CHAPTER 5
My friends saw that I was deep in thought, and so left me to sort my way through it in my own due time and way.
“Do you know what else I miss?” asked Drako.
Nobody answered her. Eventually, she answered her own question by saying, “I have a nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced.”
“How is that even possible?” asked Marmalade.
“I don’t know, but it’s so,” Drako answered. “I’ve heard about an extraordinarily beautiful type of animal that lived a long, long time ago. To give you an idea of how beautiful they were, they looked kind of like me.”
“You mean bumpy and scaly, rough and dry and gray?” Stripes said, who subscribes to a different view of beauty than Drako does.
“Pretty much; but they weren’t gray. They were reddish, or better expressed, auburn-colored. And they had wings.”
“So they were Birds,” Stripes concluded.
“No, they weren’t Birds,” Drako contradicted. “They were Lizards.”
“Oh my ears and whiskers! Lizards with wings?!?” Marmalade gasped, eyes wide.
“Just so, my little furry friend. Their wings had no feathers, but were more like . . . frog feet.”
“Frog feet? I heard that humans used to eat frog feet,” Tubthumper said. “Singular taste in food, singular.”
“Frog legs, not merely frog feet,” Drako corrected. “Frog legs—they went the whole hog . . . I mean the whole frog.”
“Well, to be precise, not the whole frog,” Tubthumper said, “If they only ate the legs.”
“Come to think of it,” Drako said, after doing a few push-ups, which she was wont to do when lost in thought, “Their wings are in actuality more like bat wings. They have no feathers or hair or fur—just skin, like me and Tubthumper.”
“I have hair!” Tubthumper asserted.
“Not enough to speak of,” Drako replied. “That’s not the hair you take to a beauty shop to get styled or colored; that’s hair you either ignore or get rid of with Nair.”
Tubthumper was a little vain of her hair, and stamped one of her massive feet. The reverberation this caused was enough to cause a miniature hyper-localized earthquake, and Drako and Marmalade, the smallest of us, were bounced a little way up into the air by it.
You see, we animals had been returned to our natural size after disembarking from the Arodnap. Instead of all being approximately the same size, as we had been while flying together, our sizes now ranged from enormous (Tubthumper), large (Stripes), medium (myself), and small (Drako and Marmalade).
“I have hair, and I will never use Nair!” Tubthumper trumpeted. “And it’s far more beautiful than baldies like you and that . . . what sort of creature is it that you’re talking about, Drako?”
“It’s called a Pterodactyl.”
“A Terra doctor?” Marmalade asked, completely confused.
“I didn’t say ‘Terra doctor,’ Marmalade, I said—”
“Wait!” I said, catching what my friends were saying for the first time since I had started daydreaming about Rovette, “That gives me an idea.”
As I was the de facto leader of the group, having the most seniority and enjoying a special friendship with Albert (the builder and pilot of the Arodnap, our time & space travel vehicle), all looked at me expectantly, with questioning eyes.
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