(Untitled)
Believing one's child to be more advanced than they actually were was a fine tradition of parenthood, and like most fine traditions, William was inclined to dismiss it out of hand, or at least expose it to a great deal of skepticism. He'd read the literature.
So he resolutely did not believe that what Olivia was trying to say was babae, a ( Read more... )
So he resolutely did not believe that what Olivia was trying to say was babae, a ( Read more... )
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Walking up casually in today's Clothes Box offerings of Hawaiian-print board shorts and an over-large t-shirt with random Japanese words on it Tooru got as close as he could without spooking the crab and crouched down on his heels.
"What is the word in English for this?" he asked, pointing at the crab. Using his lack of English skills as an ice-breaker was becoming a habit.
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"Er, that's a crab," he said, and then said, "Crab," again, in case putting it in a sentence had confused the matter. Although the man had asked the question so he probably didn't need him to, at that.
Olivia added something that probably wasn't an exclamation of wonderment at his command of the language. Yet.
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"Crab," he repeated. Then, a sudden realization hit. "Kani! These are good for eating. You have bucket?"
For some reason he looks at the baby rather than the man, as if she could understand him. Then again, his English is still at the preschool level, mostly, so there is less of a gap between the two of them than perhaps William and Tooru. He actually has no idea what kind of crab it is or even if it's the kind of crab one tends to eat, but he's already looking for a way to grab it without getting a finger snipped off.
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He paused to see if Olivia, who was being addressed, would respond to this, but she merely stared at the man with wide blue eyes, so he took it upon himself.
"No," he said, shaking his head in the hopes this was universal, "I don't have a bucket. All I have are books. Children's books, at that."
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The trouble with a magical clothes box is that, as all magical things are prone to be, it was a magic. It did not play by any particular rules. So an outfit typically made for a woman was easily adjusted in certain places such that even someone such as Gilderoy Lockhart, who could fabricate his own clothes, was fooled.
"Be careful!" Gilderoy exclaimed as he came upon father and child on the beach. "I wrote a book about household pests once," he began, but didn't finish as the creature changed directions and moved toward Gilderoy. For his part, Gilderoy shrieked and ran in the opposite direction. The running was completely unnecessary as the shrieking had caused the crab to scuttle away from the sound.
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"Do they really qualify as household pets if they're not found in households?" he said. The shrieking wasn't really an answer, but it did distract him from wanting one, as it had redirected the crab towards him. He snatched up the nearest stick and prodded the ground in front of it awkwardly, which seemed to give it pause.
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Instead, Gilderoy simply recoiled a bit away from the small leggy thing and said nothing. For a moment. One that did not last very long. "Swish and flick," Gilderoy replied, certain he'd heard or read that phrase somewhere, probably from his own books. He gave a wave of his hand as though to demonstrate how one would swish and flick away a crab.
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"Yes," he said, "but I should probably do it anyway."
Relying on strange women to deal with hazards might send the wrong message. Actually, he wasn't sure what message that sent. Strangers can be helpful? That was true, but it wouldn't do to generalize from it, that seemed a fast way to end up in a workshop somewhere doing manual labour.1
1The bogeymen people like the de Wordes used to terrify their children were not quite the same as for most people.
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He had encountered crabs before. However, his adopted sibling was much farther behind on the learning curve, not do a lack of experience, but rather a complete absence of learning from one's mistakes.
Mr Fusspot circled the crab, growling ferociously. Or, ferociously as one can expect from something less than 10 pounds.
"It's a crab, actually," Moist corrected, coming upon them with Zwerg in tow. The wolf-dog had the good sense to look a bit worried for its brethren. The crab scuttled backwards, raising its claws. "Or so I'm told. We don't eat things that wear their skellytons on the outside where I'm from."
Uberwald being landlocked decidedly helped.
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Animal taxonomies were not exactly his specialty.
"Aren't you from Uberwald?" he said, turning to Moist and, more critically, the crab, which at least seemed distracted. "It's not exactly a region of picky eaters, is it?"
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"Uberwald, where if the meat's red, you throw it out," he muttered, dropping down into a squat before the pram. "I bet your mummy and daddy don't force anything like that on you, do they?" he asked Olivia, tugging Zwerg into a sitting position when he became too interested in the ultrasmall human.
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Mostly miss, when it came to dogs bigger than she was.
"Er, no, not really," William said, "she's barely on solids."
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"I don't know if that will work," she says looking around for something to trap it. If all else fails a good kick might do the trick. "You could throw a rock at it?"
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They didn't look very smart, but assuming a small creature was of inferior intelligence, in Ankh-Morpork, was a good way of finding yourself headbutted by someone several inches high.
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Besides she's fairly certain that high intelligent crabs aren't entirely out of the question. She's seen stranger. "How would it grab the rock? Pincers don't make for good gripping."
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