Jess kindly pointed out that hawks don't have a sense of smell (it seems like birds in general cannot smell, with two exceptions, one is the Kiwi, and I don't know the other one). So the possibility of El Tuerto getting randy because of Toph and Aang not taking a bath was very unlikely. Er ... yeah, I knew that. Of course. Isn't that my credibility jumping out of the window? Wait, wait!
Anyway, that prompted the need to clarify genealogy. The following chapter doesn't add to the plot and it's an optional read. And of course, I'm also addressing here a question someone (cough-Burnice-cough) asked me regarding Nanny Ogg and her cat, Greebo. (More Terry Pratchett, naturally) :-).
XXVI. Last Interlude, Menagerie.
Momo had finally found someone. For a long time he had known that the entire crush thing on Appa was a useless obsession. Appa would never see him as anything but a friend. And then they got to the South Pole and that hussy shirshu Nyla had shown up at the stables, officially killing all hope.
Of course Bosco tried too when he was also camping with them in the stables. The silly bear would try to flutter its eyelashes at Appa, but thankfully the bison didn't even notice. Appa was a simple, noble, cool guy. He loved Aang, he loved Aang's friends, he loved Momo, he was loyal. Things like a pampered spoiled bear with a crush went completely unnoticed to him.
Before Nyla arrived, the mood at the stables had been … academic. Flopsie and Appa would get into long conversations, pondering. Flopsie was not really the thinking kind, but he was good for talks, provided these didn't ran too deep. And Appa, well, Appa was a philosopher. He liked to muse about the ironies of life. Appa was a pacifist at heart, that shared with Flopsie both, the fearsome appearance and the harmless nature. The gorilla-goat and the flying bison would talk for hours: telling stories of their adventures, mulling over loneliness and even drawing plans to find Appa's lost relatives. Which such heavy minded dialogue, Bosco came across as a bimbo: too much of a sissy and too shallow to draw Appa's interest. At the most, Appa thought that Bosco's outfits were a disgrace. And then ... Nyla-of-the-tongue-tricks showed up.
She did help make things … interesting. Momo did not liked her in the least, but she liked Appa a lot and Appa seemed, well, happier. That didn't make seeing Appa get tongue lashes from an ugly tart, that would paralyze him every time, easier. Momo would cringe but the bison would chuckle, amused. So Momo had to bear it, like a friend.
Momo had never really been able to develop a stable romantic relationship. Not with the nomadic life he was leading with Appa and the Avatar. Even that fling with the pygmy pumas back in Ba Sing Se had been only experimental. When things started to look promising he had found Appa's footprint and his smell in the middle of the city and knew that all those good looking cats couldn't compare to his Appa. But now Appa was getting all this attention from a floozy with a mile-long tongue and Momo had no choice but to show support.
All of this resulted in Momo being emotionally delicate when the Fire Nation bird showed up.
The first time he saw El Tuerto, Momo thought that it was just an unpleasant, intense bird, with a serious need for aromatic herbs. That the bird had a past was written all over him. Momo had not been interested, just mildly disturbed, until the bird cornered him in a dark aisle. Then, everything changed. Total military type, the bird treated Momo at arm's length most of the time, especially in public. But when the bird was in the mood, it was great company. In general, the bird was the quiet, mysterious type, at all times the image of the cold, detached professional used to do distasteful jobs for the Fire army. In private, the bird was close to the Fire Nation soldier he spent most of his time with, and lately, to Aang. Momo loved that the bird seemed to have develop a soft spot for Aang.
Intrigued and infatuated, Momo had resorted to talking to the other Fire Nation messenger hawks (who were the sewing circle in the army), to try to piece together El Tuerto's story.
As far as the hawks knew, El Tuerto grew up without his father. His mother, a fast chicken who dreamed bigger dreams than a coop, met the father, a mean looking cat, in a dark alley. The chicken meant it when she would use the word mean to describe her ex. The cat was iniquity incarnate, a one eyed, scarred, fat feline with a level of randiness that had the chicken sighing for years. She only knew his name: Greebo. After their tryst, the cat left her for an iguana and she continued her trip away from the coop to an Earth Kingdom town called Las Vegas, where she lived still, making a living as "the cannon-chicken", dressed in rhinestones. She had top billing as the fastest chicken in town. No innuendo here. She was fast, really. As in "I can get from point A to point B faster than the famous bullet in the physics example with which teachers had been torturing students for generations." Obviously, a family trait.
From what the other messenger hawks had been able to pick up here and there, El Tuerto grew up in Las Vegas, among entertainers. When he was still a young fowl, he went looking for his father. El Tuerto made it to a small town called Lancre, in the mountains of an alternative world, and met his dad there. The cat made a living as the familiar of a happy witch. And even though the cat was not the fatherly type, there was a sense of pride when Greebo met El Tuerto. They ended up sharing a pint of ale at the local cat's pub and a good conversation. El Tuerto left Lancre appreciating that they did share the same attitude towards life and the sense of smell. Greebo could smell a rat in a one hundred mile radius. Again, no figure of speech here. That was the reason there were not rats left in Lancre. The cat didn't eat the rats though. What he did to the rats ... anyway, we are losing focus here. El Tuerto had inherited several family traits from his father. Most noticeable, the sense of smell, which no other hawk in the Fire Nation Army had, and his democratic approach to relationships.
After Lancre, the hawks heard from reliable sources that El Tuerto had joined the Secret Service as companion to a dashing looking secret agent with a lot of zeros in his code name. The Secret Agent and El Tuerto got along like a house on fire, until their boss, M, kicked El Tuerto out of the Secret Service for (1) conduct unbecoming a bird (something to do with a fellow colleague, the attractive Agent 99) and (2) for looking like crap in a tux. Ugly did not go well with tux and martinis apparently.
El Tuerto left the Secret Service in disgrace. However when M came looking for him, at the behest of his fellow Secret Agent friend and after Agent 99 confirmed on record that anything and everything had been consensual, El Tuerto was not interested in spy work anymore. The Secret Service had been too rarefied for the likes of him and he preferred the border town he was living in at the moment. Eventually, El Tuerto met Chin and made his way to the Fire Nation Army, where the other hawks were both, terrified and in awe of him.
And now the feeling in the stables was a happy one. Momo would wait for El Tuerto to come back from work, making sure everything looked good, Appa would let Nyla get close and Flopsie would clap, delighted that Bosco was back at his master's quarters and the stables were again a place for good conversation.