Bobo and the Big Drop

     Nothing would happen today. Why, he could stay in bed all day if he wanted to and nothing would change. But the impatient squeaks of his Ghostkerchief, J.J, made his eyes flutter open and he couldn’t shut them again. J.J was hovering at the side of Bobo’s bed, his beady little eyes glittering with life as he nudged his owner out of bed.

     Bobo yawned as he rolled out of his fungus habitat and onto the floor, where he laid until J.J nudged him further. Then he admitted defeat and got up, shifting over to the room’s sole window and pushing the navy-blue curtains apart. The deep blue sky outside was sprinkled with smiling clouds, and below, the wintery ground was full of fresh snow. Bobo half-yawned, half-sighed, as he pulled his furry hands off of the sticky windowsill. Today might be a good day, after all.

     The kitchen was full of life when the Mynci finally padded into it. Around the Nova Table sat a blue Tonu, a yellow Lupe, a purple Grundo and a human girl in her early teens, who looked up at Bobo and grinned. All of them were shoving omelette and jelly into their mouths, except for the purple Grundo, who was sipping a huge cup of steaming Borovan. The scrunched-up look on his face told Bobo that sugar was much needed.

     “Want me to get you some sugar, bro?” Bobo asked his alien sibling, a wild grin spanning his Mynci face. Without waiting for a reply, he rushed over to the counter, grabbed a sugar packet, opened it, and sniggered as he poured the sugar into the garbage and filled the little packet with salt instead. “Here you go, Ying.” He said sweetly, placing the packet in front of his glowering brother and taking his seat beside the Lupe. At the same time, J.J started chomping down the food in his food-bowl beside the other Petpets: a Bearog with three different personalities, a sweet Filamen who lit up the room considerably in his little tank, and a pompous little Wheelie, who was chanting, “Oil. Oil.” in his robotic little voice.

     “I’m a girl, you idiot!” the Grundo snapped back in a deep male voice, adding a barely incoherent, “At heart, at least.” Absently adding the “sugar” to his Borovan, he turned to his owner, the brown-haired teenager who was now sipping a Neocola. “Hey Doog, can we go to the Lab Ray after breakfast? I want to be turned back into a FEMALE! The Lab Ray is such a piece of dung.”

     But Doog, who was now choking on her drink, could not answer. Akkamu, the blue Tonu, gave her a hard pat on the back, which helped greatly. A minute of heavy coughing later, the tiny adolescent gave her reply: “Maybe, Ying, just maybe.”

     Ying nodded and took a chug of her drink, which nearly made Bobo burst with laughter.

     “BOBO, YOU IDIOT!” the tall Grundo screeched, slamming his mug on the table and spilling the contents in doing so. Five minutes later, the cozy kitchen was still shaking with Ying’s explosion, and Bobo was still guffawing.

     Furious, Ying shot up, and so did Bobo. The two flew out of the kitchen; Ying hunting down his rascal of a brother, and Bobo laughing so much he could hardly breathe. In a feeble attempt to stop her Neohome from being ruined, Doog leapt after them - and came back, defeated, thirty seconds later.

     “Geez Mom, will they hurt each other?” Mikfuz asked innocently, gnawing his Omelette-less plastic plate. The beautiful golden Lupe was a lot younger than Doog, so he considered her his mother; to the others, she was just their annoyingly odd owner.

     Doog sighed, her dark brown eyes appearing to be filled with worry. “I hope not, Mik.”

     Meanwhile, Akk the Tonu was snickering over his Strawberry Jelly. Those silly humans! As if Doog could keep the laughter off her little face.

***

“You’re saying I have to travel with this git?”

     “Come on, Yingiekins, don’t be a sourpuss. Do you want to go to the Lab Ray or not?”

     Ying sighed over-dramatically. How he hated it when his owner called him “Yingiekins” - especially when Bobo was around to laugh at it. And today, he most certainly was.

     However, Bobo was less worried about Doog’s silly nicknames than he was for the weather: “It’s like, minus fifty degrees out there! Can’t we live on Mystery Island?”

     “Oh, stop whining.” Doog retorted as she shuffled into her coat. “You can hide inside my coat, you big wimp.”

     “Hide inside your COAT?” the burgundy Mynci repeated, sounding as if this was the craziest thing he had ever heard. “What if one of the guys sees me?”

     “Then they’ll think you used a Strange Potion. Let’s go,” Ying said hastily. Bobo shot him an icy glare.

     “Be good, guys,” Doog called to Akk and Mik, but there was no danger of them not being good. At that moment, Akk was trying to fix his compass and Mik was trying to settle an argument between the three heads of his Bearog, his shiny brown eyes following from one bear head to another.

