LPS - Blythe's Littlest Adventure -Chapter 2-

Littlest Pet Shop

-Blythe's Littlest Adventure-

Chapter 2

"Hey dad," Blythe greeted her father who was already lounging on their new living room couch with a cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. 'Typical dad stuff,' Blythe thought to herself.

"Morning, Blythie! All ready for your first day at work?" Roger Baxter didn't often have a day off when they lived back in the suburbs, so being able to greet his little girl in the morning was one of the many perks that he enjoyed now that they lived so much closer to his main place of employ, namely the city's biggest airport.

That wasn't to say that he was exactly pleased after his first flight in his new position, coming home to find a stream of people flooding into the ground-floor pet shop in their new apartment building home. After he had walked into the abnormally busy shop he was immediately accosted into a bear-hug from his daughter, rapidly explaining the day's events and how she was now employed by the nice elder lady that owned the Littlest Pet Shop.

"Well, kind of…I'm just so nervous. I mean, I've never worked before, and I know you had to spend all day signing all those papers yesterday, and I just…"

"Blythe, its okay," her father comforted, recognizing signs of panic in his daughter. "All you really need is to focus on what you have to do, and everything will work out just fine. You think I was always confident being a pilot?" Blythe sighed like a kettle releasing steam; somehow, her dad always knew what to say to make her feel better. In fact now that she thought about it…

"Hey dad…how do you handle being around someone you think is out to…y'know…make your life miserable?" The question caught Roger entirely off-guard. Why would she ask something like that?

"Is this about those two girls from the other day, honey?" Blythe grimaced rather unusually, the look on her face at this comment, a mix between discomfort at mentioning the 'mean girls' and an attempt to look like she wasn't lying (as her father, he was able to pick up on that right away). Roger didn't think much of it though; he would feel nervous asking the same question to his father.

"Well, I think I might have a story that might be able to help you with that problem," he could hear his daughter's moan of agony at another one of her dad's 'when I was your age' stories. "Don't worry, this one's different. I know a guy who was a first officer at one point. Whenever I used to fly with him, there would always be something wrong with the instruments and gauges and anything else we had in the cockpit, even our phones! There was nothing seriously wrong, but it ended up delaying our flights whenever we would work together."

Blythe quirked an eyebrow, this was new. Usually her father would try and relate to her problems with an anecdote from his own childhood, not something that could have happened last year. "It was so frustrating working with him, I would try to swap shifts with anybody else who was willing whenever I could. After a while, everybody else knew why I was jumping ship whenever I was scheduled to fly with him, and before I knew it, I ended up stuck with the poor guy constantly. Eventually I was just so fed up with everything; I exploded at him right before we took off on a big cross-country flight."

"I told him that I knew what he had been doing, that I was through with putting up with it, and that I was going to report him to the Pilot's Association for deliberately attempting to sabotage flights and jeopardizing the safety of passengers and crew members. I was so angry, I couldn't see straight." Here he paused, either for dramatic tension or to think back on that day in his mind's eye, nobody could really say.

"So, what happened," Blythe asked now genuinely interested in her dad's story.

"Well, the poor guy had a breakdown. Said he was so desperate to prove himself for a promotion to captain that he was trying to set everything up before the flights could take off earlier all on his own and didn't realize just how bad a job he was doing. Turned out he was trying so hard to do everything right ahead of time; he didn't realize he was hurting everybody around him."

"So I told him that if he really wanted to become a captain, he had to understand what was expected of him, and what he had to do to make it work out for everyone involved. So we trained on flights for the next few months, and when it came time to take the promotion exam, he went in more confident than anyone had ever seen him."

"And? Did he pass?" Blythe asked, eyes alight.

"Nope," her dad responded without missing a beat. Her face fell, that wasn't how the story was supposed to go! "He failed by about three percent. But our company was impressed enough that they worked him into a co-pilot position on some of the bigger flights so he could learn just what it took to get that promotion. He passed his test after that, but if I hadn't gone off on him that day, I might never have found out what the real problem was, and he would probably be out of a job by now."

"Oh, okay," Now she was confused. Why did he tell her this story? "So…what was the point of that one?"

"The point is Blythie, that you won't ever fix a problem without first understanding what's causing it, even if that problem is another person. Talk with them and find out the real issue, because that'll be the only way you can make it right." Blythe rolled her eyes a bit at the after-school special summary, but smiled anyways. He really did know what to say to make her feel better. "Now, go on and get to your first big day at work, I know you'll do great."

