Charlie and the Robotic Arm - A Bedtime Story for Kids

0:04 Hello, friends from across the nation and around the world. I'm Martin, and you are listening to Dad's Bedtime Stories, the podcast that takes listener ideas and turns them into bedtime stories. Today's idea is a standalone story that comes to us from Charlie, who I'm thinking was maybe listening to the Grandpa robones series over the weekend there and maybe thought of it as a result, or possibly it was just a coincidence. Let's check out the idea and you can see what you think.

0:41 Hi.

0:42 My name is Charlie and I'm nine years old. I've recently broke my arm, and I like listening to your stories because they helped me get to sleep. I would like my story to be one day I wake up and my aunt is a robotic arm that has lots of superpowers and I hope saved the world from criminals.

1:09 Well, Charlie, I think you have an excellent idea there. And again, I don't know if it was because you listen to Grandpa Robonese on the weekend, but I'm kind of thinking the whole premise for Grandpa Robonese makes the perfect premise for this particular idea.

1:27 You know, a.

1:28 Spaceship and his dragonling friend who like to help people in need and you know, turn them into robots or partial robots. I guess before we get started, I just have a couple things I want to do. First of all, I want to give a big shout out to some of my latest Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Kaya and Millie for signing up on Patreon and supporting the podcast.

2:00 I really really appreciate it. They will now be enjoying some ad free episodes of the show and financially helping us stay in existence. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Last I just want to talk to you guys about something I'm thinking of.

2:19 As you know, I often.

2:21 Create a logo for the show using artificial intelligence. I sort of have it read my transcript after I create the episode and come up with some artwork or a way of changing my own logo to advertise for the show, and some people out there really don't like that I use a HI for it. I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that in this case it's not actually replacing a human, as I would not be able to afford paying a human to do it at this point.

2:54 Hopefully I can in the future. But at the same time, I don't want to discourage real humans like my listeners from doing real artwork, because I think it's really important to write stories and to draw pictures. So for the month of May, I'm gonna do a couple different contests, all right. The first one is a story writing contest.

3:24 I know I have a ton of people out there who have been inspired to write stories. They might take place in some of the universes from Dad's Bedtime Stories, which is totally cool. They might be a completely standalone episode or standalone story that you come up with, which is also really cool. But whatever it is, if you've written a story, I'm asking that you submit it to me by email if you want to at dadt Bedtime Stories at gmail dot com. I am going to pick a couple of them to read on social media and share with people, with the permission of the writer, of course, and I will pick one this month to turn into a full episode of Dad's Bedtime Stories with the help of the writer, which could mean meeting up to kind

4:20 of flush out the story in a little more detail to make it a full episode that sort of thing. And second, I want to see your pictures, so if you have pictures that you've drawn or colored in or sort of anything from the podcast, please send them to me at the same email address, Dad Bedtime Stories at gmail dot com. And I would love to put some of those up on social media as well. And again, I think I'll pick my favorite one with the help of my family, and we could do an episode for that person as well. So if you want to join again, just send them to me by email. But now that's probably long enough for the beginning of a podcast and I should get on with the story. This story is about a boy named Charlie. He'd broke in his arm

5:14 and it was making a miserable. How he broke it exactly doesn't really matter, because well, he didn't share that information with me. But what was important was it was broke, and it edged, and it felt heavier than normal, and he couldn't play and do the things he wanted to do. Everyone just kept telling him it'll heal eventually, but eventually he felt very far away. To Charlie, he wanted it to heal now. In fact, he wanted it to heal better than it ever had. Sometimes he would imagine his cast arm as a robotic arm instead a robotic arm with really cool powers that allowed him to fight enemies and vanquish evil and eh, you know that sort of thing.

6:14 One night, before settling into bed and putting on his favorite podcast, Dad's Bed Time Stories for Kids.

6:22 I'm not sure if you've.

6:23 Heard of it, Charlie wished and wished that that robotic arm would come true. Luckily for Charlie, there happened to be a very special spaceship that was created for the sole purpose of well wish fulfillment and adventure. Somehow, Charlie's mental distress signal, his adamant request to become a superhuman half robot person reached that spaceship. Human distress signal detected.

7:06 Spaceship said to well no one in particular, because on this particular day, Spaceship was hanging out by himself. Emergency protocols initiated. A portal folded up from the base of the ship. It lit up a bright blue color, and soon afterward, a little black dragonling with lava like veins popped through.

7:40 Ah. Alloo, ah, did.

