When school was unexpectedly cancelled the week of the musical due to a woman from Florida threatening to reenact Columbine, I decided to get a second cat.

I had been thinking about it for a while, largely thanks to the guilt I felt over leaving Natasha alone so often.  Although I’m not traveling as much as I used to (farewell, Speech!), I did like the idea of there being two to keep each other company.

And so, Hela:

 

I found Hela at the same shelter I got Mog.

She was not a very attractive cat, having come in with a bunch of knots and, as a result, was shaved down to her skin in patches:

She’s the same age as Mog, and we clicked.  I adopted her, ditched her given name (Catarine Zeta Jones), and named this half-black, half-white, half-ugly, half-pretty creature after another Goddess of the Dead – Hela.

I set her up in my spare room and gave her and Mog a little under a week to make friends.

They are not friends yet, but they’re down to a two foot radius before the growling starts.  Slow and steady wins the race, yes?

Around the same time that Hela was allowed free roaming of the house, I wondered if I had named her correctly.  She doesn’t respond to it, but then again, she is a cat.  Still, maybe my senses were off.  Maybe something with a Z?  Zelda, perhaps?

And then Hela got comfortable.

She is the epitome of the curious cat.  She gets into places that Natasha never went.

Moreover, she is a little destructor-kitty.  She tears up any paper scraps she finds, has clawed her way through several bags of trash, has knocked over a shelf in my pantry three times, has taken off and hidden her collar four times, gets the zoomies around 1 AM and inevitably lands right on my stomach when she takes a flying leap onto my bed, and ripped into a baggie and ate the top flaky layer off of my croissant.

This is Mog looking baffled because it would never occur to her to get the cat treats off the shelf and then rip open a hole to eat them all.

So, yes, Hela is an appropriate name for this little hell cat.  Because after she rips open a bag of dried peas and knocks it onto my kitchen floor, she hops up onto my lap with a kitty trill and tucks her head under for more scratches like she’s the cutest thing in the world.

Little demon bugger.