Crabby goes to the London Science Museum
The Science Museum was enormous, all glass and steel and buzzing with excited kids, and Crabby, tucked in Sofia's ponytail, had never seen so many buttons to press in his entire life. This, he thought, eyes wide, is the greatest place ever!
Sofia raced straight for the Exploring Space gallery, where a real rocket engine hung from the ceiling, and Crabby bent his neck so far out of her ponytail that he nearly lost his grip entirely. A rocket. An actual rocket. Sofia do you understand what this means? We could go to the moon! Sofia of course understood nothing of the sort, since Crabby's thoughts were entirely his own secret, but she did tug her Baba toward the moon landing display.
It was in the Pattern Pod, a gallery full of buttons, levers and spinning gadgets for little hands, that things began to go sideways, quite literally. While Sofia was reading a plaque about symmetry, Crabby spotted a big red button at floor level, clearly meant for children to press. It was, in his professional opinion, exactly his size. So he slipped down from the ponytail, scuttled between a dozen pairs of sneakers, and threw himself claw first onto the button. A giant mechanical arm overhead whirred to life, sweeping a pattern of coloured lights across the ceiling to gasps from nearby children, all who assumed some clever engineer was responsible.
You're welcome, thought Crabby, before a small boys shoe nearly flattened him mid celebration, sending him scrambling under a display case in a most undignified panic. He made it back to Sofia just as she moved on to the Wonderlab, where a demonstration was underway involving a Van de Graaf generator - a big silver ball that made volunteers hair stand on end. Sofia watched, delighted, as a girls ponytail rose straight up like a startled octopus.
Crabby, still hidden in Sofia's ponytail, eyed the silver ball with deep suspicion. Absolutely not, he thought. I have heard of static electricity. I do not trust it. It sounds like something invented specifically to embarrass crabs. He needn't have worried. Sofia wasn't picked as a volunteer, but the close call was enough to keep him lying low for a solid twenty minutes, right up until they reached the Making the Modern World gallery. This was home to Stephenson's Rocket, an actual steam train from 1829. Crabby climbed down for a better look.
Here disaster struck in the form of a pencil. A little boy nearby had dropped his, and it rolled directly under the trains display barrier, right into Crabby's path as he attempted a quiet scuttle back toward Sofia's shoe. Unable to resist a mystery object, Crabby seized it in both claws and attempted to drag it free, only for the pencil to jam sideways against the barrier's metal foot. For one heart stopping second, Crabby was stuck fast, pencil wedged, claws straining, in full view of anyone who happened to look down.
Nobody did. A tour guide chose that exact moment to loudly announce the top speed of the Rocket in 1829, and every head turned toward the train instead, giving Crabby just enough time to abandon the pencil entirely and fling himself back into the safety of Sofia's ponytail, heart pounding, utterly rattled. By the time they left, Sofia had a bag full of postcards and a head full of facts about rockets and steam engines, completely unaware that her ponytail had provided front-row seats to several small scientific catastrophes of its own.
The End