The sun shone brightly over the lone grasslands of Eastern Africa, not a shape could be seen except that of an odd (and most likely) dead tree and also of an elephant. Not just any elephant; this one was on a mission, and not just any mission; this one was of grave importance, you see this elephant had lost his balloon. You may not consider this type of mission to be of much importance but this elephant did and he had spent the last several years of his life searching for his balloon. Despite being told many times (by a rhino, a fly, and a very annoying eagle) that the odds of him finding his balloon were a very large number indeed (one which was so astronomically large he decided to not even try and remember it because it simply took too much effort) to 1 and that even if he somehow managed to overcome these odds and find his balloon, it would no longer be the balloon he remembered.

And what did he remember the balloon as you may ask, well to explain this we will have to go back in time to his childhood. At the tender age of four the elephant (or Phil as his parents decided to call him, perhaps because they were fans of Phil Collins or perhaps because they simply randomly picked it out of one of those baby-name books, whatever the reason they had for choosing it that was his name) was asked what he would want as a birthday present, to which he simply replied ‘Whatever’. His parents however were not up to date on the latest slang and assumed that he in fact wanted something called a “Whatever”, so on the next day they went to the store and asked the store-clerk for one, the clerk who himself was a bit of a jerk decided to take advantage of them and sell them a balloon at a largely inflated price, which the parents happily bought assuming it would make their son ecstatic. The next day Phil was given the balloon for his birthday and this as you can imagine made him quite annoyed as he assumed that a balloon was only worth...well next to nothing (and not the largely inflated price that his in fact parents paid). But over the next year things slowly changed, as Phil went through a bit of depression and had trouble making friends at school; in fact the only friend he had during that year was his balloon and since then him and his balloon had been inseparable, well that was at least until several years ago.

As Phil gazed across the horizon he realised that his balloon was in fact not here, he realised this after he noticed that there was in fact nothing on the horizon except that odd (most likely dead) tree which we mentioned earlier. Bored with his search (as you can imagine one would be after several years) he decided to shake things up a bit and walk up to the tree and back for a good old laugh. As he approached the tree he heard a sound, this shocked him at first as one does not expect to hear a sound when one is alone. This caused him to consider several things, the first being that some form of higher power was speaking to him however he quickly dismissed this mainly on the grounds that he thought the existence of a higher power was just nonsense. The second was that he was going insane, however again he dismissed this under the grounds that there was no way that he was insane, and even if he was insane, he found the thought to be quite depressing so he decided he would rather just not even think about it at all. The third possibility he considered was that he was in fact not alone, this thought scared him more than any of the others because he soon realised that not being alone meant that he could be with many things, and many of these many things might want to hurt him or be mean to him or to pull his tail because they thought it might be funny, and as you may or may not know having one’s tail pulled is not a pleasant experience.

As we have previously mentioned Phil was not a happy child, and did not have many friends. What we did not say was that he was picked on a lot by the other kids (especially that mean hippo and the mean seal), one of the things the mean hippo done was pull his tail, and as I have previously mentioned this was not a nice experience, in fact it was something that felt similar to...actually I do not know, seeing as I am not an elephant and I have no idea what this feeling is like but from what I have heard it is quite bad. Well, what made this experience worse was that the mean seal, kept telling him loudly (so loudly in fact that you might assume she was not telling him but in fact telling everyone in the general area) how he was just a big baby for getting so upset about it.

Despite being scared of what the sound could be he decided that he should still continue towards the tree mainly because he could see nowhere else where he might be able to hide, and despite his mind considering the thought that it was possibly that this sound might be coming from the tree, there was also a chance that what was making the sound was invisible so he decided he might as well just go to the tree. However before he could move again he heard another sound, in fact it was not just a random sound it sounded more like a voice, a small voice (well small compared to him, as a matter of fact he actually made most things seem small, so calling something small relative to an elephant is actually quite a stupid thing to do). He listened inattentively to try and make out what the voice was saying, at first he wasn’t quite sure what it was saying but luckily the voice repeated itself after several seconds and this is what it said ‘Eh hello, listen I know it might be hard but could ya try and like not step on me? Please, I’d really appreciate it’. At first Phil was quite confused by this, doubly so when he looked down at his feet and saw nothing, then again his eye-sight wasn’t too great but the fact that he could not even see a blur convinced him that there was nothing there. However the fact that he again heard the voice seemed to prove that he was wrong or that he was insane (but he still found this thought to be depressing so decided to settle for him just being wrong about nothing being there). This time the voice said ‘Will ya stop starin’ at me with those creepy huge eyes...it’s like unnervin’’

As one grows up one learns that things are not always as they seem, in fact one learns that most of the time, things are the complete opposite of what they seem. One common example of this is how humans see animals. Humans see themselves as being smarter than animals and one of the main reasons they give for this is that animals can’t talk, however as you can see in this story animals are well capable of talking. So why do humans never see them do this, well the reason is simple, they are shy. And humans well...animals just happen to find them a little unnerving, I mean why wouldn’t you find someone from a species who seemed to rather enjoy killing your species anything but unnerving? There was however one quite famous human, who claimed he could talk to animals and that they talked to him, this made him a lot of money as people assumed he was special and talented which he was not, in fact here is what really happened. One day, this so called doctor (who in fact was not much of a doctor because he would always do very little and never cure anyone) happened to walk into a room on two rats who were talking. On discovering that rats could talk the doctor threatened that if they didn’t go along with his plan he would reveal their secret to the world. The rats of course knew that if he did reveal their secret to the world no one would believe him, in fact the humans would most likely assume he was insane and put him in an institution. So because they were nice guys and felt bad for the poor doctor they decided to go along with his crazy plans.