Eyrie Productions, Unlimited - Friends Like These

I am not a jungle cat - Servals are native to the grasslands and wetlands of sub-Saharan Africa—basically everywhere that isn't rainforest.

Please don't eat me! - This was Kaban's first line, and became a running gag as her automatic reaction to pretty much any jump scare. By this point, it's entirely possibly that she's just doing it out of unconscious respect for the classics.

northern white-faced owl - Also known, along with its southern counterpart Ptilopsis granti (once considered a subspecies of P. leucotis), as the white-faced scops owl. Northern and southern white-faced owls are also African in origin, and are semi-famous on YouTube as "transforming owls" for their ability to reconfigure their feathers in elaborate intimidation or camouflage displays.

Eurasian eagle owl - One of the largest extant species of owl, Bubo bubo is common throughout Europe and Asia (excluding Siberia). In actuality a much larger bird than the northern white-faced owl, though the Professor and Mimi are of virtually identical stature as Friends.

Lucky Beasts virtually never spoke to Friends directly - They're programmed not to interact with Friends at all if they can help it, in a manner philosophically similar to nature documentary camera crews.

her unnervingly immobile golden [eyes] - Owls can't move their eyeballs in their sockets like we humans can; they have to point their whole faces at whatever they want to look at. That's why their necks are so much more flexible than ours, and a big part of why they have very limited facial expressions by our standards.

It's likely the Professor and Mimi can move their eyes as Friends, but are simply not in the habit of doing so. On their human faces, this results in a very distinctive blank stare.

we are the chiefs of this village - By "this village", she means the entire Kyōshū Region, but stops short of claiming authority over the whole of Japari Park. The regions have very little contact with each other since the ferryboats stopped running.

As an aside, writing the Professor and Mimi is kind of like writing Mordin—hard to get started with sometimes, but once they get rolling, difficult to stop. :)

named for one of the principals of the Japari Consortium - JAPARI was actually an acronym on the initial incorporation papers. Renraku Corporation of New Japan was the "R".

that particular old book in the Professor's library - A copy of the 2295 Expanded Edition of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

fifty thousand people used to live here... now it's a ghost town - I couldn't resist.

brown rat - Also known as the common rat, Norway rat, Parisian rat, wharf rat, sewer rat, and {basically anywhere else you might find one} rat. The rat people usually think of when they think of rats. One of the animal world's great adapters and survivors, despite the disdain they're commonly held in.

you look like a cheetah to me - Many of the wild cat Friends resemble each other and have similar costumes, varying mostly by the shape of their spots (Jaguar, for instance, has dotted rosettes, while Leopard has rosettes without dots). Cheetahs and servals are quite easy to tell apart as cats because of their differing sizes and proportions, but their coats are basically the same, so the Friends based on them dress very similarly. (An observer more familiar with African wildlife than Brown Rat might be tipped off by Serval's ears, though.)

black rat - A rat species, smaller than brown rats, which originated in India and spread around the world with the Romans and later Europeans. They're less common in colder climates, where the brown rat can outcompete them, but still one of the most common animals in the world. Black rats are notorious (possibly unfairly) as a key vector in the bubonic plague epidemics of medieval Europe.

roof rat gonna roof - Black rats are commonly nicknamed "roof rats" because they'd rather nest in the attics of buildings, whereas brown rats prefer the ground floor.

Brown Rat and Black Rat are original characters; there are many Friends in the Kemono Friends canon, including some based on decidedly unglamorous animals (looking at you, Rock Pigeon), but no rats.

I know I wouldn't ruin a place just because I was leaving it - Oh, Kaban. You are too sweet and precious for this world.

Mount Vicuña - The mountain atop which Alpaca Suri's Japari Café stands is not named in the Kemono Friends anime, as far as I can recall. I decided to call it Mount Vicuña after the wild precursor of the alpaca, which still roams the Andes.

in the Clarkeian sense of the word - As in Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Actinida polygama - Like catnip, only more so. Often works on cats who are indifferent to catnip. Botanically, a kind of kiwifruit!

the Park Facilities staff will relocate it - The Lucky Beasts are willing to wait as long as necessary for the return of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

the one from back then - She's talking about the last two episodes of the original Kemono Friends anime series.

To this version of Serval and Kaban, those events happened something like ten years ago, although being Friends, they haven't aged significantly since then. Calendar time has less importance in Japari Park than it does in the outside world, anyway.

call me Rampage - Last seen being overlooked and left behind as the Maximals and Predacon survivors left the planet at the end of the Beast Wars, back in 2094.

a word none of the Friends had ever heard before - Presumably one you can't say on prime-time network television. The dialect spoken in Japari Park is relatively short on conventional profanities; Brown Rat, with her occasional "arsehole", is about as foul-mouthed as Friends get.

naturally-formed Energon tesseract - As you've probably guessed by now, what the Friends know as Sandstar is in fact the peculiar form of semi-stable crystalline Energon endemic to this planet (which gave the Maximals and Predacons such trouble during the Beast Wars). The Hypercube was a particularly rare and special formation of same.