"Thanks, dad," she kissed him on the cheek as she walked towards the apartment door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Roger pull a large red-and-purple foam finger out from underneath his favorite recliner, and a soda-helmet from underneath the blankets on the couch. She smiled to herself. Ah yes, how could she have forgotten?

"By the way, the Crow's receivers have been getting injured a lot lately, and the Razor's defense has been pretty solid these last few games, so I think they'll win by a touchdown," Blythe called over her shoulder before she closed the apartment door. Her dad's jaw dropped. Living with her father had given Blythe some unusual talents outside of understanding animals, and some were more tolerable than others. Just once poor Roger would like to watch a football game without his daughter predicting the (infallibly correct) outcome! Was that really too much to ask?

Blythe strode out of the elevator above the Pet Shop's ground floor, running a comb through the last of the knots in her hair. Despite her best efforts, her hair was often untamable and seemed to behave differently on a daily basis, forcing her to change her hairstyle just as often.

"Morning, Mrs. Twombly!" she said as she descended the staircase. "Mrs. T? Hello?" There was no sign of the elder lady that owned the Littlest Pet Shop anywhere. Blythe began to worry; she wouldn't just abandon her only employee on her first day to work, would she? No, that would be crazy…

Then again, things in this building hadn't exactly been normal since she and her dad moved in. As Blythe wondered if she would ever again have a life that could be considered 'normal', she noticed a note pinned on the door that led to the day-camp area.

"Blythe," it read, scrawled in hasty cursive, "Truck with product stock didn't arrive this morning because of accident ten miles away, went to go help driver and bring back product. Please watch over the day-camp while I'm away, will be back A.S.A.P." She set the note down, wondering briefly who abandoned their own store to help a shipping truck this early in the morning.

That thought was quickly replaced, however with the idea that she now had a whole morning alone with the seven most interesting little four-legged furballs on the planet. She briefly flashed back to her bedroom, watching all six of them tear her room apart from floor to ceiling. She banished the thought as quickly as it came.

Sure, they could be a little rambunctious and they could definitely learn the meaning of the word phrase 'personal space', but they wouldn't destroy the Littlest Pet Shop they loved so much, right?

"Pepper, watch it!"

"Oops! Sorry, Vinnie!"

Blythe gazed through the glass door, only to find a smattering of plastic squeaky toys, plushies and various other pet-entertainment-paraphernalia strewn across the Day-Camp floor, alongside bits of kibble and the odd patch of water soaking into the carpet. Six voices cried out in joy as one would chase the others, tap somebody with a paw, then take off as the chaser became the chased. Blythe took a deep breath as she braced herself to walk through the door on her first real job as an employee at the Littlest Pet Shop.

But before she could, she heard another sound, something that brought a smile to her face, a tiny voice crying out for order amid six others shrieking in playtime.

"You guys! Blythe's gonna be here any second! Come on! Just a little bit clean? That's all I ask!"

Blythe knew in that moment that she could rely on at least one other person that morning, and that one person was a hedgehog named Russell. She pressed her face against the glass as she watched the little orange critter dashing here and there, dropping off a squeaky toy in a basket, tossing kibble back into a dish, even standing on a fuzzy toy that was probably soaked through with water by now.

She couldn't help but be amazed at the level of responsibility from such a little guy, especially when he knew just as well as the other pets that it was the humans who worked in the shop that were supposed to clean up after them. Yet he still took it upon himself to be the one to take care of the cleaning and organizing when there was no one else around to do it.

"Aw, c'mon Russ! We've got time, and besides, Minka's it! Don't you want her to be chasing you?" The little green gecko asked his hedgehog buddy. Vinnie knew exactly how to tempt someone, Blythe would give him that. Unnoticed to the both of them, Minka rushed after Penny Ling, still caught up in their game of 'tag', while the panda lumbered along as quickly as her little legs could carry her. Unfortunately, this also meant that stopping before she hit a wall or tripped over a toy was far more difficult than usual, if not impossible.

Penny flew as her foot caught on the edge of a play-cube, pitching forward with such force, that she ran head-first into the enormous kitty-scratcher-brand cat-scratch jungle-gym that stood in the center of the room. The whole thing teetered precariously for a moment before deciding that it didn't want to stand up anymore, and that lying down on the floor was its new calling in life. Russell and Vinnie both looked up in fear as the shadow of the large carpet tower cast its foreboding shadow over the two of them. In that moment, both of them knew one thing for certain:

They were both about to be crushed by a gigantic cat toy, one of the most humiliating ways to die.