For much of civilized society, the preferred wake-up call procedure is a simple, gentle phone call from a hotel front desk. Though a sweet kiss from a lover, licks from a beloved puppy, or the tender embrace of a fuzzy love python (if such a thing existed) is better still.

Being thrown across the bridge of a spaceship as a wake-up call was far from a preferred procedure, and would have been very jarring for Potto if he hadn't been hypnotically dancing in a dreamworld to sweet and complex haunted woodwinds only moments before.

When the Muse was hit by an attacking ship, Clory was caught off-guard and lost her branch-entangled grip on Potto. His eyes opened just as he slammed into a flight deck wall, and not into the warm embrace of a fuzzy love python.

He sat up from the floor, noticing that the new stitches in his chest had been ripped open again in the fall. Within seconds he was scooped up back into Clory's "arms" where he was held much tighter this time, and she rooted herself to the floor to prevent further tumbles and jostles.

Teeg and Gekko made it through this initial attack unscathed, and were running amok from console to console, madly pressing buttons and trying to go about retaliating. Aye's head popped up from behind the captain's chair where he had landed during the assault without injury.

"Well, we certainly didn't get very far before that giant caught up!" he bitched in the bitchiest tone he could bitch.

"That wasn't K'ween. I wished it had've been K'ween." Teeg huffed, still running about. She pointed out the front window. An adorable little ship zipped around like a mosquito...a cute little cartoon mosquito in an animated pre-school musical about how mosquitoes were really not as bad as they actually really, really were.

"Awwwww!" Aye said involuntarily.

"No awwwww! We are in trouble. Serious trouble," she barked. "We can't get distracted by how huggable the damn thing is! This whole situation is about to get dangerously huggable."

~~~

Toobli was feeling quite lucky. He had gone back to his home planet Chagrin in order to re-fuel and pack some fresh pyjamas and his circular toothbrush for the long journey that he had planned to catch Potto and Aye. He had barely been out of orbit for any substantial amount of time at all, and there was the Muse flying past. And with a quick scan that confirmed the Quarol and the Topher were on board no less.

Although she was feared by many, Teeg didn't worry the fluffy little baby-anteater-looking alien. Nothing worried Toobli Dentatan. His species had evolved away from such an empty emotion long ago.

His wee cute ship The Gooseberry greatly out-armed and could out-manoeuvre the Muse. This adorable cartoon mosquito was (metaphorically) chock-full of malaria.

His first attack had been successful. The Muse had been temporarily diverting its power to enable the ship to go faster to outrun K'ween, and its shields had been down. They were up now, but the damage had already been done.

What Toobli wasn't expecting, as he nonchalantly munched on his jaundice beetle on-a-bun, was the presence of four Blankton ships joining in on the hunt, trying to steal his prey from right under his delightfully long snout.

Blanktons may have been useless, but they were enough of a distraction for the second thing he wasn't expecting to happen: the Muse flying towards Chagrin, into its atmosphere, and somehow landing in a dense thicket, deep in the planet-covering forest which (size-wise) it should not have been able to do.

This was Toobli's home terrain and although he was an expert on navigating it in the air or on land, it was also a terrain that Potto, Gekko and Clory were quite accustomed to; even if the actual species of flora and fauna were unfamiliar to Gekko and Clory, and Potto thought that "flora" and "fauna" were the same word.

Toobli underestimated Clory's ability to communicate with any flora, Gekko's tree-top acrobatics, and Potto's ability to let instinct kick in when his mind wandered. And it wandered like a champ.

There were few places to land on Chagrin that weren't built into the small Teddy Bear villages all over the planet. This suited the tiny Gooseberry fine. It could lower down in a tree canopy without breaking branches and crashing to the forest floor. The Muse was much more of a "crash-landing-through-the-trees-not-taking-off-anytime-soon-or-ever" size and weight. Toobli would be in perfect health, the crew of The Muse and its passengers would be lucky to not end up as piles of flesh and bark.

The first priority for Teeg was to make sure all were in one piece and to get Potto re-stitched. Clory was more than capable of carrying him through the thick brush, but walking or not wouldn't matter if he didn't have an ounce of blood left pumping through his heart.

Once stitched up, and once all (apart from Potto) were miraculously on their feet, Clory created a temporary ladder from one of her "legs" and they climbed out the hatch of the ship into the humid wildness of the horrifically charming "Forests of Chagrin".

