Literature / Griffin Ranger

Ranger Harrell, going in for the kill.

Griffin Ranger is a two-part work of Xenofiction by Roz Gibson, an active contributor to Furry Fandom for the better part of 40 years and well known within that community for her Bittersweet Endings, Darker and Edgier tales, Jerkass protagonists and Ax-Crazy villains. The Griffin Ranger duology is no exception to any of these rules.

Set on a Fictional Earth where there were no anthropocentric mass extinctions and little burning of fossil fuels, so the atmosphere is oxygen-rich, vast forests, prairies and small city-states cover the land, and six sentient races live and toil side by side:^note There's also the Longtooths, a race of sentient smilodons, but they are limited to a single cameo.

• The "greenies"^note a Fantastic Slur the griffins use or builders^note Their name for themselves, a Gadgeteer Genius, chicken-sized parrot-like race that supplies all the high technology of the world. Aggressive and expansionist.
• The wolfen, a race of anthropomorphic wolves loosely allied to the greenies. Mercenaries, Mooks and nomadic raiders.
• The herders, a race of sentient dogs that do exactly what their name suggests. Neutral but friendly. Normally hate wolfen, but there are exceptions...
• The hanz, a race of anthropomorphic raccoon/lemurs, who show handiness with high technology. Tight allies with the griffins.
• The thunderbirds, airplane-sized, feral condors that nonetheless have a primitive sentience.
• ...and the griffins, a mix of predatory bird and feline, the world's police force (thus the title) and the top dogs.

The story opens on the "Northern Continent" about 50 years after a giant greenie-griffin war. The greenies had a huge advantage in firearms, but the griffins and hanz figured out how to make antiballistic Deflector Shields, neutralizing the greenie advantage and winning the war. The griffins proposed a truce, allowing the greenies to stay and integrate into the Northern Continent in return for their disarming and following griffin law. The greenies accepted. Greenies' high technology, from maglev "Rail-Runners" to radios and video, now benefits greenie and griffin alike. But the truce is uneasy at best, and enforced by the talons and claws of the Griffin Rangers, a paramilitary law enforcement organization that keeps the peace throughout the Twin Continents.

The story follows Ranger Harrell White-Shoulders, a veteran ranger and huge griffin who has no trouble holding his position or territory. All is not well, however. A Thunderbird suddenly appears near a griffin city, and, even more unusually, he's there to seek out a specific griffin: Harrell. He reports the mysterious murder of his mate by armed greenies and wolfen - a blatant treaty violation. As if that wasn't enough to worry about, griffins have started disappearing around the greenie town of Kaerling, near where the Thunderbird was murdered. Harrell quickly realizes something very fishy is going on around that town...

Enter Kwaperramusc, a literal Agent Peacock and an Investigator. He's one of the small and non-predatory 'dancer-griffins' that are covered in iridescent feathers and do elaborate display dances as a mating ritual. Kwap isn't just a ladykiller, however; he is also the most skilled detective in Defiance, a griffin island city-state and the seat of the rangers. He's assigned to Ranger Harrell to solve the mystery of the disappearances.

The two quickly find themselves in over their heads when they uncover a greenie conspiracy and a secret weapon that threatens not just the missing griffins, but their entire world...

Set in two volumes, Crossline Plains details Harrell and Kwap's investigation, and The Monster Lands features our heroes lost in a hostile land - our Earth - as they try to locate the missing griffins and save their world...as well as themselves. Both books areavailable from Rabbit Valley Comics, with ebook editions available on Amazon.

A third novel, Griffin Ranger: Isthmus, is in process by the author. It details the post-Monster world, where the greenies are busy constructing their own version of the Panama Canal on the Southern Continent, Monster technology has fully infiltrated greenie and griffin society, and Harrell is one of the mercenary rangers hired to oversee security.

Mild spoilers below; major spoilers are still covered. The basic secret that the missing griffins are alive and captive is not spoiler-tagged. As well, there may be unmarked spoilers in the ancillary pages. Proceed with caution!

Despite the Funny Animal content, these books are NOT. FOR. KIDS. You have been warned.

These novels provide examples of:

• Alpha and Beta Wolves: Both wolfen and herder tribes are led by "alphas". Harrell notes that the herder alpha in his territory is unusually large and probably half-wolfen.
• Alternate Universe: Set on an alternate-universe Earth where humans didn't evolve, but a lot of the same animals did.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Actually averted with the greenies - during the course of the story, Harrell and Kwap meet several that either simply want to live in peace and do their appointed tasks, or are actively working against Whitehead's plot. And many are every bit as much victims of the human lab as the griffins are, leading to a critical Heel–Face Turn.
  • Also averted with the wolfen; most of them are cannon-fodder mooks, raiders and nogoodnicks, but there's actually a wolfen alpha tactician in the capital city of Defiance, and a number of wolfen captives in the human lab, that happily Heel–Face Turn and join Vaniss' war flock once freed.
