Did he smile his work to see?
Nov. 29th, 2015 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hiyaspaceguysUser Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
AIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Todd Tolansky, Chime
Character Name: Axel
Series: Saurs
Age: Adult; saurs don't care much about chronological age. Probably in his early twenties or so.
From When?: Immediately following the novella “Orfy.”
Inmate/Warden: Warden
Axel has seen the absolute depths of banal evil and doesn't hold it against anyone. He sees something new and delightful with every day that dawns, whatever's going on in the world. He takes any abuse heaped on him as just the way of things, whether he's being called stupid and delusional by his friends or dissected alive for the passing entertainment of a child. His capacity for forgiveness, optimism, fundamental goodness is more or less infinite. While Axel may frequently come across as childishly simple or utterly deranged or both, he believes indefatigably in everybody and everything. He's happy to share all his insights and ideas, no matter what the reception, and disbelief and scorn only make him go away for a while and then return, just as overflowing with boundless energy. This dinosaur loves you, whatever you might have done not to deserve it, believes in you, trusts you, wants to tell you about how tidal waves and pocket universes work and go to sleep with you so you won't be lonely.
Item: The click thing. Essentially a remote control for a toy car. Bright pink. Many buttons.
Abilities/Powers: Axel has the ability to go up and down stairs really quickly. He can also talk, which is pretty good for a tiny dinosaur. Axel has an unreliable sort of genius for designing things, which only rarely get built and which often come from the depths of his fevered imagination in ways no one else can explain, but the ideas are there.
Personality: Axel is a saur. He was built in a lab to be a more or less mindless toy for a rich kid. He's twenty-seven centimeters high if he stands up straight. Saurs may not work they way they're supposed to, but their world is still defined by what they are; tiny, helpless, artificial, abused, valuable. Axel deals with these frightening limitations and looming threats by retreating over and over again into the unrestrained glee that only he can generate. He is, as he was designed to be, infinitely patient and gentle, extremely social and devoted, sweet and huggy, friendly and cheerful. He is also, as he was not designed to be, wildly imaginative, stubborn and idealistic, and utterly, faithfully fearless (though this may be, as Agnes would argue, the result of being an idiot).
On the outside, Axel is childish, manic, unreliable, and deeply annoying. His occasional lapses with reality are unpredictable and hard to ignore, and he's been known to sound alarms about tidal waves, confederate cavalry, and space invasions as frequently as airing real concerns about dangerous humans. He's incapable of watching his mouth, once nearly blowing the secret of saur reproduction because he wanted to tell the space guys about this exciting new development (Axel sends meandering messages to random coordinates in space every week, of course). He's devoted to the egglings, but his way of informing them about the world involves more strings of random statements an insisting that preverbal babies are his buddies than anything that might traditionally be thought of as childcare, though he is concerned for their safety as well as their understanding of pocket dimensions. In short, he's a hard saur to know.
But also a rewarding one. Axel is utterly devoted to all his friends, and while they don't always quite understand his gestures or what he finds important, no one could doubt his good intentions. If you could quite call them intentions. Axel is actually quite thoughtful—indeed, he generally can't stop thinking long enough to do things like sleep, or sort out exactly what his plans are. When he designed Rotomotoman, the robot who ended up saving the saurs' eggs from detection by overly interested humans, he never thought to mention to anyone that he'd made their new friend with a concealed incubator. Instead he wrote a Rotomotoman song and insisted he would defend them from bad guys, and another saur had to deduce this utility working backwards from his plans. The first time he contacted the space guys, his original plan was to ask them if they could bring his lost friends back to life, but in the process of crafting the message he entirely forgot until later. It's no wonder not many people take Axel seriously. There's a lot going on up there, but only so much of it gets out, and that in an often unintelligible form. He'll sometimes wander off into his own imagination mid-conversation and need to be brought back.
Axel, like most saurs, has a sad, ugly history, and a lot of his weird energy and disconnect from the tyranny of reality flows from that, not that he's aware of it. His memories of abuse and fear are semi-repressed, his brain sometimes skipping across names and images, though they always circle back to him again. He deals with death by imagining a future filled with time machines (time ships, specifically) or resurrection through the power of space guy intervention. Memories of pain are subsumed by staring at the sky (or the screensaver, if it's daytime) until the universe fills him back up and makes him feel big again. Even mistreatment in the present doesn't rattle him much; Agnes can hit him with her tail a half dozen times and he won't really hold it against her, and he barely notices insults. He's not even touchy about humans in general or what he is, like a lot of saurs are, unperturbed by memories of being treated like a toy, happy to sing the good old dinosaur song (“yar-woo, yar-woo, the dinosaurs love yoooouuu!”), unruffled by questions about the nature of his own existence.
