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Cold. So cold, down to my bones… I can hardly see or hear… everything is hurting… It’s hard to even breathe… Where am I? What’s happening?

Oh, right.

That’s where I am.

I fall forward and find myself on a hard, metal floor.

As my eyes adjust, I expect to see a tall guy in a lab coat pick me up and carry me somewhere, and as my ears slowly stop ringing, I expect to hear footsteps and unintelligible human chatter. But I see no-one, hear nothing but a repeating announcement;

“CRITICAL CRYOGENIC MALFUNCTION. PLEASE REPAIR COOLANT SYSTEMS OR EVACUATE THIS LEVEL.”

The comms keep repeating this over and over, and honestly, to a cat like me, especially one that was just in a glorified freezer box for who knows how long, well, it’s very, very annoying.

It repeats the message again.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever…” I summon all my strength and push myself to standing. I look around. Same room, same computers, no people. I wonder where they all went… well, anyways… how do I get out of here?

Vents? Nope. Can’t reach the hatch, and if I could, I can’t pull it out.

Window into the test room, then use that vent? Nope. Nothing to break it.

Terminals? Aha. Good ol’ cold fusion powered terminals that I definitely didn’t invent. What’s that? That sounded like sarcasm to you? No way!

I leap onto the chair and onto the desk, and boot up the terminal. It takes no time at all. Quickly I pull up the command menu, type a few quick overrides, nothing out of the ordinary, and the two doors slide open. Now, I could just dip right now, but…

I wonder if the humans left anything useful? Anything that’s me-sized?

I gaze around at the room. Nothing. They took my backpack when they froze me? Well, that makes me feel pure, unfiltered DISAPPOINTMENT. Well, I know where they might have taken it- my locker! But that’s a floor down, which is the opposite direction of where I wanna go. Er… is it worth it? I dunno… yeah, it probably is.

I head through the left door. Wonder what I’ll find, if not my stuff. Maybe a book to read? That’d be pleasant. If it was a good book. It had better be. “

There’s nothing in this hallway. Just emptiness. All the doors are too tall for me to open, and even if they weren’t, they’re locked. Emergency lockdown protocols, and all that.

I check all the doors, trying to see if any of them are open at all, if any of the locks failed, so I can nudge my way inside, but all of them are closed fully shut. No way into any of them.

Eventually I reach the entryway to the largest room on the floor, a sort of engineering hangar for planes and cars and whatnot. It’s not necessarily far from the lockers, which is where I’d suppose they’d put my stuff, but I can’t really get to the locker room from where I am at the moment, except for through the vents. And the terminal in the first room can’t open this door. Might have to go the other way…

I hear a noise- like paws hitting the ground- through the door, and at once my muscles tense up and I freeze. Is there something out there? Another cat?

I back away slowly. I can find another way through to the lockers. I’m not in any state to fight, if whatever or whoever that is is hostile. Not yet.

I head back to the first room, and through the other door. I know there’s a service elevator, and while it won’t work, I could maybe climb down the shaft… but the stairwell will most likely be closed.

Wait… I’m such an idiot. There’s terminals. I can just disable the lockdown.

I jump onto the desk, and navigate to the system command. I click on >Locks and I’m about to press >Disable System when I remember the noise that I heard. If I open the locks, whoever that is can get to me, easily.

Instead, I navigate to >Sub-Level 8 and see the flashing square that indicates the room I’m in. Like anyone here wouldn’t know what room they were in. I open the stairwell out the right-side door and down that hall, and then, I navigate to >Sub-Level 9 and open all doors on the floor.

Hopefully whatever is in here didn’t hear anything. Knowing my luck, it probably did. Too bad the cameras weren’t running on my power systems yet… even if it wasn’t cold fusion, why not run them with the XC-2076b4, or so the humans called it? Really it was just called a hyper battery, but it would have lasted centuries…

Anyways. The point is that the cameras don’t work, the only other way to see what it is is to see it myself, and I will not be doing that. See, I’m not necessarily cowardly.

There’s a big difference between cowardice and wariness, and that is rationality. If you’re just scared of jumping from five feet up, that’s cowardice. If you’re scared of jumping from five feet up, not because of the drop itself, but because there’s spikes at the bottom of the five feet, that’s wariness.

…actually, maybe that’s not the most reassuring example. Ignore that. Maybe come up with your own.

I hear a clatter from behind that door down the left-side hall. If it’s making that much noise, it doesn’t know I’m here. No predator of cats that knows you’re there makes noise like that. Except maybe for dogs…

I head down the right-side hallway, again making sure no doors are open, which of course, they are not, because this facility hates anything remotely catastrophic happening, and down the stairwell.

When I say I go down the stairwell, I of course mean that I tightrope walk on the safety railing and then jump through the doorway. Well, I’m a cat, what in the world do you expect me to do? Just because I’m modified to be semi-humanoid, you think I’ll take the stairs like a regular, boring, unadventurous desk worker in his thirties making ten bucks an hour? No! I’ll do things the fun way, every time!

Why will I do things the fun way, you ask?

…literally just because I can. I mean… if you had a choice between a boring way to do something, and a cool way to do it, what would you do? You’d do it the cool way, obviously!

