Page 48 of Not Like The Other Girls

Lily blushes. “Nah, just rambling as usual. It’s my character quirk.”

“You know I love all your quirks, babe.” He flashes his charming boy-next-door smirk at her, and her heart skips a beat.

She yearns for him.

Oh, how she yearns for him.

Because she’s just the typical heroine, after all, unable to keep her heart from falling into the clutches of the bad boy.



“Let’s try our hand at hunting again, yeah?” Every asks exactly three hours after making his decision to fast. Which obviously didn’t work out well. “It can’t be that hard. We used to come to this cave with papa, ya know, and we found meat and game just fine. Even marshmallows on good days.”

Little does he know that his papa actually got those marshmallows from Walmart on Earth.

He’s quite incompetent, after all, the only realistically human feat about him.

So they start their journey back into the wilderness, away from the confines of the decidedly electronically heated cave. Lily and her man stroll along heaps and heaps of ice ledges, the mood so chill as if this were just an ordinary stroll in the park. Lily-girl looks out for potential marshmallows that might manifest themselves, in her mind simply falling from the sky like hail that raked through Darkindeep Ebonyngrey Wolfmane Ridge-Cliff small town a couple of years ago.

“If I remember it right, sugartits, we’re getting close to a lake,” Every announces when there is still no marshmallow in sight, not even after having walked for quite a while.

Damn, that’s tiring.

At least there’s no snowfall at the moment, or a snowstorm, at that.

See, life could be worse.

“So we’re gonna go fish?” Lily asks.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s better than the mouse, alright. I’m poor, man, but I ain’t that poor to the point that I eat mice to survive. I ain’t a panda.”

“What?” Every says, wondering what his girl is talking about.

“When pandas are out of bamboo, and they’re still hungry, they end up eating the mice they could find on the forest floor. Yang-Yang and Jing-Jing’s brother told me that when he came to visit.”

And what does it have anything to do with this?

Nothing. But this is just how Lily the Yapper is.

So we’ll document it this way.

“Why are you telling me this?” Every asks on the matter. Then his jealous-hero superpowers are activated. “Wait, your llama shelter friends have a brother?”

“Why, you wanna meet him?”

“He hasn’t been hitting on you or anything, right?” he asks like the cliché love interest he is, always concerned about possibilities of fellow man-beings stealing his girl.

Always so possessive.

“No,” Lily says, her perplexity showing in how caterpillar-like her eyebrows now are. She even halts her stroll. “Why’d he do that? He’s related to my friends, you know, so even the thought of being with him—it’s just gross, man.”

“How is he like?” Every questions further, still not letting the subject rest. “So in the case of him being a potential suitor, I could get my mafia gang to off him.”

His pretty girl, her cheeks now rosy from the cold, simply rolls her eyes. “Chill, Every. That was months ago; I don’t even know why the heck I brought it up. And he’s like, really chill too, you know, like a cool uncle since he’s a whole decade or so older than them. Looks kinda homeless too.”

But Every just raises an eyebrow suspiciously, so she adds: “And if anything, he seems like a human version of a panda. You don’t date pandas or anything, do you?”