Alfred made a face. "Oh, but then I'd have to feed it," he pointed out. He knew Pablo was into animals, because it was sort of a requirement of his career, but Alfred had never been one for pets. He traveled too much for it to be practical, unless he was going to take one underway with him. Probably an owl would have been the most likely option (or a parrot, if he wanted to really lean in to the pirate trope), but there was already someone onboard when he went underway charged with taking care of the owls, so why bother having his own? Typically animals had been more of an inconvenience than anything else, in his life so far.

Speaking of owls, though, one was swooping back in with a reply — Jo wrote much quicker replies than Zelda did, he noted.

"Well, looks like I'm done at the post office," he announced on reading it. Jo was going to meet him in his flat, so what he needed to do now was go home directly in the hopes that he could beat her there.