From a certain perspective, it might have been anticlimactic to spend the rest of the very short trip cuddled up together by the side of the boat, but Jim was in heaven. It was only with the greatest reluctance and a desire to indulge Pam’s excitement about koalas that he unfolded himself and followed her off the boat when it docked at Taronga Zoo.

OK, and maybe a little excitement himself. He wasn’t made of stone where koalas were concerned.

They disembarked and made their way over to the ticket office, where they paid for and picked up the tickets Pam had ordered over the phone almost an hour before. Because it was the low season and they were lucky, they had been able to pick up tickets to the Koala Encounter, which was after all the whole point, and it happened to be before the end of the surprisingly limited hours in which the encounter was available.

“The koalas sleep twenty hours a day,” explained their guide as they walked around the habitat. “And while we can’t guarantee that their four hours awake will correspond with the time our visitors are here,” she shrugged, “we don’t want to risk interrupting their beauty sleep too much.”

And beauty sleep it was. They weren’t allowed to touch the koalas (which was perfectly fine with Jim—cuddly they might look but they were definitely wild animals with Chlamydia, so he was good over here) but they could admire them as they lazily consumed eucalyptus and snoozed the day away.

The guide told them a number of fascinating details about koalas that Jim didn’t really catch, since he was focused on trying to figure out what the animals reminded him of. It wasn’t until they were almost done that he snapped his fingers, eliciting a questioning look from Pam.

“Stitch. They look like Stitch.” She stared at him and he explained further. “From Lilo and Stitch?”

“Duh?” She looked up at him and cocked an eyebrow. “There’s even a reference in the movie, where one of the characters thinks he’s a koala for a while.”

“Oh yeah.” He looked around and bent to whisper in her ear. “So which one do you think is going to snap and attack with its claws first?”

**

Pam looked around at the sleepy, adorable animals, and found one with a small notch in its ear. “That one.” She pointed. “He looks battle-hardened.”

“That one is actually a female,” chimed in their guide, who had been watching them and listening with amusement. “But yes, the little notch in her ear is an old injury. Not from battle though. She, uh, fell out of the tree.”

Jim and Pam joined the guide in laughter. “Well, maybe not that one then,” she conceded. “But I’m sure they’re all eager for you to figure out they’re alien genetic experiments.”

She spun around looking at all the pseudobears in the trees. This was like having her childhood stuffed animal collection come to life—all the more so because she had insisted on “feeding” her animals grass and particularly leaves at their tea parties, and so these cute lumberers stuffing their mouths with eucalyptus seemed familiar.

“Do they really only eat eucalyptus leaves?” Jim asked, which told her he hadn’t entirely been paying attention when the guide told them exactly that a few minutes ago. Probably thinking about Lilo and Stitch.

“Yes. I’m afraid there’s not a lot of nutrition in them, so they have to eat a lot—and we can’t really feed it to them because they won’t eat it off anything but the tree.”

“Wait, what?” Pam interjected. “What do you mean you can’t feed them?”

“Well, koalas have what we call a smooth brain: they don’t have the folds and furrows that humans and most other animals have. They can’t do higher order thinking like pattern recognition—which means that if you give a koala a plate of leaves, it doesn’t realize they’re the same leaves it eats.” She smiled. “It also means they don’t have the sense to come out of the rain, so they do get just a bit damp.”

“Just a bit.” Pam smiled back at the guide. “How strange.”

“It is, isn’t it,” agreed the guide. “But we love and care for them all the same. Even more so, in some cases.”

“How did they ever survive in the wild?” Jim wondered, and Pam was secretly glad he had asked the question that was also bothering her. They were dear adorable creatures, but that seemed like a bad adaptation if she’d ever heard of one.

The guide grinned wider. “Not a lot of competition for eating eucalyptus leaves. As I said, they aren’t exactly nutritious.” She waved a hand. “And now, we humans just think they’re too adorable for words.”

“They are that.” Pam grinned, and went back to admiring the fuzzy idiots.

When they exited via the gift shop later, she was unsurprised to find that both she and Jim were now the proud owners of stuffed koalas.

“Going to name yours Stitch?” she teased as Jim showed her his in excitement.

“I was, but now that I know he’s way smarter than them it feels rude.” He waved the koala. “Pam, meet Dwight.”