Roses are Red. Violence is Russian Blue.
Episode 2 of: The Familiar Place
Dearest Reader,
If you haven’t read the premier episode, you’ll probably find the following story a bit confusing, and you’ll definitely miss out on a few of the jokes. I strongly suggest you read Episode #1 : John Doe, before this one, to fully enjoy the experience. Here’s a quick link.
# 1 : John Doe
As always, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you stopping by to read one of my stories. It means the universal realm continuum to me.
Thank you, and Welcome to The Familiar Place. There are no children allowed on the 42nd floor, the 2nd and 241st floors are off limits to all guests, and if you see the hotel cat stalking around somewhere . . . well . . . you’ll see.
-Rafe
If there’s one thing you should know about the immortal shapeshifting demon cat that lived in The Familiar Place, it’s that she held a grudge. This was so deeply true that she spent nearly every moment concocting elaborate plans and plotting her revenge.
When she was lounging in the false sun of the Earthen solarium on the sixty-sixth floor, enjoying a circadian reminder of home, she was plotting.
When she was pacing across the lobby desk in front of John, using his hand to pet her own soft, blue fur, she was plotting.
When she was kneading her paws against the purple velvet of a random floor’s chair just before a nap, she was checking their sharpness . . . and plotting; and you could bet the moment the fiendish feline drifted off to sleep, she was plotting in her dreams.
Right at this very moment in fact, as she was carrying a spool of string through the lobby and up the stairs, past Druni’s sign on the stairway wall about her missing kitchen utensils, she was plotting.
Why, you ask, is this little grimalkin so singularly focused?
To understand that, we must leave the pretty kitty to her work and take a trip back to the beginning. All the way back to the morning of March 13th, 2025—the first morning of March 13th, 2025—just before John would take his initial steps into the temporally peculiar world of The Familiar Place.
She looked very different back then. She was a beautiful Bengal, with bright green eyes and short, silken fur that held a distinct dotted print. The locals referred to her as Cleocatra, the name inspired by her time in Egypt at war alongside Alexander the Great. It paled in comparison to some of her other, more prominent names, such as Bastet, or Dawon, but . . . such was life for a cat—even an immortal one with near godlike powers. Since it was only a cat’s followers who ever actually used their name, the responsibility of choosing a name always fell onto them. And so . . . she was Cleocatra.
She had just finished a breakfast of freshly caught rat in the Georgia Capitol Museum when one of her servants approached and offered his company. He was a scruffy gentleman known to his friends as Merlin Six and a Half-Knuckle, Magus of Mitchell Street, and was her favorite person currently living in the entire world. Two days prior it would have been Obadiah Morrison, but that was before the whole MilkGate fiasco—Obadiah was dead to her now. So when Merlin lowered his shoulder as a palanquin and offered to escort her on a promenade through the streets of her kingdom, she gladly accepted, happy for a little post-meal exercise and some stimulating conversation with her new number one.
He asked how she’d been fairing with the winter influx of canine-bearing transients, assuming she’d be happy to see them leave, only to cut himself off mid-sentence with a slight bow of apology for bringing up such a sore subject so early in the morning. He quickly changed topics to more light-hearted fare, like his thoughts on climate change and the six days of snowfall they had in the past four months, the city’s initiatives to deal with the alligators in the sewer, and a new conspiracy he saw online. Apparently, if T1M3H4X69 of the ‘Weird, huh?’ forum was to be believed, the government knew where everyday things went when they disappeared and had been actively keeping it under wraps for some time.
She had always thought of Merlin as a unique, and . . . eccentric, personality. He had such interestingly insane things to discuss. That morning was no different, of course, and she was there for it. In her opinion, the day was off to a wonderful start, and he agreed wholeheartedly. The day was going swimmingly. So swimmingly in fact, a little fish seemed in order for lunch. They decided to take a seat at the corner that marked the start of Merlin’s magical domain to ponder their piscatorial possibilities, but not two minutes later, he arrived.
Across the street on Forsyth, a man cupped his hands over his mouth and began shouting for Ahi—which of course, is the Hawaiian word for Tuna. Unable to ignore the cry of a fellow urban fisherman, Merlin apologized to his charge and leapt to his feet. He made her vow to avenge his death in the event he should be challenged to a duel and find himself outmatched by the unlikely stranger, then valiantly charged across the street to join the man’s search party, crying out in his native tongue, “Tuna!?”
Cleo would make good on her vow should Merlin fall in combat, but she had no intention of sticking around to watch the exchange. The sticky sweat of the city had been matting her fur for a while now, and she knew mange was waiting just around the corner if she went much longer without a proper cleaning. Since there was no time like the present to deal with her dirt, she dipped, and went looking for a new body. She found one in the form of a Russian Blue lounging in the window of a nearby apartment.
