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Forty Stories · episode 19 of 40

The Badger Who Counted

Counting the pieces that are gone tells you what is left.

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  1. Narrator: From Spark and Anvil and BluffForge — this is Forty Stories, episode 19: The Badger Who Counted.
  2. Narrator: This drama uses an AI-generated voice. Voiced via Gemini 2.5.
  3. Narrator: This is the story of a badger, a 3, who was good at counting.
  4. Badger: Every army has the same forty pieces. One Moonstone, six brambles, one spy, eight runners, and so on. So you always know what you're facing. Just not where.
  5. Quillby: And every time a piece goes home, it's turned face up. Everyone sees it.
  6. Badger: So I kept count. Blue had lost four brambles. Two were cleared by our badgers and two were found by runners.
  7. Red Piece: Why does that matter?
  8. Badger: Six brambles, minus four, means Blue has only two brambles left. Two. No more.
  9. Narrator: Near Blue's back row, three still pieces sat close together.
  10. Badger: At most two of those three can be brambles. So at least one of them is something else. Maybe the Moonstone.
  11. Quillby: That's a real reason. Into the Ledger it goes.
  12. Narrator: Red tested the pieces carefully, and the counting turned out right: two brambles and the Moonstone.
  13. Narrator: Counting the pieces that are gone tells you what is left. That's the badger's story.
  14. Narrator: You've been listening to a Spark and Anvil story, written by the Spark and Anvil writing team for ages 9 to 14.
  15. Narrator: Apps stay free forever.
  16. Narrator: Curriculum aligned to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.
  17. Narrator: Released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 for educational reuse. Visit Spark and Anvil for the full transcript.