7:44 You send this portal for me? The creature asked, as the portal shut off and folded back down into the floor of the Ship, Yes, I did. I believe I need your help once more. Magnus Spaceship said, ah, what exactly is going on? A listener of our favorite podcast is in some distress and discomfort. He is wishing heavily to have a robotic arm instead of his current broken one. Now, well, all right, you want to go fix his broken arm? Yes, however, I believe we should enhance it beyond all reason. At that moment, Spaceship's display changed to a picture of a robotic arm. I have designed the perfect replacement, a robotic arm that will both enhance and protect the wearer. We will add both offensive and defensive capabilities, the power of flight,

9:01 a holographic projector, and other interesting and useful features. I was hoping that you might be able to add some other enhanced capabilities as well. What do you mean, like a card or something? I mean, look at what I have. Magnus reached down and pulled out a deck of cards from well, Spaceship didn't know exactly where. The dragonling didn't seem to have pockets, but it produced a deck of cards. Nonetheless, all right, here we got some flight powers, some magical creatures, and oh, this might be perfect a vigilante enhancement card and a kind of card that will end grease your overall strength, speed, and of course your battle reflexes, you know, giving you the ability to fight better and that sort

10:12 of thing that sounds perfect. The kid in question was hoping for enhancements that would allow him to fight crime.

10:23 Right.

10:24 Are you sure it's a good idea to give a kid this much power? That is an interesting question, particularly from a creature who exists in a universe where parents allowed their children to have magical cards then go into the forest and battle magical creatures with little to no supervision. Yeah, I guess you're right. I don't want to be a hypocrite or anything. Let's go enhance this kid understood, and so, under the cover of darkness, Spaceship and his friend Magnus the fire dragonling made their way back to Earth. They entered the atmosphere, dropped down below the clouds, activated their invisibility field, and floated over Charlie's house, activating sleep ray.

11:26 Now we must ensure that no one wakes up. A strange blue light shot out of the bottom of the ship and sort of enveloped the entire house. Then a team of little medical robots were dispatched out the back of the ship carrying a little stretcher. They made their way through Charlie's window, carefully put the kid with the broken arm onto a little stretcher and flew him outside and into the back of the ship, where the medical procedures began. A team of robots equipped with high tech three D printing software began to reconstruct Charlie's entire arm, replacing its parts atom by atom with metal and high powered electronics. At the same time, Magnus pulled out the Vigilante card and placed it on Charlie's chest. The card activated,

12:40 glowed blue, and shot into the boy. Charlie didn't have a card Corps, but that didn't mean that a card couldn't be fully absorbed by him. It became one with Charlie's essence. It made him stronger, faster, and even enhanced his reflexes and his sense for battle. I believe we have completed the operation. Ah looks really cool too, Magnus said, looking down at the sleeping boy with the robotic arm.

13:23 The same team of robots carefully flew him out of the ship through the window and placed him gently back in his bed before disappearing once more. The next morning, Charlie woke up and the first thing he noticed was that the strange, dull pain sensation was completely gone. He looked down at his arm, expecting to see the cast that had been on it, but instead seeing a robot arm.

14:00 His arm was now made entirely out of metal. For a moment, he panicked, and then he tried to move his fingers. To his surprise, they still moved just like they always had. He bent his arm up and down, he turned his wrist, and generally speaking, despite being a robot arm, it worked just like it had other than the fact that his wrist could now turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees around without any kind of pain, something he found weird, but for some reason wasn't particularly panicked about, because at the end of the day Charlie had wished for this. Had his wish really come true, he felt a whole bunch of new sensations too, almost like parts of his hand that well weren't there before, reflexes that he instinctively knew he could activate, even though

15:09 that made no sense. He reached out to that first sensation that first knew part on his arm that he could now feel. It felt sort of like clenching the muscles in your wrist. Only when he activated this one, an energy shield began to grow out of the side of the mechanical arm. The more he clenched, the larger it grew, until it covered his entire body in a protective force field like bubble cool, he said, before releasing the muscle and the shield at the same time. Then he activated another previously non existing part of his own, and a little ray gun looking thing with a glowing blue light at the end unfolded from the center of his wrist. Maybe I should take this outside for some trials, Charlie said, releasing that particular muscle and allowing the ray

