"Father?" Belle called as she stepped down into the cellar he used as his workshop. She bent in order prevent herself from hitting her head on a low beam, and her father replied, "Oh, hello, Belle! Come this way, I need your assistance." Belle walked toward the sound of her father's voice and shook her head when she found that only his legs were visible as he bustled around underneath his latest invention. She smiled fondly and said, "Hello, father. What do you need?"
"Hand me that tool box, will you?" her father replied, not reaching a hand out to point her in the right direction, and Belle looked around her. "Which tool box, father?" she asked, her brow furrowed as she searched the dark, crowded room with squinted eyes. "Just there; by the wood pile, on top of the textile machine." Her father had been inspired by the ever-growing industrial progress in Paris when he was a boy, and had ever since been tinkering away with scraps of metal and planks of wood, screws and nails and springs; creating countless machines on various levels of operation: it works, it sort of works, it doesn't work. The textile machine was on the level of "it doesnt work", but Maurice kept it around, hoping he would be able to disassemble it and use the part for something else.
Belle retrieved the toolbox and pushed it under the machine her father's legs stuck out from, and as he thanked her, she sat back on her heels and sighed. Maurice heard the heaviness in her sigh and asked hurriedly, "What troubled you, my love?"
"Oh, nothing, father," Belle said, shaking her head. She smiled at a small kettle on the wall, one that was meant to move itself off the stove when it began to whistle. It, too, lay in the "it doesn't work" category. "It's just..." she began, pushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear as something sparked from under the machine her father worked on, "Do you think I'm odd, father?"
"My beauty? My princess? Odd? Whatever put that idea into your head?" Belle smiled and shook her head, "Oh, it's nothing, I suppose. I just...sometimes I feel a bit out of place, I guess. Like I don't quite...fit in." It was true. Belle did anything but fit in, and everyone in town, Belle included, were perfectly aware of her peculiarity. Everone, that is, excepting Maurice.
"Oh, of course you fit in, my dear," Maurice said as he wheeled himself out from under the machine, wiping his hands on his slacks. "The only thing unusual about you is your extraordinary beauty." Belle blushed and smiled, giving her father a peck on the cheek before crossing to the doorway, looking out at the pastures. "It is lovely out today, father. Don't you agree?"
"Oh!" her father exclaimed, and Belle turned quickly, finding Maurice clapping his hands together in excitement and rubbing them against one another as he said, "It work, it works! Oh, I didn't think I'd see the day." Belle's smile stretched across her face and lit up the room. "Oh, father, congratulations!" She crossed the room to him and held his shoulders as his machine chopped wood and sprung it across the room, onto the wood pile.
"I shall take it the faire in the morning!" Maurice exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air. Belle's joy wavered as fear crossed her face, but she hid it quickly and smiled sweetly, "Do be careful, father." He wove her off, "Of course I will, of course, of course. You have nothing to worry about, my dear." Belle shook her head but said, "Oh, father, I am sure you will do so well at the faire." Maurice smiled widely at his daughter and folded her into a hug before pulling away and saying, "I must begin loading it onto the cart! Begin dinner, my daughter, we shall have a fine meal tonight." Belle smiled at him and hurried to the kitchen, assuring herself that her father knew the woods and would make it to town just fine by himself.
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