• Anyone Can Die: And most of the secondary characters are dead by the end of the story.
• Barbarian Tribe: The Newlanders and Tropicas are both Barbarian Tribe griffins; both areas lacked hanz, both areas have savage, primitive griffins, and both were conquered by the greenies (though see Forever War, below, on how the Newlanders never have stopped fighting them).
• Berserk Button: After his terrible experiences in the Monster Lands, the sight of any monster artifact will turn Harrell into an instant killing machine. As a really unlucky young herder leader, wearing an ersatz laboratory tag, learns the hard way in the first chapter of Isthmus.
• Big Damn Heroes: Vaniss and her Defiance war flock invade our world, manage to ally with the human Texas Rangers, and rescue the remaining captives...at terrible cost to themselves.
  • Ranger Cheer and her family have just as important a Big Damn Heroes moment, when they come to the aid of a wounded and desperate Harrell, pursued by armed greenies and multiple Tropica griffins.
• Bittersweet Ending: The griffins defeat Whitehead and destroy the lab, gate buildings, and rogue greenie city, but virtually all of the missing griffins were dead by the time they found them, and barely a handful of the war flock makes it off our Earth alive. Harrell's daughter Aera was among the rescued, but she lost virtually all her friends to the lab, and was horribly traumatized by being raped and forced to bear eggs repeatedly. Vaniss' actions limited the overt war to Whitehead, Kaerling, and their human partners, but greenie-griffin tensions are running very high after the battle, and worst of all, Kwap does not believe the gate to the human world is closed for good - and that human invasion is inevitable. He overrules Harrell and dedicates himself to full time study of the captive humans, including one of the Big Bads. Harrell himself is so broken that the griffin he was died; he resigns his ranger commission, gives the territory to his apprentice and disappears into the wilderness.
  • Isthmus ends on a bitter note with only a touch of sweetness. Idlewood is ultimately foiled thanks to KeeKee and his allies are either dead or sent to a forced labor camp (with the traitor griffins getting their flight feathers clipped for good measure). However, the bombs still managed to kill a large number of people, including Twig, causing a grieving KeeKee to change her name to Shrike^note which is what Twig said earlier in the book to tease her. Despite what happened, the Book of Atrocities that caused the mess in the first place isn't burned, but instead sent over to the savants studying the captive humans in Defiance. At the very end, Vaniss calls Harrell to inform him that one of the humans managed to successfully escape and it's all but outright said to be Russell.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Fictional Earth under the Griffin Rangers. The rangers are tough and mostly Lawful Neutral, but they believe in Might Makes Right (below), are heavily afflicted with Fantastic Racism, and aren't at all above torture and lethal force if it gets them what they want. The greenies, on the other hand, want to take over the world and one wants to simply exterminate all the other peoples save his own. Any griffin nations they beat in war have their land expropriated and their population indentured at best and outright enslaved at worst. Those that don't go with the program are mutilated and crippled for fun and profit. However, on the Northern Continent, the greenies are for the most part well-behaved members of society until the conspiracy is fully revealed, which kicks off another greenie-griffin war.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The greenies' eyes are cold, emotionless black. This, however, ends up a partial aversion: While Whitehead and his minions use the Black Eyes of Evil trope to the hilt, many other greenies aren't at all evil but productive, even friendly members of their mixed society.
• Booby Trap: Whitehead becomes aware very early that a war flock is coming to wipe him and his facility off the face of the map, so he 'borrows' several human ideas to make sure getting in is very, very costly. The first griffin that touches the fence burns alive because he'd electrified it. The next Red Shirt discovers the hard way that he'd buried antipersonnel mines all around the fence, too.
• Book Ends: The mystery is launched by Harrell talking to a Thunderbird that lost his mate to the greenies and wolfen. At the very end of the story, before he departs for the wilderness, he finds that same Thunderbird and tells him that his mate was avenged and all the greenies responsible are dead.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Remarkably little of this, though there are some descriptive terms used. Viruses, bacteria, protozoa and other microscopic pathogens are referred to collectively as "parasites", the greenies' maglev trains as "Rail-Runners," radios of all kinds are "Barkboxes" and so on.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Used freely by the greenies and the griffins to get information, as well as punish the captive griffins when they get too rambunctious.
• Common Tongue: The griffins have Griffin Common, which all griffins and greenies speak and all the races can understand.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Every secondary character that survives until the final attack joins Vaniss' war flock at Kaerling to help take down Whitehead and rescue the griffin captives on human!Earth.
• Cool Old Guy: Yaht-eet, the ancient station manager for the Flatland City Rail-Runner station. He's cool enough that he isn't even offended by the Fantastic Slur 'greenie':
  Yaht-eet:After all, we are green.
