Someone was just unfortunate enough to draw the short end of the stick when it came to this whole mess. That’s where you come in.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Graeme Elrendir
Race: Halfling – Elf (forest) / Human
Age: 33, physically about 25
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 756 words
 

---

I think we spent close to a year struggling to find means of getting that one ferret to stop being quite as stubborn as it was. Our final setup, before we managed to find the right person to talk to about things, meant that it had its own cage for sleeping at night and that cage was in a locked room that was mainly soundproof. It would still get out of the cage, it would try hard as it might, to get out of the room but it couldn’t. So, the messes we had to clean up were centred on that particular room.

At one point, I think we were just so tired of the whole thing where we had to clean up a good chunk of the house on a daily basis, so we were drawing straws. For the most part, we’d do the cleaning together, but when it wasn’t so bad that two people weren’t necessary, we’d draw straws. It was never fun and, in a way, I’m sure that we could have just set a sort of marker somewhere to remind us of who had done the last minimal clean-up, but we were just tired by that point.

Eventually, we got in touch with just the right person—exactly the person we get them from, I don’t know why it took us so long to reach out to her again—and we talked things through. She did remember the little exhausting brat in question, she did know how frustrating some of them could be and yes if need be, she had a place where the older ones that deserved their semi-freedom and the more exuberant ones could go and, yes, if we thought we really couldn’t deal with it, we could bring it back.

We did struggle with that decision, I’m not going to lie. We had brought that little ball of fur home thinking, even through the warnings, that we could manage something beautiful with it, but we were just exhausted at that point; if not physically, it was mentally and a little bit emotionally so.

So yeah, we brought it back, we were told that we weren’t doing a bad thing; that, in a way, we were actually doing it a favour since it likely would have something of a better life out there through that door. It did help lessen the feeling of failure that I was wrapped up in, but it didn’t take it fully away.

In time, that feeling did fade and the other two we still had, were angels compared to the third one. It was weird to settle back into a quiet house. For a near year, we’d had nightly issues, we’d had to clean up the house, we’d had to pick up messes after it. I mean, we’d even had to hide a lot of things in cupboards that were childproofed because it was that bad and nothing was safe.

I know it took me a long time to settle back into a routine that didn’t involve checking through the whole house every morning when we got up to check for trash or messes to pick up. We didn’t take the locks off of the cupboards just in case we might need them again, but we don’t keep them locked anymore. The other two are angels at this point.

I don’t really regret bringing it back. I know that its behaviour was beyond what we could handle. No amount of training had stuck with it, and we couldn’t keep on living the way we had. I think that, in a way, what kept me from feeling comfortable with the idea of bringing it back, at first, were the books I’d read on how things were before. On how animal shelters worked and while I knew that I wasn’t bringing it back into a shelter, the thought had remained.

Things have been just so much better since. Our lives are peaceful again, we have the other two little bundles to keep us occupied and they’re just enough of a handful for that. I’m aware that I should have listened when I was first told that it was a very stubborn one. I just thought that I’d be able to handle it. I’ve found my limit through this particular experience though and I don’t think I can complain about that. It has been a learning experience and not something I can ignore, so I’ll take that as it is, too. There’s little else to do about it.

If you make this harder than it has to be, you will never hear the end of my complaining.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Graeme Elrendir
Race: Halfling – Elf (forest) / Human
Age: 30, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 614 words
 

---

Ferrets are smart. They’re brilliant if you give them at least a little chance to prove themselves but you also can’t just let them run wild and crazy because they’ll run circles around you and lead you around and, well, pretty much just do whatever they want with you and what will you be left with, after all that? A headache and a mess to clean up.

Now, these aren’t our first. I’m not sure when we decided to stick with their regular lifespans instead of their longer ones. I guess it’s not such a bad thing, though, it gives them a full life, a life they can enjoy and learn and live and then they get to have their well-deserved rest. It’s not hard to get them either and it’s always a new adventure.

At least, I used to think so until this recent addition to our little group of furballs.

I was warned that it was hard-headed but I didn’t expect it to be quite so much trouble. The other ones took to visual cues well, a motion of the hand, a click and point of the finger, little whistled sounds but words weren’t necessary.

It’s been quite the opposite with this one and with my need to pause and make sure my words come out in an order that makes sense, it’s been difficult, to say the least. I’ve had to let Ceci take over with this one because I couldn’t handle it. I got so frustrated that I was almost in tears over things just a few days ago so I stepped back and I told her that this one was out of my control, I couldn’t deal with it because it refused to listen and I felt like it was making things much harder than they should have been. It was either give up control and let her take over, or complain endlessly and, well, I’m not a complainer.

Though even Ceci’s struggling with this one. I think there’s a limit to how much stubbornness should be present in an animal and in something so small, I think it’s pushing the limits. Neither one of us wants to bring it back, neither one of us actually does want to give up on the little bugger but it’s getting to a point where it is stupidly exhausting just trying to keep up with it.

I mean, it’s down to the point where we can’t even keep it in its cage overnight, for one thing, it makes so much sound just trying to get out that it’s impossible to sleep and half of the time it actually somehow manages to get out on its own and we’ve got messes to pick up in the morning or, well, in the middle of the night most of the time because it ends up in the bed with us and keeps us from sleep.

It feels like a lost cause. I really don’t want that to be the case but at this point, we might just have to eventually call it quits. Neither one of us can keep going on without sleep, not for much longer anyway, and getting the bugger isn’t getting us the sleep we need to keep up with the rest of the household. I feel like a zombie lately and it’s not a very comfortable feeling, let me tell you.

