Once upon a time…

There lived an old man, not just figuratively, he was quite old.  In fact, he’d been around for so long, he was rather tired of being around.  He’d done everything he wanted to do, and seen everything he wanted to see, which in his old opinion, amounted to nothing good at all.

The world was an awful place, you see, with wars and destruction, cruelty and hatred, and though he was blowing everything out of proportion, there really wasn’t nearly enough joy to go around.  So one day, instead of moping and frumping about, he came to the realization that there was indeed another accomplishment in the waiting.

Now, The old man was a toymaker by trade, specializing in puppets.  It gave him happiness like nothing else to create gleeful things, and saddened him immensely to see them mistreated.  He wanted his toys to be happy, to thrive without the worry of having their strings yanked about abusively or little pieces broken and the rest left for trash.  He couldn’t stand it that no one else cared for the toys like he did, and so he did what no one else could do.  He set them free.

It was the greatest creation the toymaker had ever invented, for it gave the puppets a place to escape the cruelty of the world.  He called it Puppetland, for that is exactly what it was.  And when it was complete, the Maker used all of the creative magic and wishful thinking he could muster to make every puppet vanish from the Earth, and appear in his Puppetland.