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Philatel-426 was a Mark V Clockwork Cherub and member of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, being its postmaster. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief)
Description
Personality
Philatel disliked romanticising missions, preferring to stay in the Cupid Homeworld. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery) Rosen-035 thought of Philatel as “steadfast”. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief) Philatel did however think of his Department of Postal Services as the most important organisation in the Cupid Homeworld, as he proudly announced to Jenny Everywhere (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker) He collected stamps, and was willing to great lengths to protect his collection. However, even then, he did not dare to interfere with the mail, viewing its protection as his sacred duty. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery)
Biography
In 1986, Philatel was already in charge of the Department of Postal Services. It was him who received the rhyming letters sent by the Society of the Rhyming Dove to the Crew. (PROSE: The Society of the Rhyming Dove)
In April of 2019, Philatel caught wind of a plan by Foreman-964's Department of Construction to raze the West Wing of the Post Office (where he'd been keeping his stamp collection) to make way for a warehouse. When a mailbag containing the Department of Architecture's blueprints for the new warehouse passed through his hands, he stole it and hid it in his office, hoping to halt the work. To evade suspicion, he put the Blue Feather on the case of looking for the missing mailbag, assuming that they would be too incompetent to trace it back to him. However, Acquaintanceship-982 did manage to figure it out eventually. Larrikin-1029 ambushed Philatel in his office and captured him in a burlap sack, allowing the Blue Feather members to get a confession from him. Instead of them handing him over to the Department of Discipline, he made a deal with them, allowing them to use the West Wing as a HQ from now on to replace their ratty old one, with them convincing the Department of Construction to demolish the former Blue Feather HQ in question instead of the West Wing. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery)
When a later warehouse-constructing scheme of Foreman's made the front page of The Cupid Courier #1020, Philatel commented with his opposition to the Department's incessant warehouse-building. Journalist-649 allowed Foreman to find out when collecting a comment from him, leading to Foreman getting into a fight with Philatel, or, rather, attempting to as Philatel fled into the distance. (PROSE: New Warehouse To Be Constructed In The Homeworld) Their feud had not abated by the time the Copper-Colored Council of Elders put up a Cupid Suggestion Box. With Philatel having been skulking near the Post Office, one of the earliest requests the Council found in the Suggestion Box was from Philatel, asking them to officially ban Foreman from visiting the Post Office except to collect his mail. (PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box)
He was interviewed in one of the front page articles of Issue 1034 of The Cupid Courier on the topic of the large shipments of Thymon Plushies which had been arriving in the Cupid Homeworld by means unknown, speculating that Lord Thymon himself was the one ordering and transporting them. Philatel also placed a classified ad on Page 2, promising shipping discounts to any Cupids who sent him new stamps to add to his collection. The offer pointedly did not apply to Foreman-964, and, in turn, Foreman's own classified ad, a recruitment drive for the Department of Construction, specified “no stamp-collectors allowed”. (PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas)
On Halloween 2019, Philatel got into the spirit of the holiday, making paper cutouts of bats and affixing them to the Post Office walls with Lord Thymon's help. After the Spirit Realm Gateway malfunctioned and allowed the Great Ghost's legion into the Cupid Homeworld, Philatel was transported to the Interdimensional Tavern by the Emergency Transport Button along with the other Cupids, only to be the one to remember that they'd left their whole fleet of Fog Ships in the Homeworld at the ghosts' disposal. Later, when Foreman-964 foolishly activated the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway, Philatel jumped in to try and stop him (though he had not actually understood what Foreman was doing, merely working off a default assumption that it would likely be worth stopping). This resulted in him temporarily being sent to the Spirit Realm alongside Foreman, Pythagoras-858, Technician-042 and Igor-1612. When Pythe figured out that they could now “haunt” the Homeworld, Philatel took advantage of his short time as a “fearsome shade” to “haunt” the Department of Construction's headquarters and tear Foreman's current stock of warehouse blueprints to shreds. They were soon returned to the corporeal world by Juliet-178, whom Pythe had managed to contact via haunting in order to tell her how to access the machine's reverse switch. Later in the day, after the ghosts had been dealt with, Foreman discovered what Philatel had done and “chased [him] across the Homeworld with a steam shovel”. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Later in the year, he found Lord Thymon napping inside a mailbag and previously believed that he had somehow been murdered with his body being hidden there. (PROSE: Peace and Quiet)
Philatel once lived through his “very own Christmas carol”, meeting the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ghost of Christmas Present and Ghost of Christmas Future. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy)
Philatel was one of the Cupids who submitted a question to The Cupid Courier's educational Q&A about the Rifts with Doctor Sigma. However, Philatel, head of the Department of Postal Services, just used the opportunity to complain about his rival, Foreman-964 of the Department of Construction, sarcastically asking if the noise created by a construction site could qualify as the kind of “major disturbances in the fabric of reality” which could sometimes trigger Rifts. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
He briefly met Jenny Everywhere during Jenny's first visit to the Homeworld. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)