Mythical.
Squirrel.
Why yes, there
is a mythical uber-squirrel in
Norse mythology.
Packed in there with
Fenrir the
wolf, and the world encircling
Midgard serpent, And the
great cow of the Universe, is a squirrel name Ratatoskr (called
Ratatosk by some, but sounding soooo much better with the ending
r, which is correct; although
autocorrect apparently thinks its name is
Reddit Tasker....)
In Norse myth, you may know, there is a world tree called
Yggdrasil, which has a serpent or dragon by the name of
Nidhogg ever annoyingly gnawing at its roots, and an eagle ever perching upon its upper branches. And, since they apparently have no
Wi-Fi (Tree-Fi?), in order to communicate, they pass messages via
squirrel mail. Some claim these are simply observations from the watchful eagle; others, that they are insults passed between them -- as in "your mama doth be so fat, that like unto the Midgard serpent, she sitteth
around the world." And this squirrel mail is carried by one squirrel, in particular. And she's a her, and her name is Ratatoskr. This tidbit appears in various sources of the Norsemen, and would pass little notice except for the fact that
Marvel Comics, in their
wisdom, have on a couple occasions seen fit to bring Ratatoskr from her mythic Asgardian home down to Earth. Once to cause problems for
Thor, another time to make trouble for
Squirrel Girl, who then recruited Thor (who at the time was the female Thor) and the previous Thor (now calling himself
Odinson) and
Loki (who for bizarre reasons assumed a feline head for the duration of the adventure). In Squirrel Girl's encounter, Ratatoskr was depicted as having the power to grow to an elephantine size, and to project some kind of mind control onto persons in its vicinity. This is currently relevant, by the way, because a
live action Squirrel Girl character is slated to appear in the next Marvel TV series,
New Warriors, casting
Milana Vayntrub as the bucktoothed
heroine, for which it is entirely plausible that Ratatoskr will be tasked as a foe.
In some depictions, Ratatoskr has a ridiculously long
horn. This is so for no other reason than that
one time (in the
Seventeenth century) some Icelandic manuscript writer thought it a keen thing to draw Ratatoskr so. Ratatoskr has nothing to do with
ratatouille, which the divine squirrel precedes by nearly a
millennium, or with that most idiotic of
Pokemon,
Rattata.
----
I tried calling Ratatoskr as one for the We All Float Down Here: The 2017 Halloween Horrorquest, it being the closest thing in squirreldom to an Eldritch Horror, but alas I haven't the wherewithal to pull it off.