Monarchic Nemesis Revealed

Sir Angel Joe is writing his memoirs.  He's become quite a popular hero back in the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy; apparently one of the reasons he was attached to this particular delegation rather than given a posting on his home soil was that he was very unnerved by the attention he was receiving.  The poor chap couldn't walk down the street without being recognised.  Complete strangers wanted to come up and touch him.  You can see how this would have interacted badly with Angel Joe's already fractured nerves.

But now that he's been away for a while, and is feeling a bit better, he's decided to write his memoirs.  He's hoping that people will stop asking him questions if his memoirs have been published, especially if they're published while he's still away from home.  All the details of his heroic mission will be there in the public record, but he won't be around for interviews, so (he hopes) everyone will just read his memoirs, and by the time he returns he'll be uninteresting and everyone will leave him alone.

Consequently, he's been talking a bit more about his mission. Angel Joe finds it difficult to express himself in prose, so he came up with the idea of dictating his story to himself on a digital recorder, and then he takes his own dictation.  He does a lot of wandering around muttering to himself (so does Zebulon, but Angel Joe isn't crazy), and sometimes he tries telling bits of his story to someone first, so that if he skips over something or is somehow unclear, his audience will tell him.

So we've learned where Angel Joe and Winidavefred the badger were sent on their mission.  This is something AJD and I had been wondering about.  We knew that the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy and the Wild Republic are on good terms, so it didn't make sense to us that the Wild Republic would have stolen sensitive documents from the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy; but we didn't know whether there were any other candidates for the Wild Parlimentary Monarchy's natural enemy.

Now we know: the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy is the sworn enemy of the Wild Fascist Dictatorship, which is governed by a tyrannical, power-mad sheep named Ebenezer Popcorn, whose bloodthirsty ambition is equalled only by his personal insanity.  If you're thinking a sheep could not possibly be that convincing a dictator, and that a carnivore would be a more likely candidate, think again.  Carnivores have to be very careful, you see, lest they make herbivores uncomfortable.  Herbivores have rather more laxity and sometimes feel like they have something to prove.  Ebenezer Popcorn is just such a sheep.  He carries a spiky staff and has a habit of randomly slamming into anyone unfortunate enough to be in his immediate vicinity.  He's also very paranoid, frequently spontaneously deciding that those closest to him are conspiring against him and then thinking of creative ways of executing them.

You do not want to get taken prisoner by Ebenezer Popcorn.  Angel Joe's torture sessions were overseen by the infamous Popcorn himself, and he is one of the few to live to tell about it.  No wonder his country holds him in such awe.

Who was that masked aye-aye?

AJD and I spent the Fourth of July weekend at a house party with awesome people down in College Park, MD.  We took Gilly, Barry, and Zebulon with us.  Gilly and Barry wanted to go because they already knew a lot of these people from the Winter Party over New Year's; I think Zebulon was just curious.

The second night of the party, there was a masquerade ball outside on one of the lawns.  Neither Gilly nor Barry felt like going, but Zebulon wanted to go, and he and AJD came up with an idea for a joint costume.  See:

Aye-aye + captain.  The fact that there was a mask that actually fit Zebulon was an unexpected bonus.

Zebulon had a great time at the party.  He spent some time hanging out with Men of Mystery:

and also with pretty girls:

He showed a definite partiality towards hanging out with people whose costumes matched his own, so we can add "has a bit of a vain streak and a strong sense of personal aesthetics" to the list of things we know about Zebulon.

Aye, aye!

When Alfredo was sent here to head the local chapter, he knew it would be a challenge, but he hadn't realised that he would end up host to a sizable international delegation.  He likes challenges, but he doesn't like ulcers, and the combination of prestigious international delegation with a tribe of hyperactive kittens, a deranged moronic penguin, and his own puppy son keeps him up nights worrying.  He's absolutely terrified that somehow his constituency is going to start a war.  Conscientious to the point of neurosis: that's Alfredo.  But one has some sympathy for his position.

So, in addition to a disciplinarian for the kittens, Alfredo has been lobbying with his superiors for some sort of resident legal counsel, just in case.  He'd met with about as much success until the Bubble Gum Tail Incident, and then his superiors promised that they'd send him a good lawyer.

And they did send a good lawyer.  They sent one of the most promising young up-and-coming lawyers they could find, a fellow who breezed through law school, aced the bar exam, and has an excellent track record in court.  This is a lawyer who has won the respect of all his peers for the incisiveness of his mind and his uncanny ability to work the law to his advantage.  Despite his relative youth, several of his arguments have been collected as examples for law students to study, because of their unusual clarity and persuasiveness.

But the lawyer in question was... not quite what Alfredo was expecting.

Poor Alfredo.  He looks so dejected.  You can almost hear his inner monologue: 'Why me?'

