chapter three;

Taemin looked to his left.

“Where am I?”

He turned to his right.

“Where am I?”

He glanced back.

“What is this place?”

He studied his surroundings. The park was filled with overly hyper little kids running and jumping and yelling and screaming at each other, but none of them was his owner.

Taemin hid himself under a bench. He knew too well how the children would react if they saw a Chihuahua as adorable as him. He couldn’t even imagine the state he would be in after their attacks. In a worst case scenario, one of them might even take him home. If that were to happen, he would never get to see Wooyoung again. His comfortable bed at home, the sirloin steaks Wooyoung always pamper him with, the trips he was taken on; Taemin would never be able to enjoy all those again.

He cursed himself for deciding to take a stroll around the police department after Wooyoung left him in his father’s office. The door was open, and Taemin thought he smelt something nice outside, so he let the scent took his feet away.

He never found the source of the indulging aroma, but instead, he found himself in an unfamiliar place full of dirt and monstrous little kids. Taemin began to sob. Where is his precious master?

“Are you lost?” a gentle tofu-like voice greeted him.

Taemin spun around and found himself facing a chicken. A chicken? Really? At a park in the middle of the metropolitan Seoul? “Who are you?” he asked, remembering something Wooyoung’s mother warned about not being too friendly with strangers.

“Are you lost?” the chicken asked again, ignoring Taemin’s question. “You don’t look familiar,”

At first, Taemin hesitated to answer. But then he thought a mere chicken could do nothing to harm a Chihuahua like him, so he nodded. “Sorta,” he replied.

“Thought so,” the chicken responded. His face then broke into a warm smile. “I’m Onew, by the way,” he introduced himself while extending his right wing, initiating a handshake.

Taemin took it with his short left leg and barely reached it. “I’m Taemin,” he said. “Can you help me find my way home?”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m a direction retard. I can’t even find my own farm where I originally belong. I’ve been a lost chicken for a year now,”

“A year?” Taemin asked, shocked. “Then how did you survive?”

“Well, being a chicken is a lot easier than it seem, although you need to run away from the greedy human beings who want to have you as their lunch or dinner every now and then,” Onew explained. “I eat worms to survive. Sometimes, some generous grandmas or kids would give me breadcrumbs.”

Taemin scrunched his nose in disgust. Ew. He would never eat worms. For once, he was grateful that he was a dog, not a chicken.

Seeing Taemin’s worried expression, Onew flashed another kind smile of his. “Don’t worry. You’ll find your home soon,” he reassured the petite Chihuahua.

“How can you be so sure?” Taemin questioned back.

“Well, after a year worth of travels and experiences, I’ve gained quite a lot of friends,” Onew beamed proudly, as if he had just stated that he found a new planet where aliens live in. “For starters…”

“For starters?”

“Let’s go have lunch,”

Taemin frowned at Onew. He surely was one strange chicken. Even though Taemin was not exactly sure how on earth Onew was going to find him lunch, he followed the chicken anyway. At the very least, he was not alone.