And Axel loves you most of all. He's a cuddler, content to be carried around, ride shoulders, sleep in the general pile or Hetman's bed (Hetman being the most disabled of the saurs in Axel's home, limbless and eyeless from mistreatment). He's happy there. He's always happy. He smiles even when he's terrified and bounces while he despairs. And if to stay happy he has to imagine space invasions, believe absolutely everything he's told (filtered through the Axelbrain), and contact space in lieu of keeping a diary, he can probably be forgiven. He just wants to help. And to go to space. He wants that, too.
Barge Reactions: Axel has always believed that the space guys were out there listening, just waiting for the right moment to be of use to him and his friends. He has some powerful preconceived notions that it'll take a while to get past, but he has some familiarity with alternate universes (Tibor and Geraldine keep some of those in cardboard boxes back home) and his own imagination to draw from when it comes to space, so he'll generally accept every strange thing as it comes. He'll have more trouble adjusting to mundane problems like being the only saur than the existential crises of multiple realities and crazy space travel. Breaches and floods will perturb him on a purely individual basis, since his relationship with reality is tenuous at best. His distress will be based on content, not implications. With ports, he'll generally just be pleased to explore. (Someone should perhaps stop the tiny dinosaur from exploring everywhere. He's very breakable.)
Deal: Axel used to have a buddy. Lancelot. Another theropod. They were gonna be friends forever. Lancelot died when the human who owned them was dared to take apart his saurs and see what was on the inside, squishy things or mechanical parts. Axel always thought if anyone could fix it so Lancelot could be alive again, it'd be space guys. Apparently, he was right. After that, Diogenes died. And, well, there's a long list. There were millions of saurs, once, and now there are only hundreds. How many bad guys is he allowed to fix?
History: Decades ago, in an age of scientific wonders, a biotech firm decided it'd be both profitable and good politics to bring out a toy line. Making genetic engineering seem family friendly and cuddly was the main goal, aside from making a lot of money. They resolved on calling their creations bio-toys, a name carefully focus-grouped to imply fun and friendliness but not imply any connection to real animals or anything else that might expose the toy line to regulation, ethics, or general scrutiny. Millions were sold, designed to last a few years and then quietly cease functioning, programmed with a few simple behaviors and words but ultimately intended to be nothing more than a bioengineered doll, disposable as any other toy. They just ran on food pellets instead of batteries. Dinosaur designs were chosen because, well, kids love dinosaurs. Silly colors, haphazard, cartoony body plans, and varying sizes and functions were all available, expensive, shiny status symbols for all who could afford them.
The saurs didn't cooperate. First, they didn't die on schedule, the beginning of a hint that something hadn't gone quite right. Second, while they learned children's names and sang the wretched dinosaur song and were biddable and gentle on cue, they didn't quite seem to be pliant little bio-computers. It slowly emerged that saurs were more or less fully intelligent, though their intelligence took a different form than that of humans, and many of the smallest ones didn't have the ability to speak. They even, much later, turned out to be able to reproduce, which was absolutely not in the plan.
But the truth came out much too slowly for most saurs to benefit. Most died from neglect or abuse, were set “free,” were taken to pieces by cruel or curious children who'd been assured they were only toys, were run over, eaten by predators, lost, allowed to starve... The Atherton Foundation arose to protect what was left of the intelligent species accidentally created by human inattention and avarice. They didn't save many, and most saurs can't bear to look at the files from their initial recovery. Horrible injuries and emotional damage were devastatingly common.
Axel's chipper demeanor doesn't quite conceal that he was not one of the lucky saurs who escaped unscathed. He was one of two theropods who belonged to a small boy who got bored with them and was dared by friends to take his bio-toys apart and see what was on the inside. Axel, very bad at being angry and designed to be unable to accomplish aggression if he wanted to, could only plead and cry while he watched his buddy Lancelot be pulled apart on the floor. He was next, but before he'd been sliced into much, the game was interrupted by parents. This betrayal finally triggered the deeply loyal little saur to run away, expecting to die from his injuries. He found a hole in a construction site to curl up in and watch the stars while he died.