Zebulon is an aye-aye, and aye-ayes are primarily famous for three things: they all have an inexplicable fondness for ships, despite lacking all aptitude for sailing them; they are all, without exception, incredibly brilliant; and they are all, without exception, absolutely bat-shit insane.  Zebulon is a very good example of his species.  He's the most promising lawyer of his generation, but he has a few screws loose, and you'd never know it from his behaviour out of court.  Out of court you're lucky if you can get him to say anything other than 'Aye.'

I think Alfredo can be forgiven for not quite trusting that Zebulon will live up to his hype.  We haven't seen him in action yet.

The denizens of the Wild Republic are of two minds about Zebulon.  Some of them try to steer clear of him, because they're not quite sure what to make of him and can't quite believe he's not another Plouie.  (I mean, Plouie gives the impression of having a larger vocabulary.)  The other group finds him kind of fascinating.  Barry, for instance, rather likes Zebulon.  One wonders how much of this is due to the fact that Zebulon's conversational peculiarities make it easier for Barry to talk about himself.

Humphrey is being far more patient with Zebulon than one might have expected, given that he's a retired commodore and aye-ayes are notorious amongst nautical men.  See, they really like climbing around in the rigging and untying knots, and when you are a sailor you have a vested interest in keeping knots tied, so having an aye-aye aboard is a massive inconvenience.  They're sort of like gremlins that way.  But Humphrey is doing a commendable job of keeping his anti-aye-aye biases under control.  He's had a number of conversations with Zebulon that consist of Humphrey talking about his nautical exploits, punctuated by lots of "aye aye" from Zebulon.

Actually, on second thought, Humphrey's tolerance for Zebulon is not really that unlike Barry's.

Hrithik is the only other local who has had previous experience with aye-ayes; this is because Zebulon, like Hrithik, is from Madagascar.  Hrithik is excited enough about having another member of Team Malagasy - and a fellow primate, to boot - to overlook some of Zebulon's peculiarities.  He's also our primary source about aye-ayes in general.  When we first asked him what he thought of Zebulon, he did that "draw a circle near your ear" gesture with his tail, but then he elaborated that they're all like that.

Here's Team Malagasy, perched in a very short tree.

Hrithik spends most of his time on top of one of my bookcases; that's his tree.  Zebulon is less picky about his habitat, but he has a habit of hanging on things, usually upside down.  Sometimes this takes his neighbours by surprise.

Gilly and Nicodemus hadn't even realised he was there until after we took the picture.  They were rather startled.

Zebulon is kind of okay to have around, all told.  He really likes being scratched, and makes the most adorable noises when you indulge him thus, and also the most reproachful noises when you stop.  He seems to like Jeopardy! so far; he started watching mostly out of curiosity, like Hrithik once upon a time, but the game appeals to him.  Also he appears to be something of a hypnotist, which makes me rather nervous.  AJD stopped him in the middle of hypnotising me and we're not really sure what would have transpired if he hadn't.

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.

Discipline Arrives At Last

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.

Maybe it was over here...

So we have this new bear.  His name is Omri, and he's a sloth bear, which means that he has very unusual teeth and very large claws.  Sloth bears are awesome, and if you didn't already know that, you should go read about them on Wikipedia.

Omri is our new investigative specialist.  He's here to help Alfredo find things.  You know, car keys, pencils, missing important diplomatic documents, and so on.  If you're concerned that important diplomatic documents go missing often enough around here to warrant a trained specialist to be sent here, well, that's fairly normal for the Wild Republic.  It happens when you have a lot of deranged penguins and peppy puppies hanging around.  Not to mention the kittens.

In the interest of complete candour, I have to say that Omri's general method for investigation is not the most inspiring.  It seems to consist primarily of pacing back and forth, or occasionally in circles.  He's not particularly subtle about it - actually, it's something of a production.  We recently caught him on camera when he was trying to find Seleucus's personal stationery.

Is it over here?

No, maybe it's over here.

...No, maybe it's over here.

...No, maybe it's over here...

As you can see, Omri's investigative efforts tend to generate a sizable audience.  I should point out that it's not at all clear why the stationery should be by the radiator at all, but Omri was pretty devoted to the idea that it was.  

I will tell you what happened to Seleucus's stationary later.  (It has been found.)

Now, in Omri's defence, he's still very new to the investigation business.  He's only just completed his training; this is his first real posting, and he really wants to impress everyone, and as a result he hasn't got over his initial nerves.  Also, the training that they receive leaves something to be desired.  They hide something in one of two locations, so if it's not in one, it really is probably in the other.  Having more than two possibilities for missing objects is throwing Omri off his game.  He was really good when there were only two possible locations.