The humans who incorporated it into the Mark Two food transmat didn't know that, of course; they only knew it was a form of Sandstar that could be used as an apparently inexhausible source of very high levels of energy—high enough, with the right equipment, to condense into an equally-inexhaustible supply of matter.

Goji-chan's species description - The taxonomic family Metasauridae of order Daikaijū encompasses all the various dinosaur-like kaiju, such as Godzilla, Rodan, Varan the Unbelievable, et al. The specific name of G. rexbelluarum is from the Latin for "king of monsters".

Nakajima Shingoji - Goji-chan's original inspiration was a joke image posted to Twitter by Mine Yoshizaki, the character designer for Kemono Friends, depicting the Shin Gojira incarnation of Gojira (fourth stage) as a Friend. This picture inspired an extremely cute dōjinshi in which the Shin Goji Friend appears in Japari Park and has various heartwarming misadventures. Our Shingoji's origin is quite different, but her visuals, and the way she acts during the phase of the story when she's regenerating from a concussion, are based on that dōjin.

daughter of Gojira the Hunter... and Mosura the Wise - Yes, that means she hatched from an egg. Yes, she had a larval stage. Yes, she is very embarrassed by those photos. And yes, Gojira will show them to you if he's had enough to drink.

this is a UCS - "Unplanned Contact Situation", common spacer jargon for "crap, they told us there were no intelligent beings on this planet." There is a perpetual argument on Galactipedia about whether the U stands for Unplanned, Unanticipated, or Unexpected, because Galactipedia.

"These come off?!!" - In the original Kemono Friends anime, the Friends think of their clothes as part of their hides, and don't realize they can remove them until Kaban shows them how during the Obligatory Hot Springs Scene—thus adding "nudity" to the long list of things that, in Japari Park at least, she invented.

rock pigeon - The common bird from which the modern urban scourge is derived. Most city pigeons look like rock pigeons (also called rock doves), and are technically the same species, but their populations are largely made up of feral outcrosses between true wild rock doves and escaped/discarded domesticated pigeons.

Professor Konoha - A name for the Professor that was used in the original Kemono Friends mobile game. It's a contraction of the Japanese name of her species, Afurika Ōkonohazuku ("Africa giant owl", which is kind of funny given that white-faced scops-owls are really pretty small).

(Similarly, her Assistant is called Mimi-chan from Washimimizuku, "eagle owl".)

This version of the Professor does not like to be called "Professor Konoha" to her face—she considers it overly familiar—but many Friends call her that when discussing her amongst themselves. Mimi is less particular about her nickname coming from other Friends, although she and the Professor (despite being each other's closest friend) exclusively address each other by their titles.

Tsuchinoko's species description block - In real life, and as far as the Professor knows in-story, Tsuchinoko is a cryptid—an animal that is widely reputed, but has never been scientifically proven to exist. (A tsuchinoko is a creature from Japanese folklore, similar to a viper, but with a distinct bulge in the middle and a taste for liquor and swearing.) However, in the 25th-century UF universe, they do have a slot in the Linnaean taxonomy of Earth animals. Belonging to the (fictitious) family Paraviperidae, they are cousins of the Japanese viper or mamushi (Gloydius blomhoffii) with documented paranormal characteristics (i.e., they can drink liquor and swear).

As of 2410, their conservation status is listed as Data Deficient on the IUCN Red List because they're very reclusive and hard to study, but they are not believed to be in danger of extinction. It is unclear how a population of them came to exist on Natureworld, since they were officially cryptids until the early 23rd century. Possibly they stowed away (intentionally or otherwise) with samples of Japanese wildlife that were being transported deliberately.

Her specific epithet, puermalleo, is Latin for "hammer child", one of the two literal translations of tsuchi no ko (the other being the somewhat less melodic, but probably more practically descriptive, "child of dirt").

you can just call me Iwabi, it's easier - Like "Konoha" for the Professor, "Iwabi" is a contraction of the Southern rockhopper's Japanese name, "Iwatobi penguin". In the English dub of Kemono Friends, she's called Rocker.

a member of an idol unit - Iwabi is a member of PPP (Penguins Performance Project), the top idol group in Japari Park. As you might expect from the name, the other four are also penguins (specifically Emperor Penguin, Royal Penguin, Humboldt Penguin, and Gentoo Penguin).