  • ...then he gives Harrell and Kwap their first truly solid lead. He even trades them for his stationmaster's RFID tag so they can investigate cargo! He finishes by pointing out that not all Builders are like Whitehead's black hats. Harrell is impressed enough with Yaht-eet he shares a griffin laugh with him when Kwap gets Hoist by His Own Petard via Nightmare.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: From the human perspective, any death by griffin is this, though special mention goes to the kills they make by slowly crushing the life out of their prey.
  • Tamis, Tyke Bomb or not. The attacker is a young Red Tailed Griffin, Tory, rather than one of the big griffins; he's unable to make a quick, clean kill, so all he can do is keep slowly driving his talons further and further into the poor screaming creature's skull and throat until the humans come and break both Tory's front legs... by which time Tamis is nothing but a twitching corpse.
  • In-Universe, the truly cruel deaths are suffered by the captives of the human lab, everything from being egg-bound until death to being infected with a deadly plague over and over and over again until they die.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The history of the greenie-griffin wars are a series of these. For most of their history, the giant horse-sized griffins Curb Stomped the chicken-sized greenies. Then the greenies developed firearms, and started Curb Stomping the griffins right back. They swept like a green tide over most of the world - and then they arrived on the Northern Continent, where the griffins and hanz upped the ante with Deflector Shields. That caused the greenies to get Curb Stomped again. After that, the greenies sued for peace.
  • As well, any time a griffin gets in melee range with anything but another griffin, the end result is a Curb Stomp usually followed by an explosion of Ludicrous Gibs.
• Damsel in Distress: Completely inverted. It's Harrell that's in distress and Vaniss that has to rescue him; furthermore, it's his daughter, Aera, that becomes The Leader to the captives. This becomes Fridge Brilliance when you realize that birds of prey are highly matriarchal; the females are much bigger, much stronger, and take the lead in courting and mating.
• Dark Secret: None of the griffin captives on our Earth will talk about the nature of the experiments done to them. Cerrick finally breaks down and reveals it to Harrell: The griffins are brought into heat artificially by hormonal treatment and forced to rape one another to produce eggs. The idea is so abhorrent that one immediately commits Seppuku afterward, and the rest make a pact never to tell outsiders about it - even Harrell, imprisoned with them.
• Darkest Hour: After they succeed in killing Tamis, Tory has his legs broken by the human guards and is taken away...and shortly thereafter, Deverall comes for all the black-tags. Cerrick pulls out his RFID ace card and tries to let Harrell out, but Deverall hits him with a sedative and he's knocked out before he can accomplish anything. When Deverall comes for Voll, Aera goes full metal Mama Bear and almost breaks out of her enclosure, but she too is sedated before she can. All the other griffins can do is watch two of their remaining number also sedated and rolled away to their deaths.
• Death World: The Monster Lands, a.k.a. our Earth. Poisoned, oxygen-poor air, diseases that kill within days, vehicles that can crush even the biggest griffin...and that's before you get to the "Monsters".
• Deflector Shield: How the griffins of the Northern Continent won their war with the greenies. However, too many hits to it at once will overload it and short it out. They overload fast against human weapons, making them very beatable in the human world.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Whitehead and his Dragons have some legitimate reasons for hating griffins. The Newland war features atrocities a-plenty against greenie civilians, for example (and Enther-eet is fresh from that war, with both his wings missing). The griffins of the Northern Continent are not that much better; they never fail to remind the greenies they make the laws, they use a Fantastic Slur routinely and the penalty for violating griffin laws is often death or exile. However, developing a genocidal plague to wipe out every griffin and every hanz, as well as a generous number of wolfen and even greenies, as well as kidnapping, torturing and killing a bunch of innocent teenagers and children? That is going WAAAAY over the top...
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The griffin-greenie world makes a lot of sense if you imagine the griffins as aboriginal peoples (such as Native Americans) and the greenies as a colonial power, having very high fertility, high technology and a perpetual hunger for land and resources. Unlike our world, the Northern Continent griffins fought the greenies to a standstill, and the result was a much more integrated society. Other smaller griffin societies, however, were colonized, their land expropriated and their population indentured at best and enslaved at worst. The Newlanders refused the greenies' "offer" of indenture and are engaged in a Guilt-Free Extermination War with them for their land.
• Driven to Suicide: Griffins have a deep-seated belief that if they become a burden on others, or a shame to their families, the logical choice is Seppuku. An inflicted disability, such as being pinioned by greenies, or a major failure, such as the gang rape perpetuated in Deverall's lab, usually leads to this. But Altera provides an alternate view: If someone loves and cares about you, it's reason enough to try and live.
• Dwindling Party: The griffin captives on our Earth steadily decline in number as their use as lab animals diminishes.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Rusted the paralyzed herder deflects a kamikaze grenade attack by one of the Twins, at the cost of being turned into Ludicrous Gibs when it explodes inside her own jaws.
