The little platypus walked around with little aim, his webbed rear feet and fur-covered front feet pitter-pattering against a half-heartedly constructed cobble road as he searched for a human house that he could get some food from. He wasn't starving, since he'd managed to snag some scraps from a slightly larger house earlier that day, but he knew that the winter was coming, and since this place was far from wealthy, they'd soon have a shortage of food and he needed to store up whatever body fat he could find. He was one of the most healthy platypuses he knew, though he seldom saw any others. Platypuses were extremely territorial, after all, and he wasn't looking for a fight, which was a bit unusual.
This little platypus was an unusual creature. Even excluding the intrinsic weirdness of platypuses. Even excluding his unusually bright teal color in an otherwise dimly-colored-to-sepia-world. Even excluding the fact that he lived in the small town of Gimmelshtump, far from his natural habitat. No, those traits were all explainable or excusable in some way. His primarily unusual trait had to be the one that was easy to overlook, but once noticed, impossible to explain.
That was, of course, his abnormally high level of intelligence. He had realized it when he recognized a series of symbols on multiple human-places. He tried to ask his mother what they meant, but she stared at him blankly, unable to understand what he was referring to.
He had long since learned the symbols and their meanings. He also knew that they corresponded to specific phonetic sounds, and over time of looking through windows into classrooms and eavesdropping from around corners, he had gained a basic understanding of both the written and the spoken language. This gave him a distinct advantage over any other platypuses, since he could recognize words like "restaurant" or hear conversations about "feasts."
While walking slowly, the platypus heard a loud "Do not move!" He looked in the direction that it had come from only to see a normal house with a normal lawn gnome in front. He stared for a moment, though, wondering who had said that, and he could have sworn that the gnome had blinked in its glassy forward stare. Surprised, he let out a nervous chirr, and the gnome turned automatically toward him.
"Do not move!" When the voice came again from inside the house, the gnome – or rather the boy – turned forward again. The platypus walked to him quickly and the boy, without turning his head, followed him with his eyes. A panicked look on his face, the boy hissed, "Dumb thing, get out of here! Father will kill you if he sees you!" He stood next to the boy, ignoring him. After all, as far as the boy knew, he was just a platypus. They don't do much, and they certainly don't understand German. He grinned, his face outside of the boy's field of vision, as the boy sputtered and protested, infuriated.
They stood together like that, and fortunately it was only another fifteen minutes before the man inside of the house – the boy's father? – fell asleep. The boy looked inside of the house carefully before turning to the platypus. "Just look at you," he said with a high-pitched voice, glaring accusatorially, "you almost got me in trouble!" The platypus turned to walk away before he heard, "Wait!"
The platypus knew that staying could give his intelligence away, and that he had no reason to trust that the boy wouldn't freak out and call him a demon and send the village after him like that time before and yet…
And yet he had no chance to choose to stay or go because the boy picked him up in his tiny little arms and turned him so that they were facing each other. "You may be a troublemaker, but you're a cute little thing, aren't you?"
The platypus tried to avoid accidentally letting his confusion seep into his expression, but fortunately the absentminded boy was too busy rubbing him to notice.
"I know, I know, you're ready to get back home with your mom and dad, right?" the platypus, glad that the boy was too distracted to notice, stifled a giggle at his naïveté. A platypus lives with its mother for about four to five months before she leaves it and the father is not even a part of it, not that the boy could be expected to know something like that.
"Look, though, you're thinner than a goozim-poking-stick!" the boy said, poking the platypus in the belly to illustrate his point. "So your family must not know how to feed you right." The boy turned around and walked into his house, still holding the platypus in his arms.
"Father goes out like a light, so we should be safe," the boy whispered as he walked into the kitchen, "but don't make any noise, okay?" He put the animal down on a wooden table and started to rummage through the cupboards. The platypus shifted his eyes toward the boy's sleeping father and wondered if it was worth the risk for him to stay.
"I'll tell you a secret. My parents aren't very good at feeding me right, either. So we'll be having our supper together! I hope you like ham sandwiches."
Well, food is food. And the boy seemed to be too young to be tricking him. It couldn't do any harm to stay long enough to get some 'ham sandwiches,' whatever those were. He stood on the table patiently as the boy sliced some bread and got out a small piece of ham that he sliced into two pieces.
Unfortunately, the knife slipped from his hand and made a loud noise against the floor. The platypus and the boy could hear a noise from the other room. The boy froze.
The two stood absolutely still for a few moments as they waited. When there was no follow-up sound from the room, the boy slowly constructed the two sandwiches, careful not to make a single noise, and turned back to place the sandwiches onto the table. Of course, he was focusing too much of his effort into being silent for him to even think about the knife he had dropped on the floor or to realize that he was going to trip on it.
The sickening crash made the platypus wince and look over the table. He sighed in relief when he saw that the boy seemed uninjured, only for any of his relief to drain when he heard a loud footstep from the other room, followed by another. The boy shot up from on the floor and started to run outside, only to look back toward the platypus, who, after a moment of panic, shot into a cupboard and pulled it as closed as he could with his bill.
"You dumb little thing," the boy muttered almost inaudibly, his expression betraying his horror. "Father will look in there and…" The boy glanced toward the other room and his place in the yard before sighing as if in acceptance of his fate and quickly moving to stand in front of the cupboard.
The platypus tried to open the cupboard door slightly to see through it, only for the boy to hold it shut with the back of his foot, saying in a hushed panic, "Stay, you dummy."
Fortunately (or unfortunately, perhaps, since it made his heart threaten to leap out of his chest) the platypus could still hear the thunderous footsteps approaching. Eventually they stopped and there was a sickening silence. "Boy." The word was slowly uttered like an obscenity by the voice that had said, 'Do not move!' before. And yet now the voice sounded even more loud and cruel.
"Why. Are. You. Inside?" Each word was an individual poison and he could feel the foot trembling against the door.
The boy's small voice was a welcome break from the nerve-wracking loudness. "I-I was hungry, I d-d-didn't see any w-w-witches or woodtrolls, so I th-thought-"
"-You have a job to protect us!" the voice interrupted furiously. "I should have known you were too stupid for that!" The words felt painful to the platypus, especially since the boy seemed not to wince from them. He was used to it. That was not what human parents were supposed to say, was it?
"What's in the drawer behind you?"
This, on the other hand, did shake the little boy. "N-nothing!" he insisted unconvincingly.
"Do not lie to me, boy," the voice said, rising in volume.
"I-I'm not! Please! Th-there's nothing in there!"
"Boy!" the man yelled at the top of his lungs, and yet the foot blocking the cupboard stayed in place, even if it did shake like it was made of jelly. Despite admiring his resilience, though, the platypus knew that there was no way that the boy could stop the man from getting through. He braced himself for the inevitable death.
But the confrontation was interrupted by an infant's cry in the other room. The man said in an unexpectedly quiet, even gentle, voice, "My son." There was no movement for a moment until he said in a voice quaking with anger, "Do. Not. Move." The footsteps began again, heading away from the room.
The boy sighed in relief, quickly opening the cupboard and pulling the platypus out. "Now get out! Through the window, you little troublemaker!" The boy picked up one of the sandwiches and put it in the platypus's bill. The platypus looked at the boy for a moment.
"I mean it, go on, shoo! Your mom and dad are waiting for you!" The platypus winced at the boy making the same assumption before obeying and leaving.
But even if he shot out of the window, the platypus wasn't about to really leave. Because that's when the little platypus realized that he wasn't just staying at the boy's house for supper. He was staying for a bit longer than that.