I know you and the rest of PPP went there - In an audio drama that formed one of two semi-official extensions to episode 12 of the original anime (the other having been a short OVA released online).

thinking too hard... like Beaver-chan - American Beaver suffers from an anxiety disorder that manifests as a severe case of analysis paralysis. Left to her own devices, she can talk herself out of starting anything for fear that she'll foul it up. This makes Black-Tailed Prairie Dog, who is the textbook definition of raring to go but can't be bothered to think anything through, her ideal life partner.

not the sharpest thorn on the bush - Serval is perhaps being unfair here, but it's undeniable that Moose is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. In the anime, her idea of an infiltration tactic is to walk up to a patrolling guard and bellow, "You there! It is I, General Moose! Let us do battle!!"

little stuffed versions of all of us - This is a reference to a PPP dōjinshi, in which Emperor brings back a plushie of each of her colleagues, except she didn't get one for Princess because she forgot that her proper name is Royal Penguin (and there's no such thing as a "princess penguin", so she couldn't find an equivalent in the gift shop). She instead gives Princess another emperor penguin plushie, which the others think is insufferably egotistical of her (but Princess is secretly thrilled to have it).

it's full of Japari Coins - Japari Coins are suggested in the anime to have been a kind of scrip currency used within the Park, like old-fashioned video arcade tokens. Tsuchinoko collects them avidly, even though they no longer have any value.

the baggy t-shirt she'd replaced it with - Based on their outfits in this fanart.

a cheerful orange の - The Japari Park logo, also seen in the species description blocks within this story (which imitate screen graphics from each Friend's first appearance in the anime). It's also the "no" in the canonical title graphic for Kemono Friends.

a drop of venom fell from one of them - Tsuchinoko doesn't demonstrate this ability in the anime, but the legendary creature she's based on is customarily described as viper-like, with a venomous bite. In UF, as previously noted, they're specifically cousins of the mamushi, one of the most venomous snakes in Japan.

"Forget what?" "Everything." - It's strongly implied in the Kemono Friends anime that this has happened to Serval at least once before we meet her. And again in the heretical Kemono Friends 2.

sleeping in a coil - Or at least a hoop; another of the paranormal powers often attributed to tsuchinoko, despite their reputed girth, is the ability to bite onto their own tail, form themselves into a wheel, and roll after prey, much like the equally legendary North American hoop snake.

the This Is My Human position - "There are many like her,* but this one is mine."

potential CA - More spacer/spec-ops jargon. "Crisis Area", a place of imminent danger and probable conflict. Briareos refers to Olympus as a CA in the early part of Appleseed, when he and Deunan first arrive there and he deduces that it's not the utopia it seems to be.

great both-footed leaps from one prominence to another - Rockhopper penguin gonna hop rocks. This is actually easy mode for Iwabi; her kind usually do this kind of thing while battling heavy surf.

humans... were really, really good at throwing things - In fact, we're better at it than any other animal. Even the other great apes are comparatively rubbish at throwing things; their shoulder joints don't work like ours, so they lack power, and they're not very accurate either.

a four-to-one glide - That is, four units of horizontal travel for every one unit of altitude lost. Not terrific, but better than a wingsuit (ca. 2.5:1) and about equivalent to an autorotating helicopter (i.e., one that has lost power and is generating lift only from the momentum and aerodynamic characteristics of the still-turning rotor system). A 4:1 glide ratio will give you a hard landing, but a survivable one.

I'd blow us all to Fedora Core - A planet in the Debian sector. A long, long way from Meta Eridani.

her seventh sense - Magnetic anomaly detection / passive radar. Her sixth sense is an ability to perceive infrared light (similar to Tsuchinoko's pit viper sense, but not as precise).

Of course, she thought. The Legendary Beast... - Tsuchinoko does not realize the thing she found in the abandoned keepers' quarters years ago was the Handi-Play edition of Godzilla: Attack on Monster City, and not a religious artifact. Archaeologists always assume that whatever they found was a religious artifact.

Rhinox's species block - One of the many monumental tasks facing the galaxy's scientists and bureaucrats at the time of Standardization (ca. 2010) was figuring out how to fit all the rest of the galaxy's lifeforms (sapient and otherwise) into the Linnaean taxonomic system. We can see some of the compromises and innovations they had to make in the way Rhinox, a Maximal from an alternate future Cybertron where the techno-biological base had diverged significantly, is described in said system.

Domain: Anorganica - Lifeforms whose physical makeup is not carbon-based. This encompasses metallic and silicon-based life as well as creatures made up entirely of gases and various other outliers. It does not include beings who have no physical form at all (e.g., beings of pure energy like the Organians); they constitute an entirely separate Domain, Incorporalia.