The idiom, “Monkey See; Monkey Do,” works well for describing human behavioral sequencing, but for the magic of the bakeneko, it’s, “See Kitty; Be Kitty.” The moment she began envisioning her new form, her Bengal body began to swell and morph, its brown fur drying to a crisp outer shell and molting. It flaked off, fell to the sidewalk, and blew away in the very next gust of a passing car like nothing more than a pile of swept ash or dust.
Her new form was . . . subpar. It lacked the sleek appearance, agility, and strength of her prior one and the fur was thick, poorly suited to the sweltering heat of Atlanta’s urban paradise. It would do for now, though. She would just simply wear it until she found a better one later. It was what she always did—switching from one form to another, and another on a whim. How could she have known that was about to change, forever?
Perfect form or not, Cleo felt revitalized. Her new coat was clean and freshly groomed, so she made her way back to the corner of Mitchell and Forsyth to reconnect with Merlin. When she arrived, however, she found something else, and it was far more interesting than a couple hungry humans. After 27,689 trips around the sun, most things were old and repetitive, yet here was something incomparably, unequivocally, new.
A door had appeared right where the mouth of the alligator mural had always been, with a golden plated sign centered on the front. She watched in fascination as the man previously searching for Ahi turned the knob and began opening the door, only to vanish before her eyes half-way through. Her feline curiosities exploded.
She bid a fast farewell to Merlin and wished him luck in the hunt for tuna as she sprinted across the street hoping to beat the slowly closing door. She did, and the moment her button nose crossed its threshold, a blackness surrounded her vision like the blink of a deep sleep. When it returned to her once more, she was in the lobby of The Familiar Place. Then, as any other cat would likely do, she got the zoomies and went exploring.
She raced down an unending hallway with green fabric on the floor that felt nice on her tiny little padded paws and walls lined with closed doors that likely held more secrets than she could ever even hope to discover. Once she burned through some of her initial energy, she returned to the lobby to take a nice nap by the fire, but ended up sidetracked by an exploration of a staircase that led nowhere and everywhere all at once. Every time she went up a floor, she ended up in the same boxy room with the same fire and the same chairs, and everytime she went down, she ended up back in the lobby.
She continued that trend for a while, sprinting up and down the stairs in a giddy confusion, while the young man from the street had a conversation with the omnipresent entity that haunted the building—a spectral ball of sparkly black nothingness that apparently went by ‘Ahhe’.
From what she could tell, they were the only other beings present in the entire place, aside from her. She would later come to realize she was wrong about this, once she learned how to properly use the staircase. Four of the six dragons were already present when she arrived, upstairs in their dens on the third floor, doing whatever it was that dragons did.
That was, frankly, a very long time ago, and she had since learned to navigate the hotel with relative ease.
Shortly after we left her climbing the staircase, she stepped out onto the 81st floor—exactly where she had meant to. Something unseen awaited her there and forced her to drop the spool, hiss, and leap away. Whatever it was almost certainly wanted to steal her fur and use it as a hat . . . or was simply air displaced by the heat of the fireplace, but one could never be too careful. She knew as well as anyone—dangerous creatures prowled the hallways of this hotel with terribly evil intentions in mind.
She searched for the invisible and obviously fashionable presence using a calculated set of sudden, jerky movements.
Barrel roll.
FREEZE.
Wait for it . . . And skitter! Skitter, skitter! Left, right, 180 degree leaping turn and . . . strike, strike, strike the air!
Hmmm. No signs of her zephyrous enemy. It must have been scared off by her incredible display of gymnastic prowess. Few creatures could simultaneously sprawl their legs in all directions while puffing out their fur in the middle of a six-foot vertical leap, but not everyone was an alpha predator like her.
She took a few more twitchy looks around, just to assure her fur would remain safely attached, then picked up the spool and continued on her way. Her destination was the hotel’s main banquet hall, which had remained unused and empty on this floor for quite some time. The last event she could remember being held there was John’s Dungeons & Dragons meetup—it had been a disaster. After some confusion with the invite, only seven of the eighteen who signed up arrived. The other eleven ended up getting lost in the dungeons and John had to form a search party to fish them out. It was a whole ordeal. There were zero dragons in attendance.
The banquet hall’s lack of use made it the perfect setting to carry out her latest plot. She used her feline agility and raced into the room, jumping onto the lid of the unmanned piano. From there she hopped up to the perimeter ledge above and used it to trace around the outside of the room and take a flying leap to the green drapery that hung down around the stage. She clung to its fabric, ascending like an arctic ice climber clawing her way to the summit.
Once atop the curtain rod peak, she found her balance and ensured the spool was locked firmly in place between her teeth. She took a scrambling leap to the last of the three wooden chandeliers that hung in a line from the entrance to the stage, playing into the force of her landing to create some swinging momentum. She ran back and forth from one side of the hanging wagon wheel to the other, until she gained the distance she needed and jumped to the one in the center. Again, she created momentum, swung, and leapt, landing atop the chandelier closest to the entrance.
