“It’s pretty here hyung,” Toto called as he ran through the large field with Tats who was trying to see if there were any herbs or plants that he could add to his collection or deal with the occasional illnesses that sometimes plagued the five other Matoki, “I bet we could stay here and never get bothered by anyone.”

“Toto!” Tats scolded, looking up and realising that the blue matoki was farther away than he was meant to be, “Don’t go running off like that. We don’t know what is around here.”

Toto automatically came back to the pink masked matoki, “But I wasn’t far in the slightest and you can still see the ship from here.”

“I know that,” Tats sighed, “But I don’t want anything bad to happen to you okay? We’re on an alien planet...ohhh doc leaves are supposed to be good right?”

Almost immediately distracted with his medicine plants, Tats lost all interest in anything else and after a short while, Toto grew bored and started to try and find something more interesting to do.

Randomly walking off he picked a few pretty looking flowers from the field and figured that they would be good to add to his little garden and then, after taking a wrong step, he went tumbling into a small puddle. Strangely or maybe predictably, instead of throwing a weeping rage at getting soaked as most youngsters would do, Toto found this new sensation to be actually quite nice and since he had been designed to be incredibly waterproof, he decided to merrily start splashing about in the puddle, getting himself completely covered in mud and mucky water.

Though thankfully he had saved his precious flowers from the same fate by neatly placing them in a bucket on the opposite side of the puddle he was currently playing in. After around ten minutes, Toto decided that he was exhausted and clambered out of the puddle, which had decreased in size considerably and flopped merrily onto his back to stare up at the sky.

Yeah, Toto liked it here. It was peaceful and quiet and there were lots of fun things to do. So much more fun than the last place they had been.

For a while he was content to just lie there and shift his feet back and forth and watch the clouds and for a moment or two he believed that he had drifted off because it was highly surprising when something softly landed on the tip of his nose. Blinking open his eyes, the blue bunny stared at the creature which was settled gently on his face, its little antenna moving back and forth as if it were trying to work out what he was.

The small creature had four wings that were a mixture of bright red and black and its little body was barely the length of his little finger. Sitting up carefully, Toto pouted when the creature moved and fluttered around in a panic before landing lightly on the tip of his left hand ear. Carefully and as slowly as he could manage, he lowered the ear so that he could view the creature which he guessed to be a butterfly. From all the books that he had been able to read in order to help him with his gardening the creature on the end of his ear certainly matched the description and it was nice to actually see one for real.

“Hello,” Toto said, “I’m Toto. What’s your name?”

The butterfly simply fluttered its wings at him in response which Toto took to be the creature’s way of communicating.

“Flappy?” Toto guessed, “That’s a funny name but I suppose Toto sounds funny to you too.” He smiled happily, “Will you be my friend...hey, Flappy where are you going?”

The butterfly, having realised that Toto was not a flower to gain precious sugars off, had taken to the sky and was flying off in a haphazard series of circles and swoops. Toto picked himself and his pink bucket up before taking off after the butterfly with merry cries for the creature to slow down and come back, even though he was laughing and enjoying this game of chase with his new friend.

~*~*~*~

“Didn’t Toto go out with you, Tats?” Joko asked the medic when he came back in a while later and the yellow matoki noticed that the blue mischief bunny was nowhere in sight.

Tats busied himself with putting his basket of herbs down before turning to Joko, “Sorry, miles away there. What did you say?”

“Err...Toto,” Joko said, casting a panicky look around the doctor, “Where is he? I thought he went out with you?”

The medic was about to argue that no Toto hadn’t gone out with him when suddenly he remembered the fact that he had told the youngster to not go running off. Oh no, he couldn’t have honestly left him out there could he? Panic gripped at Tats as he turned around to look back over the field and there was clearly no sign of the blue matoki following along behind him.

Joko grabbed the medic’s arm before he could go running off, “Wait wait wait, we’ll go together but we’ll let the others know first so that we don’t all end up lost. Plus if we can convince that mapping program to work maybe we can track him down just a little bit quicker.”

The pink masked Matoki looked a little uncertain and more than ready to bolt out of the door but figured that it made sense. Slowly he nodded after taking another long look to the field that he had just come back from and quickly followed after Joko as they went to get the mapping system working. Hopefully it would just show a little blue blob to indicate exactly where his little blue bunny was.

~*~*~*~

Following ‘Flappy’ in their mad game of chase, Toto didn’t spot the large piece of metal that was stuck into the field until he ran into it. Taking a few seconds to clear his vision, Toto pulled himself up from his sprawled out position on the floor and looked up curiously at the thing in front of him. It was big and may have been shiny at one point but now it was weather beaten and had lots of different bits of graffiti on it. Walking around to the front of the large metal thing, Toto blinked at it in surprise when he recognised the object in front of him.

“Who left a great big spoon all the way out here?” Toto said aloud, thinking that Flappy would be somewhere nearby, unaware that the butterfly had randomly fluttered off, “And I thought that Humans weren’t that big either.”

For a while he stared at the large metal spoon before deciding that maybe he could get it out of the ground to help whoever had dropped it. With a few slick movements, the blue matoki had clambered up the length of the spoon and had reached the top. Grabbing onto the end he swung down on it and tried to move the spoon but it was clearly way too big and heavy for the little matoki to manage. Feeling that his arms were getting tired, Toto decided that he would go back down and try another way to get the large spoon shifted.

Just unfortunately at that moment he chose to look down and realised just how high he was up off the ground.

His loud scream of fright and panic was more than enough to alert the mini search party, which consisted of Tats, Joko and Shishi, of the youngster’s location and hurriedly the elder matoki’s ran to the source, convinced that something bad was happening to their youngest member.

Joko got there first, based purely on his natural clowning abilities and he looked up in surprise at Toto’s unusual position, “How did you get up there?”

“Toto!” Tats came next, almost flattening the yellow matoki, “You come down from there right now.”

“But Toto stuck!” the blue matoki immediately yelled, “I’m scared!”

Shishi sighed and shook his head, “Okay, I’ll be up in a second. Tats stop trampling Joko, he’s turning blue.” With a few quick strides and a well placed bound, Shishi was up at the top of the strange structure and hauling Toto into his grip before nimbly and safely sliding down the handle and the bowl of the spoon to deposit the snivelling mess into the waiting arms of Tats.

“Toto!” Tats said, hugging the small baby matoki who was thankfully not whimpering as much, “You silly thing. This is why you don’t go wandering off.”

“Toto sorry,” the little blue matoki replied, snuggling against the warmth of the medic’s fur, “He won’t do it again. He promises.”

Joko rolled his eyes skywards towards the fussing that Tats was directing towards Toto, “You were the one who didn’t pay attention to where he went, this is just as much your fault-ow!”

Shishi had none too lightly bonked Joko on the head, “Leave him be. Right now we’ve got an upset Toto to deal with.”

The clown faced matoki had to agree with that statement and followed off after the pair with Shishi.

When they got back to the ship, Tats gave Toto a good scrub down to get rid of the mud and muck from his little escapade in the puddle and tucked him up in bed surrounded by his mountain of toys. To use a human term which he had grown quite fond of, Tats thought that Toto looked as ‘snug as a bug in a rug’ like that and quietly slipped out of the room to let the youngster drift off to sleep.

Toto snuggled down happily and closed his eyes, shifting to turn over on his side and allow Flappy to flutter out of his ear where the little butterfly had taken refuge for a little while before flying out of the just open window to the night time sky.

A.N

Yes, that Spoon is a real thing and it’s about a twenty minute walk from where I live. It’s supposed to be some kind of contemporary artwork or something but it is quite literally a giant spoon stuck into the ground.

If you wanna know more about it, here’s a link

Anyways, like, think I’m bonkers or that Toto is just too darn cute for his own good? Comments and upvotes are loves

Signing off now

ChiaToma