Fic: A Question of Right Place, Right Time [Pushing Daisies/Doctor Who+HDM]
Title: A Question of Right Place, Right Time
Fandom: Pushing Daisies/Doctor Who, with bonus His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: Ned, Eleven, Chuck, Emerson, Olive (minor Ned/Chuck, otherwise gen)
Summary: "They're like us," Digby tells him, apropos of nothing.
Word Count: 2500
Notes: A couple months ago, I did a meme on my personal journal, asking people for fandoms and characters so that I could write daemon!fusion fic for them. caitism asked for Ned or Eleven, so I wrote both! :DD
From the mat he keeps under the counter for her when he's working, Digby says, apropos of nothing, "They're like us."
While he's still blinking at her a little, she pushes herself to her feet abruptly and crosses the floor to where Olive was politely telling their customer that no, they didn't have any fish sticks, as fish wasn't a super popular ingredient in custard pie, but they did have some shredded chicken breast if he maybe wanted some on a side plate? Olive's people skills weren't enough for her to keep her confusion from her voice.
When Digby cuts in front of her, she takes an automatic step backwards, and looks up to see Ned trailing half-heartedly after her. Whatever expression is on his face, she seems to take that as her cue to leave, because she retreats back to Oliver, curled up by the coffee pot (Ned isn't sure if her parents' daemons had actually named him Oliver, or if that was something he and Olive chose together later because they thought it would be cute. It seems like one of those things he could live without asking.)
"Well, hello there," the man in the booth says in surprise when Digby hops up onto the vinyl seat across from him. He puts his fork down. "And you are --?"
"Most people consider it rude to address other people's daemons without their people's consent, being proper people and all," goes Ned, sliding in next to his daemon, careful not to sit too close. As he does, he catches a glimpse of what he thinks is a green treefrog disappearing underneath the table.
Now he kind of understands Olive's distaste -- and Olive (being Olive) and Oliver (being a golden retriever daemon) aren't ones to judge, usually, which has always worked well to Ned's advantage. The man is covered head-to-toe in dirt and kind of smells like chlorine. His clothes are ripped, and not in the artful way he sometimes sees on store mannequins and kids with too much time on their hands, but more the, "I just got into a fight with all the trees in Sleepy Hollow and came out on the losing side" kind of ripped.
"That was a lot of people in one sentence," he remarks, picking his fork up again and scooping up a bite of custard pie, sans fish sticks.
"Sorry," Ned says immediately. "People tell me I talk fast and have a tendency to ramble and use run-on sentences. Hello, and you are?"
The man grins. "I'm the Doctor," he says, sort of sing-song.
"Sounds more like a title than a name," Ned observes, and a thought strikes him, the way thoughts tend to. "You're not a serial killer, are you?"
"Does your daemon often come over to talk to serial killers?" the Doctor answers without missing a beat.
"... Point," mumbles Ned, and eyes Digby sidelong. She licks at her flank, unconcerned.
"I told you," she says, feeling his gaze on her. "They're like us."
"I'm Ned. I make pies." Ned says, turning back to the Doctor, just as a kingfisher flutters up from the seat to the torn shoulder of his Oxford shirt. He blinks, because hadn't she been a frog just a moment ago? "And this is Digby. She doesn't make pies. I mostly just keep her around because she looks harmless."
"It's true," Digby says when the Doctor and the kingfisher look at her in question.
-
"And who the hell is this?" goes Emerson, pushing himself off the driver's side of his car as the Doctor bounds out of the backseat of Ned's.
"It's the Doctor!" answers Chuck from the passenger side. She pulls her usual scarf and sunglasses out of the glove department. "He's like us!"
Emerson looks downright horrified. "Please don't tell me I gotta hug him too. How many more people you gonna add to your hinky-kinky little love nest of non-touchitude?"
"It's not like that," Ned protests, cheeks warming as both Chuck and the Doctor exchange toothy smiles, like they know some kind of secret and Ned's just being shy, which he most definitely is not. Digby keeps unhelpfully mum. He gives them all a wide-eyed look of betrayal.
"Uh-huh," goes Emerson, absolutely deadpan. Next to him, his red-tufted boar daemon snorts derisively.