Before that happened he was found and brought to the Atherton people, who placed him in one of the saur houses with about a hundred others. They had one full-time human caretaker, weekly visits from a doctor, and regular check-ins with the foundation. The houses were meant to be safe, comfortable, rejuvenating, a place the saurs could be themselves. They were also designed as protection from a powerful business interest that wanted their investment back in the form of whatever made the saurs seemingly immortal or drove their oddly powerful little brains; offers of bribes came in regularly to their human.
Axel's new home was a paradise. There were so many saurs there, hamster-sized little ones who couldn't speak but whose brilliant eyes said so much, meter-tall tyrannosaurs who ran the library and kept the peace, crabby Agnes the stegosaurus, mad (or possibly all-powerful) Tibor and Geraldine, gentle apatosaurs, scads of friends who would last forever. The house was designed entirely for saur comfort and to provide care for those that needed it, fitted with a lift to take those with difficulty walking up and down the stairs, tiny skates to let little ones cross vast distances from kitchen to living room, little plastic stairs that rolled freely to let saurs hop up on furniture or reach books and technology. The Reggiesystem computer, brilliant and cobbled together, featuring a perennially patient and helpful AI whose avatar was a colorful baby sea monster. Saur paradise.
Day to say, Saur life isn't very exciting. Sometimes people come visit, old “owners” or interested scientists (bad guys, as Axel would call them, fortunately frightened off by Geraldine's mad science). The saurs play games, learn lessons from Reggie, maintain a little museum of bits of their old lives. Some are fairly wealthy, left resources by the humans who once took them in, and a few earn their own money as authors, quiz show contestants, anything that can be done in safe, distant anonymity. Saur fertility is a secret carefully guarded from those with scientific interest in the saurs, but they're beginning to get the hang of hatching and parenting. Rotomotoman, Axel's beloved robot, provides incubation for the eggs, and egglings are beloved by all. (Everyone but Agnes is pretty fond of Rotomotoman, really, but only Axel feels the need to say it all the time.) Sometimes something good happens, like when TV frog visited from space, but only Axel saw him. Sometimes something strange happens, like when Tibor and Geraldine get in fights about who owns the universe and strange lights come from their respective cardboard box homes. Sometimes something sad happens, like the death of quiet, clever Diogenes, their tyrannosaur librarian. Most of the time, nothing happens at all, and Axel bolts through the house all day in quest of cool ideas and sleeps in a pile of friends, safe at last.
Sample Journal Entry: Tiny dinosaur on deck!
Sample RP: The barge presents Axel a few challenges. He's grown used to the home for saurs over the years, used to a place designed to accommodate tiny, often structurally unstable inhabitants. There's a wheelie staircase and a skate in his cabin, but he's not sure he should take those out. The staircase gets tiring to push after a while, and no one here knows to look out for a very small dinosaur traveling by tiny, battery-powered cart. He might run over toes, and he'll definitely crash. He's not generally allowed to use the skates at home. Driving safely is not one of Axel's skills.
Normally he'd have several plans, many including cyborg limbs and rocket packs, but he doesn't have Reggie to help him with creating images and sorting through his barely-scrutable thoughts. Without the faithful, indefatigably patient AI, he has to improvise. He has chosen to meet the challenge of a world meant for beings more than a foot tall, therefore, with a throw pillow. It's light enough that he doesn't get too tired dragging it along beside him, the few inches it adds when stood upon multiply his options a lot, and if he ends up getting stuck and has to jump down, it's a nice landing. Actually, that's true even if he doesn't get stuck. Axel gets distracted several times as he explores setting his little cushion in place and repeatedly falling off things on top of it. This is one of the most fun games there is and often accompanied by drawn out, thready screams of tiny saurian delight.
But eventually he gets back on track. A puffy pillow is enough to get him off the ground, and usually onto slightly higher points, from whence the fluffy pillow can again lend its assistance. It comes so naturally he might have devised this method sometime long ago, before he came to live in the saur house, back when he had Lancelot but no plastic wheelie staircases. It's hard for Axel to make sense of anything but the most recent past. The fading, heady blur of his life in the great before is hard to separate out into clearly delineated facts. Space and time and time and space—the univers is one big place! Yar-woo!
Special Notes: The Saurs novellas are strange edging on surreal, and sometimes the precise reality of individual details is questionable. I've chosen to take everything Axel experiences at face value, which makes the world more fun, but means that sometimes frog aliens watch your TV at night and interdimensional beings sometimes live in cardboard boxes in the guise of small dinosaurs. It can be a hell of a ride.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitAIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Todd Tolansky, Chime
Character Name: Axel
Series: Saurs
Age: Adult; saurs don't care much about chronological age. Probably in his early twenties or so.