• Eye Scream: During the final battle Kwap gets an eye damaged by Sharkan-eet, seeking revenge for his earlier capture. He ends up with a (temporary) Eyepatch of Power, cementing his new role as all-around badass, before substituting it for a tasteful glass eye instead.
• Face Death with Dignity: When some of the captive griffins are black-tagged, they determine to resist to the very end, but Voll simply comforts Aera right until the final needle, choosing to die like a griffin, not like a wolfen.
• Face–Heel Turn: A few mercenary Tropica griffins join Whitehead as shock troops against the Northern Continent griffins for fun and profit. Whitehead's intended reward to them is to slaughter them all with his bioengineered plague, same as every other griffin.
• Fantastic Racism: "Greenie" is a derogatory term the griffins use. The greenies call themselves Builders, and it's no idle boast.
• Final Solution: Death for the griffins and hanz from a bioengineered plague, so Whitehead and the greenies can rule the griffins' world unchallenged.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Kwap and his assigned hanz, Tirrsill, close-bond in braving the terrors of the Monster Lands together. At the end, Harrell willingly gives up Tirrsill to Kwap and they go off together, now bonded for life.
• Forever War: The Newland greenie-griffin war has been going on a long, long time - over 100 years according to one character. The greenies technically conquered Newland but the griffins there fight a perpetual guerilla war against them. The Newlanders lack shields, so they can't make headway against the greenies, but they fight so ferociously that the greenies can't completely subdue them either. Those fighters they catch they kill on the spot - which makes the survivors fight even harder and nastier. The greenies are fanatic about preventing a single shield from getting into Newland - if ever the Newlanders got shields, every single greenie in Newland would end up in the crop of one griffin or another by the end of the day.
• Fragile Speedster: To some extent all the falcon-based griffins, but couriers - often "blue" griffins - are the fastest and most fragile of all.
• Genre Shift: The first book starts out with all the elements of a basic Western; desperadoes, shifty characters, a Town with a Dark Secret, a Big Bad that kills ruthlessly to advance his nefarious plans. It shifts hard to science fiction once the action moves to our Earth.
• Gorn: And so, so much of it. Anytime a griffin gets within melee range with their avian talons, the results are messy for whatever it is they want to neutralize - and it's all described in loving detail. Any time a firearm manages to get through a griffin Deflector Shield, the end product is just as messy and just as lovingly described.
• Heel–Face Turn: Coro-er, the social savant of the greenies, doesn't share Whitehead's genocidal insanity and as a result is imprisoned in the human lab. She joins with the griffins to take Whitehead down once she is freed from the lab, and proves a priceless ally, as she can translate between griffin and human speech. A number of wolfen also Heel–Face Turn on Whitehead for similar reasons.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Winter chooses to go out in a blaze of glory, and succeeds in incapacitating Deverall and forcing him to use his plague on her before she dies.
  • Also mention to the disabled herder Rusted, who grabs Soonder-er in her jaws and triggers the grenade she's carrying at just enough range to protect Kwap... and is literally blown to bits for her troubles.
• Hidden Depths: Kwap and Tirrsill. The tiny hanz starts out as an entertainment company's secretary, barely out of adolescence and ends up a battle hardened veteran and survival expert after being forced to help Kwap survive in the human world. Kwap himself ends up the same way and for the same reason, and the two end up Heterosexual Life-Partners. See Fire-Forged Friends, above.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Irrant-eet, the inventor of the dimensional gates. His first gate opens straight to the vacuum of space, as in that universe, Earth didn't exist. Almost everyone in the facility dies screaming as they're sucked through the gate, but thanks to Heroic Sacrifice they manage to close it before it becomes a Doomsday Device. Irrrant-eet is subsequently executed by being torn to pieces and his notes supposedly destroyed, but then Whitehead gets ahold of them...
• Hollywood Encryption: Actually averted. Once the universal greenie tracking of all com transmissions is detected, Coro-er develops a system of symmetric encryption using paper-and-pencil pads, meant for short coded transmissions, and she makes a lot of pads to make sure if one is captured by Whitehead, they can readily switch to another. It's described pretty accurately, and it works, leaving the greenies in the dark on Defiance's war flock preparations, and giving them secure transmissions during the Battle of Kaerling.
• Hope Spot: Vaniss and the remains of the war flock finally return to the human gate building, ready to go through and complete the rescue of the missing griffins - when Russell's goons open fire, kill most of the remaining members of the war flock, and take down Vaniss' shield.