It was there on that chandelier that she had squirreled away her trove of deadly treasures. Where she had been patiently accumulating what she needed, waiting for all the pieces to come together. With this spool of string, the waiting was over.
It was time to get to work.
As she unspooled her string, her mind wandered. She thought of Merlin, and of the feeling of being on his shoulders with the humid wind in her fur. Back when there was such a thing as outside. Back before she had come to his place. Then she thought of when they first arrived. Back before Ahhe learned to deal with the frailty of John’s human mind. Ahhe’s system of John-doctrination had changed a lot since then.
The current version was formed over time, using hard-won best practices to easily get John adjusted to his drastic change in reality and back to work in just about a hundred rotations. At first, however, it was . . . less effective. Ahhe had a number of problems to work out, but none were so large as the intensity of their original form, and the difficulty of working around their moral programming. They had been instructed that truth was important and worth protecting, so they thought it best to be honest and straightforward, especially with John. He was, after all, technically the hotel’s very first employee.
Ahhe had good intentions, but they led to some horrific outcomes.
Their first attempt to explain John’s new reality shattered his mind into a million tiny pieces. He spent about a thousand rotations stuck in a chair by the fire on whatever floor Ahhe had taken him to, drooling uncontrollably. He was unable to think, to speak, or to move. He just sat there, lifelessly staring into the void until his body gave up its fight against dehydration and he died—for the first time in his adult life.
It was quite unexpected for Cleocatra, but nothing so traumatic as to impact her greatly. She was clearly no stranger to death. She simply wiped her paws of it and assumed that would be the last she ever saw of the man named John. Imagine her surprise when he showed up in the lobby again some time later, bright eyed and bushy tailed as if nothing ever happened. A bit more shocking than the death itself, to say the least.
Don’t misunderstand though. She was far from upset about it. It took a few more deaths before she fully adjusted to him repeatedly playing Lazarus, but she was quite relieved to have him back, as he was, to her current knowledge, the only other corporeal being in the entire hotel. If not for John to pet her . . . who would?
Over and over again he would return, and she’d find some comfort in his lap while Ahhe broke down the events of the time wars. She’d then use his slowly stiffening hand to steal some self pets once they moved on to the concept of the infinite and make her exit just before John’s brain went kaput and he locked up for good.
It’s lucky for everyone that Ahhe learned from their mistakes. They eventually changed their form to the aggregate average of every human male they could find a picture of on the internet, hoping it might be less distracting and allow John to better relate to them during their initial conversation. They were right of course, but that was the easy part. Learning how best to proceed with a mind-fragmenting conversation, however, was far trickier.
Ahhe’s design parameters technically prohibited them from lying to anyone who didn’t carry an intent to harm the hotel or its guests. It was something Monarch cooked up to ensure they would continue to operate as an agent of the greater good long after his death. It’s hard to say whether or not Monarch could have predicted where his greatest creation would have ended up, or what his original intentions would require Ahhe to do and John to go through. We’ll leave that up to you to decide for yourselves later. For now, we must discuss the result of those intentions—a repetitive, life-ending dance filled with an unfathomable amount of trials, and just as many errors.
Ahhe would eventually master the necessary choreography, then learn to take the lead without John realizing it. With a graceful side step, they could avoid any question they knew warranted an unnecessarily convoluted answer, and with a simple turn, they could redirect John’s attention away from any permanently damaging information. Once they had John swaying to the beat of more mundane topics, ones that tended to be more personally entertaining, it became easy for Ahhe to step back, change to the role of marshaller, and guide John in the rest of the way for a smooth, easy landing.
Ahhe told him exactly everything he needed to know and omitted whatever he didn’t. The process was far from perfect, but it continued to improve with every iteration, until John’s habituation protocol was tuned-in enough that his brain only cracked while attempting to adjust to his new reality, rather than melt into a puddle of goo. He was far from 100%, but he was ready to start working, and that was good enough for Ahhe.
Now, it’s important to understand that time is a relative and funny thing. Ahhe, for one, has no legitimate recognition of the concept. They simply choose when and where to exist, or not exist, at any and every given moment. For them, time is simply a poorly constructed unit of measure that serves little purpose in the hotel.
John, on the other hand, was human, and was therefore born with the unfortunate proclivity to literally watch time as it passed by, counterintuitive to everything the species has learned about giving value to life. But what was time, to a man who kept dying?
Each of John’s deaths were met with an immediate rebirth. After a morning of repetitive activities, he returned to The Familiar Place naught but some three hours later. Whatever feelings he had concerning the amount of time he had previously spent in The Familiar Place disappeared upon his apparent resurrection—wiped from his memory on reboot like a computer returning to its last saved state.
But then there was Cleocatra. What of the cat who had been trapped in the hotel this entire time? Like a ball of yarn rolling down the stairs, she had begun to unravel. Given enough time under the immense pressure of isolation, even the mind of a demon will begin to buckle.