-
"That. Is. Fascinating," breathes the Doctor as the corpse drops back down onto the body tray, dead as a doornail once more. He looks from the body to Ned and back again, eyes tripping fast, before he snatches up Ned's hand and inspects it, holding it inches away from his face. His daemon clambers up the side of his neck, this time a knock-kneed tarantula, and Ned shifts uncomfortably, unsure where to look that isn't the Doctor's too-wide eyes or the beady, unblinking gaze of his daemon.
"How come he ain't dropping like a big stone of dead person?" Emerson asks lowly.
"Because he's not a dead person," Chuck's daemon answers, buzzing close to her scarf-wrapped head.
"What the hell is he, then?"
"What happened to you, Ned the Piemaker, that you have Time Lord regeneration energy tucked in your touch?" the Doctor says, voice soft and private, holding Ned's fingers so close to his mouth he can feel every syllable. "What event in your childhood brought you close enough to a regenerating Time Lord to capture some of the vortex for yourself? Not enough to completely revive a person and change them, oh no, just enough to bring them back in their own bodies. For a price." He looks back at Chuck briefly.
"I-I don't really know what you're talking about," Ned tries to lean away, but the Doctor seems oblivious, just keeping with him.
"Oh, now there's the lie, isn't it," he whispers, and licks Ned's hand.
-
The most horrible thing that could ever happen to a person is to lose their daemon. Nothing else even comes close -- exposure to never-ending operatic music, Chinese water torture, slow dehydration in the Gobi desert. All of that is sunshine and daisies compared to what it's like to reach for that spot inside of you where all rational thought and ability to be calm and any capacity for love come from, and finding nothing.
When young Ned was nine years old, he had gap teeth and a bad sugar-bowl haircut, and he was cutting through the daisy fields by the highway on his way down to the supermarket in Couer d'Couers to pick up a bin of strawberries and more flour for his mother. Digby ran on ahead of him, her head bobbing up above the yellow daisies. She'd always preferred the warm-blooded shapes, even when all the kids at school were going through phases where their daemons were all horned lizards or dragonflies, and that day she'd been a dingo, slope-backed and grinning. "Last one there gets the drafty side of the bed!" she crowed over her shoulder, and darted out across the street.
Neither of them even saw the semi, or heard it, which seems strange in hindsight, as semis weren't particularly known for stealth. It didn't even slow down.
To this day, Ned isn't entirely sure how to describe what it was like. He doesn't remember getting down the rest of the hill, although he's sure he must have. It's like nothing could get processed, not without Digby there: not the sun on the back of his neck or the pollen clinging to his trousers, or the gravel on his palms when he dropped to the pavement beside her. It didn't really matter, because how long does a human last when the daemon is dead? He knows they can survive, unlike the other way around, but just the thought of it -- the rest of his life, existing without Digby -- made his mind veer away, flee as fast as it could.
He reached out, hand shaking and bloodless, and stroked the fur on Digby's head.
And then she stood up.
-
The thing about touching someone once and bringing them back to life ("regeneration energy transference," explains the Doctor. "It's what that little golden ... shimmy-like thing is that you always see,") is that their daemon never comes back with them. It is, of course, one of the first things they get really concerned about, so Emerson and Ned tend to set the first ten to fifteen seconds aside for reassuring their dead folk that they're going to see their daemons on the other side, but first, a few questions.
But keep a dead person alive for longer than a minute, and they get a daemon. It's just, someone else has to die for it.
Ned remembers summer afternoons with Chuck with the kind of accuracy that borders on the pathological; dressing up and crushing play-doh cities while Digby and Alamin wrestled each other into the grass, flitting between shapes, from bobcat to terrier to diamond-back rattlers. And so he knows that the daemon that pops out of Chuck's coffin with her on the hillside in Couer d'Couers is not Alamin.
As far as Ned's ever been able to figure it, it's like hitting a factory default button: the instant Laurence Schatz dropped dead of a heart attack in his funeral home was the instant his daemon reset and became Chuck's, brand-new like she'd been freshly born, which he supposes isn't too far off the mark. And he knows she remembers Alamin -- there probably isn't a minute that goes by when she doesn't think of him -- and he's sorry, so very sorry that she has to go through that, but her connection to the new daemon is just as strong as her connection to her first one was, and he can almost see that grief begin to patch over. When they solve the case of the golden monkeys, she looks shyly down at her folded hands while her daemon wove circles above her head, a bumblebee, and offers shyly, "We've been talking, and we were thinking of Mercutio for a name. What do you think?"
