Gwendolyn Gobstopper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Gwendolyn Gobstopper had made forty batches of laughing candy, and not one of them worked. She wanted a sweet that would make anyone who tasted it laugh for a full hour. Real laughter, the kind that bends you double. She dropped another green drop on her tongue and waited. Nothing. Just sugar and disappointment. She scraped the batch into the bin and stared at the coiled mainspring on her workbench. It came from her father's pocket watch. She had taken the watch apart the day he died, and she kept that little spring near her while she worked. It reminded her that tiny parts could drive big things. But no part of it told her what she was missing. The shop door chimed. Mademoiselle Cocoa Beans swept in without knocking, red hair piled high, top hat crooked. She had made chocolate for thirty years and was Gwendolyn's oldest friend. The Guild wanted her shop shut by month's end, yet here she stood, grinning. She plucked a rejected candy from the bin and popped it in her mouth. "Too clever!" Cocoa Beans said. She spat it into her palm. "You built a joke. Bodies don't laugh at jokes. They laugh at surprise, darling. The catch in the throat. The thing that arrives wrong!" Gwendolyn frowned. "Surprise isn't an ingredient." "Isn't it?" Cocoa Beans tapped the mainspring. "You already made one candy turn sour overnight. Sharp citrus, out of nowhere. That startled you, yes?" It had. Weeks ago a clockwork sweet went sour by morning, a flavor it never had before. Gwendolyn had chased that mistake and never caught it. Now she saw it differently. She had been trying to build laughter into the taste. But laughter came from the body being fooled. She grabbed the mainspring and set it inside a fresh candy shell, wound tight. Around it she packed sugar that stayed sweet, then a hidden pocket of sour citrus behind a thin sugar wall. The spring would hold the wall until it cracked. The mouth would taste sweet, relax, then get ambushed by sour. Surprise, delivered by clockwork. She made three. She swallowed one. For two seconds it was ordinary. Then the wall cracked. Sour flooded her tongue and her whole face jumped. A laugh burst out of her, loud and helpless. She could not stop. Cocoa Beans ate one and doubled over, hooting, gripping the counter. Gwendolyn laughed until her ribs ached. She watched the shop clock. The laughing did not stop at a minute. It did not stop at five. At last she wiped her eyes. The trigger was surprise, hidden and timed. She finally knew the secret. But she also had a new problem. Her laughter had lasted barely six minutes, not a full hour. The clockwork surprise fired once, then died. She needed the spring to keep striking. Again and again, for sixty minutes straight.