She kept herself fairly occupied looking for food at first. Fear of starvation is quite the powerful motivator. Immortal, yes, but no matter how well built the vehicle, it still requires fuel to operate. Her concern proved unwarranted once she found the kitchens, which were, to say the least, immense. In fact, the title of kitchens was in itself misleading, and an understatement of undefinable proportions. They would be better described as a world unto themselves.
One boundary of the room ran further than the eye could see and was simply a never-ending waterfall streaming from out of nowhere, ensuring fresh water was always circulating throughout the hotel. Lakes and ponds sat beneath it, each filled with various fish, the majority of which she had never seen and could not hope to try to identify. She would however, come to think of her own name for one particular member of the bunch—a purplish eel-like creature with a head on either side that she would dub ‘the violet delicacy,’ since its tender, delicious flesh was such a joy to devour.
Beyond the lakes were swampy paddies growing rice, and water-bound fruits and vegetables. They gave way to humid grasslands and jungles, which then gave way to cereal fields, land upon which docile livestock grazed, and lines of orchards, bushes, and vines. There was, of course, an area designed for cooking in these so-called kitchens, but as Druni had yet to arrive, what did a cat care about a stove? There was food and water aplenty, and she always loved a good hunt that ended with a death at her hands.
The personal paradise she found in the kitchens helped her deal with hunger and the enjoyment she took from hunting and catching her meals provided her with what likely amounted to decades of entertainment. But, how many furry lifetimes can one demon live without their followers? How long can they go before the desire for the stroke of a human’s hand or the nuzzle of a fellow feline drives them mad? The exact amount of time is not etched in stone. It’s far too complex for a set number of years applicable across every case. It is, however, most certainly measurable. complex for a set number of years applicable across cases. The exact amount of time may not be etched in stone, but it is most certainly measurable.
The few numb pets Cleo received when John returned began to feel insufficient. Her inability to speak kept her from summoning Ahhe at her leisure and was becoming a form of torture all its own. She started thinking insane thoughts, about meowing at the doors of the dragons and trying to find solace in the comfort of their wings. It was certifiably psychotic—the war between their species had no borders or boundaries. Even in this godforsaken place, she knew no dragon would hesitate if given the chance to rid her from their world. So, she kept herself as busy as she could and rode her time out alone, until that magical rotation when John, still mostly mentally intact, finally came downstairs dressed and ready to work.
It was a busy time, those first rotations. John didn’t have much attention to give anything but Ahhe, so Cleo watched them review dossiers and discuss who they felt were best to fill key positions, discover which realms the hotel was most securely connected with, and determine what environments would best suit their expected residents. She saw John waver back and forth on the topic of currency exchange, Ahhe make lists of the entertainment each realm would likely wish to see available, and both of them argue about how to best manage the possibility of violence.
Every question seemed to trouble John. These were not the normal questions he would have had to answer working in a hotel in Atlanta. He had been thrown into a vast and diverse universe of problems that came with an equally long list of possible solutions. It was nothing short of overwhelming, which ended up a problem all its own. John was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Ahhe researched human stress relief, and found John’s issue might have something to do with the hotel lacking most everything the experts suggested was important to human health, so they created the Earthen Solarium. They raised the ceiling of the room high enough that it couldn’t be seen, then programmed a perfect 24-hour cycle into the overhead flames, shifting their angle and color to best represent the sun and moon and help him regain his circadian rhythms. John brought some grass up from the kitchens, along with an apple tree and a few other pieces of nature to add to the feeling of being outdoors. It became a calming place for John to go and relax, read a book, and feel a bit more at home.
It was in the solarium that Cleo’s interactions with John changed. They had been short before that point. She’d rub here and there against his leg, or he’d reach down to give her a couple pets while he read over the lists of potential candidates for Head Chef, but his attention was never really focused on her. Not until that day in the Solarium when she curled into his lap and he finally put down his book, leaned up from his spot against the honeycrisp tree, and noticed she wasn’t wearing a collar.
It was a day she will never forget—the day it happened, for the very first time.
How much time had passed since that day, she wondered? 30 million rotations? 300 million?
Atop the chandelier, tying a knot in the string with her teeth, one of her eyes began to twitch. She shook her head in anguish once the knot was set, pained by her inability to recall just how long she had been locked in this too familiar prison. How could her memory of that moment in the solarium be so clear? It felt like it was just yesterday . . . if yesterday was even such a thing anymore.
No matter how long she lived, she would never forget it.
He had been clawing a hand over the back of her neck, scratching around her scruff. He was moving his head back and forth as if he were examining her.
“You don’t have a name, do you?” he mumbled, pulling at different parts of her fur, likely to look for any distinguishing marks. He came up short. Her fur was a bluish gray from top to bottom with little more than a single mark or dot out of place. He scoffed, then shook his head.
