beer_good_foamy | OK, I know everyone's sick of the flightless little bastards, but just one more

Warning: Fowl Language.

"K-kaaaaar..." Buffy moaned as she plodded across the endless plain. The sun was impossibly hot, but even worse was that the snow here was all wrong; not only was it warm enough to burn her poor webbed toes, but it was brown, with strange green ice crystals much bigger than any she'd ever seen sticking out of it. And no water anywhere.

Her penguin brain could hardly understand how she'd gotten here. One minute she'd been home in Antarctica, happily freezing her rump off, when she'd come across a large box with fresh herring inside. As soon as she went inside the door had slammed shut, everything shook for a long time, and when it opened again she found herself in a cruel mockery of the true Antarctica; there was ice and snow, but it was tiny, ending in an upright and oddly transparent sheet of ice behind which weird pinkish creatures waved at her. There were other penguins here too; they said they were born here in the San Diego Zoo, and that she was the chosen one, brought here by the powers that be to add new genetic material to the flock and lay many eggs. (Well, what they actually said was "Kaaark", but the penguin language is all about inflection.)

Buffy wasn't having any of that. So the next time one of the odd creatures came inside with a bucket of sole (how lame was that?), she'd charged him, making him slip and fall into the water. She'd called out to the others that the door to freedom was open – "Kaaaaaarrk!" - but they had refused to follow her. Alone, she had run out into the sunlight.

Instinctively, she started waddling south, hoping to reach Antarctica soon. But it seemed further than she'd thought, and it was so incredibly hot it felt as if she was being boiled alive like a... like a... well, penguins don't really have any good metaphors for heat-related things. With a final "Kaaaaa..." she stumbled, fell face-first into the South California sand, and lay still.

She didn't know how long she'd been lying there when she felt something nudging her. With a superpenguinal effort, she looked up... and looked right into the face of a huge, greyish animal with strange, sun-bleached not-quite-feathers on its head. It looked sort of like a seal, only... kinder, somehow, the slight hint of rebelliousness notwithstanding. "Kaaaaar...?" she flustered.

The donkey regarded the strange fowl, so far away from home. He looked into her tiny black eyes and felt... not pity, but respect and compassion: this was a bird with a mission, who had come a long way and would have to go a lot further before she was done. Which sounded like a lot more fun than carrying sacks. "HEEEEEE-HAW, HEEEEE-HAW, HEEEEE-HAWWWW," he asked tenderly; Is there something I can do?

Buffy's beak opened in a tired smile and she pointed with her flipper: "Kaaaaark." South.

And so carefully, he took her tiny body between his teeth, lifted her onto his back and started trotting for the Tijuana border crossing. For he was Spike, the ass who sometimes did good things.