  • The captive griffins have Tirrsill, Kwap's hanz, drop by for a casual chat and an escape attempt but the humans catch on to her and she has to flee, unable to free any of the captives. Many of them are subsequently killed.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: The first descriptions of "the Monsters" are reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft, with much said on how unnatural their expressive faces, long limbs, and seemingly precarious stance. To say nothing of the greenie who went insane after six months in the human world.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Invoked by name. Our Earth has a lab full of captive griffins, hanz, herders, and greenies being used as lab animals to develop a plague that would wipe out most non-greenie sentient life on the griffins' world. It gets worse when the smarter greenies realize that if the gate is left open, human invasion of griffin!Earth is inevitable, and humans would leave nothing standing and no-one alive.
• I Eat Greenies for Breakfast: A common feature of Newland griffins during their war - greenies are small enough to go down whole and that's exactly what they do. Their children aren't exempt, either. The Northern Continent griffins are revolted by the idea - tearing greenies limb from limb in combat is fine, but preying on them like animals is a bridge too far.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A favored tactic of the griffins and their six inch, diamond-sharp talons - what they don't reduce to Ludicrous Gibs they simply punch holes in until it stops living.
• Jerkass: Ranger Harrell. Starting as little more than a bully verging on Dumb Muscle, he gets better as the series wears on, though he also gains the famous Thousand-Yard Stare and eventually ends up a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
• Jerk Ass Has A Point: Harrell thinks that griffins are too dependent on greenie technology, and that the griffins of the Twin Continents would be better off if they are ALL expatriated. It comes out that all greenie comm technology is a Trojan Horse, used by Whitehead against any who discovered or tried to interfere with his genocidal war preparations.
• Klingon Promotion: The griffins practice a mild form of this. Their job is in part based on the territory they hold; to take their job, a challenger has to beat them in (non-mortal) combat and take the territory, which sends the loser into exile until they, in turn, can win a challenge or stake out a new territory. It's further moderated by social custom - it's considered very bad form, for example, for an experienced adult to take the entry-level territory of a subadult. At the end, Harrell gives his territory and commission up to his apprentice without so much as lifting a talon, voluntarily going into exile.
• Lightning Bruiser: Most any falcon-based griffin, but the queen of it is Vaniss White-Shoulders. Her blinding speed and hulking size are a near-unbeatable combination.
  • Rine Blue also proves to be this, despite having only one foot and being a non-combat courier griffin .
• Ludicrous Gibs: Anyone not a griffin unfortunate enough to end up in melee with one quickly ends up an explosion of gibs in their talons.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: Kwap has one secret weapon that he deploys only when given no other choice, a jet-engine scream that's loud enough to paralyze wolfen (who have sensitive ears) and make even other griffins very uncomfortable.
• Mercy Kill: Once Vaniss finds out that the missing captives had all been injected with plague, she terminates the rescue attempts and simply brings the building down on top of them for a quick death.
• Might Makes Right: The griffins' world runs on this. Whoever is biggest and strongest wins. On the Northern Continent, that's the griffins. It runs the griffin society as well: The bigger the griffin, the better their job, wealth, and territory. Handicapped griffins are expected to commit Seppuku or end up in a kind of "Untouchable" caste. The greenies, being Gadgeteer Geniuses, attempted to neutralize the griffins' physical advantages with firearms. They mostly failed thanks to Deflector Shields the griffins possessed on the Northern Continent, but in those territories they did take over, they got to work destroying the land for extraction and indenturing the resident griffins. There aren't a lot of white knights.
• Morality Pet: The entire hanz race started out as this, as they voluntarily allied with and bonded to the griffins, which in turn, started toning down their natural solipsistic, arrogant natures, and gave them ready "hanz" to do the tasks their big bird forefeet weren't dexterous enough to handle.
• Never Found the Body: Whitehead, as Genre Savvy as he is, has a blind spot when it comes to Kwap as he never insists on seeing his body. Though he's set straight at least once by Russell, the delay proves costly. Eventually he learns: If his mooks can't show him the body, he assumes they are still alive and goes to do the job himself. Rather appropriately, he's trapped in the human world at the end, but his body is never found, either, so he's still out there somewhere...
• Noodle Incident: Among all the tragedy and darkness, there's Coro-er's unabashed hatred of a fellow greenie captive, "Shithead," whom she refers to as "Whitehead's little vent preener." Despite this, "Shithead" is clearly on the side of the griffins, and exactly why Coro-er hates him so much is never addressed.^note Word of God is that "Shithead" relentlessly teased and trolled Coro-er during their mutual stay in the lab, though eventually he did discover they were on the same basic side: Against Whitehead.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: Griffins aren't simply eagle and lion, but based off many different raptors: white-shoulders are based off Stellar's Sea Eagles, white-heads after Bald Eagles, golden-napes after Golden Eagles, red-tails after Red Tailed Hawks, and so on. They also lack feline tails, instead having archaeopteryx-like bony tail-flaps with feathers ringing them. The really different griffins are the dancer griffins, based off several Birds of Paradise species.