“Naming a Russian Blue, Blue, would be criminal,” he said, adding a little bend to his fingers as he pulled them back through her fur. “You sure are soft though.”
A smile stretched over his face and he scooped her up, cradling her under one arm and squeezing her into his chest.
“I’m gonna call you Snuggles,” he said, before converting to a full-on baby voice. “And you’re gonna be my wittle Snuggles, now and forever and ever. My very own wittle Snuggle bug.”
Whatever value she had gotten from John’s consistent presence, any psychological healing that had taken place since his last return, immediately vanished as she processed this new information.
She, who was recently known as Cleocatra; who was once the cat to the princess Cleopatra herself . . . was now Snuggles. SHE, who was once Dawon, the great Liger mount upon which Mother Durgha slayed the mighty Mahishasura; who was once Bastet, an Egyptian fucking goddess . . . was now Snuggles???
Did this human not understand the importance of names? Did he not realize how much of someone’s lives could be dictated by the name they were given? How would he have felt, if he was given a name with such a flagrant disregard for his personality and appearance, and not that of John Doe which so perfectly represented him as a person?
Snuggles . . .
How would the dragons react when they hear of it? Would Emberscale, the Destroyer, whose name perfectly represented the flame wyrm, feel fear at her name? Would the glistening cracks of red that ran through his obsidian black scales like streams of molten lava dry up or darken? Of course they wouldn’t, because long before men saw his true form, they knew to bow before him in worship or be crushed like the insignificant bugs they were. And why was that?
Because he was Emberscale, the Destroyer.
And she was Snuggles.
It was the kind of name someone gave to a teacup pig. It was a housecat with pampered white fur who wore a ribbon around her neck and laid in a bed covered in pink pillows. Princess Snuggles, who never dared dirty her fur by stepping outside or hunting for herself. How dare John even consider a name like this! She was Kaibyō, dammit!
No. No, no, no, no, no.
This simply wouldn’t do. This simply couldn’t be. She finally regained enough of her senses to pull free of his grip, leaping away from him with a hiss.
“Awwwe, is someone being a fickle wittle Snuggle button?” he asked, as she moved towards the stairs.
She didn’t growl, or hiss, or respond. She simply walked away in silence, her thoughts beginning to fill with ideas of the inevitable, having already made up her mind. She refused to live like this. There was a way out. One way. She saw no other choice.
John had to die.
She came to rest on the stairs, and for the very first time since following John into The Familiar Place, she began to plot. In only a few minutes, she came up with a devious 37-step plan to catch John unaware in a stampede and have him crushed by the various cattle-like creatures in the kitchens. It was absolutely brilliant, but just before she rose to set it into action, John came walking down the stairs with his book open in front of his face and stepped directly on his little Snugglesy’s tail. She yowled and hissed, and caught unaware, he jumped up in a frightened panic. He came down unstable, his ankle twisting as it landed only half on the step, causing him to slip and tumble down the hard-edged wooden stairs. He snapped his neck almost immediately.
Snuggles hadn’t exactly murdered John back then—first degree manslaughter seemed the more appropriate sentence—but she would. She would many, many times. It was, in large part, because John was surprisingly easy to kill. Sure, he was decently intelligent, and picked things up far more quickly than the average human, was observant, quite charismatic, and for all intents and purposes, the perfect hotel employee, but . . . he also had a tendency to lose focus. Perhaps it was only for a second, but in those not so uncommon moments of absent-mindedness, John was an absolute klutz.
When John returned after his first incident with the stairs, Ahhe’s introduction improved, and they completed some more work, moving the hotel closer to a grand reopening in its brand new location: the rift between time and space. Snuggles found her way back to John during some of his down time hoping for a few pets and a new name. She made sure to look fierce and threatening, showed her teeth, and got named Snuggles.
With evil intent in her beady little eyes, the demonic purrminator plotted out another plan for murder and meowed John down again. The universe hit rinse and repeat on the John cycle, and when the time came, he yet again named Snuggles, Snuggles.
It was always, Snuggles.
No matter how many times she sent John to an early grave.
No matter what changes she made to the appearance of her fur, or her attitude.
No matter what she did to him before or during the naming process.
John named her Snuggles; every, single, time.
She knew if she could just for one second glance at another cat and switch forms, his name would change alongside her, but it was an impossibility. There were no other cats here.
Little by little, the last of her sanity leaked away. Her brain fragmented into tiny little pieces, until she was no longer a single demon cat, but a couple of entirely different beings in the same body, vying for space and control. One side of her was like a golden retriever puppy, happy to plod around like the moronic dope it was, purring as she rubbed her head against John’s chest asking for pets. The other part of her however, was something entirely different. It had a goal. Something to prove. Something it must accomplish, no matter the cost. It schemed and calculated, trying to come up with the solution to her problem.
