Prompt 14 (Plight of the Penguin): Most birds migrate south for the winter. Destiny City is hardly a tourist destination for any migratory bird–much less penguins. They don’t even fly! And yet, Destiny City has a colony of roughly a thousand penguins that have decided to take a winter vacation in the metropolis.
One evening, the horde of penguins waddled into town, and though they’ve broken up into smaller groups for the time being, there are still so many of them. They are friendly and they are foolish. They don't know anything about city life. They waddle into stores, hang out in the road, and stare at decorative lights. They look like they’re having the time of their life, and they are not afraid of people, at all.
They will follow you home. They’ll croak at you. They’ll try to eat whatever you have in your hands. The penguins look like Adélie penguins, but they are only about a foot and a half tall and some are far more plump than others.
All sorts of rumors have been going around about these penguins–they’re migrating because of climate change, they escaped the zoo and bred in the forests of Destiny City, they’re escaped from a lab attempting to create a new wave of pets, they’re aliens–to be honest, no one really seems to know. The city is corralling them and attempting to relocate them somewhere safer, but the friendly little penguins are happy to be involved for as long as they can.
By the end of the season, Destiny City will have safely recovered all of these cute little birds, so they cannot be kept as a pet and will escape if you attempt to confine one, but they are mostly friendly and like to be involved in whatever you’re doing. Their calls can be either cute or creepy, and they look like funny little monsters if you manage to agitate them enough to get them chasing you. They almost always travel in small groups and always look after each other.
Liánlí hadn’t really given much thought to what he’d do with a backyard until he actually had one. The primary one he’d grown up with, back in Boston, it hadn’t been much to fuss over, barely enough room for anything green amidst the not-quite-urban, not-entirely-suburban bit of sprawl that Zhìháo’s family had called “home.” After getting out of there—first to the reprieve of his undergrad dormitories, then to various apartments either all his own or shared with Hayden—Liánlí simply hadn’t had a backyard, so he hadn’t needed to worry about what to do with one.
Mostly, the backyard at his extremely Saturn Knight-appropriate Victorian Gothic revival-style home had been used by Táotáo, who needed space to relieve herself, same as everybody. A rickety old swing-set and slide had come with the place because nobody had wanted to move them, but Liánlí didn’t entirely trust the two-piece play-scape to fully support Miss Huanjing Guo, his ten-year-old violin student, or Miss Xiaxue Guo, her baby sister. He’d considered testing them out on his own—not that their hypothetical failure to support a full-grown adult would prove very much about their ability to support children—but every time Liánlí had come close to climbing up the dingy-looking metal steps, a voice in his head had flared up, sounding an awful lot like Ming-er and rightfully scolding him for doing something so dangerous without anyone there to help him if it went badly.
That had been before Huanxi and later Dewey had arrived on Earth, though.
Following Táotáo outside with his morning mug of tea (a fresh green that he’d only found stocked at his favorite Chinese, Taiwanese, and Tibetan import market in town) in-hand, Liánlí smiled at the evidence of things being done with the backyard. Not very many things yet, but only because the season wasn’t right (as far as he knew) for planting or growing anything.
Plus, a lot of effort from the three of them had gone into the creation of a plot in the backyard where Huanxi and Dewey could garden, when the weather got better for it. That didn’t cease being true just because nothing had gotten properly planted yet. Working together, they’d had to dig up the grass for the in-ground plot, dredge up and weeds and seeds thereof that they could find, work the soil and add mulch to make sure it would be healthy enough for seeds, keep the ground hydrated enough even without anything planted there yet, set the posts so they’d be ready for Huanxi’s and Dewey’s plants to grow, built some additional raised boxes that sat below the window and filled them with their own soil…… As yet, they had not built the fence they intended to make out of five-foot-high chicken-wire—which would apparently do the best job of foiling the local rabbits’ attempts at theft—but since they hadn’t put down any seeds yet, that hadn’t proven too much of an issue.
Blissfully unaware of her human, Táotáo trotted through the yard to perform her daily round of sniffs over by the wooden fence between this yard and the neighbors’, by the tree that sat kitty-corner to the garden, by the swings that nobody used. She’d already gone out with Liánlí for his morning run, but some business still needed to get done………as soon as she verified that none of the assorted rodents, rabbits, and other small animals had done anything funny with her yard.
At least, Liánlí imagined that her inner monologue sounded rather like that. Standing in the grass and drinking his tea, he had to admit that he didn’t really know what she was thinking—not until Táotáo perked up with a firm, decisive bark.
Hearing her bark at all snapped Liánlí right to attention. His little girl could be chatty, sure, but usually not by barking. Moreover, as he darted to her side, he noticed that she was standing straight and almost rigid, with her batty-looking ears up almost as straight as she was herself, the way she did when the next-door neighbors had unsavory-seeming guests over.
“Baby, what’s wrong,” Liánlí started, but looking in the direction Táotáo pointed her nose quickly answered that question.
Right in the middle of the plot that was going to be Huanxi and Dewey’s garden stood a little penguin. Liánlí frowned, tilting his head and bemusedly wrinkling his nose. The angle didn’t explain the bird’s presence any more or less than having it right-side up had done.
Beside him, Táotáo barked again, definitely loud enough for Huanxi and Dewey to hear, and probably several of the neighbors too. That would’ve been more than enough at this time of morning, if anyone asked Liánlí, but reality clearly disagreed. Rustling in a distinctly cranky-looking manner, the penguin flipped its little wingies and tried to puff up its chest. Not that Liánlí had ever learned to interpret penguin body-language, but it sure seemed like the little guy was glaring at him and Táotáo.
Then, the penguin cawed at them, far too loudly for a guy his size. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, with a vibrato too much like cackling to be properly adorable. But it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, either? Mostly, it left Liánlí perplexed about how to even begin handling this situation, staring helplessly at the penguin as it flapped its wings and cawed at him once more.
Noir Songbird_
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2023 3:48 am
It was Táotáo's bark that grabbed Huanxi's attention. Normally, Liánlí's furry companion--and his, as well, of late--was polite and well-behaved, particularly in the early morning. He had been a bit sluggish to rise, even in the face of being deprived of morning cuddling, and so he was just wandering into the kitchen to make a morning cup of tea for himself--and there was some pride in having figured out enough of Liánlí's kitchen to be able to do so--when the barks drew his ear.
He frowned, lightly, and moved to and through the back door, glad that he had tossed on a warm robe and slippers because the temperatures were certainly starting to dip.
"Liánlí? Is everything alright?" He asked, as he stepped closer to his partner. (That...was the word that felt most right, to him. "Partner." In many things.) His eyes followed Táotáo to the strange bird, and he wrinkled his nose.
"What...is that?" It was wholly unfamiliar, nothing like the birds he was used to seeing around Destiny City. But Earth was large and quite biodiverse, so perhaps it was from somewhere else?
Hearing someone else approach yanked Liánlí’s attention away from the inexplicable penguin, and he felt a rush of warm relief when he saw Huanxi. Not even Huanxi-in-Human-Glamour either, but tall and radiant, delicately antlered Huanxi with his beautiful pastel skin and sherbert green hair looking rumpled like he’d only gotten out of bed a few moments previously, a state of affairs that made Liánlí’s heart flutter around like it was dancing to a hyperpop remix of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.” Glimpsing a little slip of chest at the top of Huanxi’s robe, Liánlí blushed and immediately tried to bury that in his mug of tea—which didn’t really help, because his mouth felt all dry in a way that wanted either water or kissies, but not so much tea.
(Granted, Huanxi’s human glamour did likewise Very Unauthorized Things to Liánlí’s heartbeat and general sense of personal stability, but……his genuine shape was special. Getting to see it because they didn’t need to worry about the neighbors yet? That was also special. Made Liánlí feel very privileged, but it also wasn’t entirely the point.)
The point, such as it was, asserted itself with another loud caw, this one sounding even more aggrieved than the previous ones had done. As Liánlí looked back to the bird that seemed to think it had claimed ownership of the garden plot, the penguin threw in a cackling little hiss for good measure. It puffed up its chest toward Huanxi and flapped its flipper-wings with the intensity of a rebel army who wanted to expel the British Empire from their territory. Did……did it really think that Huanxi was some kind of threat to it?
