Northwood removed Timby’s family. What happens next will SHOCK you.

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Matthew Dimaandal

TORMENTED TIMBY STRIKES AGAIN: An unsuspecting Northwood junior falls victim to shenanigans of Timby’s ancestors as jump-scares of Timby take over the Integral app.

Parashar Bharadwaj, Staff Writer

Everybody loves Timby the Timberwolf. He’s cute, makes for great logos and is usually the only reliable source of entertainment during Northwood’s football games. But how did Northwood’s beloved mascot come to be?

The legend goes that Timby’s parents were wolves in the Northwood community decades before the school was founded. They terrorized the community, eating students from Santiago Hills and disrupting SAT Prep classes in the ‘90s. Of course, this did not bode well with the “master plan” Irvine founders intended, where an out-of-place bush drove them up a wall. 

“The feral animals were a clear threat to our reputation as the safest city in America,” director of Human-Animal Relations Ihat Ewolves said. “Our prepatory classes deserve our utmost attention and safety.”  

The founders decisively orchestrated the Timberwolf Removal of 1998, in which animal officials moved the troublesome canines to the barren wasteland of the Great Park. Timby was the only one that remained as he braved the menacing Northwood residents. Without any other options of Irvine wildlife beyond lizards, beetles or avocados, Timby was recognized as the mascot of Northwood during the school’s founding in 1999. However, nearly 20 years later, the citizens of the community are now paying reparations for their founders’ grave actions.

“I’ve experienced some odd occurrences around Northwood recently,” English teacher Alexandria Wallen said. “I’ve noticed strange shadows of wolf-like creatures staring at me late at night while I’m struggling to understand my students’ sonnets.”

And that’s only the start of the aberrations from this year. Ever since the start of the school year, the newly installed bell system has been inconsistent and unreliable, with students even reporting hearing strange noises in the bells throughout the day.

“The bells randomly start howling out of nowhere,” junior Olivia Cai said. “I even hear it during volleyball games. It usually sounds like a couple of angry dogs at night.”

Students have expressed strong distaste for the malfunctioning bells, with many looking to the app Integral to help with getting to class on time. But it seems that Timby’s predecessors aren’t fond of Integral either. 

“I couldn’t keep up with class times because of the streaky bells, so I started using Integral to manage my time better,” sophomore Tyler Truong said. “But I can’t even use Integral anymore because everytime I open the app, a random jump scare with an uncomfortably zoomed-in photo of Timby’s face pops up instead.” 

Worst of all, Northwood students are being forced to control their coffee-infested bladders in the day. Even though Northwood has a plethora of state-of-the-art bathrooms, only one is available to students during lunch. And it’s not to prevent students from stealing soap dispensers, sinks or whole toilets as a part of the Devious Lick TikTok trend; it’s to prevent students from disturbing Timby and his parents. 

“The shrine of Timby in my office was recently toppled and nearly destroyed,” Principal Lesssaly Rouch said. “When I first got the job, I was told Timby’s parents reside in the bathrooms to avoid the cacophony of student cries, so my first instinct after his shrine was ruined was to close the student bathrooms during lunch.” 

Nonetheless, we ask for forgiveness from Timby’s ancestors. According to Rouch, there are two effective ways to repent. The first is to make a shrine (full of wolf decorations and sleds) at home for Timby, and to consistently offer sacrifices in the form of Integrated Science hate letters and completed math homework. The second is to have all Northwood students adopt a timberwolf from the towering, snowy mountains of Irvine, and treat it as they would a friendly coyote trudging along Portola. These two strategies will elicit pardon from Timby and his ancestors. 

What would we do without Northwood’s pride and joy? If it wasn’t for Timby, we wouldn’t have our gorgeous T-Wolf hats, the “You wish you were a T-Wolf” chant and of course, our beautiful Howler logo. But by far, Timby’s greatest contribution was preventing a lame Northwood mascot (like a bulldog).