Disclaimer: Wolf Emperor doesn't own any copyrighted material included in this Fan Fiction.
A/N: Sorry, I haven't updated lately. I hope you enjoy this chapter.
Calamity sat underneath a leafless tree that grew out of a tiny dirt patch just outside of her apartment. The sun was out, but a cold wind was blowing. Her fur stood up as a sudden gust sent a sudden chill up her spine.
When the wind died down, she laid her sketchbook securely in her lap, so her hands were free to flip the pages of her paleobiology book. Calamity got to the original spot of the book before the wind had another chance to blow the pages.
She set the book down and picked up her sketchbook again to continue coping the image from the textbook's pages. She pressed very lightly on the paper with the pencil to make faint, curvy lines that would symbolize soft earth. In this collection of dirt lines, she carefully drew a group of fat and thin roots. She started to gently draw a long line of small ovals that serve as the stem.
Other then Little Beeper, the art teacher, and (to a much lesser extent) Professor Wile E. Coyote, no one knew that Calamity had a remarkable talent at art.
Calamity loved to copy interesting images from books and magazines. These images could have ranged from anything to airplanes to fossils to unicorns. Last year, she even won a contest with a drawing of a pair of shoes she had copied from a clothing store's ad in the Sunday newspaper. She also enjoyed sketching things to make still-life art and she also drew things from her own imagination. She must have at least several sketchbooks that were filled with alien landscapes, monsters, and superheroes.
She had finished a small section of ovals on her paper and she leaned back to critic her work. It was going to take a long time to finish the drawing continued to make it with so many small parts, but (as far as Calamity was concerned) the small parts of the creature were what made it beautiful.
Calamity finally decided that the small connecting ovals were all wrong for this image, so she grabbed her pencil, flipped it so that the eraser was on the bottom, and started removing a large portion of the ovals.
As she dusted the eraser dust off of her book, a sudden gust of wind blew past her and made her textbook's pages flutter up and settle on a different page again.
However, this gust had not been an act of nature nor weather.
"What are you drawing?" Little Beeper asked.
He voice sounded a little annoyed, but Beeper was never really a morning person, so Calamity let it go.
"A botryocrinus," Calamity responded.
"What?" Beeper looked at the sketch confused.
Calamity quickly flipped back to her place in the book for the second time and showed him the original image in the book.
"It's a form of early Paleozoic marine life," she explained, "its body is covered with calcareous plates and these branches are like food-gathering arms."
As she said that she pointed to the numerous branches the sprouted out of the creatures head.
"Oh," Beeper said one-sidedly, "so… how long have you been awake?"
"I've been awake for a while now. Why?"
Beeper grew a little more annoyed. He wished she had woken him up and they could have talked about what had happened yesterday.
"Have you eaten breakfast, yet?" Beeper asked.
"Uh…" Calamity smiled shyly, "maybe."
Beeper let out a heavy sigh. He knew that that was her codeword for 'no.'
"Okay," he said, "Let's go and get something to eat together."
"Sounds good," Calamity replied as she collected her things.
"You would probably starve to death if it weren't for me," Beeper said with a smile.
"So I actually forget to eat once in a while and I miss a meal here and there, so what?" Calamity shoved him playfully.
"Yeah," he shoved her back, "but you should know by now that eating popcorn in the morning doesn't count as breakfast, either."
While those two fought a shoving contest, Buster had woken up to a very unpleasant scene.
"Crap," Buster snorted as he stared at his empty cabinets.
He had forgotten to go grocery shopping the past weekend and he was now left on the first day of vacation without any food.
"Crap," he sighed again.
This actually wasn't the first time this had happened. He would have starved to death long ago if Babs didn't check on his food supply occasionally and remind him to go shopping.
"No carrots," he said, "no cereal, no peanut butter…not even any popcorn for breakfast… I guess I need to go out and get breakfast."
A/N: If anyone is wondering, botryocrinus really did exist during the Paleozoic era.