Ned's mouth quirks in one corner, and he says, "Mercutio? You're naming him after Romeo's daemon?"
She lifts her chin, matching his shy smile. "It seemed fitting."
Now, he watches the sway in her step when she follows the Doctor out into their parking lot, their heads bent together, watches as Mercutio and the Doctor's daemon drop down to the pavement and become grey foxes, weaving easily underneath the cars.
"They's grown-ass folks. That's just damn unnatural," grumbles Emerson.
-
"You know what I don't think is natural?" goes Olive when he calls her to ask her to come out and rescue them when they inevitably get kidnapped and tied up in the back of a van that's then left by the side of the road twenty miles outside of town. She jabs at Ned's shoulder, hard. "You never touch Digby. What kind of person never touches their daemon?"
"The ones pathologically afraid of touching, Olive, we've been over this," he answers, looking on as she springs the latch on the pin holding in Emerson's boar. "If you had the kind of childhood I did, you'd understand. Me and Digby, we just aren't ones for touching."
"Not natural," Olive mutters, but she lets it drop, on account of them suddenly having to run for their lives and all.
And god, Ned would probably even give Chuck up if it meant being able to stroke Digby's ears, or rest his head on her flank when he's napping, or pet her absently when he passes her in the kitchen. You just don't realize how much it messes a person up, not being able to just reach out for that comfort and that reassurance whenever they want it.
But he'd take it over the alternative. Every day, he'd take this over a world with no Digby in it at all.
"Is that why she's a deer?" Chuck asks him once, sweeping up after the Pie Hole closed for the night. She leans against the handle of her broom, smiling at him thoughtfully. Mercutio's in a macaque shape tonight, curled up with Digby on her mat and mindlessly stroking down her spine. It has Ned warm and tingly all over -- this he will never tire of.
"Is that why what?" he goes, snapping out of it.
"Digby, is that why she's a deer? Did you watch Bambi too many times as a child and developed a complex and couldn't shake it, so as a result she settled as some sweet-faced, sacrificial looking animal?"
"That is an incredibly unflattering portrayal of me," Ned says, not horribly insulted. "And actually, she's a vicuna, if you want to be encyclopedic about it. They're more closely related to camels than they are to deer, but they're small for either order or family. When she sheds in the spring, I can usually collect enough to make wool, which is always nice. It's almost like touching her, but profitable. I should make you a pair of mittens sometime, they're ridiculously soft."
She keeps on smiling at him, like she thinks that his rambling is endearing instead of the emotional vomit it always sounds to him like it is.
"I wonder what Mercutio will settle as, this time around," she goes, more to herself than to him, and Ned just smiles, because whatever it is, he's looking forward to it.
-
"Sure you don't want to stay, Doctor?" Ned offers, but it's more for show than anything. His life is full of enough adventure without adding the Doctor, who died and came back to life with a new face and a new daemon and knows something about the origin of Ned's powers but won't say a single helpful thing about it.
"Nah," the Doctor answers on cue, shrugging. His daemon is a chipmunk this time, twitching around at every single noise. "I've got a little girl waiting for me anyway, she's got a crack in her wall that needs fixing. But it was good meeting you, Ned. Ned the Piemaker, the Boy Who Brings the Dead Forward in Time."
It might go away eventually, like acne or particular kinds of allergies, he'd explained, but considering Ned's almost thirty and he still has his Midas touch, it'll probably stick with him for the rest of his life. There are worse fates, he and Digby agreed.
"Doctor," Ned finally works up the courage to blurt out, as the Doctor's fiddling with the door handle of his police box. "You never told us her name." He nods at the daemon scampering back and forth across the box's doorframe.
"She doesn't have one," the Doctor smiles up at her, wistful. "Too brand new, hasn't even been a day. No name, definitely no settled shape, but that's not strange, I don't even know what kind of man I am either, yet. Why, do you have any suggestions?"
Surprisingly, Ned doesn't even have to think. "Juliet," he says, because Chuck would get such a kick out of it.
The chipmunk stops her pacing and tilts her head, contemplative.
"That might actually fit," the raggedy Doctor says after a beat or two, and this time when he smiles, Ned smiles back, wide and unable to help it.