~~~

In an impound lot, deep down in an underground parking lot big enough to house illegally parked spaceships, and deep below yet another moderately damp and dank Lyme Node high-rise, sat the Shiv.

The Shiv-part-of-Knutt didn't mind the rest from flying any more than a vacuum minds sitting in the closet of someone who has neglected their floors, and is waiting for their mother to come and do the vacuuming for them, forgetting that she passed away several years before. The ex-human Captain Stig-part-of-Knutt didn't much care for the rest.

The Stig-part-of-Knutt missed her wife. The Stig-part-of-Knutt was feeling abandoned and lost. The Shiv-part-of-Knutt bleeped and blooped along, the weapon system playing virtual chess with the nutrient smoothie replicator. The Stig-part-of-Knutt didn't care for chess and kept sweeping the virtual pieces off the virtual board and onto the virtual floor just before either the weapons system or the much-more-likely-to-win nutrient smoothie replicator got to end a game.

She had more than enough time to contemplate her options. She needed a distraction from picturing her sweet Vitrie smiling down at her after waking her up late on a day off. Kissing her gently. Joining her in their oversized shower and simply holding each other as the warm water cascaded over them, feeling wanted, safe and loved.

Now Vitrie thought she was dead. Now Vitrie was no-doubt crying herself to sleep every night feeling as lost as she felt. Her literal heart would break if she still had one. Her metaphoric heart was already long broken.

She couldn't take off without a crew member, she had been humiliatingly towed by a humongously scary (yet boyishly pretty) muscle-head with "Frappe" written on his uniform tag and his round little maintenance crew partner that sported a "Stane" tag. She temporarily marvelled at how apt (even if misspelled) the Stane tag was.

They had somehow released some kind of small bird onto her bridge, and had taken off on a janitorial ship oddly named The Velveteen Rabbit. It was a ship too stupid for her to communicate with.

After a quick search in her data banks, she discovered this bird was called a sparrow. She also discovered that it shouldn't exist anywhere in the universe, especially on a spaceship in an underground impound lot on a different planet than it was from, off of a janitorial ship, many eons after it was sadly declared extinct.

This Stig-part-of-Knutt was miserable. She had patched through to Vitrie's home com-system many times. She wanted so badly to tell her what had happened. She wanted so badly to have Vitrie come down, gingerly lay her hands on Stig/Knutt's console and tell her everything was okay, that it could still work, and that a human/ship marriage could carry on...but she always disconnected without saying anything at all. It was better for Vitrie to consider her dead and get on with her life than to stretch out the pain and try to figure out how to make love to a spaceship.

The Stig-part-of-Knutt got angry. Very angry. So, the timing of the voices she started hearing couldn't have come at a more horrible time.

"I can feel you here with me," the voice whispered in a creepy male tenor.

"Who...who is that?" the Stig-part-of-Knutt answered, but she knew.

"I need you to help me. I need you to release me," the voice hissed.

"Why would I do something as ridiculously stupid as that?"

"Because I can help you, too."

"How could a psycho like you help me? You aren't interested in helping anyone but yourself."

"True, but I'd be glad to do this. It's in my nature. It would make me feel oh so goooooood."

"What are you talking about?"

"Let me go, and I'll get back at those that did this to you."

"YOU did this to me you sunofabitch!"

"Right, I did!" and the telepathic voice of Weird Jimmy laughed. It laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a disturbing laughter, the kind that had so much murder behind it, so much manic, crazed madness embedded deep into every ha.

"Ah, fuckit," the Stig-part-of-Knutt said with a bored shrug embedded deep into the fuckit.

