This story is mine! All of the characters mentioned within are MINE! Do not use them without my permission. The story is also mine, derived from a less than enjoyable baby-sitting experience I once had. Please read and enjoy!

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A Walk in the Park

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Chiad surveyed the mess in the living room of Sharra's house, the kitchen and play rooms were in a similar state of disorder. Furniture was overturned, cupboards had been emptied, and what appeared to be every single object in the universe that could be considered a toy was on the floor somewhere in the house. Seeing as the house took up the better part of the inside of a mountain this was quite an accomplishment. She glared at Culprit #1 and Culprit #2. Culprit #1 currently looked like a normal four-year-old girl with red hair. The image of normality was shattered if a person happened to notice the slightly pointed ears, golden cat eyes, and the fangs. Culprit #2 currently looked like a three foot long red dragon.

The two children were currently engaged in an activity that seemed to consist of building a tower of furniture, climbing to the top with a variety of toy-like objects, and dropping each toy off of the top. Apparently the purpose was to test which of the toys would bounce. Most of them weren't.

How do I get myself into these situations? she wondered to herself as she gazed at the mess surrounding her.

*****

"Please, Chiad. You'll only need to look after them for a few hours. Some rather urgent business came up and I have to go deal with it."

Chiad groaned, "I have a better idea. I'll go deal with this problem you have and you can stay home enjoy some quality time with your kids."

Sharra shook her head, "Nope, sorry. This business requires a rather more delicate and diplomatic touch then you tend to use. You're just going to have to watch the kids for a few hours."

"I'm not getting out of this am I?"

"Nope, but think of it this way, after this I'll be owing you a favor." Sharra tried

unsuccessfully to hide a smile

"OK, fine then, having you owe me a favor is probably worth putting up with a bit of trouble. I do have a few questions though."

"Fire away." Sharra stopped trying to hide her smile.

"That's one of them, have they learned to breath fire yet?" Chiad looked faintly worried as she waited for a reply.

"Not yet. But." Sharra paused and seemed to be counting to herself, "they should be learning how any day now."

"Oh great." Chiad looked even more worried. "How long are you going to be gone and what exactly should I do with them?"

"There are lots of toys in the playroom, and if you want to take them outside to play there is a park and playground just down the road. Oh yeah, and the Library is locked up and they haven't learned to teleport yet so you won't have to deal with that."

"Well let's get over to your place then. The sooner you are gone, the sooner you'll get back." Chiad gave a small smile and thought to herself How bad can it be? They're just kids, no matter what species they are, they're just kids.

Three minutes later.

"AUNTIE CHIAD" Chiad turned her look of horror from the two four-year-olds glomped onto her legs to Sharra, just as Sharra took that as her cue to leave at top speed.

*****

"Get down from there right now you two." Chiad ordered the two girls sitting on top of the pile of furniture.

"Why?" Kalla (AKA Culprit #1) asked.

"We don' wanna." That came from Tarma (AKA Culprit #2).

"Because if you do come down then I will take you out for ice-cream."

"Ice-cream!"

"Yay!"

Both girls launched themselves off of the tower of furniture, precious game forgotten.

"Catch us Auntie Chiad." Came the chorus from the two toddling, now airborne children.

"Aak!" by a stroke of luck Chiad managed to catch the girls but ended up flat on her back on the floor. As she recovered from her fall she noticed the tower of furniture doing a good impression of the leaning tower of Piza, but without the stability.

"Urk." She commented as she headed for the door with a squirming girl under each arm.

She made it by a tail.

*****

Chiad looked around and sighed, "Well, at least it's a nice day."

She looked down at the two girls who were currently in the process of devouring two monstrous ice cream cones that were almost as large as the girls themselves.

"How can you eat those things? They're almost as big as you are. If I ate that much ice cream in one sitting I'd get sick."

Tarma stopped eating long enough to say, "It's simple, we're little kids, the only thing sugar does to us is increase our energy level. When we get really hyper we don't notice something as trivial as a stomachache."

Chiad's brain brought a simple equation to her attention at that point.

C6H12O6 + Little kid = WAY too much ENERGY

Her brain also pointed out that one hyper little kid was as hard to control as an out-of-control nuclear reaction. She shuddered at the thought of two such occurrences happening simultaneously.

"At least we are out in the open." she muttered to herself.

"C'mon girls let's head over to the playground, maybe we can burn off a bit of that energy before your mother gets home."

*****

Chiad scanned the playground apprehensively. The decorative fountain was too shallow to be hazardous. The playground itself looked safe, it had the usual collection of teeter-totters, slides, monkey bars, and swings. There were only a few kids there, with a parent each sitting on the bench reading a book or sitting chatting with another parent. It looked like a mixed crowd so there shouldn't be any excitement if the girls pulled any of their tricks.

"OK girls, you go play on the playground and enjoy yourselves. I'll just sit here and watch you."

The girls bounced over to the swings. Chiad looked the park benches over and headed towards one, but seemed to change her mind at the last minute and sat down on a different bench. A few minutes later another person sat down on the bench that Chiad had avoided. The bench instantly collapsed into a pile of splinters. The unfortunate and surprised parent found herself sitting on the ground rather abruptly. Chiad hastily wiped the grin off of her face and helped the other woman up.

Foreknowledge is a wonderful thing. She thought to herself.

"That was rather unfortunate", she said to the woman, "the wood must have been really rotten."

"Oh well, no harm done." The woman said brushing herself off and moving to another bench.

She tested this one very cautiously before sitting down.

