Hershal was a Yellow Jacket; a wasp; an insect. Hershal had quite a mean sting and wasn’t afraid to use it. He wasn’t really mean. It’s just that he was a wasp and wasps have stingers. They can sting you as many times as they want. Hershal didn’t go around just stinging anybody for no reason, mind you. Hershal spent his time being the most perfect wasp he could possibly be, and that included stinging the crap out of anything animate that got too close to his paper and saliva nest.
He didn’t do it on purpose to be spiteful, he did it on instinct to be waspful.
He also went around pollinating flowers and drinking nectar, you know, useful things like that, but hardly anybody reminds anybody of that. It’s just “Oh, that Hershal the Yellow Jacket: he’s got a darn mean stinger on him.” A good thing because even birds and lizards left him alone...unless they were starved to the point of dying.
The only thing that hung him up was spider webs.
Hershal could be quite the careless wasp: flitting about exploring or just flying at top speed for the fun of it, when he’d get all sticky all of a sudden. He’d have to buzz like the dickens to get out of there before a fuzzy spider came and tried to bite him and wrap him up or vice-versa depending on the spider and their personal preference. He never got munched by a spider but one day he did get old and fell off the nest, stunned and unable to fly he was chewed to ribbons by ants.
He had been the perfect yellow jacket, in life and in death...an integral part of that grand thing called life.
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