Our Post Office Will Never Be the Same (and Thank Goodness)

There's this stereotype of the bat as a dark, dangerous, sinister creature who strikes terror in the hearts of men and whose morals are suspect at best.  You know, all creepy, like this:

Those who buy into this stereotype have clearly never met our new bat, Meph.  Meph is unrelentingly upbeat and absolutely delighted to be alive and a bat.

His name, moreover, is short for "Mephibosheth", not "Mephistopheles".  Bats apparently have a penchant for long and awesome Hebrew names.

We've never had a bat before, so many of the long-time residents find Meph very intriguing.  Here he is with Murchison and the Fox, with whom he shares a certain foxy affinity.  He's telling them all about what it's like to fly.

Look at that wingspan.  Isn't that awesome?  Meph's wingspan is even more impressive than Lord Twilby's.  Twilby's not jealous, though; he and Meph are getting on quite well.

Meph comes to us from the Ministry of Transportation.  There's been some internal reorganisation in the Wild Republican bureaucracy of late, and as a result, the postal services are now under the province of the Ministry of Transportation rather than the Ministry of the Interior, as it was previously.  As is so often the case with reorganisations, this bureaucratic move is accompanied by a desire for reforms and improvement, including clearing up any odd irregularities.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

The mail delivery in our local chapter has never been any better than "irregular".  This is what happens when you make Plouie postmaster.  He is very enthusiastic about his job, but he really sucks at it.  Outgoing mail tends to arrive at its destination water-logged, because Plouie cannot comprehend that not all species send waterproof messages.  This is when the mail is delivered at all.

Plouie was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking up Sir Tristan and Lady Faraday.  While Lady Faraday was still stationed elsewhere, she and Sir Tristan used to write each other letters every week.  At one point, Plouie proudly presented Sir Tristan with a bundle of his own letters, lovingly tied together with a green-striped ribbon, and Sir Tristan realised that his last two months of correspondence to his beloved had never been delivered.  He panicked and sent Lady Faraday the following telegram (Parsley, not Plouie, is in charge of the telegraph system).

CRAZY PENGUIN IN CHARGE OF MAIL HERE STOP MY LETTERS NOT SENT STOP VERY VERY SORRY STOP I LOVE YOU STOP DON'T BREAK UP WITH ME PLEASE STOP LOVE TRIS

 This telegram was sent just in the nick of time.  Lady Faraday, no shrinking violet, had every intention of buying a plane ticket and demanding to know in person the reason behind her beloved's sudden and uncharacteristic silence.  She had to wait until she had a moment of leave, or she'd have left already.  Fortunately, she is eminently reasonable, and upon learning what had happened, she put the blame where it belonged.  So, in addition to nearly destroying a relationship, Plouie's incompetence very nearly sparked an International Incident.

Sir Tristan and Lady Faraday were not the only ones affected.  Reggie's nephew Barmy has received some pretty strange mail over the last year, everything from coded messages from Murchison to letters of a *cough* delicate nature intended for one of Magick's ladies, because there was this period in which Plouie, pleased with himself for working out how to send mail to Barmy, proceeded to send all outgoing mail to that same address.  A letter from Magick to one of his ladies was mistakenly sent to another, causing no end of trouble for him; Navarre's letter to his parents was accidentally sent to Rusty's parents, and you can imagine how well that went over, given that said letter was full of complaints about a certain obnoxious tiger.  And any number of messages have been lost entirely, or eaten, or God knows what, under Plouie's watch.

And to think, they'd made him postmaster because they wanted to give him a job that wouldn't have dire consequences.  Sigh.

So there's some room for improvement in the local postal service, and that is one of the reasons Meph was sent here.

Meph's first meeting with Plouie went about the way you'd expect it to, but not the way Meph had expected it to.  Poor Meph.  He had wanted to talk business, but Plouie was unable to get past the part about Meph being birdlike but conspicuously not a bird.  First he was startled.

And then he passed out, to Meph's astonishment, and hasn't woken up since. 

Par for the course, really, but Meph's not used to doing business this way, and he's not sure what to do now.  He can't really reform Plouie's role in the post office while the penguin in question is passed out in a box.  Speaking of that box, I'm not sure you can see it well, but remember how Omri was looking for Seleucus's stationery a while ago?  It's under Plouie.  I'd say that this is why Omri hadn't managed to find it, except that Plouie and the box are on the opposite side of the room from the radiator where he was looking, so he really wasn't all that close.

Expansion!

Our local chapter of the Wild Republic has just been enlarged by five.  All of them are adults, which I'm quite pleased about; I love the young ones (they're so cute!), but I was afraid the balance was tipping too far in the juvenile direction.

Alfredo is particularly relieved.  He'd been requesting some reinforcements from his superiors for some time, and the bureaucracy finally decided to grant his requests.  This had more than a little to do with that incident a bit ago, the one where the kittens somehow managed to get illicit bubble gum on Leprosy's tail.  Alfredo had been telling his superiors for months that he needed someone sent here specifically to handle the kittens: it's all well and good that our chapter was chosen to train young felines, but without anyone actually in charge of them, they were getting out of hand.  I'll explain more about this in a later post.  But anyway, his superiors finally admitted that they really should have been listening to him all along, and they found someone to deal with the kittens.  They also agreed that, with such a large foreign delegation stationed here permanently, and with some of the members of the local chapter being more than slightly eccentric and unpredictable (*cough* Plouie *cough*), Alfredo was correct that he could use some permanent legal counsel on staff.

So here they are, our five newest denizens of the Wild Republic:

In the front row, left-to-right, we have Jasper, the leopard, who is here to look after the kittens; Quixley, the zebra, whose exact responsibilities are not yet clear to me; the aye-aye, who has not yet gifted us with his name, and who is the promised legal counsel; and the sloth bear, whose exact role is not yet clear either.  Behind them all we have Meph, the bat, who is from the Ministry of Transportation and who intends to reform the local postal service (i.e. Plouie).  ("Meph" is not his full name; apparently bats are fond of giving each other very long names.)

Yesterday was a long day, full of meetings between various old and new residents.  Alfredo was particularly busy getting everyone settled in.  He's really delighted that we have Jasper now, as you can imagine (so is everyone), but he's not sure quite what to make of the aye-aye.