From Outside

The Cat Out of the Bag, Then Eat the Bag
Dan's Comments
DISCLAIMER: My Little Pony is the property of Hasbro, Inc. Harry Dresden is the property of Jim Butcher, Carl Kolchak is the property of ABC/Universal Television, Ranma Saotome is the property of Rumiko Takahashi, Sailor Jupiter is the property of Naoko Takeuchi.

Night meant more easily seen stars and none of us recognized anything in the starfield that spoke of home. The local pex field also changed with the coming of darkness and night. I had the whimsical thought that two competing fields existed on the planet, one for day, and one for night. On analysis of the whimsy, I remember that the two largest Boths had marks on their sides. One I now realized was a stylized daystar, the other was the partially occluded moon. It was impossible not to take the reasonable flight of fancy that one controlled the day pex, and the other the night's.

I'll pause to allow the laughter to rise and fall.

What did arrive after all my analysis and initiation of future revelations was the Arboreal. It managed to slice through the bars and glass of the third floor window, and tumble exhausted through the opening before it's vulog claws guttered out. The poor creature's clothing was torn and it could only manage a soft hiss as I approached. I lifted it easily as it feebly struggled to escape. When I set it at the head of the bed just where the pair's heads lay it actually looked quizzical. It proceeded to snuggle against them and fall into an depleted sleep. My job done I stepped away and verified that neither He-who-writes nor the Speciesist had been awakened.

It was not long after that I discovered why the Arboreal had fled. I'd seen materialized vulog energy fields before, and not just from 'They-who-can't-be-talked-about-around-Xothians', yes they eat brains, you don't, we all get it. This one was more fluid than most, as it crept in through the hole in the window. Out of professional curiosity, and a sense of duty to the others, I approached it to examine it closely. While I'm a poor flier, and not being a physically imposing or impressive specimen, my vulog manipulations are first-rate. No one who competes for a place at and passes a Class-3 license board exam is anything less than the best, of the best, of the best, and most are several iterations more.

I was trying to determine whether it was simply a probe, or an attack construct, when it attacked. Not in a physical way, but by infiltration. It really should have gone after another, although considering the Arboreal's exhaustion, it likely did, with little more success. The best way to analyze a vulog construct is to load it into a shielded node, and disassemble it carefully. I did exactly that. It had rudimentary anti-intrusion defenses, which I bypassed and neutralized. I will admit, I never considered it might be sentient. I committed a crime against science in that I didn't attempt to preserve that sentience, during my disassembly. I can only say that if I had understood, I would have also understood I was fighting for my life and identity, and the end result would be the same. But at least I would have regarded its actions as a death struggle, instead of a bit of clever programming.

Finding the language files was a gift from FIPSM itself. They were intact, mnemonically compatible with myself, although not with my companions, and completely free of hidden surprises. Installing them on myself gave me much to do later when I rechecked what I could remember of the natives' vocalizations. Discovering that a great deal of the language was somatic was a great surprise. I also began recognizing the utterly insane babbling of the probe and realized its purpose was infiltration and espionage, with a side of wetwork as well. Dismantling the rest of it was an easy enough task, although when it started pleading with me, I felt a bit of remorse until I realized that this was the exact tack anti-intrusion systems might employ as social engineering. Again, I hadn't realized it was sentient, it gave none of the accepted evidence of it and it was not merely a 'Chinese Room', namely it lacked empathy, although a biologist might have interpolated its responses differently.

Once it was disassembled and the bits and pieces were stored in an inactive node, I turned my attention to the Arboreal. Its battle with her was recorded and was quite an interesting conflict. It also indicated that the Arboreal needed some pretty extensive work on the preexisting problems and battle-damaged psyche.

The sudden arrival of the natives' assault group and the three, large Boths, awakened everyone, and the natives began casting around, presumably for the attack probe I'd just dealt with. The Pair awoke in their bed and reacted with embarrassment at their predicament, He-who-writes ambled over and explained the situation, while the Arboreal settled across their laps and began purring, and became quite alarmed when the Pair seemed to be pulling away from each other. While it was quite gentle in pushing them together to form the extra-large lap, and was careful to nuzzle each of them, it was also far stronger than either. Add the higher-pitched, baby-like sounds and it had them, resistance was futile.

That changed when the smallest, pinkest of the Both ambled over with a horn aglow. The Arboreal leapt to the end to the bed and hissed. Both He-who-writes and I moved too, and the Pair scrambled backward, each trying to put the other behind them until they impacted the wall and could retreat no farther. The vulog-infused pex construct floated out of the pink Both's horn. The Arboreal snatched the isosceles triangle with the two half-circles on the unequal side out of the air and ate it. The pink Both seemed shocked that the Arboreal had done that, possibly that the Arboreal had even seen the construct. The Arboreal looked back at the pair, and its cheeks became almost as red as its hair. Then it looked back at the pink one, who'd had the wisdom to retreat. The pure malevolence in the Arboreal's expression exceeded what the probe had recorded during their fight, and they'd been trying to kill each other.

While the natives' activities should have been enough to wake the dead, it was not sufficient to keep the Pair awake. The Arboreal, He-who-writes, and I settled them back down, with the Arboreal pushing them together and offering herself as pillow. With nervous laughter, they settled back and returned to sleep. Soon after, the natives had either found what they were looking for, and covered it with more searching, or failed to find it. While the language files allowed me to parse their expressions, the context made it almost a code that I could not break. I mean a sub-planetary body could not be concealed in a room, no matter how forbidding it was. The body, not the room. And the addition of the Arboreal drew no interest, nor did the obvious gap in their security the Arboreal had made.

Only the smallest, and only bipedal one, noted that the snack bowls were depleted. The observation caused chagrin on the two Neithers, and all three of the Boths. Whether their vocalization promised food, were an apology, or both, I don't know. Again, without context, they were essentially a code. I assume they were speaking in colloquialisms that didn't translate well. I was beginning to feel I was a Chinese room. I could translate the words and the grammar, but was only hearing, and would probably speak, gibberish. Only the bipedal one's clear 'they must be hungry, at least they didn't eat the bowls' came across clearly. I would have to reparse the sentences assuming that some of the words and phrases are names, rather than not, and hope that clarifies their statements, but that will take time.

The discovery that the probe's files contained an intrusion package was interesting, although it came with a compulsion, aided by my own curiosity, to use it. I fell to temptation and was cast into parallel worlds of nightmares. The female of the Pair seemed obsessed with being abandoned by males of her own species. The sexual dimorphism seemed reversed for her though, the males were all smaller, weaker and less physically aggressive than her. And thus would abandon her after a short while, over and over again. While even He-who-writes was only slightly shorter, the other two were both taller, so I classed that as a dream-justification, but filed it away. Another node infiltrated the male's dream and found a lack of female support on his endeavors. Which admittedly were often combat, but included diplomacy. He was merely a resource females used, for the promise of reciprocity, approval, etc., but never was delivery made on those promises.

While I am physically incapable of grinning, had I been of my comrades' or the natives' physiognomy, my grin would have terrified. I simply put them in each other's dream, with full autonomy. The 'enemies attack my friends' dynamic, which I judged the real reason for the female's abandonment issues, not her height, for him was a slightly more aggressive day than usual. For him, she was grateful for the help, and stood by his side either fighting or advising, and didn't differentiate between 'her' and 'his' enemies.

Once it was a stable cycle, which occurred frighteningly easily, I left it running. I didn't watch too closely as they became intimate, but I was aware of it.

Then I delved into the Arboreal's dreams and discovered a pair of vaguely mad worlds running side-by-side, the Arboreal in its 'mental shape' of a small, hunting, arboreal creature, and one of its physical form, like that of my other colleagues. Strangely, the colleague-shaped was a dark-haired male, rather than a red-haired female. A bit of work, and all four dreamscapes were linked, and while the colleague-shaped was terrified by the arboreal creature, the four seemed to get on well, especially since they all seemed to take an attack on one as an attack on all. The Arboreal took great delight in shredding anything that threatened its pack.

It isn't fun, waking up and wondering what the cat did when it was in charge. The vivid dream was also disorienting. I . . . I should feel guilty, thinking of some guy as my pop, and some girl as my mother, but they were so nice, and if they were only a little older than me, they were more like parents I'd heard about in stories from the others at Furinkan High than my parents. They looked after me, and the cat. Makoto was like the best parts of Kasumi and Akane. She loved cooking and cleaning, and teaching me all her tricks and techniques, and she was eager to really learn martial arts from me. Not that she let me get away with anything, but it wasn't 'oh hit him with a table' for taking the last cookie. Patrick was a mix of Nabiki and how Kuno thinks he is. It felt weird knocking someone down, and instead of a cry for vengeance, he'd laugh, get up and ask how I did it. He never hit me, but his 'I'm very disappointed' was worse than a kick in the guts. Weird, when you know something's a dream when not everyone is trying to beat you up.

The dream went on for months, and it felt so real. I remember the sparring, the hugs, the fighting monsters, and the meals after. And while I knew neither of them could stand against me in the dojo for an instant, they, we meshed on the battlefield. No monster had a chance, then it was heading on home laughing to clean up. Heck, the only thing that really gave me any trouble were the piano lessons. 'The paper just tells you the movements and the rhythm, you saying it's too tough?' Yeah, Patrick definitely had a streak of Nabiki in him.

The cat was the problem. It was always around. Yeah, it was friendly, but it still frightened me. And it seemed to be eager to keep us all together. I still have to laugh at it scaring Makoto right out her bath towel into Patrick's arms, so she was clinging to him like an anaconda, naked, wet and too terrified to care about either. It did that kind of stuff to all of us, and that Makoto and Patrick used it to help me over my fear of cats.

The part that really frightened me was the way I started feeling towards them. Not just Makoto, who was athletic, friendly and beautiful, but the way Ranko began reacting to Patrick, because he was athletic, friendly and understanding. I suddenly realized their jokes at 'is this a threesome or a foursome' early on, weren't just jokes but prescience. If I hadn't woken up, would it have gone that far? I'd held them in my arms, been held in theirs, even fallen asleep holding or being held when one of us was sick or scared. Brr, that cat-demon, I hope the cat gave it what for.

Waking up with Patrick's head in my lap and Makoto's head on my chest was shocking, in good and bad ways. Before I could fully awaken and act, they growled the way they sometimes did, sometimes did in the dream, and suddenly I was between them and getting hugged by both of them like the long-lost friend I sort of was. I was glad I was still a girl, because bursting into quiet tears came easily. We three stayed that way for a bit until I released my grip on them.

Patrick's question, 'Do you want some hot water?' came a both a shock and a comfort. They still knew me, since he knew I preferred to be a guy. Especially if there was going to be a fight, and I suspected there'd be a fight soon.

But all it did was reignite the waterworks. Two people who cared about me, and let me care about them in my own way, who trusted me and I trusted them, and it was real, not a dream. I didn't have to worry about them understanding me, I knew they did.

"Yeah, but aren't you hurt?" I asked Patrick.

"As long as she doesn't frown at me, I'll live. AKKK!" he said then 'played dead' when she invariably did.

This attracted the attention of the others, and the winged, tentacle creature held up the tips of its tentacles to indicate its nonthreatening intent.

We helped each other out of the collection of little beds, and sat on the floor, although I suspect Makoto and Patrick had wanted to stand but just couldn't manage it.