     An icy blast of winter wind entered the cozy Jelly home as Doog opened the purple door, and her Grundo and Mynci followed her out into the snow. Even Mr. Sharp the Wheelie and J.J were shivering (if Wheelies could shiver). Ying, who had built up a resistance to the cold on her special “job, traipsed through the white without too much shivering (normally, since Grundos are cold-blooded, she would slow down), Bobo was yelping within two seconds. Surprisingly, he didn’t rebel when Doog snatched him up and put him inside her coat.

     Determinedly, the two on feet trudged through the fresh snow (which was up to poor Ying’s neck) for quite a while, before stopping outside the Snow Faerie’s odd-looking home. Bobo sighed against the chilly mountain air. Doog wanted another stupid quest, knowing her.

     He was right. “You guys go ahead,” the siblings’ owner said, shivering as she placed Bobo on the ground, “I’m gonna do a quest. I’ll meet you in Happy Valley -- you can see if the Snowager’s sleeping if you want.”

     Ying nodded, and within seconds, Doog was off through Taelia’s door.

     At that moment, Bobo suddenly realized that he couldn’t feel his toes. He kicked a small rock over the side of the mountain in an attempt to keep active, imagining it soaring down the mountainside and hitting some poor Bruce on the noggin. But then he had a better idea to stay active.

     Ying’s stubby leg was kicking at the icy path to the Snow Faerie’s adobe, which did nothing except hurt his two Grundo toes. Grinning, Bobo reached out to grab a clump of sticky snow and rolled it into a perfect ball before slamming it at his brother.

     A surprised shriek filled the air, and before long, the two had skyrocketed out of Taelia’s frozen lawn.

     “C’mon, boy,” Bobo shouted to J.J, feeling a rush of adrenaline as he hurried past a puzzled Scorchio in an attempt to outrun his raging brother. He could barely hear Ying’s screams over the wind whipping past his ears, but he was quite aware of how much his dear brother wished to have his Snowglobe Staff right about now. How long they ran, Bobo didn’t know, but he was rushing past the Ski Lodge for the third time now. Exhaustion swept over him, but he kept running; as soon as he stopped, he would become an ice cube again.

     And that’s when he turned his head to face forward and saw, almost in slow motion, himself plummeting over the cliff. He could hear horrified screams, one from a familiar voice, but he had no time to identify who it was.

     Darkness enveloped him.

***

“Bobo?”

     Bobochokky the Mynci forced open his eyes at the sound of the female voice. He was in a calm room, blindingly white, and he knew it was all over. A Grundo was beside him, clasping his hand - who was it?

     “I’m a girl again, Bo,” the shaky female voice explained. “Doog took me to the Lab Ray while we were waiting for you to come out of surgery.”

     Ying.

     “Where am I, bro -- I mean sis?” Bobo said hoarsely, wondering why Ying was calling him Bo; she rarely even called him anything except “idiot” or “git”. He tried to sit up, to show her that he was okay, but pain washed over him.

     “In the NeoHospital. Look, I’m really sorry...” The little alien’s voice resorted to a barely audible whisper: “I was so scared, Bo. We all were.”

     “It’s okay, sis,” he replied, trying -- and failing -- to lift himself up for the second time. Sighing deeply (which, being in so much pain, he found extremely hard to do), Bobo gazed at his sibling for the first time in ages. A sad smile replaced her usual sarcastic grin or agitated frown, and her glazed-over eyes were unusually moist. Was she... crying? No, couldn’t be. She had never cried once in her whole life, and certainly she wouldn’t start now over her least-favourite brother.

     “Bo?”

     “Yeah?” He had just noticed that his eyes were closed; the anguish was unbearable.

     “I love you. I just wanted you to know that. You’ll always be my favourite idiot.”

     Bobo half-smiled for a minute, before his bandaged Mynci face twisted into grief. He wanted, somehow, to tell her how sorry he was for throwing that snowball - that he never meant any harm. Because, really, he loved her too, along with Doog, Akk and Mik. But all he could manage to get out was, “I’m gonna be fine, Ying.”

     “But what if -?”

     But it was too late; Bobo the Mynci had drifted off to sleep, his little chest contracting and expanding with every laboured breath.

     “He must have his sleep now,” a pretty Uni nurse said in a polite voice, “if you can please leave him to rest.”

     Ying nodded absently, gave her brother a quick peck on the forehead, and slipped out the door. Slumping into a chair beside Akk the Tonu, she was safe to cry.

The End