Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a beautiful, sunny day, and normally this would have meant Landor was working in his garden, but his six weeks was almost up. It was time to be practical. He had memorized the information from the flyer and brought Grayson down to be enrolled in the Liberty Center. It was hardly a long or arduous process: the Center was able to simply transfer much of Grayson's information from the nursery where he had been adopted. Fifteen painless minutes and the secretary handed him a printed sheet of rules for the daycare center and a packet of information on the Center in general, including a map.

Secretly, Landor thought star charts were much easier to read than the colorful Liberty Center map, but they found the playground easily enough. There was certainly ample signage at the facility. Landor let Grayson down near to the playground so the little penguin boy could run the last leg, eager to learn more about the colorful equipment and meet other children. Truth be told, Landor's house was a little quiet and lonely compared to the nursery, where Grayson had enjoyed many neighbors in the cribs around him.

Grayson's response was immediate: a sunny smile and a happy, "Hi-i!" He wiped his hand on his shorts and stuck his hand out at Orli just the way any adult would when meeting someone. He was very happy that all the adults he knew treated him in this fashion, it seemed only courteous to treat everyone else the same way.

"'M Grayson!" said Grayson, eyeing the rocket-plane. He wished he had brought some of his toys, but no one had told him he was supposed to. Probably Landor had not known; there were a lot of things Grayson noticed his guardian didn't understand about people. "That looks nice. Cn'I see it?" He held out his hand.

"Cool!" said Grayson in appraisal of the toy. He gave it an experimental wave through the air as Orli had done. "Bjjjh." It was really more of an explosion sound, but Grayson liked that noise. He pointed with his other hand at Landor. "My fa's there."

Poor Landor looked completely unsure of what he should do. He stood at the edge of the playground wringing the packet of papers in his hands, glancing at Grayson and the bench and not wanting to intrude, but not wanting to be unattentive, either... He chewed his lip and gave a little wave to Grayson. Grayson enthusiastically waved back in encouragement.

Grayson looked at the plane he was holding and put it carefully down on the wooden border around the playground area. Orli's mama could see the toy there and it was not likely to get lost of stepped on. He went heading after her to the jungle gym as best he was able. Grayson was not a terribly fast child; his webbed feet did not lend themselves well to running. They were better suited for swimming.

He paused with his hand on the ladder and looked at the various features of the jungle gym structure. "C'we go downa slide?" he inquired of Orli, following her up the ladder.

Grayson came up behind Orli and studied the net. He had never seen anything like them before. Admittedly, he was only a month and half old, so there were a lot of things he had not seen, but this was certainly a strange one. "What is it?" he asked, hooking his finger on the net. All he could think to call it was a "big string thing," but these were certainly a different kind of sting than the strings in his clothing or the ones in the tassels on the rugs in Landor's home. He did know that strings were things you were not supposed to pull, in case they unraveled. Aside from that tidbit of knowledge, Grayson was at a loss.

"Oh. Okay," agreed Grayson, copying Orli's example. He grabbed the rope bridge firmly, put one foot on, and then another.

For the average person, walking around in flippers was a trick, but Grayson was used to it -- they were his feet, after all. But flippers were designed for swimming, not climbing, so after a few steps Grayson put his foot through a hole and it slipped right through. Grayson lost his balance and ended up stuck on the rope bridge with one leg through a hole and the rest of him laid out on the net kind of confused as to what it was supposed to do to get out of this predicament.

Grayson took her hand, but he probably weighed a little bit more than Orli, so he tried not to accidentally pull her down with him. That left one leg and arm as leverage against the rope bridge, and no greater hope of getting his foot pulled out from the hole it had gone through.

"Ace..."

Grayson looked down. "Hi, fa." Landor was wearing a distressed frown and pushed Grayson's foot up from below. Grayson had failed to realize that in order to get his foot back through the hole he had to bend his foot in such a way that his back toe didn't get stuck on the net. "This my fa," he said to Orli in introduction just as Landor popped his flippered foot out and freed him.