-fin
Helpful Google reference: Digby, a vicuna; a red river boar (also, this, because it is adorable)
Fandom: Pushing Daisies/Doctor Who, with bonus His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: Ned, Eleven, Chuck, Emerson, Olive (minor Ned/Chuck, otherwise gen)
Summary: "They're like us," Digby tells him, apropos of nothing.
Word Count: 2500
Notes: A couple months ago, I did a meme on my personal journal, asking people for fandoms and characters so that I could write daemon!fusion fic for them. caitism asked for Ned or Eleven, so I wrote both! :DD
From the mat he keeps under the counter for her when he's working, Digby says, apropos of nothing, "They're like us."
While he's still blinking at her a little, she pushes herself to her feet abruptly and crosses the floor to where Olive was politely telling their customer that no, they didn't have any fish sticks, as fish wasn't a super popular ingredient in custard pie, but they did have some shredded chicken breast if he maybe wanted some on a side plate? Olive's people skills weren't enough for her to keep her confusion from her voice.
When Digby cuts in front of her, she takes an automatic step backwards, and looks up to see Ned trailing half-heartedly after her. Whatever expression is on his face, she seems to take that as her cue to leave, because she retreats back to Oliver, curled up by the coffee pot (Ned isn't sure if her parents' daemons had actually named him Oliver, or if that was something he and Olive chose together later because they thought it would be cute. It seems like one of those things he could live without asking.)
"Well, hello there," the man in the booth says in surprise when Digby hops up onto the vinyl seat across from him. He puts his fork down. "And you are --?"
"Most people consider it rude to address other people's daemons without their people's consent, being proper people and all," goes Ned, sliding in next to his daemon, careful not to sit too close. As he does, he catches a glimpse of what he thinks is a green treefrog disappearing underneath the table.
Now he kind of understands Olive's distaste -- and Olive (being Olive) and Oliver (being a golden retriever daemon) aren't ones to judge, usually, which has always worked well to Ned's advantage. The man is covered head-to-toe in dirt and kind of smells like chlorine. His clothes are ripped, and not in the artful way he sometimes sees on store mannequins and kids with too much time on their hands, but more the, "I just got into a fight with all the trees in Sleepy Hollow and came out on the losing side" kind of ripped.
"That was a lot of people in one sentence," he remarks, picking his fork up again and scooping up a bite of custard pie, sans fish sticks.
"Sorry," Ned says immediately. "People tell me I talk fast and have a tendency to ramble and use run-on sentences. Hello, and you are?"
The man grins. "I'm the Doctor," he says, sort of sing-song.
"Sounds more like a title than a name," Ned observes, and a thought strikes him, the way thoughts tend to. "You're not a serial killer, are you?"
"Does your daemon often come over to talk to serial killers?" the Doctor answers without missing a beat.
"... Point," mumbles Ned, and eyes Digby sidelong. She licks at her flank, unconcerned.
"I told you," she says, feeling his gaze on her. "They're like us."
"I'm Ned. I make pies." Ned says, turning back to the Doctor, just as a kingfisher flutters up from the seat to the torn shoulder of his Oxford shirt. He blinks, because hadn't she been a frog just a moment ago? "And this is Digby. She doesn't make pies. I mostly just keep her around because she looks harmless."
"It's true," Digby says when the Doctor and the kingfisher look at her in question.
-
"And who the hell is this?" goes Emerson, pushing himself off the driver's side of his car as the Doctor bounds out of the backseat of Ned's.
"It's the Doctor!" answers Chuck from the passenger side. She pulls her usual scarf and sunglasses out of the glove department. "He's like us!"
Emerson looks downright horrified. "Please don't tell me I gotta hug him too. How many more people you gonna add to your hinky-kinky little love nest of non-touchitude?"
"It's not like that," Ned protests, cheeks warming as both Chuck and the Doctor exchange toothy smiles, like they know some kind of secret and Ned's just being shy, which he most definitely is not. Digby keeps unhelpfully mum. He gives them all a wide-eyed look of betrayal.
"Uh-huh," goes Emerson, absolutely deadpan. Next to him, his red-tufted boar daemon snorts derisively.
