"It's just a charming, harmless little tribble..."

At last, three of my favourite obsessions — 19th-century Great Mouse Detective and Sherlock Holmes with 24th-century Star Trek — merged and mingled as one little, parodistic crossover, brought to you by me and, pushing my hesitancy aside, I am pleased to introduce the adventures of Star Trek: Titus:

Small of stature and round in shape, cuddly and cooing, this little fuzzball has no arms or legs, no eyes, and no face, in fact — only a mouth, and moves by rolling, by stretching and flexing like an inchworm, or by a particular throbbing itself along slowly but smoothly, rather like a snail. Its species made its upstaging contribution to the Federation by eating, reproducing, and, occasionally, by hissing at the nearest Klingon. What is it? It's a tribble, of course!

Chief Medical Officer Aristide Le Arnaud owns the friendly, residential tribble on the Multi-Vector-class USS Titus (NX-74910) named Pouf — which means "pillow" in French, due to his fluffiness. Pouf was one of the many tribbles that were born on Deep Space K-7, narrowly escaping the predatory glommers that ran freely on the station. While many tribbles come in a variety of colours — from beige, deep chocolate, gold, white, gold-green, auburn, cinnamon, and dusky yellow, Pouf is an rare colour of pure black. Dr. Le Arnaud found it, rolling gleefully around his foot in a corridor, and "fuzzy" followed him to his quarters, and even hijacked itself into his luggage! Although unassuming, this little tribble is more clever (and troublesome) than it appears — able to perform simple tricks, express a range of emotions, and cunningly learned how to use a food replicator, which compelled Dr. Le Arnaud to program a force-field over the device. And yet, no matter how cranky its master could be, his roughness seems to melt away at the simplest "coo" of this tribble. Pouf loves eating, playing, singing, dancing, petting, and shiny objects, but dislikes diets, glommers, and nasty ol' Klingons.

(Because a tribble doesn't have appendages, or eyes, or a face, or a mouth one can see, I found it difficult for Pouf to express emotions. Actions, like rolling, hopping, cooing, and singing, can easily express emotions in animation, but in a static drawing, it was a little more difficult. Although I'm not a fan or anime or manga, I am familiar with it and felt that anime/manga emoticons — like sweatdrops and pinched nerves — would assist with Pouf's "faceless" emotions. I asked my dear friend skyechan, an expert at anime and manga, about it and she assisted me greatly! There was so much information that I had to draw notes — and these are the notes! Thank you, Skye!

Guess what? Believe it or not, I actually found and bought a custom-made black tribble in a Trek convention in Tulsa! It's the exact size, shape, and colour as I imagined Pouf to be! Cooooo!)

Alien Models - Tribble

Medium - 7B graphite, 9B graphite.

"Pouf" © Diane N. Tran.
Based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry.