Welcome to Gaia! ::

It looked nice enough on paper.

Martin shuffled through the pile of pamphlets and forms scattered across his kitchen table, absently looking over the glossy photographs of cabbages and happy, chubby toddlers. It did look nice. A genetically engineered child, one that would grow many times the speed of a normal child. Perfect for an old widower like him.

He sighed and pressed his heels of his palms against his eyes, feeling unreasonably exhausted. Whitman, who was ten years old and far more sensible than him, prodded Martin’s leg with his nose and growled sympathetically.

“Let’s go for a walk, boy,” he said, standing up from the table and shoving his chair in with a screech. It was a pleasant day, sunny and clear, but cold. Martin shrugged into a large brown overcoat and put on his gloves and scarf, whistling for Whitman as he opened the door.

A slight breeze ruffled his salt-and-pepper hair as he stepped outside, and he felt a wave of relief. He had no taste for the cold, but it was good thinking weather. Whitman was a force of peace as well; he walked beside him like a gentleman, stately in spite of his slight limp. Within moments the emotions at the kitchen table were gone.

“What’s your opinion of babies, Whitman?” Martin asked after several minutes, vacantly watching the trees as they passed them. That was the nice thing about living more or less away from society, one could talk to oneself without getting a reputation for insanity. Just misanthropy, perhaps.

“There’s a lot of vomit involved, I understand,” he continued, “and diapers, and scraped knees, and, well, when they’re teenagers-- I’m not certain I could handle a teenager. They’re quite mad, I hear.”

He tore a brown and trembling leaf off of a low-hung limb and shredded it between his fingers absent-mindedly. It was something to think about. Sixty-two was not old for living in general, but it was too old to counter screaming fits with a hormone-fueled adolescent, or to wake up six times a night to feed a crying baby, or to chase a giggling scamp through the house.

He in particular had been something of a tired old man since his infancy, at least according to the people who had known him then. It had been different with Anna, but distressingly little of her influence remained.

“She would love it, though,” he mused to himself, tucking his chin down into the scarf like an over-sized turtle. “A baby from a cabbage...she would think it was the funniest thing.” Anna would have liked a lot of Gaia’s oddities, in fact. He wished that he had found the portal before she died.

An angry, high-pitched yipping broke him out of his train of thought with a start. Whitman listened intently for a moment, then snorted and trotted off into the bushes by the path. Martin followed with some hesitation. Whatever creature was there sounded young, but he was still not eager to be bitten by a strange animal.

Caught in the thickets was a small brown dog, apparently uninjured, but furious and quite stuck. Martin couldn’t help but laugh, and even Whitman had a certain doggy grin on his face.

“Well, you’re in a bit of a jam, aren’t you?” he said, still grinning. The little creature snarled and squirmed against the branches of the bush, as if he disliked the condescension. He looked like a mutt, maybe a German Shepherd mix.

“It’s all right, quit fighting and we’ll get you out,” Martin told him, beginning to snap and bend back the necessary branches. “What are you doing out here, anyway?” Not lost, by the looks of it; he was unkempt and had no collar, and an animal that young was unlikely to have made it so far out from town without some help. Perhaps he had been dumped.

Martin untangled him from the worst of his mess, and the little dog promptly bit him. Martin couldn’t help but smile again.

“Ah, that’s children for you, I suppose,” he murmured to himself, although it took him a moment to realize what he had just said. He scratched behind the puppy’s ears absent-mindedly, vaguely aware that a decision had just been made for him.

“Let’s get home, boy,” he said finally, picking up the little dog, who gave an indignant squeal but did not bite him again. “I have a phone call to make.”

[Reserved]