Never-ending story

The library hosted Cheadle's 1ˢᵗ book festival on 6 September 2025. Below is a story created by children at the event. Each paragraph is a new child's addition to the story. The image was created be feeding the story into Google's generative AI tool Gemini.

Characters from the story.

Once upon a time at Cheadle Book Festival...

A terrible thing happened. A stripy blue and yellow bear stole ALL the ice creams. Everyone cried because the only one left was mint choc chip!

But Rocco loved mint choc chip but then the stripy blue and yellow bear ate that too. The blue and yellow bear saw how sad Rocco was so made some more.

Rocco was happy and ran away with the ice cream. He ran into the forest and climbed a tree. He found a hole in the tree and made more ice cream with mint leaves from the tree. But mint leaves do not come from trees, they come from the garden. But this was a magic tree! This was a very special magic tree. It had amazing rainbow flowers.

All of a sudden, the vanilla fairy arrived in a puff of smoke. “What’s all the noise about?” she said. When she heard about the ice cream she said, ”Good heavens! I can magic you all sorts of flavours". And in a swirl of stars she produced hedgehog, bleach, a sing along flavour and loads of other flavours. But suddenly she could only make broccoli, sprout and courgette flavours. Very Strange indeed!

The stripy blue and yellow bear sat all alone. Drops puddled on the ground where his ice cream had been. Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. With his head down he let out a sad, "Aghh". Everyone was enjoying ice cream but he was alone. So more bears came over and they gave him their ice cream because he was sad. Then they heard a massive roar in the woods, "ARRRGHR". It made the ground shake. It was a lion with a sore throat and he wanted ice cream. The bear gave the lion chocolate ice cream to make his throat better.

A crab came along and tried to pinch the ice cream from the lion. But a dragon stopped him by breathing fire on him. The crab caught fire and ran away. The lion ate the ice cream so his throat was better and gave another ROAR! But the the crab returned and pinched the lion’s paw. “Ouch”, screamed the lion. “What was that for? I need more ice cream now to soothe my paw but make it chocolate please”. But there was no chocolate ice cream left, So the lion roared as loudly as he could “RRRRRRRRRRRRRH”. And the crab ran away again.

The lion found more ice cream but it was strawberry flavour and had Llama food in it. The Llama could smell the food so took the strawberry ice cream. It made the lion so angry that it made his throat hurt again. He found more chocolate ice cram but this time a fairy took it. He said give me back my ice cream. But then he spied a secret passageway and went in it. It was a whole new world of ice creams. He was so happy. But there was an ice cream man who ate all the ice creams before he could get some. He was having the worst day of his life and he returned up the passageway.