Virtual Quill

Sorry about the delay; a weird interdimensional disturbance affected the portal, but it’s open now.
Last Tuesday Fenton and I flew up to Washington DC for the Inauguration, skipping class because the professors were, too. This event presented certain challenges for us, not just due to the huge crowds but from us being nocturnal. We stayed up for this, though!
We flew all night, arriving just after dawn. We attempted to take a quick nap atop the Capitol building, but some Secret Service birds shooed us away. Instead, we found a spot between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
The weather was really cold, and we watched the ceremony on a big video screen. People all around were hugging and crying. Despite the diversity, I didn’t see a single instance of predation, or even drooling.
An old friend of mine from Domain, an armadillo named Cara, has an apartment in Arlington and she let us sleep there for the rest of the daylight hours. At nightfall we flew home, exhilarated.
We also did our best to avoid US Airways jet engines.
How was the human version of the Inaugural?

Until Coney came along I never had a sister, and of course the age difference between us makes this a different relationship than with most sisters who don’t have as many years separating them. To Coney, I’m probably more like “Mom 2.0.” ...Or “The Mom That’s Never Breast Fed Me.”
Not so with Fiona and Corrie who are exactly the same age. While not biological sisters, they nevertheless established a familial bond. That bond has been tested by their new circumstances.
When Uncle Ralph married Martha Fennec to create that family, Corrie and Fiona were already good friends. Moving into that mansion caused their friendship to shift, but it wasn’t a wrenching change. They each had their own rooms, and the mansion is so vast that everyone was able to maintain their personal space.
Now for the first time Fiona and Corrie have to share a single room. For Corrie this is familiar terrain owing to the years she spent with Bruno, but Fiona has never been in this situation before. She grew up an only child, and her parent’s frosty marriage led to even less contact.
Now on top of the trauma of her lost fortune she has to adjust to living with someone else in the same room. No wonder she’s not sleeping well! I suspect the problem isn’t her overly sensitive hearing but simply coping with what’s happened to her.
Sometimes one’s inner thoughts are the loudest sounds in the galaxy, and there’s nothing that woolen ear coverings can do for that.
This week's question: Have many siblings do you have in your litter?

I heard from Rudy that the Fennecs have a solution to their immediate money worries: they’re converting their enormous (and paid for) mansion into a boarding house. While their fortune is gone, this strategy will give them a reliable (yet labor intensive) way to get by.
With Uncle Ralph and Corrie with full-time jobs, and Fiona in school, it falls on Fiona’s mother Martha to do most of the running of the house. Even though the first boarders are just moving in, she seems pretty effective at it so far.
(I was sworn to keep this secret, but I’ve been made aware that everyone here knows this already: for a month Martha was transformed into a human. She was able to change back, but her experience was invaluable to me when I discovered my own human origins. So, she and I have that bond.)
The mansion itself was divided into two halves when Fiona’s parents divorced. George eventually sold his half to buy Hare-Link, and when he married Danielle they moved into a much smaller tree nearby. Now, the Fennecs will house herbivores on one half and carnivores on the other. Omnivores sleep wherever they want...as usual.
An odd thing about the mansion (aside from it being one of the few local residences not being either a hole in the ground, a cave or a living tree) is that it’s divided into many, many small rooms that make perfect one-person apartments. I’d assumed that a mansion that size would have huge open spaces, and while there’s couple of those the general layout is perfect for its current use.
It’s as if when Fiona came into money she didn’t scale her lifestyle upwards; she just multiplied it. Good thing, too, considering.

Poor Fiona! Just after I’d returned to Beige University I got a text from Rudy that the tech fortune she’d accumulated had been wiped out.
These days it’s sadly a common story, and even though her investments were as conservative as they could possibly be they were still vulnerable. I like Fiona a lot, and this just sickens me.
From what I’m told the Fennec family (Uncle Ralph, Martha, Fiona and Corrie) has one asset left: their vast mansion which is paid for, free and clear. Still, they have to pay for its upkeep, and then there’s property taxes. Uncle Ralph has his job at Hare Link, and Corrie does the Herd Thinners, Inc. website design and maintenance, so they still have two regular paychecks and (more importantly) health benefits. I don’t know if their current income will cover everything. I know what Uncle Ralph makes, and R.L. isn’t known for paying big salaries to non-hunting staff like Corrie.
Looking ahead, I hope this doesn’t impact Fiona’s ability to go to college. (Corrie, already with a career, has no intention of pursuing higher education.) Rudy has told me that several colleges have expressed interest in giving Fiona an athletic scholarship, so I hope that’s the case.
I’m looking at Hare Link’s finances. We’re good.
For now.