So my family keeps a couple of tortoises in the house, and recently we've switched to moving them out of the house, because i) the two of them can hardly be in the plastic aquarium without being in some way stacked, and ii) their water stinks to high heaven no matter how many times you change it.
So when we are in the house, we usually put them out on our doorstep so they can walk about and exercise, and when we go out we put them back into their tank. (Don't start about tortoises being aquatic animals, mine are actually hydrophobic, i swear, they violently swat their heads and wrench about in a hideous tortured way when water droplets falls on them.)
The other day I thought I should participate in this family responsibility and so while everybody was out I decided to walk my tortoises. Obviously the anti-tortoise-escape plank barrier had to be missing, and me being who my mum created me to be did not notice.
5 hours later my mum returned and the family tortoises were, obviously, missing. We combed the entire building (that's 12 floors of your old trusty pee-in-every-stairwell HDB flat) and found only the smaller tortoise on the 8th level, one level down. (Now, friends who haven't seen tortoises navigate stairs must try at least once.) The other one was sadly gone, and my family for some hours entertained notions of spawns of devil like yours truly's brother flushing our bigger tortoise down the toilet, to liberate aquatic creatures into the ocean.
So as the resourceful future investment banker in my family, me, decided to draw up a lost and found poster to put at the central lifts:
So i went out and had dinner and a monster cookie with Daryl, during which we were naturally gossiping about Kasster and Lydia, since I had just found out, and during which they were obliging enough to appear. I was rather embarrassed, the hand in cookie jar thing.
Then went back and tortoise has come back home! :D Poster worked: neighbour sort of pointed out that it wasn't actually lost, it was behind our flower pots.
From now on, prison break not possible, since wooden anti-escape barrier has been replaced with mini brick wall. They rest in a little corner:
