I Don't Seem So Bright in a Well-Lit Room

Chapter Eleven

For much of civilized society, the preferred wake-up call procedure is a simple, gentle phone call from a hotel front desk. Though a sweet kiss from a lover, licks from a beloved puppy, or the tender embrace of a fuzzy love python (if such a thing existed) is better still.

Being thrown across the bridge of a spaceship as a wake-up call was far from a preferred procedure, and would have been very jarring for Potto if he hadn't been hypnotically dancing in a dreamworld to sweet and complex haunted woodwinds only moments before.

When the Muse was hit by an attacking ship, Clory was caught off-guard and lost her branch-entangled grip on Potto. His eyes opened just as he slammed into a flight deck wall, and not into the warm embrace of a fuzzy love python.

He sat up from the floor, noticing that the new stitches in his chest had been ripped open again in the fall. Within seconds he was scooped up back into Clory's "arms" where he was held much tighter this time, and she rooted herself to the floor to prevent further tumbles and jostles. 

Teeg and Gekko made it through this initial attack unscathed, and were running amok from console to console, madly pressing buttons and trying to go about retaliating. Aye's head popped up from behind the captain's chair where he had landed during the assault without injury. 

"Well, we certainly didn't get very far before that giant caught up!" he bitched in the bitchiest tone he could bitch.

"That wasn't K'ween. I wished it had've been K'ween." Teeg huffed, still running about. She pointed out the front window. An adorable little ship zipped around like a mosquito...a cute little cartoon mosquito in an animated pre-school musical about how mosquitoes were really not as bad as they actually really, really were. 

"Awwwww!" Aye said involuntarily.

"No awwwww! We are in trouble. Serious trouble," she barked. "We can't get distracted by how huggable the damn thing is! This whole situation is about to get dangerously huggable."

~~~

Toobli was feeling quite lucky. He had gone back to his home planet Chagrin in order to re-fuel and pack some fresh pyjamas and his circular toothbrush for the long journey that he had planned to catch Potto and Aye. He had barely been out of orbit for any substantial amount of time at all, and there was the Muse flying past. And with a quick scan that confirmed the Quarol and the Topher were on board no less. 

Although she was feared by many, Teeg didn't worry the fluffy little baby-anteater-looking alien. Nothing worried Toobli Dentatan. His species had evolved away from such an empty emotion long ago. 

His wee cute ship The Gooseberry greatly out-armed and could out-manoeuvre the Muse. This adorable cartoon mosquito was (metaphorically) chock-full of malaria. 

His first attack had been successful. The Muse had been temporarily diverting its power to enable the ship to go faster to outrun K'ween, and its shields had been down. They were up now, but the damage had already been done.

What Toobli wasn't expecting, as he nonchalantly munched on his jaundice beetle on-a-bun, was the presence of four Blankton ships joining in on the hunt, trying to steal his prey from right under his delightfully long snout. 

Blanktons may have been useless, but they were enough of a distraction for the second thing he wasn't expecting to happen: the Muse flying towards Chagrin, into its atmosphere, and somehow landing in a dense thicket, deep in the planet-covering forest which (size-wise) it should not have been able to do. 

This was Toobli's home terrain and although he was an expert on navigating it in the air or on land, it was also a terrain that Potto, Gekko and Clory were quite accustomed to; even if the actual species of flora and fauna were unfamiliar to Gekko and Clory, and Potto thought that "flora" and "fauna" were the same word.