From When?: Immediately following the novella “Orfy.”
Inmate/Warden: Warden
Axel has seen the absolute depths of banal evil and doesn't hold it against anyone. He sees something new and delightful with every day that dawns, whatever's going on in the world. He takes any abuse heaped on him as just the way of things, whether he's being called stupid and delusional by his friends or dissected alive for the passing entertainment of a child. His capacity for forgiveness, optimism, fundamental goodness is more or less infinite. While Axel may frequently come across as childishly simple or utterly deranged or both, he believes indefatigably in everybody and everything. He's happy to share all his insights and ideas, no matter what the reception, and disbelief and scorn only make him go away for a while and then return, just as overflowing with boundless energy. This dinosaur loves you, whatever you might have done not to deserve it, believes in you, trusts you, wants to tell you about how tidal waves and pocket universes work and go to sleep with you so you won't be lonely.
Item: The click thing. Essentially a remote control for a toy car. Bright pink. Many buttons.
Abilities/Powers: Axel has the ability to go up and down stairs really quickly. He can also talk, which is pretty good for a tiny dinosaur. Axel has an unreliable sort of genius for designing things, which only rarely get built and which often come from the depths of his fevered imagination in ways no one else can explain, but the ideas are there.
Personality: Axel is a saur. He was built in a lab to be a more or less mindless toy for a rich kid. He's twenty-seven centimeters high if he stands up straight. Saurs may not work they way they're supposed to, but their world is still defined by what they are; tiny, helpless, artificial, abused, valuable. Axel deals with these frightening limitations and looming threats by retreating over and over again into the unrestrained glee that only he can generate. He is, as he was designed to be, infinitely patient and gentle, extremely social and devoted, sweet and huggy, friendly and cheerful. He is also, as he was not designed to be, wildly imaginative, stubborn and idealistic, and utterly, faithfully fearless (though this may be, as Agnes would argue, the result of being an idiot).
On the outside, Axel is childish, manic, unreliable, and deeply annoying. His occasional lapses with reality are unpredictable and hard to ignore, and he's been known to sound alarms about tidal waves, confederate cavalry, and space invasions as frequently as airing real concerns about dangerous humans. He's incapable of watching his mouth, once nearly blowing the secret of saur reproduction because he wanted to tell the space guys about this exciting new development (Axel sends meandering messages to random coordinates in space every week, of course). He's devoted to the egglings, but his way of informing them about the world involves more strings of random statements an insisting that preverbal babies are his buddies than anything that might traditionally be thought of as childcare, though he is concerned for their safety as well as their understanding of pocket dimensions. In short, he's a hard saur to know.
But also a rewarding one. Axel is utterly devoted to all his friends, and while they don't always quite understand his gestures or what he finds important, no one could doubt his good intentions. If you could quite call them intentions. Axel is actually quite thoughtful—indeed, he generally can't stop thinking long enough to do things like sleep, or sort out exactly what his plans are. When he designed Rotomotoman, the robot who ended up saving the saurs' eggs from detection by overly interested humans, he never thought to mention to anyone that he'd made their new friend with a concealed incubator. Instead he wrote a Rotomotoman song and insisted he would defend them from bad guys, and another saur had to deduce this utility working backwards from his plans. The first time he contacted the space guys, his original plan was to ask them if they could bring his lost friends back to life, but in the process of crafting the message he entirely forgot until later. It's no wonder not many people take Axel seriously. There's a lot going on up there, but only so much of it gets out, and that in an often unintelligible form. He'll sometimes wander off into his own imagination mid-conversation and need to be brought back.
Axel, like most saurs, has a sad, ugly history, and a lot of his weird energy and disconnect from the tyranny of reality flows from that, not that he's aware of it. His memories of abuse and fear are semi-repressed, his brain sometimes skipping across names and images, though they always circle back to him again. He deals with death by imagining a future filled with time machines (time ships, specifically) or resurrection through the power of space guy intervention. Memories of pain are subsumed by staring at the sky (or the screensaver, if it's daytime) until the universe fills him back up and makes him feel big again. Even mistreatment in the present doesn't rattle him much; Agnes can hit him with her tail a half dozen times and he won't really hold it against her, and he barely notices insults. He's not even touchy about humans in general or what he is, like a lot of saurs are, unperturbed by memories of being treated like a toy, happy to sing the good old dinosaur song (“yar-woo, yar-woo, the dinosaurs love yoooouuu!”), unruffled by questions about the nature of his own existence.