Chiad headed back to her own bench. Let's see now, what should I do while I'm waiting for these guys to get tired. I didn't bring a book, so I can't read. I can't clean any of my toys because that would start an evacuation and get quite a few people mad at me. I can't work out, because people, no matter how tolerant, would probably object to a lycanthrope near their kids and the last thing I need is to be chased out of town by an angry mob.

Her train of thought was abruptly derailed as she looked up and realized that the coordination level of the children in the play area had dropped below normal even for a bunch of growing kids.

About that time, a small boy, with the look of a goody two shoes, standing at the water fountain called to his mother, "Mommy, the water tastes really funny, and it's not the right colour either."

Out of the corner of her eye Chiad noticed Kalla moseying away from the water fountain, back towards the swing set.

"How does the water taste funny, dear?" the boy's mother walked over to him and leaned over to smell the water.

"What in the world?!" the mother exclaimed, "This isn't water, it's wine! What is going on here?"

A suspicion that had been sneaking up on Chiad jumped out and smacked her on the back of the head. She waved at Tarma and Kalla and gestured for them to come over to her.

The two girls came trotting up, "Yes Auntie Chiad?" they said in unison.

Chiad leaned over so that she was face to face with them.

"Which of you changed the water in the water fountain?" she asked, staring hard at the two girls.

Kalla smiled, "It was a good game wasn't it? Too bad it didn't last longer."

Tarma poked her sister, "You only like it because you thought of it first. If I'd thought of it you wouldn't think it was so neat. It was a good idea though."

Chiad glared at the two, "Go fix it right now Kalla."

"Uncle Ryu never complains about how we play." whined Tarma.

"Well normally I wouldn't complain either but I don't know how well people around here feel about magic. I don't want to find out the hard way either. So go put it back, right now."

"Awwww." the twins started to whine in unison.

"Now! Or we go home right now."

"OK fine," Kalla said, pouting, "I still think Uncle Ryu is nicer though."

The girls walked over to the monkey bars and climbed on top of them. Kalla stared hard at the water fountain for a minute and then nodded to her sister.

"Shaitain give me strength." She pleaded.

An evil giggle that no one else seemed to notice was her only answer.

She sighed.

One of the adults in the large crowd that had formed around the fountain exclaimed, "Hey the water has gone back to normal!"

"I don't care," said another, "I'm still calling the park manager to complain."

"Too bad it stopped, it was actually a fine vintage." A third parent said.

The parent who had complained the loudest glared at the speaker and stalked away, dragging her child with her.

The crowd around the fountain started to break up and drift back to whatever they had been doing when the excitement broke out.

Chiad kept an eye on the two girls who appeared to be playing a game that seemed to involve seeing how long they could hold their breath while hanging upside down and being tickled by the other girl. Chiad relaxed a bit and started to enjoy the warm sunshine.

*****

"There's a monkey on the monkey bars!"

Chiad jerked awake from the light doze she had drifted into as she sat in the sunshine watching Tarma and Kalla play. She looked the monkey bars and saw that there was indeed a monkey playing on them. There was also only one red-headed girl.

Serves me right for drifting off like that.

The monkey waved at Chiad and turned back into Tarma.

Kalla got a rather odd look on her face. It was a look rather reminiscent of someone trying to hold back hiccups because they know that hiccuping now would be a very bad idea.

Chiad got up from the bench and headed over towards the monkey bars.

Kalla shifted into her normal form, that of a five foot long baby dragon. The monkey bars, able to support a four-year-old child with ease, but not strong enough to hold up even a small dragon, began to creak ominously.

The sounds of scared and angry people began to impinge on Chiad's ears. She looked around and realized that Kalla's transformation had been rather startling for the rest of the people in the area. People were beginning to leave the playground at top speed, children in tow, some were shouting for the police.

"Great." was all Chiad had to say. She started to move at a quicker pace.

Kalla got an apologetic look on her draconic face and stopped trying to hold in her hiccups. A four-foot long flame shot out of the end of her snout.

Kalla gave a startled yip and jumped backwards, apparently forgetting that she was (until that point) sitting on top of a set of monkey bars.

The law of gravity took over at that point and Kalla hit that ground with her tail and, subsequently, the rest of her body. This surprised her so much that she let out another yip and an accompanying burst of flame. Unfortunately her snout was facing one of the support beams for the monkey bars. The flame neatly melted the thick iron bar in half.

The monkey bars started to lean and Tarma said "Uh oh." Tarma hopped off the collapsing structure from the side closest to Chiad. Chiad scooped up Tarma and held her under one arm.

"Do you think you can hold on if I shift?" she said to Tarma, who nodded and replied, "Sure, no problem. This is fun isn't it?"

Chiad thought for a second, "Yeah actually, it is. But I think we should leave, right now."

She circled around Kalla, so as to approach her from a direction that would not emit flame. "Can you turn human again and hold onto me for the run home?" she asked.

Kalla replied by emitting one last burst of flame, which turned the rest of the monkey bars into a pool of molten metal, then she shifted back into her human form. Chiad waited for a moment to see if any more fire was forthcoming then nodded and turned into a wolf that was five feet tall at the shoulder.

She shook herself vigorously and crouched down so Tarma and Kalla could climb onto her back.

"Hold on tight you guys." She said as she took off for Sharra's house.

Just after they left the park, about fifty police cars pulled up.

*****

Sharra walked into the main room and saw Chiad in wolf form curled up on the floor. Both girls were lying next to her stomach and they were all fast asleep.

I'll just let them sleep, they look like they had such a good time especially Chiad. I ought to do this more often.

END