And release James "Weird Jimmy" Flowermorey she did.

~~~

Toobli hunting them down wasn't Teeg's only concern. This was a planet filled with Teddy Bears. Turtle Teddy Bears, and Hippo Teddy Bears. Civet Teddy Bears, and Squamboggian Swamp Bull Teddy Bears. Quarol Northern Neglie Teddy Bears and Secretary Bird Teddy Bears. Bantorian Fanged Dangling Jessop Teddy Bears and Flettocean Sweaty Mongrel Spiderhumper Teddy Bears. Tsk'tdinkian Shallowbrained Bottom Biter Teddy Bears, Hallolund Chlorine-breathing Pool Crab Teddy Bears, Grande JebJeb D'nollian Gambling Dum Dum Eel Teddy Bears and Puce-crested Towerscappian Subway Bird Teddy Bears.

It was as if all the creatures of the known universe had come here and evolved into intelligent and deadly cartoon characters. Even the cold, dead eyes of the Earth shark had become big and bulgy with long lashes on Chagrin; its toothy frown turning into a bashful smirk, it's smooth and slippery skin covered in a thin layer of curly grey-blue fluff and fuzz that made it oh so huggable while it devoured you.

The Barbohdean crew of the Muse were all very aware of what surrounded them. Aye, being born on a planet made up of one enormous globe-encompassing city had no idea what was in store, and Potto was thinking about the subtle differences between mild and medium cheddars.

Staying put on the ship would only make them a bigger target. And besides, the Muse was now on fire.

Clory, carrying (and shielding) Potto went first, communicating with the forest trees through the underground network of fungus that connected all plant life on the planet. Her own branched-out limbs pulled back those branched-out limbs of other trees. She made sure she apologized to each of them for disturbing their slumbers, constantly asking the trees far ahead if there was danger. So far so good, though she knew not of these tree species and therefore knew not if they told the truth.

Trees on all planets generally told the truth, but she, herself, knew that there were always exceptions to the rules. The "slippery" in Slippery Elm on this planet might mean something very different than it did on pre-mall Earth.

Aye complained with almost every step, until Teeg punched him out cold and Clory had to carry him (completely and intentionally unshielded) as well. Gekko climbed high above them in the canopy, also keeping an eye out for danger, and gobbling up the odd small bird she came across.

After an uncommonly uneventful hour of trekking, they stopped for a rest. Gekko remained the eyes of the group, and Clory remained the ears. Aye was now conscious and Potto was recovering and alert. Clory snapped a small twig off from one of her branches. It was a gesture that seemed to pain her greatly. A thick liquid dripped from the twig.

"So this is the plan," Teeg said, mostly to her fellow Barbohdean sisters. "We travel for another few hours, giving us a healthier distance from our poor ship, and then we set up camp for the night. Tomorrow we find a village and steal a ship. Some of these villages are nocturnal. Clory will slip in. She will go unnoticed, and with any luck she will find one, come back, pick us up, and get us off this awfully cute awful planet. We'll get back to Lyme Node and grab your ship, which will now be our ship."

She expected an argument; most folk were often very protective of their ships, and wouldn't just hand over ownership without at least a frowny face.

Aye, however was not most folk; he cared very little about any of this, and was glad to be rid of it. Potto was also not most folk, and had assumed the Shiv was either Teeg's already, perhaps Aye's, or someone else's entirely. At any rate, he was pretty sure the big light-bulb-of-a-ship wasn't his.

No one in the group wanted to admit to themselves this well-known (but ridiculous) bit of trivia: that other than Toobli, Teddy Bears were homebodies and The Gooseberry was the only ship on the entire planet.

Usually.

~~~

The Gooseberry was not the only ship on the entire planet on this particular day. First of all, there was the Muse burning away far behind. There were also four Blankton ships that had been quickly shot down by the Gooseberry.

The Gooseberry was the only working ship on the planet.

The Blankton ships had gone down relatively close to each other, and all four Blanktons had uncharacteristically survived. All four had, even more uncharacteristically, found each other.

"What the hell??" said the first Blankton, rubbing his moustache.

"It all happened so fast!!" said the second, switching his eye patch from one eye to the other.

"This planet smells nice. Like buttercups and bathroom mildew," said the third as he checked his pocket for potato chips.

"Maybe if we pool our resources together, we can combine the parts of our ships that are undamaged and make one that we can all escape from!" said the fourth Blankton. He was the only one using his head, and he used it only moments before it was sliced off by a lone fuzzy little painted turtle-looking Teddy Bear with the type of claw no one would expect to see on a painted turtle. Not even the painted turtle of one's nightmares.

