly ball was actually wrapped inside another ball. And this ball was much bigger, darker, and heavier.

And the bigger ball got squeezed by the weather, so it decided to shrink.
But the shrinking caused the bigger ball to start squeezing around the smaller ball, too!

Since the people in Onething only did the one thing.
Since the people had declared they had seen all the things.
Since the Kings thought that they didn’t have other Kings.
Well, there were no people left there to look at that thing!

But the things could remember the dance of the ball.
The stones in the tower remembered what it was like to be pushed down into the earth.
The wheat in the field remembered what it was like to be pressed in the mill.
The water in the fountain remembered what it was like to be squeezed by the clouds.

The stuff remembered that big things squeeze little things. But the people had forgotten, because this thing is a new thing, and that breaks their one rule.

Inside the city, the air grew so sticky. The squeeze made everything feel quick. It made the Kingdom feel like it was shaking, but it was so subtle!

The Miller was the first to grumble and mumble. He looked at his hands, the same hands that had turned the one wheel for forty years. "Ouch," he complained, rubbing his knuckles. "I haven't changed a thing, but now my hands are puffy like balloons! "

The Baker frowned at his dough. It wasn't rising and poofing. It was sitting there, all flat and all grey, and all mushy. "It’s not my fault!" the Baker shouted. "It’s that grumpy Miller! He sent me a bad batch. He lied about the ingredients!"

The Builder looked up and saw the hard, white clouds turning dark. He tried to shout a warning to the Miller across the street. He meant to yell, "Close the windows, the rain is heavy!" But the air scrambled his words up! What the Miller heard was: "Toes the blimpos, the train is a Chevy!" The Builder screamed at him again, and the Baker thought he was crazy!

The Kingdom was fine in the midst of a panic, because the one thing that Onething could believe was that only one King at one time could ever change their one rule.