When I woke up later that night, though, half the sheets on my bed were bunched up at the foot of my bed. I reached to pull them back, but in addition to a sharp tug of resistance from the other end, a voice that shouldn’t have been in my house resounded from the foot of the bed.

“Brrrr!”

I was about ready to jump out of the bed wailing at the would-be intruder, however ninja-like he or she may be for breaking into my house without so much as a creak of wood or a tinkle of glass being heard. But what the voice said next gave me pause.

“Please don’t disturb me,” the voice said. “It’s cold. I didn’t know there were places on this world where it could get this cold!”

A plea for shelter and mercy. Did a homeless person really have the audacity to break into my new house? As much as I had compassion for the homeless - I could easily wind up as a homeless person myself if YouTube ever died - they were welcome at any of the homeless shelters around the city. Certainly not here. I’d gladly drive the hobo to any one of them, even if I had to stuff him or her into my car’s trunk to do it.

But then what could only be described as a tiny hawk head poked out from the sheets. The hawk head was unmistakable even to me, because I unboxed his plushie butt this morning. What was he doing under my covers? However the plushie Ra got there, his mouth was moving on its own. I didn’t even know it could, as it was a hawk beak that was supposed to be sewn shut!

I grew pale as I witnessed this. I tried to stammer out some kind of statement, but I had no idea what to say. I could literally feel the color draining away from my skin as the shock hit me like a brick thrown at my head.

“Oh, do not worry about me, child,” said the plushie. “After an eternity away from your world, I wanted to come back and visit, see how things have progressed since my absence! But...what sorcery is this?” He questioned as he rustled the sheets enough to look at his new plush, fluffy body. “Why am I made of...this soft material? And why am I shorter than you, human?”

“I don’t know,” was all I could stammer out.

“No matter. Wherever I am now, the sun is gone, but I have a light! For the sun always rises again!” With that, he raised his plushie hand, only to find that his fingers have been sewn together. He gasped at the sight.

“What have you done to me, human?!?” The formerly inert plushie Ra demanded to know of me.

“What?” Was all I could sputter as I still couldn’t process what was happening.

With that, somehow the plushie Ra threw the sheets off of himself, and then in a physics defying move, lunged for my head. A flurry of blows followed, but they were more annoying than anything. Hard to make a dent against a human when your limbs and beak are...well, that soft. He hit like several wet noodles.

I tried throwing him off but every time he landed on the bed he just lunged at me again. How he stuck to my head I have no idea, but eventually I just let him stay on my head fruitlessly wailing at it as I got out of the bed itself. I had to contain this wild plushie somehow. Thankfully the laundry room was relatively close to my bedroom, but the plushie Ra was impeding my vision as I attempted to carefully walk there. I bumped into multiple walls on the way, and I wasn’t sure if I broke anything. After many banged shins, shoulders shoved into walls, near falls, and the occasional head knocking, I made it to the laundry room.

Once in the laundry room I forcefully wrenched the Ra plushie from my head. Ra was still cursing away in some language I didn’t understand, my educated guess was that it was an ancient Egyptian dialect. Or not, I honestly had no idea. Holding the flailing Ra in one hand, squeezing as hard as I could to avoid letting him slip from my grasp, I fumbled around the laundry room looking for something to contain this wild plushie. Eventually my hand settled upon a relatively small laundry basket. In one fluid motion that I didn’t know I was capable of, I slammed the plushie down on the floor, then placed the laundry basket upside down on top of him. Before the surprisingly strong plushie could throw off the basket, I nonchalantly put some full containers of laundry detergent on top of the inverted basket for extra weight.

It somehow worked. Ra, unable to lift the laundry basket, put his hands through the holes in the basket as the newfound prisoner of the makeshift cage. “What foul prison is this you put me in, human?!? I will smite you for this!!”

“I have no idea what you are, but I’m gonna get to the bottom of this,” I screamed to Ra. “But right now, I’m gonna insist you stay quiet while I get some freaking sleep and hope this is all a dream. You better be inert when I wake up!”

“You have no idea who you are dealing with, mortal! I have more power than you can ever imagine and I shall use it to teach you the lesson you—“

His voice grew quieter as I slammed the door to the laundry room. I could hear more muffled cursing behind the door, but this should make him quiet enough for me to sleep for the rest of the night. And this better be a dream!