Kingdom: Mechanoida - Any living being based on complex mechanisms—Tranformers, Cyben, et al. Species that evolved as organic lifeforms and then replaced their bodies with mechanical analogues, such as the Cybermen of Mondas, do not fall into this kingdom, or indeed the Anorganica domain; they are still classified based on their orginal species (e.g., Cybermen are Homo mondasensis). This is also distinct from creatures that are non-mechanically constituted, but made from inorganic elements, such as the silicon-based Horta and the Lava Men of Magmalore.

Order: Cybertronica - Lifeforms whose origins can be traced to the planet Cybertron. This includes offshoots and diverged lost-colony populations such as the Junkions of Planet Junk.

Family: Protoformidae - Cybertronians whose technobiological makeup is derived from "protoform" technology, i.e., a Spark, generated by whatever means, infused into a shell that was semi-amorphous and possessed no individual identity before infusion. Other families in order Cybertronica include Mechaformidae, those whose bodies were completely constructed the old-fashioned way and then Sparked from without, and Metallicae, which arose Spark, body, and all from the interaction of various generative energies (the Matrix, the Allspark, the will of Primus, etc.) and previously-inert metal, such as the surface of Cybertron.

There were a lot of arguments about the family structure of order Cybertronica. Some believed the distinguishing criteria should be how the Spark arose, rather than the shell; others worried that drawing "official" distinctions between Transformers of different origins could provide a false, pseudo-scientific justification for discrimination or even apartheid. In the end, the "shell origin" scheme was the one that seemed to conform most closely to the way the Linnaean system works for organic lifeforms, so it was ultimately the standard adopted, although even in the 25th century, there are holdouts who prefer nonstandard approaches.

Genus: Maximalius - Individuals in family Protoformidae who descend from the "Maximal" line of their reality's Cybertronian technobiome. Again, there was contention over whether Maximals and Predacons (genus Predaconus) should really constitute two separate genera, but CNA analysis pretty conclusively shows that they have diverged sufficiently to be so designated by anyone interested in basing the system on genetics.

Specific epithet: rhinox - Pretty self-explanatory, really. :)

By real-life Linnaean rules, all Maximals and Predacons (and, indeed, all Transformers generally) should be classified as a single species, since they are all capable of producing viable offspring together, but since Transformer reproduction is so thoroughly independent of their physical characteristics, that doesn't make practical sense. I'm sure this is a Linnaean rule that has had to get bent a lot since Galactic Standardization.

As a meta-aside, Phil (who helped define these terms after I made them up off the top of my head in the middle of the night) and I had some of the same discussions about these rules as the fictional people who established them in-universe did. Applying Linnaean taxonomy to sci-fi aliens is always an adventure.

As another aside, if in doubt about anything to do with Cybertron's participation in galactic scientific standards, blame Perceptor, who probably came up with all of it himself in the course of one long weekend around the middle of 2010. :)

silently reciting Shepard's Prayer - Goji of course uses the Dìqiú variant of this venerable prayer: Spirits, please don't let me fuck up.

where's Hululu when we really need her - Hululu is the nickname of Iwabi's PPP colleague, Humboldt Penguin, who—although not particularly large—always seems to be eating.

a gaily patterned red-and-blue paperback book - Bacon Publications' So You're Not Alone: A First Contactee's Guide to the Galactic Community. Duplicates a lot of the same information that's in So You've Just Arrived from a Parallel Universe and So You Became Unstuck in Time, but with a somewhat different tone and set of background assumptions.

Steelhaven - An Omega Sentinel-class space cruiser, one of a batch commissioned after Ironhide's team located and reclaimed the Omega Sentinel production facility back in 2397 (see the Mini-Story Lost Technology). Also known as Sigma Supreme. Since they're powerful and durable ships that require very small crews, the Omega Sentinels often find themselves assigned as transport for Autobot, Maximal, and/or IPO special mission teams.

the Primes will be pleased - Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal. The latter was made an honorary Prime in recognition of his place as the de facto leader of the Maximal community, however small, that has been "adopted" into the Autobot nation. Technically, that means his proper name is Optimus Primal Prime, but it's confusing enough to outsiders without insisting on that.

As an aside, there are those, mostly veterans of his tenure as Rodimus Prime, who believe Hot Rod should be still regarded as one (based on the fact that the Matrix chose him, even if he did willingly relinquish it later). Hot Rod himself disputes that assertion, but some of his old followers simply cannot be dissuaded. Rhinox isn't including him on this occasion, though, since he's not part of their chain of command.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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