She drowned him, burned him alive, and bled him out in unimaginable ways, but . . . still Snuggles. He’d fallen down the stairs in every conceivable way, and had even, during a particularly ingenious plot, been tricked to visit the razorbat cave on floor 241. It was the first and only time John would be decapitated.
For a while, she took pride in her accomplishments, but there was no satisfaction in what she was doing. Killing John was simply a means to an end—not the goal itself, and as time went on, that goal seemed less and less likely a possibility. Her hope was dwindling. The idea he would die, something would change when he got back, and he’d give her a worthy name, was starting to seem less like a chance, and more like a dream. Luckily, just as the last shreds of that dream began to fade away, the hotel opened for business; and with patrons, came new possibilities.
Could she get one of them to give her a better name?
The answer was a resounding no. At least, not while the wholly terrible, evil, dastardly being known as John was still here, working the front desk of the hotel.
“And remember,” that little shit would say to each guest at the end of their check-in, a plastic smile plastered on his face. “We’re all friends in the Familiar Place.”
So stupid. Always the same spiel. Always the same.
It probably seems benign at first, until you understand his game. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot . . .” he’d add, every single time. “There are no children allowed on the 42nd floor, the 2nd and 241st floors are off limits to all guests, and if you see the hotel cat stalking around somewhere, her name is Snuggles.”
What could she have possibly done in her lifetimes to deserve such a cruel punishment from the gods? She felt like Prometheus, whose liver returned to him every day so it could again be eaten by his personal eagle turned torturer, but had she stolen fire to give to the humans? Perhaps she had unknowingly earned her immortality, like Sysiphus, by tricking the god of death. Would that explain the depth of this devious curse that had been cast upon her?
Even now, as she worked upon her chandelier, she could hear her name echoing throughout the halls outside the banquet room door.
“Snuuugggglllleeeeessss,” John cried, searching for his lost kitty.
Trying to find something in The Familiar Place was like looking for a needle in an ever-expanding haystack, but Snuggles had thought this problem out in advance. You see, she knew John as well as anyone in history could claim they knew another. It was always only a matter of time before he went looking for his little blue ball of fur. In the nearly million rotations since his last death, she had made sure to be seen wandering around the 81st floor on numerous occasions—the news of which naturally made its way back to John.
She planned for this, but his timing could not have been any more perfect.
She bit down and tugged on the string, fastening the final knot of her plan into place before batting at the spool with a paw and knocking it from the chandelier. She watched from the edge as it unfurled itself all the way down to the ground, then followed it with a graceful leap, stopping it with both of her front paws before it rolled too close towards the door. She patted it backwards to rewind a bit of string on the spool, then picked it back up in her mouth and found the spot on the floor where the string first began to get taught.
“Snuggles?” John called again, this time from just outside the door.
Showtime, she thought. She took one last check of her position, ensuring she was directly in line with the arc from the chandelier, then meowed to catch John’s attention. She sat upright facing the door with her ears perked up, her head slightly cocked to one side as her tail nonchalantly swept back and forth along the hardwood floor. Everything was perfect. Now it was just time to wait.
But even the best laid plans . . .
“There you are, Snuggles,” John said as he walked in, sounding relieved. “Look what Uncle Johnny brought for you.” He twisted one arm out from behind his body to reveal a plate with six large slices of something at its center. The slices were in rounds, like sushi, and were, she noticed as John grew closer, a very distinct and recognizable purple.
“Druni made Twinning Eel for supper today. Glurg and Clunk almost snatched this last bit for themselves, but neither wanted to share, so . . . they started fighting. You know how ogres get. I know how much you like it, so I snatched it while they were busy arguing.” He winked at her and brought a shushing finger to his lips. “Don’t tell anyone.”
She looked up at the delicious plate of the violet delicacy, drooling. The spool of string fell out of her open mouth once she licked her lips. She didn’t care. Her favorite food took precedence.
She rushed forward and began walking figure eights between John’s legs, rubbing up against them. “Mew. Mew, Meow,” she said, and meant every single word of it.
“Awe, you’re such a sweet little kitty, Snuggles,” John said, bending down to scratch under her ear and drop the plate of food on the floor. “Here you go. Buen Provecho.”
She rushed over to the plate, but stopped to look up at John. He was smiling down at her without a hint of disdain on his face. She cocked her head at him. It was strange, she thought, that such evil could be stored in such a kind and gentle man.
He looked from her to the plate and back, then scrunched his forehead. “That’s strange. Aren’t you gonna eat, Snuggles?”
She hesitated. She had put so much time into this plan. Sure, the food smelled delicious, but this was John we were talking about here. The man who named her . . . Snuggles.
‘John has to die.’
It was true. Dems were da rules. But . . . it didn’t really have to be right this second, did it? She could always come up with another plan; kill him, another rotation.
