A: Fun!

Sqootles are an invasive class of extra-dimensional fauna who’s precise taxa cannot be determined with our current technologies and understanding of interdimensional travel. They exhibit a vast array of sizes, shapes, colors, densities and behavioral traits, even within identifiable subgroups. They have incredible empathic capacities, unique to any terrestrial species discovered on earth so far. They are also delightfully floofy and fun, which is partially why they don’t have a fancy latin name yet.

A: A magical portal in the backyard!

Sqootles are originally residents of a parallel dimension to our own material plane. Sqootle-U researchers currently theorize that said dimension, nicknamed “The Floof Zone”, is teeming with many beings similar to and possible derivative of what we know as Sqootles. All attempts to enter the Floof Zone have failed, as have any attempts to collect samples from the Floof Zone directly. It’s difficult to determine exactly when they began to appear, but all known Sqootle variants have been traced back to a fae portal in rural Pennsylvania (designation PSOL42) with local planar variants all descending from a Sqootle that “fell out of” the Floof Zone into our dimension from aforementioned portal.

A: Joy!

Sqootles form from empathic resonance and dust in very complicated and multi-faceted pseudo-spiritual psychochemical reactions that we are only beginning to learn how to study, let alone understand. In an overgeneralized sense, Sqootles are organisms spawned from happy feelings and dust, in the same way a star is a ball of gas formed from a reaction of elements and cosmic debris. Sqootle-U is working to publish a much more expansive scientific article on Sqootle formation and genetics. Progress has been delayed by grant complications.

A: Fidgety!

Sqootle personalities are diverse. Some are more active than others. Sqootles possess a fascinating level of emotional understanding, and navigate the world through a combination of simpler sensory organs and a complex empathic interfacial plexus.

A lot like domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, Sqootles tune into the feelings of those in their immediate environment, and their personalities will often reflect those they spend the most time around. Also like many pets, regardless of how much they understand us and our communication methods, Sqootles are not capable of human speech beyond crude mimicry. Instead, Sqootles use body language methods to convey their needs and feelings. Typical behavior includes wiggles, dancing, head bobbing, tail flicks, nuzzles, scoots, boople flicks, mlems, bleps, shuffles, shimmies, zips, zoomies, bumps, rolls, summersaults, twirls, brushes and jittering.

A: A few, yes!

Sqootles do feel and exhibit a delightful amount of joy.

As previously mentioned, Sqootles are highly tuned into emotional frequencies, and have complex natural mechanisms to detect and convert those frequencies into vital energy. Their relationship with feelings other than joy is a little more complicated. Sqootles do not feel sadness, anger or fear. They are intimately aware of their existences, they in fact seek out concentrated sources of them. Sqootle behaviour, while also a form of communication, is used to promote happiness where it is otherwise obscured or obstructed.

Emotions aren’t a solid thing you can eat or really be made of. If you think of yourself like a house, and you imagine the emotion of joy to be light, Sqootles are like houseplants that need to bask in that light from time to time. We call the method in which Sqootles interact with emotional frequencies “empathic resonance”. Think of sadness as blinds pulled on a sunny day or anger being a blown fuse in our house metaphor. Sqootles would be houseplants that could lift the curtains or flip the circuit breaker if someone forgot every once in a while.

A: Friendship!

All signs currently point to Sqootles having evolved their survival adaptations to serve them in a symbiotic relationship with People-folk. While technically an invasive species, Sqootles have shown to be nothing but beneficial to Person-kind by helping to spread joy with no detrimental environmental impact or economical burden. Sqootle-U Cohabitation Services Department was formed with the mission of streamlining the “friend finding process”. 

We take our jobs very seriously.

A: Pet them!

Sqootles require nothing but dust and proximity to a source of happy feelings to survive, both of which will be plentiful and readily available in their new home. You don’t need to locate or create any extra dust for them. All Sqootles gain significant enrichment from being pet and from being lifted from a lower altitude to a higher one (uppies). Most Sqootles will benefit from play and mutual stimming activities, although some seem more content to perch upon their companion and show themselves off. 

That’s it. For all their complexities and mystery, Sqootles have simple needs.