Maybe Faith can find something to help us with this one, maybe there’s just something out there, pheromones or something-other and just, I don’t know. I’d just like to at least have one night of peaceful sleep in the next few days if that might be at all possible.

What do we want to focus on?

 
Timeline/World: Atheria – 3rd Generation
Characters: Graeme Elrendir
Race: Halfling – Elf (forest) / Human
Age: 30, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 626 words
 

---

Besides my focus on games while I was little, to help me do something other than stare at a wall because I was too painfully shy as a child to go out and make friends, I also saw a speech therapist.

That’s not something I tend to bring up, not even to my ever-wonderful pair. Mind you, it’s not that I’ve lied to Cecilia; it’s just an omission of something that happened when I was young and actually learning to talk. For one thing, it took far longer than it should have for me to utter my first words. Longer still for me to manage to put anything together into a proper sentence. I’m pretty sure my parents thought I would likely never talk.

So sure, I spent a little time twice a week with a speech therapist. We worked on sounding out words, on trying to figure out why I was having so many issues and on trying to get me up to par so that I could start school at the same time as everyone else.

Every time I went, it was the same question. As though I was the one deciding what we were working on. I know it wasn’t my choice in the end, there were things that were decided prior to my visit, usually based on my last visit, but the subjects still were mostly mine to pick and we didn’t get started until I spoke of the desired subject. Pointing wasn’t working out in my favour and the first few times after we’d gotten the hang of that ‘game’ and I remember that a few times, there was almost a quarter-hour pause at the very beginning because I refused to say anything.

I was asked to decide what I wanted to focus on for that session.

It took a long time. I’m not going to lie. I still was going—though only once a week or so—once school started and it’s only when I was ten or eleven or so that I was deemed able to manage myself well enough to no longer need to visit. I’d still go every few months and even now, during my yearly, I have a small check-up relating to that because, as it does turn out, they never did find out what the issue was.

I wasn’t a sick child; there had been no issues while I’d been in the tank. It was just one of these things and even now, unless I do briefly pause before saying something to make sure the words all make sense, I stumble. Be it that my brain somehow switches two letters together in the word or two words around, or use one word when I mean another word altogether, it sounds complex when I put it that way but it’s not, not for me. It really is just a matter of telling my brain to focus and that’s that. It’s the one way we found for me to actually work through this.

I’m sure that if I let them dig around in my brain, they’d probably find something that’s not wired completely right but what would that achieve? I’m not broken, I’m just a little different and I’ve always been quiet. I’ve always given a moment’s thought to things before I say anything and I’m fine with my life being like this. I’ve also never heard Cecilia complain so why fix something that technically isn’t broken?

Well, okay. I may be a little broken but I’m still functional, so that remains, why fix something that still functions just fine? If I wasn’t happy with my life, I’d see about getting it fixed but I’m perfectly content with my lot in life, so really.

We won’t tolerate this.

Timeline/World: Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Graeme Elrendir
Race: Halfling – Elf (forest) / Human
Age: 28, physically about 25
Final Word Count: 584 words

---

The rare times I open up one of the older computer games and start playing, something I’ve done mostly while I was growing up and I was trying to escape my surroundings because I was such an introverted, painfully shy child, I realize that the way some of these things are setup makes no sense whatsoever.

Though, I think that in a general sense, a lot of what was needed to be done in those games by the playable character made no sense to me. Looting homes and breaking items to get to the treasure inside if there was any, for one thing, has always left me confused. I get that it’s just a game and that gathering loot to buy better items to advance was important, but I always thought it gave the wrong sort of idea. You’re in a village where others are living, it is the house of other people that you’re digging through to find things, even if these people are just part of the programming, to me it always seemed to be trying to say that it’s somehow okay for someone to go out there and dig through everyone else’s things because hey, who knows what you might find, right?

I never liked the idea of stealing from others if I could help it, even in game form and I was always telling myself that I would find some other ways of getting to what I might have needed. That never worked out so well for me as I ended up stalling almost all the way from the start with no real way of getting forward in the game, so I had to break my own self-imposed rule of not breaking into homes that were just, essentially, begging for it.

Over time, it is that particular breaking and entering thing that turned me off of most of these games. Slaying monsters, I had no issues with, climbing trees, swimming through rivers, managing my way around lava and other earthly troubles wasn’t difficult but anything that had to do with things that weren’t tolerated in everyday life just sat poorly with me. I couldn’t leave behind the everyday knowledge imparted to me by my parents to appreciate the game for what it was so I gave it up. I gave most of them up.

I settled on other games, puzzle games held my attention the longest, logic games were interesting. I had some mixed results about simulation games, even if most of the ones I was interested in were the farming kind. I wasn’t very good at the world building ones. In this case, it wasn’t even so much that I was looting anything, it was, to me, the pointless slaying of beasts for the ‘bettering’ of the world. I think this part might half have to do with my vegetarian ways, however, I’ve never been able to stomach the sight of an animal being slaughtered and I know I asked my parents if they could please no longer put any red or white meat on my plate. It took some adapting but as it turns out, dad had a lot of experience with a no-meat diet so it wasn’t much of an issue.

All in all, games and food aside, I’d like to think that I managed myself well enough and that I’m a well-rounded, if maybe a somewhat quiet person. I’m not difficult to be around, really. At least, I don’t think I am.