Philatel-426
Philatel-426, sometimes mistakenly called Mailbag (actually the name of his old Co-Prefect), was a Mark V Clockwork Cherub and member of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. He served as the Crew's postmaster, i.e. the Prefect of the Department of Postal Services.
Description
Physical appearance
Philatel was a Mark V Clockwork Cherub. Most of his body was a yellowish-gold colour, with light silver accents, including his wings, which had a bat-like character. He had metallic hair, styled to appear receding and curling up at the back of his head. There was a square panel of grating to the left of his chest, and his feet resembled pointy shoes. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol, etc.)
Personality
Rosen-035 thought of Philatel as “steadfast”. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief)
Philatel was primarily defined by his love of collecting stamps, which he discovered in his youth; (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol) he 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) Philatel thought 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)
In his youth, he had shared in Journey-535's dream to go exploring the Multiverse, but he drifted apart from Journey as time went on, becoming more and more monomaniacally focused on the Department and his stamps; (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol) the adult Philatel disliked romanticising missions, preferring to stay in the Cupid Homeworld. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery) He rarely read fiction, preferring “stamp guides”. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
Powers & abilities
In his youth, Philatel was trained to use a bow and shoot Cupid Arrows, but by his own admission he was “never very good at that”. Similarly, he did not usually wear his rightful anti-gravity circuit. He did however own a personal Fog Ship and was capable of driving it. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
Biography
Early life
The Mark IV Clockwork Cherubs were scheduled to launch in 1974, logically placing the construction of Philatel and the other Mark Vs at some point between that year (PROSE: The Arena of the Detraxxi) and the Mark IXs' creation in 1982. (PROSE: The Dark Cabaret)
As a newly-built Cupid, Philatel trained with a bow and arrow in the old training hall, soon realising that he was untalented as a bowman. He was “no good at any of the usual Cupid things”, and made few friends among the other Mark Vs in training; their training lasted for several years, marked by the yearly Valentine's Day parties, but at each of them Philatel stayed by himself in a corner instead of dancing with the others. He soon discovered stamp-collecting, and failed in his various training missions even more thoroughly as he began to treat them merely as opportunities to collect more, without even trying to hit his mission objectives. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
Setting up the Department of Postal Services
While still in training, Philatel began to plan the creation of a Department of Postal Services. He submitted plans to the Cupid Parliament, but it was a long time before they were approved; in the meantime, he worked at the Department of Journalism under Editor-345, whom he would later recall as “the best boss [he] ever had”. Editor's warm demeanour went some way towards loosening up the young Philatel, once convincing him to leave behind some figures relating to “the subscription and circulation data of the Cupid Courier” to join in the fun of a party Editor had organised within the building.
At some point around this time, Philatel even made a true friend, the slightly younger Journey-535, and the two made plans to go explore the Multiverse together once Philatel was done setting up the Department. A month after the Department of Postal Services' building had been built, they again talked excitedly of those plans, but a year after that, when Journey brought up the subject, an increasingly distant Philatel dithered and claimed he was too busy planning new building extensions, including what would become his stamp wings. His stance did not alter when a saddened Journey suggested that he might, in that case, go on his own. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
The lonely Postmaster
By 1986, Philatel was in charge of the Department. 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)
For a number of years, the similarly close-minded and work-obsessed Mailbag-431 assisted Philatel as Co-Prefect, although he did not appear to have been involved when Philatel founded the Department. The two shared an office, over which both of their names were written, and were one another's “only friend” by that point. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
However, by April 2019, (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery) Mailbag had become one of the few Cupids ever to die, in unclear circumstances. A “document declaring him” so was signed by Philatel himself as well as the Council, the Supreme Quaestor, the Parliament, and the Cupid Prime. Philatel was Mailbag's “only mourner”. By December 2019, he still hadn't painted out Mailbag's name from above the door to the Prefect's office, for which reasons some young Cupids sometimes called Philatel “Mailbag”; he never corrected them. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
Feud with Foreman-964
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)
2019 Christmas season
In the 2019 Christmas season, an irate Philatel had to record a public-service announcement to quell the influx of letters addressed to Santa Claus, which the Depatment was in no position to deliver and which had piled high even after they were given a specific sorting crate; (COMIC: A Message from Philatel) he was further angered by the waste of good stamps on letters that couldn't even be delivered. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol)
Taking advantage of Dandy-432 having dragged Foreman-964 to the Prime Universe to cut down and retrieve a Christmas tree for Dandy's own house, (PROSE: Dandy and the Christmas Tree) Philatel stole “all of [Foreman's] documents approving new constructions”. Foreman discovered this as soon as he returned to the Cupid Homeworld, and ran frantically through the Mainland Cloud, looking for Philatel or anybody who knew where he'd taken the all-important papers — notably accosting Larrikin-1029, who was busy transporting a Christmas pudding on behalf of Bibliophile-962 and had no inkling of the situation. (PROSE: Larrikin and the Christmas Pudding)
Philatel subsequently lived through his “very own Christmas carol”. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy) The event began towards the end of December 24th, when, sitting angrily at his desk pondering the folly of Christmas, he rebuffed Dandy-432, who had tried to invite him to the Blue Feather's Christmas party; rebuked Charity-563 and Philantropist-926, of the Department of Donations, who had tried to persuade him to distribute a few stamps for free; dismissing a caroler at his window; and, finally, only acquiesced with extreme reluctance to Lord Thymon's request for a week off to visit his friends and family in the Void.
After returning to his house, he was visited by the ghost of Mailbag-431, who had been chained up in trinkets of his callousness and selfishness in life. Telling Philatel that there were beings in the Spirit Realm who would harshly punish him in the same manner if Philatel were to die, Mailbag warned his old partner that he would be visited by the Three Spirits. Indeed, over the course of the night, Philatel was successfully whisked through time and space by the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ghost of Christmas Present and Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, who forced him to realise what a humourless, selfish creature he'd become, and reminded him of the zest for life he had in his youth. He was particularly stricken when the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Christmas Yet-to-Come took him to the Void to see Lady Spatium and her children, including Tiny Thymon, who was in danger of fading away if Philatel did not start allowing Thymon more time off to educate and mould his shapechild duplicate.
After the obligatory graveyard sequence, however, things took an unusual turn, even though the Spirits had been making a valiant effort at sticking to the classic script despite the newness of Christmas in the grand scheme of their charge's life. The Ghosts of Past and Present turned out to have been captured outright by the invaders to the Spirit Realm right as they left Philatel. Realising what had occurred, Yet-to-Come took Philatel into the Spirit Realm itself and set him the final task of walking a subjectively-infinite distance to reached the captured spirits, and then free them from the ghost-repelling chains in which they had been bound. After he succeeded, the Spirits explained what had occurred, then erased Philatel's memory of the deviation, returning him to his house in the morning of December 25th believing that he had come directly from the graveyard vision.
Calling upon the young Cupid caroler to go and buy a turkey for him from one of the unauthorised shops in the lower clouds, he then hopped into his ship to deliver it (and a bevy of stamps) to Thymon and his family, alongside the announcement that he'd decided to promote Thymon to Co-Prefect of the Department. Back in the Homeworld, he walked up and down the Mainland Cloud, delivering well wishes to everyone he met — including the Donations Cupids, to whom he gifted a fantastical amount of stamps before turning up at Dandy's party, where he was happily welcomed by all, with the possible exception of Pessimist-242. (PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol) His “Dickensian journey of self-discovery” was noted, and approved of, by Cupid Fact File #1225, written up shortly thereafter. (PROSE: Father Christmas)
Later events
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)