-
"That. Is. Fascinating," breathes the Doctor as the corpse drops back down onto the body tray, dead as a doornail once more. He looks from the body to Ned and back again, eyes tripping fast, before he snatches up Ned's hand and inspects it, holding it inches away from his face. His daemon clambers up the side of his neck, this time a knock-kneed tarantula, and Ned shifts uncomfortably, unsure where to look that isn't the Doctor's too-wide eyes or the beady, unblinking gaze of his daemon.
"How come he ain't dropping like a big stone of dead person?" Emerson asks lowly.
"Because he's not a dead person," Chuck's daemon answers, buzzing close to her scarf-wrapped head.
"What the hell is he, then?"
"What happened to you, Ned the Piemaker, that you have Time Lord regeneration energy tucked in your touch?" the Doctor says, voice soft and private, holding Ned's fingers so close to his mouth he can feel every syllable. "What event in your childhood brought you close enough to a regenerating Time Lord to capture some of the vortex for yourself? Not enough to completely revive a person and change them, oh no, just enough to bring them back in their own bodies. For a price." He looks back at Chuck briefly.
"I-I don't really know what you're talking about," Ned tries to lean away, but the Doctor seems oblivious, just keeping with him.
"Oh, now there's the lie, isn't it," he whispers, and licks Ned's hand.
-
The most horrible thing that could ever happen to a person is to lose their daemon. Nothing else even comes close -- exposure to never-ending operatic music, Chinese water torture, slow dehydration in the Gobi desert. All of that is sunshine and daisies compared to what it's like to reach for that spot inside of you where all rational thought and ability to be calm and any capacity for love come from, and finding nothing.
When young Ned was nine years old, he had gap teeth and a bad sugar-bowl haircut, and he was cutting through the daisy fields by the highway on his way down to the supermarket in Couer d'Couers to pick up a bin of strawberries and more flour for his mother. Digby ran on ahead of him, her head bobbing up above the yellow daisies. She'd always preferred the warm-blooded shapes, even when all the kids at school were going through phases where their daemons were all horned lizards or dragonflies, and that day she'd been a dingo, slope-backed and grinning. "Last one there gets the drafty side of the bed!" she crowed over her shoulder, and darted out across the street.
Neither of them even saw the semi, or heard it, which seems strange in hindsight, as semis weren't particularly known for stealth. It didn't even slow down.
To this day, Ned isn't entirely sure how to describe what it was like. He doesn't remember getting down the rest of the hill, although he's sure he must have. It's like nothing could get processed, not without Digby there: not the sun on the back of his neck or the pollen clinging to his trousers, or the gravel on his palms when he dropped to the pavement beside her. It didn't really matter, because how long does a human last when the daemon is dead? He knows they can survive, unlike the other way around, but just the thought of it -- the rest of his life, existing without Digby -- made his mind veer away, flee as fast as it could.
He reached out, hand shaking and bloodless, and stroked the fur on Digby's head.
And then she stood up.
-
The thing about touching someone once and bringing them back to life ("regeneration energy transference," explains the Doctor. "It's what that little golden ... shimmy-like thing is that you always see,") is that their daemon never comes back with them. It is, of course, one of the first things they get really concerned about, so Emerson and Ned tend to set the first ten to fifteen seconds aside for reassuring their dead folk that they're going to see their daemons on the other side, but first, a few questions.
But keep a dead person alive for longer than a minute, and they get a daemon. It's just, someone else has to die for it.
Ned remembers summer afternoons with Chuck with the kind of accuracy that borders on the pathological; dressing up and crushing play-doh cities while Digby and Alamin wrestled each other into the grass, flitting between shapes, from bobcat to terrier to diamond-back rattlers. And so he knows that the daemon that pops out of Chuck's coffin with her on the hillside in Couer d'Couers is not Alamin.
As far as Ned's ever been able to figure it, it's like hitting a factory default button: the instant Laurence Schatz dropped dead of a heart attack in his funeral home was the instant his daemon reset and became Chuck's, brand-new like she'd been freshly born, which he supposes isn't too far off the mark. And he knows she remembers Alamin -- there probably isn't a minute that goes by when she doesn't think of him -- and he's sorry, so very sorry that she has to go through that, but her connection to the new daemon is just as strong as her connection to her first one was, and he can almost see that grief begin to patch over. When they solve the case of the golden monkeys, she looks shyly down at her folded hands while her daemon wove circles above her head, a bumblebee, and offers shyly, "We've been talking, and we were thinking of Mercutio for a name. What do you think?"