16:20 gun to fold back into his arm. He got dressed and decided to head outside. Though, uh wait, should he show his parents he had a mechanical arm. He imagined them panicking just a little bit, perhaps calling an ambulance or forcing him to go to the hospital to get things checked out. He would need to find a way that they wouldn't see it to cover it up, maybe, And with that thought, a strange sort of shimmer appeared around the outside side of the arm. It glowed for a second and then disappeared, leaving behind the image of a normal human broken arm, just like it had looked the day before. He could tell it was still mechanical, but to his eyes it looked normal, cool, some sort of holographic projection or something. He said out loud, turning

17:32 his wrist over left and right. I ain't wonder what else that particular feature can do. Charlie made his way out of the house, passed his parents, sent into a small part of the yard that he thought would be open enough yet secluded enough to try out his new powers. Deciding that it probably wasn't the right place to try out a ray gun, he reached for one of the other sensations. His hand folded inside his wrist, and a long pole extended outwards, a long pole with four long propellers.

18:15 The propellers popped up and well. Charlie now had a medium sized helicopter propeller sticking directly out of his mechanical wrist. He lifted the propeller up in the air and activated it using his muscles. It instantly began to spin around faster and faster and faster, until it slowly started to lift Charlie up off of the ground, higher and higher and higher into the air. Whoa, Charlie said, this is amazing.

18:57 Charlie tilted his arm forward, flew forward. He tilted it back and flew backward. He could adjust the speed in his height with a simple thought. This was the coolest thing ever. In an instant, he launched himself up towards the sky at incredible speed. The propeller pulled him along through the air, almost as fast as a jet. He blasted through the clouds and high above the world below.

19:33 It was honestly a pretty awesome time. Though Eventually Charlie decided that it was probably time to come down for a landing. He slowed down into more of a hover mode, hanging from the propeller once again, and thought for the first time that, eh, he wasn't even really feeling tired. He was holding his entire body up by a single arm, and normally that would exhaust a person, but Charlie's muscles felt fine. They felt like he could do this all day.

20:11 That was another change that couldn't be explained by the robotic arm alone. He slowly lowered himself down through the clouds and realized that he was above some kind of town center below. He wasn't sure exactly where, but there were clearly a lot of people around, people who could see him and report him and well possibly call the army about him or whatever. In his worry, the same strange, distorted energy that had covered up his mechanical alarm for his parents started to spread over his arm and across his entire body. It shimmered for a second, kind of like air does when it's extremely hot over top of pavement, and then his arms disappeared, and his legs disappeared. Everything about him well was no longer visible invisibility. Maybe the

21:22 same holographic field can well give the illusion that I'm not here, Charlie realized, as he slowly and invisibly lowered himself down to the top of a fairly tall building in the area. This should be an easy place to test things out, he said, though he was kind of disoriented, not being able to see his feet and where they touched the ground. He could still feel them in everything, but it's weird to not be able to see them.

22:00 He focused for a second, trying out something that he hoped might work. He focused on that field that was directly surrounding his limbs to expand outward into more of a bubble. The air shimmered again as the glowing energy moved away from his body and into a large bubble form around him. It shimmered once more, and he could see his arms and legs again. Looking out through the bubble, everything was a little bit distorted. A quick look over at a near by reflective door surface told him that he was still invisible, at least from the outside of the bubble, and this was probably a better place to test some of the other equipment that came with the arm.

22:59 He once again focused on that sensation that had caused the blue ray gun to pop up and had folded out of his arm. Once again, he pointed it over to a large mechanical box looking thing on the top of the roof, squeezed his muscles, and a pulse of blue energy shot out, hit the metal box and started building ice up all around it. An ice ray perfect, he said, Now what else have you got? He let go of that muscle, folding the ice ray in, and activated another. This one also looked like a ray gun of some kind, though it was sparking on the end with bits of electricity something about had told him that he probably shouldn't point it at the metal box, so instead he pointed it straight up in the air, squeezed

24:01 his muscles, and a bolt of electricity shot directly upward.

24:07 Wow. Cool.

24:11 This one came with a sense of power too, one that he could turn up or down instinctively. He knew that well. He knew there was a level that would simply shock things it touched, and a level that would do more. He said it to the first one. Charlie didn't want to do anyone any real harm after all. Then he released the muscle, allowing the electric blaster to fold back into his arm, and activated the last one.