Apart from his occupational insecurities, Omri is still something of an enigma to us.  The other thing we've learned about him so far is that he's a trained dancing bear.  Laszlo, who is a world-class tap dancer, is over the moon at this revelation; we'll show you pictures of them together later.

The Wild Republic Gets Tech-Savvy

So we have a zebra now.  His name is Quixley.  You will note that there are no "z"s in this name.  Zebras get sick of everyone always wanting their names to begin with "z"; it's an old joke and they're over it.  'You're a zebra!  Is your name... Zachary?'  In fact virtually no zebras have names that start with "z".  They much prefer "q" and "x".  Like Quixley.

When we first introduced him to Quixley, Parsley was rather distraught.  He's a very sweet guy, but more than slightly high-strung, and he has a bit of an inferiority complex that pokes its head up at odd moments.  In particular, he has this thing about zebras; he thinks that okapis are disfavoured because they're less stripy than zebras are.  If you look at this picture, you'll see Parsley's initial reaction upon realising that we'd brought home a zebra.

He was a bit taken aback.  You could see him looking at his stripy legs and then at Quixley's all-over stripyness and getting more threatened by the moment.  Then he ran over to AJD and stared up at him as though he'd been betrayed.  It took a while for AJD to sufficiently reassure him that we hadn't acquired a zebra because we thought Parsley was deficient and that we're very fond of Parsley and Quixley will never supplant him in our affections.

To our great relief, this actually worked. Parsley went back over to talk to Quixley, who graciously pretended not to have noticed his temporary panic, and they ended up having a sort of ungulate bonding session with Lazslo.

Fortunately Quixley is pretty chill that way.

Quixley is here because the powers that be in the Wild Republic hierarchy have decided, after months of debate, that it is time they entered the new millennium and got with it.  That is, it's time everyone learned how to use computers.  At the moment, the Wild Republic's technological expertise is sadly lacking.  Some of the animals - Sir Theo and Gilly, for instance - know how to use a computer for gaming purposes, and Rochester caught Mahler and Khamsin trying to get to a cat-porn site a while back, and a few of the others know how to use Word and Excel and check their email.  Tibby's computer skills are actually quite good.  But by and large, they're all pretty useless when it comes to computers, and the systems they've been using are all hopelessly out of date.

And this is where Quixley comes in.  He's a trained IT professional whose mission is to bring our local chapter into the new millennium if it kills him.  Everyone is supposed to be subjected to mandatory tutorials and training classes and this and that.  This should have commenced a week ago, but Quixley's still trying frantically to get the computers updated.  The systems they were using were so out-of-date, and had so many problems, that he's been working overtime.  Sadly, the budget doesn't extend to getting wholly new equipment (the powers that be aren't savvy enough to truly understand the necessity), so poor Quixley has his work cut out for him.

It's a good thing that Quixley appears to be the laid-back sort.  Lesser zebras might have been panicking by this point, but Quixley just drinks more coffee, shrugs, and gets on with things.

Eventually his job will become a pretty easy one, and he'll be able to spend his time doing whatever he feels like while answering the odd call of duty, but those days are still in the future, because many of the community members are less than thrilled about all this new-fangled technology crap.  Leprosy and Humphrey are particularly resistant to the idea, and are making it clear that while they'll comply with the mandatory training, they are doing so under duress.  Some of the others (Alfredo and Stal, for instance) are more willing but don't obviously have the aptitude.  The kittens are the most enthusiastic about the new technology, and will probably take to it more readily than the others, but come with their own set of problems.  Quixley doesn't seem fazed.  He says that he likes a challenge, and that it will all work out in the end.  You have to give the guy credit for his attitude.

Quixley is our resident geek.  It's not just that he's an IT expert, either.  He's watched every single episode of every single Star Trek series at least six times (and all the movies), and every episode of Babylon 5 at least thrice, and he's really into WoW, although he says his guild is about ready to disown him since he's been so busy working lately that he's neglected them sadly.  He likes computer and video games in general, particularly the sort of old-timey classics, although he also really likes Portal.  And Portal II; he's been after AJD to play Portal II so that they can talk about it, but AJD hasn't yet.   He's also a huge fan of George RR Martin, and is really looking forward to discussing the first season of the TV series with Alfredo, who hasn't read the books but liked the show because of the portrayal of wolves.  Quixley, of course, had read the books beforehand, so he's very curious to hear Alfredo's take on it.

Anyway, so Quixley is fun.  He doesn't take anything, including himself, overly seriously, but he's dedicated to his job all the same.  These are both qualities that should serve him well with this bunch.  I'll let you know how the training sessions go once they're underway; there's bound to be some interesting stuff to say about them.  The first thing Quixley means to do is explain to Plouie and the others that the iceberg is just an obsolete desktop, which should be interesting.