Seahorse Dad was not pleased.
Granted, occasions in which the lusus was pleased were very few and far between. It was just a matter of his nature; he was a superior, pretentious creature of the sea, and by jove, he certainly did not find reason to be pleased with anything less than right proper perfection.
Strangely enough, that little disgrace of a troll he had raised from a grub was not the cause of his torment for once, though he was always quick to aid in adding to Seahorse Dad's general annoyance. As it so happened, the water dweller had disappeared off somewhere. "Probably trying to work on his quadrants and failing as typical," Seahorse Dad had thought to himself, shaking his head, but it was a pleasant change from having to listen to the boy's constant glubbing.
No, the matter was a far more aggravating, infuriating problem than anything that the silly boy could have caused.
The hive was infested with starfish.
Starfish were, in Seahorse Dad's opinion, the most annoying creatures he ever set eye on around his home. All bright and sunshiney and cheerful with their whimsical shapes, that were now plastering the sides of the ship. The place looked simply gaudy. It was quite unacceptable.
He had attempted swimming around the hive, glaring at the small creatures with as much loathing as he could muster, pointing his tail accusingly at them. "Now see here, you useless brutes," he would snap, "you must vacate the premises immediately, as I will not stand for loiterers around this ship." But it was to no avail. Be it rebellion against authority or invocation of squatter's laws or the simple fact that starfish lacked the nervous system to understand such demands, the rough, bright creatures stayed firmly latched to the wood.
Attempts to scrape them off with a piece of wood proved quite useless as well. The things seemed properly and completely stuck, unable to budge even through Seahorse Dad's most sincere efforts. He had the idea to perhaps scare them off by placing a match by their head like a leech, but he encountered difficulties in the form of an inability to locate the head of a starfish, the fact that even the most prehensile of tails simply couldn't wrap themselves around such a tiny matchstick, and the matches were likely too soggy to have any way of lighting in the first place.
So all Seahorse Dad could do was to sigh and wait for that sorry sight of a seadweller to return to the hive in hopes that perhaps he'd be able to be of some use whatsoever in the removal of the small beasties. At the very least, he'd be able to chortle at the boy's ill-fated attempts at banishing the creatures.
Still, he supposed, it could have been worse. Squiddles are far more insufferable than starfish.