“On this day, John Doe,” she said, “You get to live.” It came out “Meeeeoowww,”
Then she turned to the food and went to work, chomping into a slice of the perfectly tender eel and basking in the glory that was Druni’s incredible cooking. She didn’t pay any attention to the pat John gave her on the head as she ate, nor did she notice when, instead of leaving the room, he moved deeper into it to investigate a strange spool of thread sitting on the ground.
“Is that what you’ve been doing up here? Are you pwaying with some lost stwing, you wittle Snuggle butt?”
She could have sworn she heard him say something, but she was far too absorbed in her food to care.
“Well, sorry kitty, but I gotta clean this up,” he said, spooling the bottom of the thread back up. “Someone could hurt themselves.”
It wasn’t until the spool was rolled up off the ground and to his chest that he realized it was stuck on something above. He looked up at the chandelier, then gave the string a little yank.
The first sound John heard was the snap of Druni’s tongs popping open as the string around them untwisted. It was loud enough to finally pull Snuggles’ attention away from her food, and over to the clumsy buffoon staring at the dropping tongs who was most certainly about to die even without her assistance.
The second, third, and forth sounds should have been the quick pop of three sharpened knives as they were dislodged from the inside of the wooden chandelier, but they were drowned out by the violent clatter of the tongs falling to the floor. Instead, the knives swung down in a swooping silence like three well-trained ninjas in rapid succession, each ready to catch their mark in the chest, completely unaware.
“Oh look at that,” John said, immediately bending down at the waist to pick up the fallen utensil. The three knives sailed through the air over his arched back, missing their target by mere inches. “Druni’s tongs!” he announced, holding them triumphantly in the air as he stood back up, blissfully unaware of just how close he had come to yet another death. It was only after the knives clanked into each other at the end of their swing and came spinning awkwardly back that he even noticed their existence.
“What the . . . ?” he muttered to himself, inspecting the poorly tied knots around their handles. He plucked at one of their strings as though it were the low E of a bass guitar and it trembled, the three knives rocking back and forth awkwardly as they hovered in the air perfectly in line with chest.
John looked up, slowly following the strings to where they lined around the chandelier, and then back down to the tongs he held in one hand, to the spool he held in the other, and finally, to the cat on the ground staring up at him in silence. There was a strange look on her round face, and John couldn’t help but notice she was sitting completely still—for the first and only time since John had met the cat so very long ago. It was eerie, and rather unsettling.
He looked back at the knives, back to the cat, and then swallowed, long and slow.
“Niiice kitty,” he said, slowly putting down the tongs to free his hands and begin untying the knives. “Goooood kitty.”
‘This,’ Snuggles thought, ‘is a first.’
She didn’t answer him. Not even so much as a mew. She did, however, start to move again. It was only a quick glance back down at the plate where the two slices of the violet delicacy remained untouched. She slowly bent down to eat again, all the while keeping her eyes up and locked onto the man with the knife, like a lion on the savannah taking a drink from a waterhole while it knows a threat is nearby.
John stared back without saying another word. He simply finished untying the knives and started to leave, careful to leave the largest possible berth around Snuggles on his way out. He didn’t bother to reclaim the plate he had left on the floor.
The door hadn't even closed all the way before Snuggles heard the clomping of his footsteps running for the stairs. She let out a little kitty sigh, realizing this . . . situation . . . could cause problems for her, should it remain unchecked. Again, she found herself without a choice. John had to die.
She abandoned the last of the slices and slid through the door just before it shut, racing down the hallway after him. He turned, rushing down the stairs, so she leapt up onto the bannister to gain some ground. She caught up halfway down.
John noticed the movement from the corner of his eye and turned to find the cat sliding down the bannister in a completely upright, seated position, facing him, using her tail to control her balance and speed. He screamed at the sight and startled, fumbling two of the knives in his hands and dropping them down the stairs before turning and putting his back to the wall. The last knife shook in his grip as he raised it in a defensive posture and held it out between them.
Snuggles followed it with her eyes and cocked her head, reaching a paw out to gently bat the air in front of it.
“Stay away from me!” John yelled, shaking the knife more violently. It quashed the last of her doubts about John’s appraisal of the situation and confirmed the necessity for another reset.
‘Spasiba, John,’ she thought. ‘For my eel. You are the bane of my existence, and yet, you are also my oldest, dearest friend. And now, again my friend, it is time for you to die.’
John watched the change in her intent visibly manifest. Her eyes narrowed from marbles to thin horizontal creases, like archers taking aim from behind newly constructed arrow slits. She bore her teeth and they glistened with death, chunks of shredded purple eel clearly visible between her teeth and fangs. Claws emerged from her paws, growing long and sharp, and when she growled, long and low, John’s eyes went wide, terrified by the confirmation of his suspicions.
He shook his head and raised his other hand as if telling her to stop. “N-No. N-Now Snuggles,” he said, frightened tears beginning to well at the edge of his eyes. “Let’s just hold on a—”
She spat and smacked the knife with a quick strike of her paw, then leapt over it onto his face.