24:46 He could sense. A somewhat larger cannon like thing folded out of his arm, with strange green good dripping from the end of it. He pointed it at the same mechanical box, squeezed his muscles, and fired a stream of sticky, bicky, goopy goo blasted out and covered the mechanical box. It looked like that would be really annoying to clean up and very hard to escape from if you were hit with it. Cool, he said, I think I might be a superhero. Just then, his wrist started to beep. He lifted it up to look at the side of it, allowing the goo cannon to fold back in, and something else unfolded from the side, a little screen with a picture of a radio signal or something like that. The numbers changed as the radio tuned itself into the right frequency,

25:59 and Charlie heard at tension, all units, we have a bank robbery in progress. All available units should head to the corner of First Street and Fifth Street immediately again, bank robbery in progress, First and Fifth. The screen then changed to a picture of a map. A blue dot was blinking at the top of a building, clearly Charlie.

26:30 The map then zoomed out and pinged another dot, a red one at the corner of First and Fifth Street. Charlie oriented himself so he was pointing directly at the red dot. Then he lifted his arm up in the air. He activated flight mode. His hand folded inside his wrist and was replaced by a medium sized helicopter propeller or something like it, still invisible, Charlie blasted up into the air and straight towards the coordinates on his wrist, coordinates that were honestly somewhat hard to see when it was his wrist holding him up, but he knew he was going in the right direction. Scanning the streets below, he soon came across what he assumed was the right street.

27:29 A bunch of police cars surrounded a large glass bank building. At that instant, a team of people, while wearing black, burst out of the bank and onto the streets. Put your hands up and put the money down, a police officer standing beside his car announced. In response, one of the robbers pointed what looked like a ray gun straight at the police car and blasted a red band of energy straight at the thing. The car exploded. As the police officer jumped out of the way to safety, the robbers began to run. Charlie looked at where they were running, to a car or a van that looked suspiciously like an escape vehicle. He headed directly for it and dropped down out of the air in front of it, Still entirely invisible. He activated his freeze ray, pointed it at

28:38 one of the robbers, and squeezed his wrist. Blue energy shot out of what seemed like nowhere to the robbers and instantly froze one of them into a gigantic ice cube. But who did that? The others said. Slowly, they backed into each other back to back, pointing their ray guns outward in a sort of protective circle formation. Charlie moved to the side so he wouldn't be in exactly the same place, switched to his goo cannon and blasted it straight at another two of the perpetrators. A stream of gooey green goop blasted out, hit the two individuals and almost instantly stuck them to the floor. It's coming from over there, the other two announced, pointing directly at Charlie. Instinctively, Charlie activated his force field just in time for two

29:46 beams of red energy to bash directly into it. It seemed that his invisibility had disappeared at that point. Maybe he couldn't have both of them activated all at once. Luckily for him, the energy shield seemed to be completely unaffected by the blasts of energy. Charlie slowly began to walk towards the two blasts. Hey, it's not working. Why isn't it working. They continued to fire their blasters until eventually they both became too hot. They dropped them as if they'd just touched something straight out of the oven.

30:31 Ah I think it overheated, one of them yelled, and in that instant Charlie activated his shock wave or lightning device or whatever it was, and pointed it at one of the robbers. A blast of non lethal electrical energy shot out, hit the robber, and then changed to the other one. Oh is he doing, they said, as they clinched every muscle in their body. He allowed the shockwave weapon to turn off, and the two robbers fell to the ground. At the same time, sirens from almost every direction started to appear. The police were coming. Charlie had done the right thing, but he didn't really want to answer questions about it right now. He instantly focused on his invisibility field reappearing. The air shimmered around him, and

31:35 well it did just that. He lifted his arm up in the air, folded his hand in and produced the little, medium sized helicopter rotor. Once again, it began to spin and Charlie lifted up into the air. He watched for a minute from eye above the scene as the police arrested the two shocked individuals, and well endeavored to free the other three from the goo and ice, looking particularly puzzled as they did so. Then Charlie blasted off into the air once again. He flew high above the clouds until the landscape below started to look a little more familiar.

32:29 He slowly lowered down and came to a hover as he saw his very own house. He gently lowered himself down to the ground, landing in front of his door and deactivating his flight propeller as he moved toward it, Keeping his field of invisibility activated, he slipped inside the house, hoping no one would notice he'd gone. He tiptoed back to his bedroom and deactivated the whole thing when he was safely inside, His bed looked particularly comfortable right now, and well he'd earned a good sleep after a day of work as a robotic superhero. He climbed into his bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes.

33:32 With every breath, Charlie sank down into the mattress. He released his shoulders, his arms, his legs, and with each breath he sank a little deeper and his mind began to wander off to thoughts of new dreams, new adventures, and new robotic soup Your powers to come.

34:03 Good night everyone.

35:07 Name never in New York Union, No more.

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