Get out there and hunt rabbits you lazy so-and-so seemed a reasonable interpretation, and I attempted an apology posture, wondering if this Challenge was starting out with a collection quest after all.
Turning to go, a shiver ran along my extra-flexible spine. Lightning-quick, I snapped back to Black Tom, and saw he’d risen, ears flattened. But he was looking up, not at me. I followed suit, aware of a deep rumble, and then found myself crouching, trying to make myself smaller. A pointless gesture since animals could hardly be of interest to the thing above us.
Three many-sided polyhedrons arranged in a triangle and connected by straight sections, with the gap in the centre filled by a circle. Metallic, somewhat streamlined despite its segmented shape, though not what I’d call aerodynamic. But still a ship.
It passed quickly from my line of sight, descending, and the low, deep note of whatever it used as engines grew fainter, changing pitch as it did so, before cutting out. Landed?
An image of a patched grey and white cat chasing off after it imposed itself onto the empty sky. Two other images rapidly followed: the patched cat peering at the ship from a distance, and then returning.
A scouting mission. Right. Thoughtlessly, I started to nod, and clumsily transformed the gesture into a more catly crouch. Then I turned and raced excitedly down the rocks, past the three kittens and into the trees.
The wealth of scent I plunged into reminded me of basic caution. I might feel marvellously fast and strong and agile, but I was still housecat-sized, and so I slowed, and paid attention to scent and movement, along with my handy vision-map, that kept showing me places I was heading before I arrived. A stream, a gradually clearing slope up to a ridge. And beyond that, a valley farm.
I almost stopped altogether when presented with this image. Humans, represented in the image by a worn-looking woman working industriously with a hoe. For some reason being Cat had made me assume that this was a world of animals, but of course if the Challenges were all based on the planet—past, future or fiction—then humans were only to be expected.
Which colony was being invaded?
Cresting the ridge, I flattened myself to gritty stone, seeing the farm of my vision with the addition of the ship, currently crushing an uneven field of some grain crop. I even saw the woman, running frantically, one of a half-dozen people scattering from the house in every direction.
They’d managed quite a distance in the time it had taken me to reach the ridge, and the fact that none of them ran together made me narrow my eyes. Even the children. One, not more than six, was flagging and stumbling, clutching a shaggy black-and-white dog for support, but was also the nearest to shelter, having been sent in the direction with the shortest route out of the clear centre of the valley.
An opening appeared in one of the straight sections of the ship, and two vehicles emerged. Somewhere between sleds and chariots, they featured a single person standing at a tall front control panel, and a second seated in the long, low rear section. The ship was at enough of a distance that, even with my keen Cat eyes it took a long study to realise the sleds hovered above the ground.
They were also much faster than running people, zipping off in effortless pursuit of those nearing cover. The boy and dog were to my left, and I watched as one pursuer—a woman wearing a dark green coverall—pointed what looked like a torch at the pair. Boy and dog fell without any attempt to break their momentum, thumping into tussocky grass.
The sled bobbed a little as the woman hopped down and loaded both limp forms, and then they were off again, heading to intercept the next-nearest runner.
No-one escaped. I thought one had managed it, disappearing along a stream bed far to my right, but after the sleds had delivered their unconscious loads back to the ship, they both sped off along the stream, and returned after the barest delay.
Either the final runner hadn’t had the sense to hide, or the sleds had some way to track those they hunted. Was it specifically people, or would they be able to spot any living creature?
Movement to my right almost had me leaping, but it was only the trio of kittens, crouched much as I was, the tail of the darkest flicking.
I formed a picture of the three of them standing before Black Tom: they could report back while I continued to watch. In response I was given an image of a dark grey cat sitting in the entrance of the farm below, eyes closing in greeting. The vision was accompanied by a strong sense of concern.
Firmly, I re-sent the image of the three reporting to Black Tom, but added a rider of my patched self, much closer to ship and farm, watching. And, putting action to thought, I then snaked over the lip of the ridge and tucked myself beneath the nearest bush.
Two of the kittens stayed where they were, while the third departed. For a time I kept a portion of my attention on them, to be sure that they did not—at least immediately—follow me down. But then all of my focus turned to the drama below, and the task of reaching it without exposing myself.
I was not a particularly well-camouflaged cat, but the people from the ship didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the valley after they’d captured the runners. They took their prisoners into their ship, and then emerged to explore the farmhouse. Before I was halfway down the valley they brought an elderly man out of the house and marched him off to the ship, and then there was no more activity until I was close enough to be making serious decisions.
With the ship sitting in the middle of a grain field, I could probably get right up to it without being spotted—so long as there was no proximity detector to beep out a warning. The question was, what was I doing here? I’d been sent on a scouting trip, and potentially to check on a fellow cat, but I’d seen no sign of any cats being taken into the ship, and what did Cat-me care about a bunch of captured humans?
But I was a Player Character. My decisions were not driven by self-preservation, but by story, advancement and reward. And any risk had to be significantly mitigated by the fact that I was safely stowed in the Soup at the Challenge entrance—along with at my parents' house in Drenthe. The most I had to worry about was my player statistics and boasting rights.
Well, and pain. Pain was definitely a factor I’d never before had to deal with in an MMO.
The prospect didn’t deter me, but meant I was not inclined to attempt a run past the mobs to a checkpoint manoeuvre. If this game even had checkpoints. It could be so freeform as to not have an actual objective: a sandbox cat colony, there for me to make what I wanted of it, spaceship included.
In any case, I wanted into the ship, which was not so simple a goal. Spaceship design didn’t lend itself to convenient open windows.
Hoping I wasn’t irradiating Cat-me, I crept up to where the ship had opened. The door had closed, the ramp was gone. I trotted beneath one of the straight sections, nose twitching at a variety of harsh scents. There was definitely an ozone tang, with an acrid undernote, and a weird burned popcorn odour that I realised was coming from the grain immediately flattered by the polyhedrons. Definitely some heat involved in the landing.
As I approached the central circle, I spotted quivering in the grain immediately below it, and was two heartbeats from bolting when a pair of grey ears popped above the green-gold, unripened heads of grain. The farm cat.
I blinked a quick greeting, and then sent an image of the door as I’d seen it when open. Farmhouse Grey’s ears showed dissatisfaction, and then I had an image back of smooth, unbroken metal. No way in.