• Panthera Awesome: Subverted. The griffins' hind-halves are cat, but they're all the same generic Big Cat structure. They define their clan (white-shoulders, prairie, etc.) entirely by their bird features. Their tails are very birdlike (albeit longer then real bird tails) and their plumbing is bird-like, too. The Author's a bird enthusiast and you can tell.
  • Played straight with the Longtooths (sentient sabercats) an Expy for the Inuit and Bedouin people of our Earth. They're feral, but they make very hardy workers and laborers, highly sought after by the greenies. They make only a cameo in the first two novels, but play a central role in the short story Hunter, and are the backbone of the Isthmus Canal non-flying workforce.
• Pet The Hanz: As standoffish, arrogant and solipsistic as the griffins are, they care intensely about their hanz servants and families, and attacking a griffin's hanz is a guaranteed way of pushing their Berserk Button and getting a Tasmanian Devil with talons right in your face.
  • Deverall's lab techs keep "pet" herder puppies around as companions - the allure of a dog with human intelligence is apparently too much to resist. That, unfortunately, is weaponized against the griffin captives, when they install an imprinted herder puppy to act as a living alarm system. It doesn't stop the griffins from killing him, and in a truly horrible fashion, as part of another escape attempt.
• Plot Armor: Harrell and Kwap have it six inches thick, but it gets pretty battered and beaten up as the story goes on.
• Professional Killer: For his Elite Mooks, Whitehead hires a number of Tropica Griffins, who were interested in seeing new lands and making a quick passel of credits chasing off or (if necessary) killing other griffins. He also has a pair of Creepy Twins assassins that he deploys for special jobs like killing Kwap and everybody in his roost.
• Psycho for Hire: Mercenary wolfen and Tropica griffins form the backbone of Whitehead's Mook squadrons and cannon fodder.
• Rape as Backstory: Brought home hard core by the story of what happened to Aera. She and her storm chasing friends, young and naive, were lured straight into Whitehead's trap, drugged, and kidnapped for no other reason that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There she was repeatedly raped, forced to bear eggs, and watched one friend after another taken away to their deaths. Even though Aera was ultimately rescued, she, Cerrick and Raan were the sole survivors of the group. It's little wonder that both she and Harrel were massively traumatized.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: A major theme of the second book. The captives were forced to rape one another to produce eggs for Deverall, and it is a Dark Secret that they even keep from their parents and relatives. Made even worse by the fact that part of a Twin Continents subadult's passage to adulthood is to show mastery over their bestial impulses; subadults being forced to mate with one another - to be chemically induced to give in to the base sex drive - is a direct violation of this powerful taboo. Even Harrell doesn't have the heart to make them become victims all over again by telling that part of the story, and he stands as The Stoic against Vaniss to prevent her harassing Aera about it.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Played deadly straight with the Thunderbirds, which do indeed have red eyes. Most just want to keep to themselves and rarely interact with any other race, but the rangers always keep a weather eye out in case one of them goes completely savage - which happened to Harrell as an apprentice when he went out with a team to kill a rogue Thunderbird. Said Thunderbird, an adolescent, had gone completely Ax-Crazy, and it knocks his master and mentor out of the sky in a surprise attack. Then it proceeds to absolutely shred the rest of the ranger squadron while Harrell helplessly watches his mentor die.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Harrell is most definitely red, and Kwap is icy blue. Ranger Nightmare, however, actually gets them to reverse briefly, as Kwap is forced to run for his life from a hopelessly curious Nightmare. When Harrell dryly reminds Kwap that the Dancer did suggest staying at the Flatland City Rail-Runner station overnight - with Nightmare - Kwap starts screaming Dancer obscenities at him.
• Red Shirt Army: Vaniss' war flock. They start dying the moment they arrive at the gate and drop like flies when attacking in our Earth.
• Rite of Passage: The griffins' Rite of Passage has two parts:
  • The first is a sort of rumspringa where newly adult griffins go out into the larger world to find themselves, prior to taking a territory and a job and settling down. Harrell's original journey was to track and find one of the billion-strong flocks of Nomad pigeons, and his reward was the feast to end all feasts. His daughter, Aera, joined up with several of her friends to go chase tornadoes - and it was during that chase that she and all her friends disappeared, kicking off the plot proper.
  • The second: The subadults have to prove they have mastery over their animalistic impulses and can be properly disciplined, civilized members of griffin society. This is a huge part of why the subadults being forced to mate with one another in Deverall's lab is so completely devastating to them: They're essentially forced to fail this part of the test via chemical induction. The intense shame of it quickly drives one to suicide, and the others vow to keep the secret at all costs from the adult griffins.
• Rule of Cool: The entire griffin world runs on it. It's supposed to be a Fictional Earth; most of the same animals evolved, but instead of humans you have sentient parrots, wolves, dogs, giant prehistoric birds...and griffins, which somehow managed to mix bird of prey and feline traits in one body.