And Axel loves you most of all. He's a cuddler, content to be carried around, ride shoulders, sleep in the general pile or Hetman's bed (Hetman being the most disabled of the saurs in Axel's home, limbless and eyeless from mistreatment). He's happy there. He's always happy. He smiles even when he's terrified and bounces while he despairs. And if to stay happy he has to imagine space invasions, believe absolutely everything he's told (filtered through the Axelbrain), and contact space in lieu of keeping a diary, he can probably be forgiven. He just wants to help. And to go to space. He wants that, too.
Barge Reactions: Axel has always believed that the space guys were out there listening, just waiting for the right moment to be of use to him and his friends. He has some powerful preconceived notions that it'll take a while to get past, but he has some familiarity with alternate universes (Tibor and Geraldine keep some of those in cardboard boxes back home) and his own imagination to draw from when it comes to space, so he'll generally accept every strange thing as it comes. He'll have more trouble adjusting to mundane problems like being the only saur than the existential crises of multiple realities and crazy space travel. Breaches and floods will perturb him on a purely individual basis, since his relationship with reality is tenuous at best. His distress will be based on content, not implications. With ports, he'll generally just be pleased to explore. (Someone should perhaps stop the tiny dinosaur from exploring everywhere. He's very breakable.)
Deal: Axel used to have a buddy. Lancelot. Another theropod. They were gonna be friends forever. Lancelot died when the human who owned them was dared to take apart his saurs and see what was on the inside, squishy things or mechanical parts. Axel always thought if anyone could fix it so Lancelot could be alive again, it'd be space guys. Apparently, he was right. After that, Diogenes died. And, well, there's a long list. There were millions of saurs, once, and now there are only hundreds. How many bad guys is he allowed to fix?
History: Decades ago, in an age of scientific wonders, a biotech firm decided it'd be both profitable and good politics to bring out a toy line. Making genetic engineering seem family friendly and cuddly was the main goal, aside from making a lot of money. They resolved on calling their creations bio-toys, a name carefully focus-grouped to imply fun and friendliness but not imply any connection to real animals or anything else that might expose the toy line to regulation, ethics, or general scrutiny. Millions were sold, designed to last a few years and then quietly cease functioning, programmed with a few simple behaviors and words but ultimately intended to be nothing more than a bioengineered doll, disposable as any other toy. They just ran on food pellets instead of batteries. Dinosaur designs were chosen because, well, kids love dinosaurs. Silly colors, haphazard, cartoony body plans, and varying sizes and functions were all available, expensive, shiny status symbols for all who could afford them.
The saurs didn't cooperate. First, they didn't die on schedule, the beginning of a hint that something hadn't gone quite right. Second, while they learned children's names and sang the wretched dinosaur song and were biddable and gentle on cue, they didn't quite seem to be pliant little bio-computers. It slowly emerged that saurs were more or less fully intelligent, though their intelligence took a different form than that of humans, and many of the smallest ones didn't have the ability to speak. They even, much later, turned out to be able to reproduce, which was absolutely not in the plan.
But the truth came out much too slowly for most saurs to benefit. Most died from neglect or abuse, were set “free,” were taken to pieces by cruel or curious children who'd been assured they were only toys, were run over, eaten by predators, lost, allowed to starve... The Atherton Foundation arose to protect what was left of the intelligent species accidentally created by human inattention and avarice. They didn't save many, and most saurs can't bear to look at the files from their initial recovery. Horrible injuries and emotional damage were devastatingly common.
Axel's chipper demeanor doesn't quite conceal that he was not one of the lucky saurs who escaped unscathed. He was one of two theropods who belonged to a small boy who got bored with them and was dared by friends to take his bio-toys apart and see what was on the inside. Axel, very bad at being angry and designed to be unable to accomplish aggression if he wanted to, could only plead and cry while he watched his buddy Lancelot be pulled apart on the floor. He was next, but before he'd been sliced into much, the game was interrupted by parents. This betrayal finally triggered the deeply loyal little saur to run away, expecting to die from his injuries. He found a hole in a construction site to curl up in and watch the stars while he died.