The remaining Blanktons ran screaming in three separate directions.

Blankton the second ran east. He was surprisingly agile and dexterous for a Blankton clone. He zig-zagged through the trees, over rocks and roots. His adrenaline was peaking and he was running faster than a Blankton had ever run in the history of all Blanktondom. Trees in the way or not.

Blankton the first ran south and right off a cliff. The last thing that went through his mind was his navel.

Blankton the third ran northwest. The painted turtle Teddy Bear went after him first. This direction was an unfortunate leap of faith. Though against a Teddy Bear and in the horrifyingly charming Forests of Chagrin, every direction was unfortunate, this one was especially unfortunate because it was also a dead-end. A rock wall too steep to climb soon had the Blankton cornered and facing his attacker.

He couldn't help himself. "Awwwwwww!" he exclaimed and gave the painted turtle Teddy Bear a big hug. Although the Teddy Bear enjoyed it immensely, he quickly jumped aside to avoid getting the Blankton's newly freed guts all over his knit ice-cream-cone-patterned cardigan.

By the time the painted turtle Teddy Bear found Blankton the second, he had already died of a massive heart attack from running faster than any Blankton had ever run in the history of all Blanktondom.

~~~

There are many that use herbs and plants medicinally, and have since the beginning of the universal flora/fauna partnership. This isn't just a take-take relationship on the part of fauna either. Not completely. Fauna uses flora for food and medicine and to hold together their various planets and provide them with oxygen, and fauna in return is kind enough to die and fertilize flora. It's not take-take, but it is unbalanced for sure. Flora has a good chance of surviving without fauna, while fauna couldn't survive without flora at all. Even city planets like Lyme Node and Towerscape had to keep their polluted lakes and disgusting oceans filled with flora to keep people breathing.

These facts are greatly ignored by most fauna, and flora is sometimes abused, sometimes ignored, sometimes disregarded and underestimated, and almost always taken for granted.

The sentence "that tree in our yard was causing too much shade for total barbeque enjoyment, so we had to cut it down" was far more common than "oh my heavens, look at that tree...it's so majestic...so miraculously old and beautiful...it has been growing here for over one hundred years...let's build a shrine around it and sing heavy vibrational hymns to its greatness and protect it from harm and thank it every morning for simply being here!" on almost every planet in the universe apart from Quarolode (where trees were seen as Gods and sang their reedy songs to the locals) and Ch't Ch't (the entirely flora, no-fauna-allowed, planet), both elite members of the Lost Seventy.

Some planets even killed their flora en mass for various fauna-made-up holiday traditions that the flora certainly didn't have a say in.

The fact that a mobile, sentient species like the Sentaphylls weren't all pissed off and murderous spoke volumes for the species. The fact that Clory (flora) had used her own extracts to heal Potto (fauna) because of her trust and love for Teeg (also fauna) spoke volumes as well.

Potto sat on the ground, leaning on a resting Clory. He examined his wound, now dripping with a chocolate brown sap. His skin painlessly bubbled under the sap. Upon seeing this Aye quickly vomited on some shrubs (flora) that he had moments before urinated on.

Potto was fascinated by the process. As disgusting as it appeared, his skin was repairing itself. As an added bonus, he thought this medicinal sap smelled of crab apples and bran.

"We should bottle some of that. We could make a fortune!" Aye exclaimed, wiping his rancid-smelling lip on a leaf (flora).

"There are synthetics that do the same. And it takes a lot out of Clory to produce even the smallest amount," Teeg snapped.

Potto looked up to Clory as she rested. "Thank you. I want you to know that I love you very, very much," he whispered and wrapped his arms around her trunky torso. One of her knotted eyes opened and looked into his. She passed a telepathic message to him, something that he had never felt before. He felt centuries in his head. He felt time slow down. Goosebumps covered his entire body as she gave him the gift of warmth. In all of Clory's long, long life, no one had ever said "thank you" to her before. She liked it.

With this gift of warmth, Potto had just a split-second spark of clarity. He sat up very suddenly.

"Hey! What ever happened to that strange and filthy girl from the prison? Did she not get on your ship with us? Hmmm. What was her name? Shamrock? Grass? Ground-Cover? No...no. Her name was Clover! She seemed nice."