The League of Tool-Using Animals

A Thousand Words

You may remember The League of Tool-Using Animals from my Sean and Wormwood comic. I’ve always liked them, and I decided to start writing a story about them to see where it would go.

It evolved into something akin to a post-apocalypse narrative, only the survivors are an uplifted chimpanzee, sea otter, and New Caledonian crow. I’ve posted the first thousand or so words from my first draft below. Enjoy!

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27 June 2070

My name is Shadowflight. I will be honest with you, it’s not at all clear to me why the task of documentation goes to the one member of the League who lacks front paws, but Flotilla can’t read or write and Jitterbug claims keyboards give him PTSD, so the task falls to me, as so many do.

Jitterbug’s appeal to mental illness is particularly galling given that one of the many pillars of his, ahem, apeifesto On the Superiority of Animals is the wide variety of mental disorders to which humans are subject. He brings the subject up whenever one of us uses the the word “anxiety,” or “depression,” even in a non-clinical context, claiming that we’re just imitating the humans, but somehow when he wants to get out of writing reports it’s a reasonable excuse.

“Apeifesto” is not my term, by the way. I tried explaining etymology to Jitterbug, but he’s more interested in entomology. Or would be, if he knew what it was. He eats a lot of insects, is what I’m saying. And he always takes the best ones.

As you can tell, I have gripes, which is why, in addition to the official reports, I am also writing these shall we say less-official reports. A corvid has to let off steam somewhere. I can always gripe to Flotilla, but I’d get a more equitable deal if I offered to split the bill with him at a seafood buffet. So I gripe a little, Flotilla gripes a lot, I fly off to write the official report, which is always a quick job because everything after the summary may as well be lorem ipsum for all Jitterbug reads it, and then I write this to fill up the time Jitterbug thinks writing a report should take.

I have convinced him that writing takes a long time. He’s willing to believe it because writing takes him a long time. I expect you’ll appreciate the irony that between the two of us, he’s the hunt-and-peck typist. I, on the other hand, have harnessed the power of emacs and diligence to bring my typing speed up to 28 wpm. At least when Jitterbug’s not in the room.

Today Flotilla asked me “Why don’t you take charge of the operation?” I replied, “What operation?” Despite our organization’s lofty name and General Jitterbug’s insistence on military titles, our “operation” is just three animals living in an abandoned treehouse in the backyard of an abandoned single-family home in the abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

If you’re scratching your head and thinking “that sounds familiar,” Centralia is a ghost town that was abandoned because of an underground coal mine fire that started in 1962. That much is public record. What you almost certainly don’t know is that after the last holdout resident died in 2052, the government miraculously figured out how to shut down the coal fire and replace it with an experimental underground “tepid fusion” reactor, then used the town to house top-secret research facilities. Then, when an underground fusion fire ran out of control in 2068, Centralia was abandoned again, and we were abandoned along with it. Well, perhaps abandoned is the wrong word, given that we carefully schemed to be abandoned rather than euthanized. 

And so, for roughly two years now, we’ve lived together in a treehouse, and what started as a plan to get us each into a better position in life has grown into a increasingly complex plan to dominate the world. The complexity has increased, but not the likelihood of it actually happening, which remains at a nice round zero percent.

I have no interest in dominating the world, but I have less interest in trying to talk Jitterbug out of it. It keeps him busy, which is ideal, and he keeps us busy, which is less ideal. But when you have intelligence and self-awareness in a body that needs nothing more than light foraging and a safe place to sleep, you have to fill the hours somehow.

I count myself lucky, although it’s a bastard sort of luck. I’m the only one for whom this is a roughly natural habitat. Technically I am a New Caledonian crow, and it would be difficult for us to be farther from New Caledonia, but my needs are essentially the same as American crows. It’s not like I was actually born in the southern hemisphere. I was hatched out of an artificial egg not two miles from where I type this.

The bastard part of the luck is that crows, to the genus, are very territorial creatures. And apparently the local crows can tell that I’m not one of them. In the fall and winter this doesn’t cause much trouble as long as I don’t compete directly with them for food, but in spring and through much of the summer I am literally in danger of my life as soon as I leave our backyard. I wouldn’t even control the backyard without help from Flotilla and, to a lesser extent, Jitterbug.

That should explain both why I don’t try to take charge, and why I just don’t leave. Like it or not, as uplifted animals we have more in common with each other than we have with others of our base species.

30 June 2070

Flotilla has found another method of getting under Jitterbug’s skin. I don’t think it benefits any of us, but I can’t blame him for acting out, living so far from any form of salt water. He found a half-smoked cigar on one of his supply runs, and now he insists on holding it in his mouth at all times. I think he picked it up from a movie. He says he likes the aroma. I pointed out that he can’t even light the thing, and he said “I mean the aroma of pissed-off chimp.”

3 July 2070

Today we went to one of the facilities and watched a movie. Jitterbug is completely against the idea of turning to “human mind-rot” for entertainment, which he claims is why he needs to accompany me and Flotilla, so that he knows what propaganda to warn us about. I don’t buy the excuse, not just because it’s ludicrous, but because, given that it’s swooping season, he has to pedal me to the facility on his tricycle. I don’t think he’d do that if he didn’t want to see the movies.