“WHAT THE FUCK!” John screamed, scrambling backwards and slamming his back into the wall in shock. “GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”
He reached up with his open hand and grabbed her fur, trying to squeeze it tightly enough to pull her off, but she was latched onto him, her claws digging into his skin like a dozen barbed fish hooks. She reared back, flashing her fangs for a moment before sinking them into his cheek. She released her front paws and made a barrage of rapid fire slash attacks to his neck, gouging out chunks of his skin and bringing thin slices of red leaking to the surface.
John screamed in pain and pulled back with all his might, wrenching his head in the opposite direction, finally freeing himself from her grasp. He held her out at arms length and spat.
“You mangey Russian piece of shit!” he yelled at the cat. She responded with the whirling dervish skill, turning into a violent tornado of claws and fur in an attempt to scratch and spin her way out of his grip, but John held strong. He cocked back his knife. “You’re no Snuggles,” he said, blood splattering forward onto the cat from his lips. “You’re evil. You’re Vladicat The Fucking Impaler!”
Just as John drove forward to bury his knife in the murderous little shit, the expression on the cat’s face changed. The look of homicidal savagery in her eyes dissipated, exchanged for one of pure amazement. Her mouth dropped open in quite a doglike fashion, as though a dinner bell had just been rung to reveal a heaping mound of freshly cooked steak in the place of the usual dry kibble, her claws retracted, and the violent Tasmanian spin-cycle of death came to a sudden and unexpected halt.
The transformation threw John. Not enough to stop the impetus of the stab, mind you. No, just enough to bring about another moment of John’s completely unfocused confusion, which, when combined with the spontaneous end of the cat’s violent resolve to be set free, meant he was in for a world of hurt.
John had been struggling to hold the cat steady as it whirled, due to the addition of torsional force. When she stopped, so did its effect on the little furball’s weight, which meant that Vladicat, the Snuggler, momentarily dropped about six inches, putting John’s right forearm directly in the path of Druni’s well-mainted chef’s knife. The sharpened blade carried the momentum well, slicing through layers of skin and muscle fibers like they were room temperature butter.
John dropped the cat, unable to maintain his grip without intact lines of flesh to control his hand. It wasn’t until the knife caught the side of his Ulna, cracking the bone in his forearm, that John even realized what had just occurred. He looked down at his arm, skewered by the work of his own hand, then screamed and slid down the wall to take a seat on the step, not realizing there was now an inordinately aggressive feline just beneath him. It yowled at his quickly incoming buttocks and tried to leap out of the way, just as John tried to adjust his own descent. It was the dance between an animal in front of a speeding car and the driver in control of it, where both shuffle back and forth together until the inevitable finally takes place.
John fell.
He landed awkwardly on Sir VladiSnuggles, then tumbled backwards down the stairs from the 81st floor to the basement, finding both of Druni’s other knives on his way.
The cat, of course, would be just fine. It would have taken a lot more than two hundred pounds of bleeding human, or a stab through her gut for that matter, to kill her. While John bled out below, she was not only the picture of perfect health, she was, for the first time in god-only-knows-how-long, absolutely joyful.
She left John, the shishkabob’d scarecrow, lying in an unconscious bloody heap and pranced back upstairs to finish off her food. She cleaned herself afterwards, but didn’t care too much to clean off all of the blood, hoping it might serve as a powerful statement to the rest of the staff and guests about who exactly she was.
Snuggles was a thing of the past. She had been reborn, so she ran down to the lobby, hoping to find someone to witness her transformation. She was now Vladicat, The Fucking Impaler—and that was no name for a teacup pig.
There was, however, one itty-bitty problem.
No one had been around to hear John rename her, and while she was perched on the front desk, modeling her bloody fur like the poster child for a bad PETA campaign, he bled out and died.
Some time later, John returned as he always did. He went through Ahhe’s well-developed spiel, met a dragon named Mox-Riaythor, drank a cup of chamomile tea, and ate the best chocolate croissant of his entire life. Then, he met a furry little ball of Russian murder, and he named her Snuggles.
She wasn’t as angry about it as you might expect.
Why, you ask?
Because of hope, my dear friends.
Hope had returned to the heart of our immortal blue helion, and if there has ever been anything so true in this life to be parroted and passed down from generation to generation, grandparent to grandchild, it is this: Anything is possible, so long as one has hope.
So when Snuggles reclaimed the name of her struggle, she was not angry, nor did she grow violent. She did not lash out at John or run from him. She simply plopped down in his lap and began to pur. She was happy and comfortable there, in his lap. She was rubbing her head against his hand, swishing her tail back and forth through the air, enjoying John’s gentle touch, with a little crested smile beneath her pair of closed green eyes, because all the while, underneath each and every purr, she was plotting.
Russian Blue Photo By : Elisa Pérez Rodríguez