Notes

alright here's what's going down.

so Tyra and the twins go to the fair, and Tygra is kept separate from the others because the chief already has a buyer in mind. kit and kat spend most of the fair just dicking around, though they have to sneak into Tyra's tent since they have nowhere else to go at night. after three days the buyers arrive. tygra is taken way out to the middle of the woods (the twins follow of course) and the buyers are revealed to be birds, and specifically a representative of Vultaire, the Prefect of the bird city Avista, who is looking for a gift for his wife. the chief had contact with the birds purely on accident after discovering some communications technology that she managed to gt working, and they arranged this meeting specifically for the birds to buy Tyra, which they do. the twins sneak onto the ship, and they all ascend into the clouds.

so in avista, tygra's stuff is confiscated (that is, his armor and weapons) and all he's allowed to keep is his cuff, and only then because the birds can't figure out how to get it off. the twins are also mistaken for his attendants (he is a prince after all) and are allowed to stay. so tygra is presented to Voltaire's wife as a birthday present, and the birds are really condescending and superior, and treat the cats basically like barbarians, but tygra really is expected to just. sit around and be pretty. obviously sometimes the wife shows him off, but aside from that he has no duties. (side note: birds have much more revealing clothing than other species and more often than not go toples,s so tygra is shirtless most of the time to show off his stripes, and he hates it so much).

tygra is recalcitrant at first but eventually realizes he has to make nice in order to escape. so he starts working on that, befriending servants, guards, and most imprortantly, the wife. he learns actually a lot about their history with mumm-ra, bird culture, and piloting, which happens after he expresses interest in technology and flying. the twins, of course, are menaces and spend most of their time exploring the city and reporting back to tygra. it is they who learn that there's a power stone here, and the wife confirms that they have the tech stone.

so now Tyra's like well shit, I cant leave the stone but I can't take it otherwise the city will fall, so he doesn't know what to do. and then cheetah manages to contact kit. it's been two weeks by now? the others have made it back to the elephant village, but reveal that grune attacked the place. they waited for a few days before lion-o went into the astral plane, and he's been in there ever since. cheetah and panther have been helping the elephants withstand a siege from grune. kit tells cheetah about the stone, but without lion-o there, tygra and panther kind of vie for second in command status. panther is focusing on the siege, and they decide it falls to tygra to decide what to do.

so by now tygra has kind of fallen in love with the city. he's sure that if he spent more time there, he could come up with a way to get the stone, but he doesn't have a plan and he doesn't have a way to come up with one. so he decides they have to leave, because the others need their help. their plan kind of starts and ends with "steal a ship, get tf out of here." but tygra doesn't fully have Voltaire's trust, even if they have been kind of chilling with each other over the past few weeks. so tygra has to commit subterfuge, which means he needs to learn how his invisibility works.

they never gave him back his pistol or his whip, but he knows his invisibility is an innate talent and the whip was just to help him control it, so now he has to learn to do that on his own (eventually it comes down to the sound; rather than a whip snapping, he trains himself to react to his fingers snapping). so one night, he, invisible, sneaks out and gets to a ship while the kits steal back his stuff. they are caught by the wife, who is sad but understanding. vulttaire and the guards are not so understanding, and shoot tygra out of the sky. they crash and survive, but then they have to get back to the elephant village.

so from there it's a lot of walking before they find a place where they can buy mounts, but then they just. travel back to the elephant village. they manage to help withstand the siege, and then tygra goes into the astral plane to find lion-o, who the elephants say has become lost. tygra finds him facing mumm-ra, in his disguise, during that memory where tygra pushed lion-o into a pit, and the real tygra manages to help lion-o, regain his trust, and together they defeat him and retrieve the spirit stone. once they emerge, they drive off grune, stabilize panther and resolve to get him to the berbills to do something about his arms, and basically hug it out. tlion-o and the others apologize for not telling tygra about the nomads, tygra apologizes for being a stubborn ass about it afterwards, he tells them about the tech stone, and they go on with their quest the end.