TYNG: Petpetsitting - Part Three

      "Rise and shine, Olli!" said Anise brightly, opening the curtain to let a shaft of light shine in and rest on Oliver's pillow-covered head. "I told our friends to be here at dawn, so they'll be here any minute now! Lug your sleeping bag back to your room if you don't want Petpets to sleep in it!" she giggled.

      Oliver pulled his heavy sleeping bag down the stairs and into his room again where he laid it sprawled out on the floor. He then returned upstairs on his bouncing tail. Anise was sitting with her back against the wall, looking off into space. She seemed rather bored since almost none of the Petpets were up yet. Daz and Chera, of course, were leaping about on the floor, playing a very nimble game of tag. Soon, Jay woke up and he and Daz ganged up on Chera. Laughing, Oliver heard a quiet tap on the door. He said "I'll get it!" and bounced downstairs.

      On the front porch stood Janelle, Jeff, Caitlin and Neal. When Oliver opened the door, they came in and leaped or walked or flew up the stairs to the attic, where more of the Petpets were waking up. Soon they had maintained the same stream of Petpets about their feet as the previous day.

      "How interesting," remarked Caitlin, her eyes open wide, tapping one black hoof against the other. "I didn't expect this many people would drop off their Petpets."

      "Well, they did. And now we've got to take care of them until their real owners come back. How much did you say that they would cost on the posters, Janelle?" asked Anise, turning to her Aisha friend.

      "I wrote down five hundred NP for a day," replied Janelle. "So for those that are staying for four days, you'll get two thousand NP! Did I charge a little too much or a little too little?" she asked worriedly.

      "No, that's perfect. I don't think that we would have so many if you had charged one thousand NP per day," said Anise matter-of-factly.

      "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" asked Jeff, flapping above the roaring sea of Petpets and clinging to the rafter on which the Beekadoodle still sat, trilling away. Anise shot him a foul look before sitting down and pulling Chera into her lap, stroking her back which made her say "Ugga ugg!" in a very sleepy way.

      There was a loud, businesslike rap on the door that made Oliver jump. "I'll go get it!" he said, bouncing downstairs and opening the door. An adorable little baby Aisha sat on the doorstep, looking up at Oliver.

      "You aren't the Wocky who answered the door last time!" said the Aisha accusingly.

      "True. Do you want me to get her?" asked Oliver quickly.

      "Go get her!" the Aisha tried to nip him but Oliver hurried upstairs and panted "There's an Aisha who wants to see you, Anise."

      "Is he baby?" asked Anise. When her brother nodded, she said, "He'll want his

     Sauropod back then," she took a peek at the slumbering Petpets, and she saw a blue Sauropod snoring softly among them. Cooing quietly, she lifted it out and took it downstairs to meet the baby Aisha, who was still sitting on the doorstep. "Hello!" she said, smiling at him.

      "Hi! Can I have Gemmie back now?" asked the Aisha eagerly.

      "Of course you can!" Anise bent down and deposited the blue dinosaur-like Sauropod on the doorstep beside the Aisha.

     He looked up at Anise adoringly and said "Thank you!" then he and his blue Petpet scurried away quickly.

     "Well, that's one less Petpet on our paws," said Anise under her breath to herself, walking back upstairs to where the Petpets were now playing a surprisingly well organized game of tag.

     Anise found Jeff, Janelle, Caitlin, Neal and her brother Oliver clinging to the rafters, watching the Petpets and clinging on tightly so that they wouldn't fall off. "Are we ever going to do this again?" Jeff asked Caitlin worriedly, eying the Petpets who were all fleeing from a disco Feepit, who was running around and had touched an Acko on the shoulder. It grunted and started to chase all of the other Petpets.

     Caitlin cast a nasty look at Jeff and she said acidly, "At the time, I happen to have thought that it would be an interesting idea to try out. If you don't like it, you can go back to your house and snuggle up in your Petpet-free home."

     "Guys, guys!" objected Neal. "Fighting isn't going to solve anything any time soon, you know."

     "Try telling Sloth that," shot back Caitlin nastily. She and Jeff were both in rather foul moods at the moment.

     "I'll just ignore you two then and leave you to your fighting," said Neal, sliding along the rafter until he neared where the Beekadoodle still twittered and tweeted shrilly, the noise barely being heard because the Petpets who were playing tag on the floor were being so amazingly loud. Janelle was on the Beekadoodle's other side. "They're really annoying, aren't they? They're always bickering!" remarked Neal to his fellow member of TYNG.

     Janelle nodded and looked at the bickering members of TYNG. "Do you think that Anise should make a rule that all TYNG members have to be friends?" asked the white Aisha, looking at Anise who was trying to climb up onto one of the rafters but she couldn't. Oliver let his springy tail dangle over the edge and he hauled his sister up by means of that.

     "What were you saying about me?" asked Anise, scuttling along the rafter and once she was close enough to the pair of members who were on opposite sides of the Beekadoodle, she leaned towards Neal and Janelle. "I thought I heard my name being said," she grinned lightly.

     "We were wondering if you could make a TYNG rule that all members have to be nice to each other," said Janelle, pointing at Caitlin and Jeff who looked like they would be exchanging blows soon. And not light blows either.

     "Or you could just boot them out of TYNG altogether if they're not being nice to each other," said Neal.

     "True, very true," answered Anise slowly. "I could do that."

     ~()~

     The next week or so passed without incident except for one of the thick wood rafters that the TYNG members were sitting and bickering on cracking and almost breaking and almost making the attic roof fall down. All of the Petpets' owners came to pick their beloved Petpets up and pay the yellow Acara and the olive-green Blumaroo siblings until Anise and Oliver only had to take care of Sakhmet the green Geb, Ginger the plain Pikis, Frizz the white Gathow, Slither the plain Cobrall and of course, Chera the plain Gruslen and Daz the plain Spyder in their attic.

     Both Oliver and Anise had soon developed dark circles under their eyes and were yawning regularly. But perhaps the duo's single consolation was the rapidly increasing amount of NP in Rachel the shadow Cybunny's bank account. She was the treasurer for TYNG.

     After another few nights that were a little easier to sleep for the entire night since there were quite a few less Petpets to take care of, the last Petpet's owner came to pick it up. Anise breathed a very audible sigh of relief. She and Oliver started to clean up the attic, but didn't get very far before their owner burst in again. "How's it going?" she asked her two sleepy pets.

     "The last one's gone!" said Oliver, his voice full to bursting of relief.

     "We're cleaning up," said Anise tiredly, yawning loudly and obviously. Her owner didn't take the hint, though.

     "What have you learned from this?" asked their owner, grinning slightly and pushing her hair back. "Think about it for a while and tell me when I call you up for lunch, which we are not going to have Tigersquash corn dogs for. I'm making Tigersquash sandwiches," and with that, their owner closed the door again and Oliver and Anise could hear her loud footsteps descending down the long wooden staircase.

     Oliver grinned and said, "Not too much of a difference there, hey?" This was before the two siblings stopped cleaning up the bath tubs, scratching trees, the pipe maze, the cage, cushions, beds and the toys that weren't ripped up or broken in any other way, and thought about their owner's query for a few seconds. Then Oliver concluded loudly, with a playful grin on his olive green Blumaroo face, "Owners letting you continue things are hazardous to your health."

The End