“That, uh……” Liánlí started, only to trail off at the sight of the bird awkwardly stomping one of its little feetsies on the tilled soil of the future garden plot. While he felt like he mostly understood the intent of the gesture, Liánlí also kind of didn’t? Something got seriously lost in translation because the penguin’s feetses were made for paddling through frozen waters and waddling around snow and ice, not for stomping on soil and mulch.
Liánlí sighed. “That’s a penguin. They’re these sort of……flightless, semi-aquatic birds that we have on Earth? But they mostly only live down in Antarctica, or in zoos. So, unless this little guy broke out of the Destiny City zoo, I have no idea what he’s doing here?” Although he really wanted water, a sip of tea would suffice for now. “……He looks like he maybe could’ve slipped through the gate out front to get in here, but I still don’t get why he’d be in the neighborhood in the first place?”
Sure, the gate at the front of the house would keep Táotáo from getting out, but the penguin seemed smaller than she did, and the way the sunlight shone off its feathers suggested it was far more slippery.…… As if the bird thought it was making a very important point, it stamped one of its feet into the dirt again.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2023 11:55 pm
Huanxi nodded along with Liánlí's explanation, still regarding the strange little bird with interested curiosity. Earth's diversity of environments was genuinely fascinating, by his measure; this one was apparently from quite far away, and Hunaxi could see how it would likely be adapted to very different conditions than the pigeons that were, generally, all over the city itself.
"It seems quite lost," he observed, idly. "Is it any danger to the garden? Its feet hardly seem adapted for digging, but if it intended mischief?" Not that there was too much for it to damage, with the soil resting for spring planting, but it had been a long time since Huanxi had done any work with his hands in soil, and it was fully possible that there was something he didn't know about how these things worked on Earth.
"Moreover....we should help it out, yes? It does not belong here, and it most certainly has a home to return to." Not that he couldn't empathize with being very, very far from home, but the very fact that he could made it seem all the more urgent to him to return this displaced little bird to its flock. If there were others of its kind who sought it out, a flock that it had become separated from...it deserved the chance to return.
"Should also check the fence, in case there was any damage done while it was wiggling its way in. After breakfast." And after they'd evicted their odd little visitor, but that seemed obvious.
“Uhhh, that is a good question……” Liánlí answered, mostly because……well. It was. Watching the little penguin stamp its foot in the dirt, he didn’t know how to even begin to answer that. “It maybe might cause some mischief? But I don’t really think…… Like, its feet are more adapted to swimming, generally? Or hopping around in the snow and ice? Maybe rocks, down by the water? I don’t even know how this soil would feel to the poor little guy, or if he’d like it enough to stay there to cause problems, he……”
Liánlí trailed off in a mix of bemusement and mild shock. As if perfectly on cue, the penguin seemed to figure things out enough to stop stomping its feet in the dirt—or, rather, to stop doing so pointlessly.
Watching it waddle out of the garden plot—notably pointing itself away from Táotáo, Liánlí, and Huanxi—Liánlí could perfectly hear, in his head, the way he’d score the scene, had it been in a movie or on TV, instead of happening in real life. A mix of sounds with a deeper resonance (horns like tuba and trombone would probably work well, they often did for comedy bits), galumphing up and down through full, round whole notes all slurred together, and juxtaposed with something sort of lively and disjointed. Western concert flute might’ve worked well to help capture the perilous-looking nature of the penguin’s little journey. For all its feet could handle themselves more or less decently in the terrain, it didn’t seem to know what to do with the feel of the soil. Yet, it determinedly toddled forth, scrunching its wobbly little legs up and tilting around, each time it lifted one of its little feets. Wrinkling his nose, Liánlí didn’t entirely know where the little guy thought it was going.
