She woke with a start. At her feet, the tiniest creature she had ever seen in her short life was glaring at her quizzically, it's little grey whiskers twitching away in time with the lapping of the waters on the side of the raft. 'Hello. And who might you be my little friend?'

With a burp way too huge to emanate from such a tiny body, the little creature span its tail like a propellar and floated off above her head in the direction of some extremely dark and brooding clouds.

Gin-gin looked up at the foreboding vision before her, tweaking her young neck quite painfully while trying to see how far the darkness spread. In her discomfort, she also happened to see the jagged outline of a small island resting helplessly beneath the now raging storm.

Helpless because if she squinted really hard, she could just make out the shape of a figure standing on the shoreline jumping up and down frantically waving its arms above its head.

Gin-gin suddenly felt something hit beneath the raft, and as if in some wonderfully tranquil childhood dream, she saw the large fluted tail of a gigantic whale as it crashed into the water. She felt the raft being turned around beneath her, away from the approaching thunderhead.

She looked back at the now vanishing island, and the poor lonely figure that was so desperately trying to warn her. Well, that's what she had hoped the figure was trying to do anyway, and with a note of puzzled sadness in her voice, she asks her new found friend the still unseen Wooffington H. Whalebone - a name she thought sounded quite good for a whale - the simplest of all questions; 'where to now?'