#squalor

When going on a quest, one usually must have company. Certainly one could go questing solo but then there’d be no one else for the reader to become attached to that they would feel sorrow for when that character died horribly.

Now, I don’t know for sure that the little squirrely fellow would have died during the course of the story - the writer hadn’t finished the script - but that was a possibility. Hopefully he would have died heroically, sacrificing himself for the greater good. But maybe not. We will never know.