Another New Addition

I hereby present Stal, the newest member of the Wild Republic.

My brother ASD was visiting, as I mentioned earlier, and on Thursday we decided to go to the Academy of Natural Sciences.  Since museum gift shops are one of the best places to find new citizens, I insisted we check theirs on the way out.  They didn't have much, actually, which surprised me; Plouie and a couple of others came from there originally, and they'd had quite a selection at the time.  Most of what they had didn't interest me, either.  But they did have a lone smilodon who immediately stole my heart.  I've always liked saber-tooth cats, and there's something endearing about Stal's face.

"Stal" is not his real name, of course; it's short for "Stalactite", and it refers both to his dentition and to the era with which he is associated.  He's here because the Powers That Be apparently decided that not enough young felines are learning Archaic Feline these days, so they decided to make our chapter a sort of test case and have all the cats learn it.  Alfredo was kind of put out about this, because he feels like they're behind where they should be anyway, but there's not much he could do about it.  The cats from the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy all learned Archaic Feline at school, of course, but they're ambassadors and not tutors.  So the Powers That Be decided to send our chapter a native speaker of Archaic Feline: Stal, naturally.  He's supposed to address the kittens only in Archaic Feline until his superiors give him permission to do otherwise.

Here he is talking to Mahler and Cami in Archaic Feline.

You'd think a saber-tooth tiger would be kind of brutish and scrappy, but actually Stal is the soulful poetic type.  I mean that he is actually a poet.  Here he is, looking pensive.  

He's written and published lots of odes and elegies and epics, all in Archaic Feline; he's in the rather unusual position of being one of the most renowed ancient feline poets despite writing in modern times.  The Ice Age are in kind of a weird niche anyway, what with their extinction and all.  One doesn't talk about the extinction, because they're very sensitive about it; for this reason, the Ice Age creatures really stick together.  Mimsy and Gus were delighted to have another Ice Age creature in their midst.

Gus insisted on demonstrating how effective his shell is against predators by having Stal attempt to bite him.  (Stal, being a lover rather than a fighter, required some convincing.)

Mimsy thought this was all pretty amusing.  He's a little odd that way; I think he's sort of hysterical. 

It's the Ice Age extinction complex, you see.  Takes them all differently.  Gus is probably the least affected of our three, and he's kind of erratic; Mimsy's a bit mad; Stal is melancholy.

Stal's presence increases the soap opera factor of our local chapter a bit, because he's a poet, so naturally he needs an object for his courtly affections, and the most obvious candidate is of course Lady Faraday.  Here Stal is, probably composing an ode to her in his head.

Lady Faraday is pretty used to this, though, so she doesn't really mind.  She gets this a lot.  And Stal isn't really serious, of course.  Look how impressive her posture is.  When she was a kitten, they made her practise pouncing for hours with a book on her head.