Spark & Anvil Privacy

← All Forty Stories

Forty Stories · episode 2 of 40

The Four Who Sat Still

Set fair decoys, and treat still pieces as questions.

Loading audio…

Read the script
  1. Narrator: From Spark and Anvil and BluffForge — this is Decoy, in chapter 1 of the BluffForge cast.
  2. Narrator: This drama uses an AI-generated voice. Voiced via Gemini 2.5.
  3. Narrator: This is the story of a 4. Not strong, not weak. And very, very good at sitting still.
  4. Four: My job tonight was to do absolutely nothing. For the whole game.
  5. Decoy: Everyone looks for a piece in the back row that never moves, with brambles beside it. That looks like the Moonstone.
  6. Decoy: So we build one that looks exactly like that, and isn't.
  7. Four: They put me in the back corner, with two brambles next to me. The real Moonstone was somewhere boring, behind a 6.
  8. Narrator: The game began. The four never moved. To anyone watching, that corner shouted: treasure here!
  9. Four: Blue sent a badger all the way across the board to clear a bramble. Then a 5 came for me.
  10. Narrator: The 5 met the 4 and won. But it found nothing worth finding.
  11. Four: I went home. But Blue had spent turn after turn on an empty corner.
  12. Narrator: Meanwhile, Red had pushed forward on the other side.
  13. Decoy: Was that sneaky?
  14. Quillby: Both players know decoys are part of this game. Blue built one last match. Nobody broke a rule.
  15. Quillby: A still, guarded piece is evidence, not proof. It's a question, not an answer.
  16. Four: Sitting still is a job too. Mine bought Red half a game.
  17. Narrator: Set fair decoys, and treat still pieces as questions. That's the four's story.
  18. Narrator: You've been listening to a Spark and Anvil chapter, written by the Spark and Anvil writing team for ages 9 to 14.
  19. Narrator: Apps stay free forever.
  20. Narrator: Curriculum aligned to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.
  21. Narrator: Released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 for educational reuse. Visit Spark and Anvil for the full transcript.

This episode goes with a chapter: read the story →