Light's Fright (formerly Lightwielder in China)

The Zoo At Last (Chapter 17)

Chapter: The Zoo At Last

Lixue and I took the zoo by storm. We bought three baby turtles for the both of us, naming them Spade, Zuzu, and Fuzzybutt. A ten gallon aquarium goes with that, and poor Li Jie has to carry all this.

We ride the bumper cars SIX TIMES IN A ROW, driving the rest of the people lined up there, mostly teenagers my age, wild with envy. Jealous Chinese guys my age are pretty cute though. Cute enough to hammer against the walls a time or two!

A sky car takes us through the air, where we can see the atrium in the distance, our sky car crossed over the boating lake full of koi and lotus flowers, all around the borderline of trees that mark the zoo boundaries are skyscrapers with construction cranes on every four-out-of-five, and below us are the big cat cages. I watch white tigers pace about, exotic bears (though none are pandas...yet) having a pool party during this hot Zhengzhou summer weather, and the male of a pride of African lions looks lazily up at me, him seeing yet another visitor quaking in amazement at him (like I said, not through my eyes).

We touch down and see the famed pandas. Most of the giant pandas, the da xiong mao, are hiding away from the crowd, but one sits up a tree, sleeping with a bamboo stick in its mouth. Lixue glues her eyes to him. The red pandas climb close to me, also holding bamboo sticks in their mouths. One drops theirs at my feet, so I bend down and give it back to them.

The panda exhibit is done with, which makes Lixue a little sad, but we go off towards the rides! This isn't a regular zoo's kiddie carousal ride, this is an amusement park inside the zoo, worthy of being copied by a corrupt American retailer. Poor Maylin, her pink hat FLIES off of one and a hot college-age guy had to go and fetch it for her after the ride stopped...and the hat had been run over by said ride. Maylin accepted the now-grimy hat graciously, placing it on its place of honor, and Li Jie tried not to show his jealousy, but I easily saw through the Swiss cheese holes there.

Along with Spade, Zuzu, and Fuzzybutt, we added goldfish, though not as food, FRIENDS. Stop nipping at that fantail, Zuzu! Anyway, Lixue and I got our goldfish not by buying them, as we did the turtles, but by fishing for them.

We each got a fishing pole with a hook and giant lumps of man to (rice bread) to break into smaller pieces to use as bait. Once the hook was plopped into the clear water, a swarm of easily 20 goldfish would attack it, and it was luck which one you hooked. Lixue and I caught 57 goldfish together, which with the turtles was going to obviously need a larger tank, and made Li Jie take them all with us. Jie was going to have Qiang's muscles by the time Lixue and I finished with our trip to the zoo.

Qiang was being quiet and kept an eye on Lixue and me, making sure we weren't getting into too much trouble when Maylin and Jie had their backs turned to us. Ar Jo and Ar Jo's friend were our happy tour guides, Maylin and Jie of course translated everything for me, and Lixue and I were having a great time!

Ar Jo's friend took us into the monkey pit, a large area in the middle of the zoo, at around noon. We crossed a bridge that sprang up for us across the water creek, the creek a barrier to keep the monkeys from escaping, and the bridge disappeared below the waves behind us when we were finished crossing. The pit was about 14 feet deep and the crowd looked curiously down at us, pointing every now and then. There was a steady buzz of chatter.

"It's feeding time for the monkeys." said Jie.

I froze. "Wait, THEY'RE FEEDING US TO THEM?!?!?!"

"No. We're feeding them." Maylin tried to explain.

My eyes stayed wide. "OUR BODIES ARE GOING TO BE THESE MONKEYS' MEALS?!?!?!"

"Savanna! We're giving them cucumbers and carrots to eat. We are not the actual meal." explained Qiang impatiently.

I blushed. "Oh. My bad."

Today wasn't my day of hearing correctly, I guess.

The zoo guy in charge of these monkeys handed me a slice of cucumber. The monkeys jumped off their exercise equipment and moved down their massive rock hideout centerpiece to get closer to mysterious me, giver of potentially delicious food. I tempted a monkey to sit on my thigh before I gave the treat to them, and they promptly scurried away after receiving it, not wanting to share.

I fed more and more of the monkeys. One I got to stand on his hind legs as high as possible. Another stretched to place their hand on my shoulder and then grab the carrot from there. I offered a cucumber to a mother monkey holding her baby, who snatched it away with suspicion, checked it over, and offered a bite to her small infant.

I stopped abruptly as the sun was suddenly eclipsed by a large shape in the sky. An endangered raincloud? No. It was dragons flying overhead, a large group. One I noticed immediately as my enemy.

"Xiao Cao Zhu!" I growled.

The youngest-looking dragon circled back and spat at me, "Savanna Stephenson!"

It was definitely them. They were still in Zhengzhou.