On the plus, Táotáo decided to calm down as soon as the penguin left the garden plot, abandoning any interest in it to instead sniff around the edges of Huanxi’s robe. Awkwardly, she burrowed into the fabric here, and there, and everywhere, just looking for Huanxi’s legs, so she could rub herself against them. Awww, asserting to the interloping bird that Huanxi was one of Her People, not the Bird’s People—Liánlí couldn’t help but smile.
Glancing back at the bird, however, Liánlí winced. It had made its way over to the alleged slide, but it couldn’t jump high enough to climb on the thing. Sighing, Liánlí held his mug toward Huanxi.
“Could you hold my tea for a moment please, Huan-ge,” he said, reaching for his pocket (and moreover, his phone) with the other hand. “I don’t wanna hurt the poor little guy by trying to catch him, but…… I’m gonna call Animal Control. They should be able to send someone who can help get him back to his flock.”
Noir Songbird
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 2:52 am
Huanxi nodded, thoughtfully. The penguin's little stomps did not seem to be doing much in the way of damage, at least so far, and Liánlí's evaluation made quite a lot of sense.
"Well," he said, as the creature waddled off, "that does seem to have solved itself."
A wry smile crossed his face as he felt Táotáo press against his leg, and he bent down to pet her, an acknowledgement that yes, he was indeed Her Person and very well protected from this dangerous, menacing...tiny snow-bird.
"Good girl," he told her, and then he straightened and held out his hands to take Liánlí's tea. (A reminder that he would have to make some for himself when they got back inside.) And if he let his hands linger on Liánlí's for an extra moment as he took the mug, well, that certainly wasn't going to hurt anything, but he found himself regularly seeking out any touch, any contact, as a way to make up for a thousand years of loneliness.
"Mm. The proper authorities are the best option, might know how to handle our visitor better than we do. No reason to risk frightening or harming him."
It certainly did not hurt for Huan-ge to linger an extra moment while taking Liánlí’s mug. Made a warm little blush blossom on Liánlí’s cheeks and made him smile without thinking, as so many little things about Huanxi did. The feeling of his arm around Liánlí’s waist when they woke up entangled together. How loath he generally was to surrender any amount of morning cuddles. The way his face lit up when they tried out some new recipe—whether new to him or new to both of them because Liánlí had taken to looking up more vegetarian ideas for him—and it did all the happy things on Huan-ge’s taste-buds.
Sometimes, it occurred to Liánlí just how fast he’d gone from being perfectly fine and happy romantically on his own, happily sustained by the love of his family [meaning: Qiye, Ming-er, and Hayden] and his Very Good Girl, to feeling like he simply could not imagine a happy future for himself without Huanxi in it. Even knowing what Huanxi and Xingyi had meant to each other, and even having definitely had a crush on Huanxi based on Xingyi’s memories, it felt strange (good strange) and a bit exhilarating to fall so hard and to do it so quickly. Part of him wondered if the feelings were entirely his own, or if some part of Xingyi still existed in their shared starseed, and if he did, then would Liánlí even know the difference?
Huáng Zhìháo had never thought of himself as a deeply romantic person. Not that anyone had cared much at the time, excepting Hayden, Qiye, and maybe San-di Jiawei, but Zhìháo had run his mouth off kind of a lot about how he’d never, ever let himself need another person like that. Like the universe made the most sense with that person and could too easily fall apart without them. Like his happiness wasn’t his own responsibility to ensure, at the end of the day. Like it wasn’t selfish and weird to pin so much on someone else, probably without any input from them on the subject, because “true love,” as so often popularly conceived, perpetuated the same sort of gross, exploitative societal garbage that led to so many people getting hurt and taken advantage of.
Huáng Zhìháo had been a ******** idiot. Nobody who’d known him questioned that. He’d been miserable, and stupid, and his so-called “home” situation hadn’t helped. He’d felt certain that nobody would ever love him like Huanxi, that maybe he wanted it but that his soul wasn’t good enough to find someone who could truly know him without immediately realizing how much better they could have it and leaving him behind. So, Zhìháo had ground his fangs on sour grapes and broken bricks instead of throwing the brick to attract a jade or trading the grapes for strawberries. At least he’d gotten lucky in some ways. He’d had Hayden, Qiye, and Da-jie Xiuying to put a little humility in him—also, Ming-er to punch him back that one time instead of letting him get away with saying whatever stupid ******** he wanted—and he’d learned better how to act right around people, instead of staying miserable and alone and blaming everybody else for it, the way so many people in this world did.
