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When Laharu the striped hyena isn't hanging out with King Amadu'o - with whom he has an improbable friendship despite the lion's temperament - he is often seen in the company of Petal, one of Sun Pride's broodmothers. Petal is a winged lioness whose flamingo-like pink plumage almost perfectly matches her maroon coat and skin. Even her eyes are pink. Petal is a gentle and demure creature, and she has been part of Sun Pride since the beginning; no one remembers who her parents may have been. Possibly no one ever knew. It's easy to understand, therefore, why rumors quietly circulate that Petal may have angelic ancestry; this would certainly explain her wings, and she does seem to have an appropriately soft and kind-hearted temperament. But who knows? The truth could be something more mundane... or far stranger.
Setting aside the mysteries presented by her wings and lineage, though, Petal makes good company, and she's a great broodmother. She loves cubs of all species and has been known to adopt offspring of other animals that she considers to be abandoned or in need. Laharu enjoys hanging out with her because she will give him food scraps if he's pitiful enough and never seems to lose patience with his antics.
Aside from Laharu, Petal's best non-lion friend is a fancy mouse she got ahold of somehow. She has named the mouse Aami, meaning 'Tiny', an appropriately twee-yet-literal and hence a very Petal sort of naming choice. Apparently, Aami once belonged to a human-cub, but the human-cub let him go for some reason. One of the pride's submales then found the very lost little mouse while on patrol as Aami roamed aimlessly through the African savannah with no idea where to go or how to take care of himself. Since the mouse was too small a morsel to be worth eating, he decided to bring it to Petal as a small gift, expecting the lioness to eat it herself. Instead, she kept Aami as her own little pet, finding wild cereals and other seeds for him to eat and otherwise caring for him just as she would any animal-child. Petal has firmly forbidden her charges to chase, pounce on, or eat her mouse, but some of the cubs struggle with controlling their predatory impulses at times. Petal has even caught Laharu eyeballing him once or twice. So Aami tends to hang out on top of Petal's head; it's safe there.
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