• Schizo Tech: Fairly extreme. The greenies (and to an extent the hanz) introduced digital television, distance communication, Deflector Shields and maglev trains to a world that would have been in the early Bronze Age otherwise. Your typical griffin roost is a hole in a really big tree or a cave in a cliff - reinforced with adobe or concrete, covered in a climate control shell and with all the conveniences of a high-tech home.
  • There's also a huge difference between the Northern Continent griffins (with hanz and full access to greenie and hanz high tech) and the griffins of the other continents, which are barely above the "barbarian tribe" level.
• Sequel Hook: Whitehead is lost on human!Earth, but most of the greenie technicians at the human gate building survived and are trapped with him. The machinery was all on griffin!Earth, but the knowledge is still available to Whitehead. He'll be back...
• Servant Race: The hanz. They weren't created to be servants, but they're happy to serve the griffins in many capacities as their hands. In return, they're provided protection from everything from wolfen to greenies, have free travel rights within griffin cities, and get the privilege of physical contact with the griffins. Most servant hanz live with their families in "their" griffin's roost and are treated by the griffins in turn as part of the family. Abusing a hanz is likely to incur severe penalties. Killing a hanz is a capital crime.
• Shown Their Work: Roz Gibson knows a lot about birds and it shows. The griffins are built and act in ways completely realistic for large birds of prey; many Birds of Paradise really do have very elaborate courtship dances, and the greenies have all the parrot mannerisms - including plucking themselves bald when they are under strain.
  • The "parasite" that blinded Altera Blue was likely West Nile Virus; birds that are not outright killed by it often develop lifelong neurological symptoms, and blindness is a common one in birds of prey. Their optic nerves are acutely sensitive to the viral encephalitis that often accompanies West Nile.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: At the fulcrum. It's a Gorn and violence filled world where might makes right, but the rangers are for the most part an honorable organization, and heroes often come from the most unexpected of sources.
• Tempting Fate: The courier put in charge of the pictures of the dimensional gate, an extremely fast "blue" griffin, is told the greenies would stop at nothing to kill anyone with those pictures. He says he can fly higher than the greenies or their firearms can reach. He wasn't counting on them using anti-air artillery on him.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Harrell. At the start of Isthmus he is back to being a senior ranger, now a mercenary helping run security on the Isthmus Canal project.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Sadly averted in the case of the human lab. While the guards at first consider the griffins to be dumb animals, they quickly figure out otherwise, and while Harrell and the captives try a series of attacks, they learn fast and virtually no attack works more than once. Their one real escape attempt gets them nowhere because Deverall put cameras in the hallway. The second attempt, during the collection of the black-tags, lasts less than 2 minutes. There isn't a third.
• Too Dumb to Live: Tamis may have been a young pup and raised as a Tyke Bomb, but it really wasn't a good idea to, caged or not, taunt the giant predators big enough to swallow you in one gulp. He pays for that later, in just about the most horrible way imaginable.
• The Unpronouncable: The aboriginal name Kwaperramusc, something even other griffins have trouble with, so he just shortens it to "Kwap" most of the time. Notable that Tirrsill the hanz can pronounce it perfectly, foreshadowing her bonding with him later.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Kaerling, a greenie city near Crossline Plains. It harbors a extremely illegal dimensional gate to our Earth, where oil is pumped in and weapons come out, and they are preparing for a genocidal war with the griffins using a new human bioengineered plague. The moment anybody starts zeroing in on any part of this plan, the greenies attack fanatically - including attacking their families and loved ones to try and get to them. Kwap's instructions, given before he goes through the gate, are explicit - wipe Kaerling from the face of the Earth to win the war before it begins in earnest. Vaniss organizes a war flock to do just that, and by the end of the story it's nothing but a smoking hole in the ground.
• Trojan Horse: All greenie communication technology is a giant Trojan Horse - it's all tapped as a way of tracking and eliminating anyone that catches on to Kaerling's war preparations. Only very late in the stories to the griffins catch on to this, and by then it's almost too late.
• Tyke Bomb: Greenies in Newland frequently steal griffin eggs to raise the griffins as Tyke Bombs, using them as shock troops against the guerilla fighters.
  • That tactic also is imported by Whitehead. Once the human lab workers figure out cameras alone aren't enough to watch the griffin captives, they start raising herder puppies as Tyke Bombs, and install one to act as a living alarm system. The captives try to convince him to Heel–Face Turn but he's too well imprinted on humans, so they're forced to kill him, and since the only one that could get to him was a young Red Tail, his death is a slow, horrific drawn-out affair.
• War Crime Subverts Heroism:
  • An Ax-Crazy white-tailed griffin named Winter, describing in chirpy detail how she fought for the Newlanders in their Forever War with the greenies.
