Welcome to Gaia! ::

The humidity was nothing new to Petrolium. Neither were the bugs, nor the dappled sunlight showering the forest floor, nor the rough bark of the tree branch he had flopped across to laze away the afternoon. Life here was slow, but good. He didn't know of anything beyond the woods. It was his simple universe.

Today, he was counting gnats. Once he had counted a hundred and sixty three gnats in a single sitting. He was pretty sure there were more of them at the time, but he'd been going cross-eyed trying to look for some of them. Most of the gnats were tiny and black, but not a few branches away was a gnat that looked to be about the size and shape that he was. And orange! And sparkly! Now this was quite a gnat. He had to get a better look before it buzzed away with the rest of them.

Deftly, he bounced from branch to branch with a stupid grin on his face. His wings flared out for balance and a bit of lift with each hop, and his brightly-colored paws barely scrabbled over the wood. It didn't take long to make it to the branch right across from the mysterious glittering gnat.

"You can talk?" he asked, completely amazed, his head dipping down and back up as he watched her fall and fly. Maybe she wasn't a kitsu-sized gnat after all... a shame, really. He was curled snugly around his branch, tails flicking behind him like little beacons in the limited sunlight.

"That's just silly! I wasn't nowhere. I was over there." He nodded his head in the general direction of the forest behind him. He made a pouting face at her accusation. "I just wanted to see if you were a gnat. But gnats don't talk. I've tried to get them to talk about the weather a hundred times and they never have a thing to say but 'buzz, buzz, buzz'."