Like, one time, I invented the schematics for a really cool kinetic energy production machine, and instead of making it myself, I made another machine to make it for me, and then I spent two days painting it. And no, that’s not inefficient, because I made two other things in the time it took for the second machine to make the first one. See? I made three things in the time it would have taken for one. That’s super efficient. Right? Right.

I can now hear the sounds of movement above me, more clattering. Must be looking for something. Whatever. No way to get down to this floor except through a locked door and this stairwell. Maybe…

You might question why there would be a cast iron doorstop for a stairwell door that looks like a kangaroo mouse, and I would completely agree, but it’s a cute doorstop, and if the something gets through the locked door, it will meet a moused door. Totally and completely impenetrable.

Hey, did you know that kangaroo mice are fluent in English, but the frequency of their voice is so high that humans can’t understand it, and likewise, the human frequency is so much lower that the mice don’t recognize when humans are speaking English? To both, the other’s speech- which sounds exactly the same to a cat- is total gibberish. Interesting, innit? They tended to break into this facility accidentally all the time. None of the other cats tried to eat them.

The meat is stringy, anyways, or so the other cats say.

I think it’s actually because they had bark shields and sewing needles. Not all mice can do this. Only the ones that jump. I believe it’s supposedly because some of the mutagens used on cats got into a small creek. It’s pretty far from the city, more towards the desert part of Arizona, so regular mice aren’t there often, but thousands of kangaroo mice live around there.

There was one who said he was twenty-six. I dunno how he was twenty-six. I think he lied.

What was I doing again? I feel like it was, like, almost important…

Backpack! That’s right! Locker room! Yes. That’s what I was doing. Sorry. Mice are cool.

Wait a second. Couldn’t you get into the vents really low down in the hangar? If so, you could get down here…

I start creeping towards the locker room, navigating through radar-tracking and radio-monitoring and satellite-data-collecting desks at a quicker pace, making sure my paws meet the ground as little as possible. Soon enough, I get there.

Huh… was it just me, or did the big terminal say DEFCON 1? Or was it 2?

I look at the hundreds of lockers. South row, seventy-six right, three up.

I hear a clatter of a vent door falling out of its slot. I begin to sprint towards my locker. I throw it open, unzip the backpack, take out a knife and some high-strength twine, and tie them to a stick, the only other thing in the locker, to fashion a makeshift spear. I’ve done this before for practicing, if you couldn’t tell. Well, actually, there’s my condensed milk stash in here too, but that’s probably not good anymore.

I brandish my spear, and peek just slightly around the door.

It’s a she-cat. About my age. Tortoiseshell fur and pale green eyes, a cute little white nose, and a scowl.

“These-ow!-stupid-ah!-mice!” She hisses, throwing some jumping mice off herself that seem to be attacking.

Another she-cat leaps gracefully out of the vent opening, much older, slightly scarred and wiser-looking than the first. “I told you not to insult them, didn’t I? I told you to pay their tolls.”

“Like I’d give up a can of meat just to- ow!- get past some little- get off!- mice!”

“That’s what you’re meant to do, Mint Nose. To avoid being poked by mice with needles.”

“There was a cat here. Do you think they’re from Radiance? Or they’re a Rustpaw?”

“No… the scent bears no tinges of chemicals nor rust. Not even of leaves, so they are no Ashclaws, like ourselves. It’s sort of… clean. Maybe one of those military cats got lost from their ‘base’.”

“No, their scent is like oil, or so my mother told me.”

“Willow Branch does not know everything, but she is right, in most cases. However, the militias have showers.”

“Showers?”

“It’s something that lets you be clean, and it… in any case, it’s most likely a loner, and therefore is not our problem. Maybe they’re someone Styx knows. Let’s move on and see if we can find any good materials for nests, or mice we can hunt who haven’t got any needles, or even Lone Wolf and Rain Tail, if we can find where they wandered off to, shall we?”

“Who says I want to find them? I’m having fun with just you and me, Clover Leaf. Teacher and apprentice.”

The older she-cat- Clover Leaf, I s’pose- smirks. “Be that as it may…”

The two she-cats head out of the room through another door.

Well… that was certainly, er… not what I thought was going to happen.

…Mint Nose. What a nice name. And such pretty eyes… Wait… is that Jerome?

I pause and stare at one of the mice, which is wearing an American Revolutionary soldier’s uniform. I made that uniform for fun one day, and a five-year old mouse stole it. But this mouse looks nothing like Jerome- this jumping mouse is much more of a light shade of tan than Jerome is , like I am. Must be his kid, or something.

But Jerome also knew about… I think about running after the she-cats for a moment, before deciding that this is much, much more important. Probably it isn’t, but I have my own priorities. I bolt back to my locker, actually taking the backpack out this time, and I see that my smuggled cans of milk have gone.

That sly little rodent, literally! He’s the only one who knew I had this!

All the other mice have now left, but the one in the outfit is still lying on the floor, so, as I reach him, I pick him up and pop him into the vent shaft. I’ll be back to find out how you guys even carried all those milk cans out of my locker.

With that, I head towards the door that the two she-cats exited the room through, and on the way, I read the biggest monitor. It does, in fact, say DEFCON 1, and not 2.

Cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool. Just the most awesome, amazing thing ever!

…can you tell when I’m being sarcastic yet?