hear, tortoise.

Sully once told his favorite tortoise to shut up.

The tortoise kept quiet and crawled on, poise being one of her strong points. Besides, poor Mrellis hadn't really said much at all.

The one sign, quite likely reflexive if so, of any displeasure was an imperceptible hiccup in her shuffle. Other than that, she kept on keeping mum and trudged on.

Sully was a curiously spoiled man-child. His mum had never really taught him (or quite possibly herself understood) the value of squelching one's fantastical notions from being given voice at all times. He would on occasion slip into the wildest of reveries (if one could call them that; most of which were anything but pleasant) and to everyone's dread, enact them out in a manner far more disgraceful than the previous one.

This one personality tic, to put it gently, alone guaranteed that “Silly Sully” (thus went the unimaginative nickname) was regularly avoided in polite circles. Not that he took much notice of it.

His only company, however indifferent, was the band of tortoises with whom he regularly took (mostly silent) “walkabouts” along the wooded outskirts of Dervishire. It wasn't such a terrible arrangement, for the man's proclivity for what one might conceive of as part-perambulation and part-circumabulation kept him roughly in pace with his unidirectionally-slow fellows.

Tortoises tend to be excellent listeners – they like to keep to themselves most of their long, rarely tonous lives.

One of Mrellis' few social graces involved rolling her eyeballs while yawning throaty grunts of a very low frequency, inaudible to Sully or any other human. Sully however took that to be a case of reptilian sarcasm in response to his one of his spirited soliloquys, which if he had bothered to enquire, was decidedly a laughable proposition if there ever was one.

Strictly speaking, not entirely improbable. Scientifically speaking however, it would classify as a non-starter and dead-end rolled into one within the narrow confines of zoological research -- the unstated dogma being that tortoises are incapable of irony. One can safely say that it will likely never be conclusively proven or otherwise (that would require a cross-disciplinary study backed by equally improbable funding).

But then Sully didn't think much of science either – not in a particularly critical way, he just never thought about it...