But with what he knew now: had any of that teenage angst and pain and nihilism, however unwittingly, come more from Xingyi than from Liánlí-nee-Zhìháo himself? Was Liánlí gonna have to rewatch episodes from the “Steven Quartz Universe is his own mom” to sort out all these feelings of how he and Xingyi were intertwined or not?
At least he could be grateful, he felt pretty sure, that he’d never put any vlogs on the Internet in which he’d made the stupid “True Love is gross and stupid and it gets people taken advantage of, it’s the worst, and by the way, this DEFINITELY IS NOT me being a b***h about how no one will ever love me” argument.…… Pretty sure. Reasonably sure. Liánlí had posted vlogs while blackout drunk more than once in undergrad, but he’d noticed most of them and taken several down as soon as he’d sobered up. He didn’t remember any where he’d ranted about anything to do with true love.
Not that this was a guarantee of safety……but eh, he’d probably be fine.
As Liánlí tried to keep his breathing steady and even and fumble through the automated help line messages at City Animal Control, he couldn’t imagine anybody ever not agreeing with him that Zhìháo had been a terrible, wretched little gremlin and everyone was better off without him—especially Liánlí himself. Glancing over at the poor little bird’s fruitless attempts at hopping onto the alleged slide, Liánlí sighed.
“Seriously,” he whispered, rolling his eyes at Huanxi. “How many buttons do I need to press to just talk to a person? This is madness.”
He stood by that assessment, no matter what. Automated help-lines always found the exact right way to get on Liánlí’s nerves, and their only saving grace, in his mind, would’ve been if the composers who’d made the idle waiting music got paid decently for this use of their work. Of course, some automated help-lines didn’t even do that much for anybody. But as he hovered closer to Huanxi, enjoying just quietly being around him and maybe leaning against his arm a little for some extra stability (emotionally) while enduring the wait.
Finally, an actual person picked up the other line, a perky-sounding admin who said her name was Kelsey.
“Yeah, hi, my name is Liánlí Huáng, I live down on Mount Hawthorn Street, in the big purple house?” Groaning softly, he rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Look, I was taking my dog out, and my zhiyin and I found a wild penguin? In the backyard?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Kelsey said and actually sounded genuine about that, “but who did you say is with you?”
………Right. Dammit. Chinese terms didn’t make sense to most people.
“Sorry—it’s just—bilingual thing,” he said and shifted to rubbing one of his eyes. “My partner and our dog are with me right now. We also have a housemate, but he’s inside.” Liánlí did his best to moderate his sigh, hoping that he made it sound less exasperated. “And the wild penguin? Like I said?”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Kelsey replied, the sound of her keyboard clacking perfectly audible. “Not that it helps, but you’re not the first call we’ve gotten about penguins.”
“We’re not?”
“Definitely not, sir. We appreciate every tip on where to find them.”
Destiny City seasonal weirdness would always do what it did, Liánlí guessed, but at the same time, uh………wow. Penguins running amok in the middle of Virginia was certainly a new one for him. At least, them not being the only ones meant that the poor little guy still fruitlessly trying to hop on the slide wouldn’t be alone.
When he and Kelsey wrapped up, Liánlí looked up at Huanxi with a soft sigh. “They’re sending a guy out with someone from the zoo,” he explained. “They said don’t touch him or let Táotáo touch him. Without knowing which member of his flock he is, they can’t know what sort of germs he may or may not have, and we definitely don’t wanna hurt him. They said it might be up to an hour getting here, but all we have to do is keep an eye on him and make sure he stays in the yard, and we’re clear to do that from inside as long as he keeps relatively behaving himself. But……”
Dropping his head onto Huanxi’s shoulder, Liánlí gave him a nuzzle. “They’re on their way to collect this little escapee and get him back home.”