  • During the attack on Deverall's lab a hyped-up war flock griffin corners and disembowels Kriss, Russell's Dragon, a civilian and noncombatant that wasn't even wearing any lab gear. Then the Red Shirt starts eating her twitching corpse. Whitehead has his Pet the Dog moment - Kriss had always treated him with respect, and he considered her a friend...it's hard not to be satisfied when Whitehead, taking revenge for Kriss' death, blows the Red Shirt away with his BFG.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Despite their speed, power and lethally sharp talons, the griffins go down fast to firearms. That's partially rectified by their Deflector Shields, but said shields go down equally fast against human weapons.
  • Like most birds, griffins have very delicate lungs designed to extract every bit of oxygen from the air they can. When the humans accidentally expose them to tear gas, they promptly choke to death or have their lungs irreversibly scarred.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Mnear proved to be a formidable villainess and foil to Harrell. She ends up a crushed lump of meat in his talons before the end of the first book.
• We Have Reserves: Greenies favor a combination of this method of warfare and Zerg Rush (see below).
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Most griffin juveniles (prepubescent children) and subadults (adolescents), in keeping with the fact that birds of prey get self-sufficient a lot faster than human children. The king of it, though, is Voll. It helps him keep Aera's spirits up, which in turn gives her the strength to keep the captives focused and organized. When he's taken away to his death, it utterly breaks Aera.
• What Measure Is A Non-Griffin: The griffins make no secret of the fact they consider other races beneath them, particularly greenies - even the name "greenie" is a Fantastic Slur. (The hanz are an odd exception; they're a Servant Race and definitely below griffins in the social totem pole, but they get a number of special privileges, and abusing or killing a hanz leads to severe penalties). It's this sort of casual disrespect and debasement that ultimately gives Whitehead his opening.
  • Played deadly serious as What Measure Is a Non-Human? in Deverall's lab. There, nonhuman life is very cheap indeed - torture, rape, and murder are day to day affairs, even when it becomes blindingly obvious that the "animals" there aren't animals at all.
• Wham Line: There's a few, but these two deserve special mention:
  Coro-er:The monsters are not interested in killing a few [griffins], or a hundred. Whitehead wants them to kill all the griffins and hanz on the Twin Continents.
  Kwap (in shock):That's impossible...
  Coro-er:Not for them.
  • And this:
  Red-tailed ranger:Investigator Kwap has returned!
• Worldbuilding: The first book is largely worldbuilding with a plot loosely attached. However, in the second book, the action moves mostly to the human world and gets a serious upgrade in pacing and tone.
• Would Hurt a Child: Whitehead's way of introducing himself to the captured griffins was to walk in and casually murder one of the griffin chicks to try and find out what happened to the photos of his gate facility. Winter, an insane Newland griffin fresh from a hot war, is even worse: She ate greenie chicks alive just so she could feel their death-struggles within her. The captives themselves don't shrink from this, either; they deliberately engineer the murder of a "turncoat" herder pup that was put in their room to watch them, though only when given no other choice.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Both Altera and Kwap execute these in their respective places, and both work to perfection: The former gets the captives an RFID tag for their cages, the latter gets Kwap Sharkan-eet, whom he uses to reveal the location of the lab building.
• Xanatos Roulette: Whitehead is a master of this. It nearly gets Harrell and Kwap killed on numerous occasions and leaves a shockingly high body count of secondary characters.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: The entire Battle of Kaerling is opposing gambits between Whitehead and Vaniss, with the conditions constantly changing as the battle wears on. Whitehead mines the Kaerling gate building and puts up electric fences, not to defeat the war flock but to delay them long enough that they lose the initiative. It works spectacularly well, and the humans at the other side are ready for them...but many of the griffins boosted their shieldsuits at Coro-er's instructions, and Kwap specifically chose numbers over stealth - so Zerg Rush tactics take the gate building with heavy losses. Whitehead tries getting the police to shoot the remaining griffins, but Vaniss negotiates a treaty with them to make sure she can take the battle into the lab. Whitehead tries to kill the captives to make sure they have a Pyrrhic Victory, but fails before Vaniss finds them. It's two Genre Savvy badasses battling it out the whole way...and Whitehead would have easily won if not for Coro-er undermining him every step of the way.
• You Are Too Late: Invoked by name by Sharkan-eet after the war flock captures the human gate facility and he's not entirely lying. By the time Vaniss and the rescue party break in to free the captive griffins, most had already been removed, and an Elite Mook of Deverall's tells her that they already had been injected with the plague and were either dead or dying. Only a scarce few make it back to griffin!Earth alive.
• Zerg Rush: And armed Zerg Rushes at that. A greenie "zerg" with guns is a absolutely terrifying sight to anyone, even a ranger with a Deflector Shield.
  • Also used by the griffins during the battle on human!Earth. Kwap knew the battle was going to be an incredibly bloody slog, considering the humans had time to build machine gun nests, but supercharged shields and rushing reserves en masse at them quickly brought them down.