So you may recall that a month or so ago, there was an Unfortunate Incident involving the kittens putting bubble gum - which they should not have even had - on Leprosy's tail. This created a huge uproar, and left the kittens grounded until further notice. The situation was pretty dire. Leprosy was threatening to resign, and he's sufficiently high-ranked that this would have caused massive problems, not merely in our local chapter, but in the Republic as a whole. So the Republic did something that Alfredo had been asking them to do for ages: they agreed to send a full-time headmaster to take charge of the kittens.
The traditional method for training up young animals within the Republic is a sort of fosterage system. The idea is simple: promising young animals are sent to some chapter of the Wild Republic to learn from their elders, all of whom teach occasional series of classes on their respective areas of expertise. It's all relatively informal. None of the adults is specifically responsible for the young ones, but they're all expected to keep an eye out.
Under ordinary circumstances, this works pretty well. It probably would even have worked well here; think about Tibby, for instance: he is a perfect model of how this tutelage system is supposed to work. The problem is that our Local Chapter includes six kittens.
I'm sure this is the result of some brilliant idea someone had, possibly upon realising that this chapter already had an adolescent clouded leopard and a baby snow leopard. Why not station a bunch of kittens from different species in a single chapter, in order to foster interspecies harmony? Especially if the bunch includes a lion and a tiger, with enough non-lions and -tigers to provide a bit of a buffer for the inevitable dischord?
Well, our local chapter gives you the answer. Put six kittens together without anyone officially in charge of them, and all of that natural energy will feed on itself until it mushrooms into something exponentially greater than the sum of its parts. You will get chaos. And shenanigans. And bubble gum on the tails of crotchety elite citizens.
It's not that they didn't try to rein in the kittens, but the fact that all of them had other jobs meant that they didn't do a great job of it. Alfredo is supposed to be running the local chapter, not keeping a constant eye on the kittens. Lady Faraday, bless her, did what she could, but she's a high-ranked visiting diplomat; she has her own job to do, an extremely important one, and it does not extend to baby-sitting foreign kittens. Stal is a poet first and a tutor second; he's not trained for any more than that. He's felt very guilty about it, but it's not his fault that he was thrown into a job for which he's neither prepared nor well-suited.
Alfredo has sent a number of impassioned pleas to his superiors, begging them to send someone, anyone, to take charge of the kittens; but all of his pleas were brushed aside because they failed to sufficiently appreciate the situation. Until the Leprosy incident. After that went down, Alfredo's superiors belatedly moved heaven and earth to find a suitable candidate. Poor Alfredo was gritting his teeth at all the 'Why didn't you tell us how serious the situation was?' shit he was getting from his superiors.
And so they sent us Jasper.
Jasper has credentials. He has a master's in education and was the headmaster at an exclusive all-boys school for kittens for several years, after serving first as a physics teacher at the same school. He's also the eldest of many litters and is a world-ranked kick boxer. If anyone is qualified to take charge of the kittens, it's Jasper.
I'm not sure who was more relieved by Jasper's advent, Alfredo or Stal. The day the new arrivals got here, immediately after the initial formalities were taken care of and before he had even started unpacking, Jasper had a long conversation with Alfredo about what his approach would be, how he would structure the kittens' lives, and so on. Look how relieved Alfredo looks.
Then he had a similar conversation with Stal, who feels as though a huge burden has been lifted from his shoulders. Now he can work on his epic and some odes without feeling guilty about it.
While this was going on, the kittens were roughhousing over on the "water" in their classic style. Rusty was doing rather well for himself, as you can see. I really like this picture of him, actually.
Jasper watched them for a while to get a feel for his new charges.
Then Alfredo officially introduced Jasper to the kittens, and really laid down the law. The kittens were duly chastened; they'd been aware for weeks that they were going to get it.
Jasper isn't cruel or anything. He's not keeping the kittens chained to their desks or scrubbing floors all day. He's a cat, and he knows that kittens will be kittens. But he's not letting them get away with anything, either, and they know it. Rusty and Navarre made a token effort to get the better of him and learned immediately that this would not be tolerated, and they've been remarkably well-behaved ever since. He's always at least three steps ahead of them.
We haven't learned much about Jasper the private individual yet, in part because he jumped to work immediately and in part because, well, he is a very private individual. We know that he's a bachelor with a lot of brothers and sisters, and that he and Alfredo really hit it off right from the start, and that he likes singing baritone in barbershop quartets. We know about the barbershop quartets because he's trying to get people together to form a new one here. Alfredo's in; he is, as you know, a world-famous wolf tenor. (It's not clear whether he'll sing lead or high tenor; he's by far the best singer we have, so he'll sing wherever he's most needed.) Barry wants to be in, but he'd have to sing bass rather than baritone and he's a little miffed about that. I'm sure there will be pictures at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment