Speaking as, apparently, the room's standard bearer for unfortunate circumstances, or something along that line, a two-week embargo sounds about right. There's a balance between the nuisance of having the plot surprises spoiled and the nuisance of adding and then reading past the spoiler tags, and there might be some value in holding on to them a bit longer for especially potent plot twists. (Tip o' the hat to Craig for giving me a good belly laugh this morning. Never figured I'd be setting a bad example!) I'll go with Matthew's suggestion for what follows.
It seems clear in the first Winter Special that Lance and the cat (whom I guess we are calling Sepideh) are familiar enough with each other that Sepideh welcomes being found by Lance, rather than hissing and defending her kittens. I do think this indicates that Lance had been [SPOILER] living with Shahpar and Sepideh for a while by the time of the first Special, long enough for cat and dog to have been living together [/SPOILER]--you can supply the Peter Venkman quote yourself if you like--[SPOILER] and to have figured out each other's place in things, and certainly long enough for Shahpar to have been taking inspiration from him. [/SPOILER]
The better tell would be in the weather, except that the Weather Service records only a trace of snow at Central Park in December 1997. Dec. 22-23 did see substantial rain in the actual records with a couple more days of moderate to heavy rain in the days that followed, but also temperatures that stayed above freezing almost right through the end of the year. In the January that followed, there were several more rainy days but very little snow at all, and a stretch of a couple of weeks early in the month that were substantially warmer than average (topping out at 65 deg F (18 C) on the 8th!).
The best hint as to the timing? [SPOILER] The kittens. It's been a long while since I've dealt with kittens directly, but by the second Special they are active enough to climb up on Bronx, and it sounds like that would be consistent with them being about four weeks old or a bit older. Going back to weather, if we're just looking at precipitation and not at temperatures, January 23, 1998, had a lot of rain (2.55 inches, which could equate to 2 ft of light snow if it had the chance) and that plus the stage of the kittens makes this the best guess I can offer for the date on which the second Special begins. That doesn't do much to explain the cards, but knowing a few people who make crafts for a living, the extra cards we see are likely extras that Shahpar kept for herself, drafts, proofs, or just unsold stock; I'm not sure they say much on their own about the timing. [/SPOILER]
I can't help but think that naming the stars would have seemed to the Wyvern clan a little like it'd seem to us if someone named each of the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles. Anyway, assuming that the clans didn't have a need for long-range navigation that couldn't be served by landmarks, it seems like the primary sense of astronomy they'd have would be for gauging the time of year. (Using astronomy for finding longitude is hard, especially without a way to find local noon and keep time from it, so it may be just as well if they didn't need it for detailed navigation.) Knowing that certain patterns of stars at sunset indicate how near the equinox is could be very helpful, for example. Calling the pattern something other than "the spring pattern" or "the midsummer stars" (or whatever) is potentially something they'd only have picked up in order to communicate with their local human populations, assuming there was any special need for that.
morrand - [morrand276 at gmail dot com]
posted @ Sat, Jan 17, 2026 6:07:45 pm EST from 108.69.72.60