Ned's mouth quirks in one corner, and he says, "Mercutio? You're naming him after Romeo's daemon?"
She lifts her chin, matching his shy smile. "It seemed fitting."
Now, he watches the sway in her step when she follows the Doctor out into their parking lot, their heads bent together, watches as Mercutio and the Doctor's daemon drop down to the pavement and become grey foxes, weaving easily underneath the cars.
"They's grown-ass folks. That's just damn unnatural," grumbles Emerson.
-
"You know what I don't think is natural?" goes Olive when he calls her to ask her to come out and rescue them when they inevitably get kidnapped and tied up in the back of a van that's then left by the side of the road twenty miles outside of town. She jabs at Ned's shoulder, hard. "You never touch Digby. What kind of person never touches their daemon?"
"The ones pathologically afraid of touching, Olive, we've been over this," he answers, looking on as she springs the latch on the pin holding in Emerson's boar. "If you had the kind of childhood I did, you'd understand. Me and Digby, we just aren't ones for touching."
"Not natural," Olive mutters, but she lets it drop, on account of them suddenly having to run for their lives and all.
And god, Ned would probably even give Chuck up if it meant being able to stroke Digby's ears, or rest his head on her flank when he's napping, or pet her absently when he passes her in the kitchen. You just don't realize how much it messes a person up, not being able to just reach out for that comfort and that reassurance whenever they want it.
But he'd take it over the alternative. Every day, he'd take this over a world with no Digby in it at all.
"Is that why she's a deer?" Chuck asks him once, sweeping up after the Pie Hole closed for the night. She leans against the handle of her broom, smiling at him thoughtfully. Mercutio's in a macaque shape tonight, curled up with Digby on her mat and mindlessly stroking down her spine. It has Ned warm and tingly all over -- this he will never tire of.
"Is that why what?" he goes, snapping out of it.
"Digby, is that why she's a deer? Did you watch Bambi too many times as a child and developed a complex and couldn't shake it, so as a result she settled as some sweet-faced, sacrificial looking animal?"
"That is an incredibly unflattering portrayal of me," Ned says, not horribly insulted. "And actually, she's a vicuna, if you want to be encyclopedic about it. They're more closely related to camels than they are to deer, but they're small for either order or family. When she sheds in the spring, I can usually collect enough to make wool, which is always nice. It's almost like touching her, but profitable. I should make you a pair of mittens sometime, they're ridiculously soft."
She keeps on smiling at him, like she thinks that his rambling is endearing instead of the emotional vomit it always sounds to him like it is.
"I wonder what Mercutio will settle as, this time around," she goes, more to herself than to him, and Ned just smiles, because whatever it is, he's looking forward to it.
-
"Sure you don't want to stay, Doctor?" Ned offers, but it's more for show than anything. His life is full of enough adventure without adding the Doctor, who died and came back to life with a new face and a new daemon and knows something about the origin of Ned's powers but won't say a single helpful thing about it.
"Nah," the Doctor answers on cue, shrugging. His daemon is a chipmunk this time, twitching around at every single noise. "I've got a little girl waiting for me anyway, she's got a crack in her wall that needs fixing. But it was good meeting you, Ned. Ned the Piemaker, the Boy Who Brings the Dead Forward in Time."
It might go away eventually, like acne or particular kinds of allergies, he'd explained, but considering Ned's almost thirty and he still has his Midas touch, it'll probably stick with him for the rest of his life. There are worse fates, he and Digby agreed.
"Doctor," Ned finally works up the courage to blurt out, as the Doctor's fiddling with the door handle of his police box. "You never told us her name." He nods at the daemon scampering back and forth across the box's doorframe.
"She doesn't have one," the Doctor smiles up at her, wistful. "Too brand new, hasn't even been a day. No name, definitely no settled shape, but that's not strange, I don't even know what kind of man I am either, yet. Why, do you have any suggestions?"
Surprisingly, Ned doesn't even have to think. "Juliet," he says, because Chuck would get such a kick out of it.
The chipmunk stops her pacing and tilts her head, contemplative.
"That might actually fit," the raggedy Doctor says after a beat or two, and this time when he smiles, Ned smiles back, wide and unable to help it.
-fin
Helpful Google reference: Digby, a vicuna; a red river boar (also, this, because it is adorable)