Before that happened he was found and brought to the Atherton people, who placed him in one of the saur houses with about a hundred others. They had one full-time human caretaker, weekly visits from a doctor, and regular check-ins with the foundation. The houses were meant to be safe, comfortable, rejuvenating, a place the saurs could be themselves. They were also designed as protection from a powerful business interest that wanted their investment back in the form of whatever made the saurs seemingly immortal or drove their oddly powerful little brains; offers of bribes came in regularly to their human.
Axel's new home was a paradise. There were so many saurs there, hamster-sized little ones who couldn't speak but whose brilliant eyes said so much, meter-tall tyrannosaurs who ran the library and kept the peace, crabby Agnes the stegosaurus, mad (or possibly all-powerful) Tibor and Geraldine, gentle apatosaurs, scads of friends who would last forever. The house was designed entirely for saur comfort and to provide care for those that needed it, fitted with a lift to take those with difficulty walking up and down the stairs, tiny skates to let little ones cross vast distances from kitchen to living room, little plastic stairs that rolled freely to let saurs hop up on furniture or reach books and technology. The Reggiesystem computer, brilliant and cobbled together, featuring a perennially patient and helpful AI whose avatar was a colorful baby sea monster. Saur paradise.
Day to say, Saur life isn't very exciting. Sometimes people come visit, old “owners” or interested scientists (bad guys, as Axel would call them, fortunately frightened off by Geraldine's mad science). The saurs play games, learn lessons from Reggie, maintain a little museum of bits of their old lives. Some are fairly wealthy, left resources by the humans who once took them in, and a few earn their own money as authors, quiz show contestants, anything that can be done in safe, distant anonymity. Saur fertility is a secret carefully guarded from those with scientific interest in the saurs, but they're beginning to get the hang of hatching and parenting. Rotomotoman, Axel's beloved robot, provides incubation for the eggs, and egglings are beloved by all. (Everyone but Agnes is pretty fond of Rotomotoman, really, but only Axel feels the need to say it all the time.) Sometimes something good happens, like when TV frog visited from space, but only Axel saw him. Sometimes something strange happens, like when Tibor and Geraldine get in fights about who owns the universe and strange lights come from their respective cardboard box homes. Sometimes something sad happens, like the death of quiet, clever Diogenes, their tyrannosaur librarian. Most of the time, nothing happens at all, and Axel bolts through the house all day in quest of cool ideas and sleeps in a pile of friends, safe at last.
Sample Journal Entry: Tiny dinosaur on deck!
Sample RP: The barge presents Axel a few challenges. He's grown used to the home for saurs over the years, used to a place designed to accommodate tiny, often structurally unstable inhabitants. There's a wheelie staircase and a skate in his cabin, but he's not sure he should take those out. The staircase gets tiring to push after a while, and no one here knows to look out for a very small dinosaur traveling by tiny, battery-powered cart. He might run over toes, and he'll definitely crash. He's not generally allowed to use the skates at home. Driving safely is not one of Axel's skills.
Normally he'd have several plans, many including cyborg limbs and rocket packs, but he doesn't have Reggie to help him with creating images and sorting through his barely-scrutable thoughts. Without the faithful, indefatigably patient AI, he has to improvise. He has chosen to meet the challenge of a world meant for beings more than a foot tall, therefore, with a throw pillow. It's light enough that he doesn't get too tired dragging it along beside him, the few inches it adds when stood upon multiply his options a lot, and if he ends up getting stuck and has to jump down, it's a nice landing. Actually, that's true even if he doesn't get stuck. Axel gets distracted several times as he explores setting his little cushion in place and repeatedly falling off things on top of it. This is one of the most fun games there is and often accompanied by drawn out, thready screams of tiny saurian delight.
But eventually he gets back on track. A puffy pillow is enough to get him off the ground, and usually onto slightly higher points, from whence the fluffy pillow can again lend its assistance. It comes so naturally he might have devised this method sometime long ago, before he came to live in the saur house, back when he had Lancelot but no plastic wheelie staircases. It's hard for Axel to make sense of anything but the most recent past. The fading, heady blur of his life in the great before is hard to separate out into clearly delineated facts. Space and time and time and space—the univers is one big place! Yar-woo!
Special Notes: The Saurs novellas are strange edging on surreal, and sometimes the precise reality of individual details is questionable. I've chosen to take everything Axel experiences at face value, which makes the world more fun, but means that sometimes frog aliens watch your TV at night and interdimensional beings sometimes live in cardboard boxes in the guise of small dinosaurs. It can be a hell of a ride.
