A deregger grabbed one of the station cats by the fur dismissively. The cat clawed the he** out of them, and then several other cats pounced, biting and attacking.
Jay merely looked up from his tea with Lilicoon and Sunshine and stated "They did it to themselves." And pretty much ignored the chaos. -- Anon Guest
Of the many unwritten rules of the Alliance, one of the lesser-known classic blunders is: Never abuse a Skitty.
A regular cat, if seized roughly by their fur and hauled around, will scratch and bite until its free. Then they will run like the wind for the nearest safe haven. Skitties only look like Terran cats. They're genetically programmed for pest control, but also to defend station systems against saboteurs.
Skitties are also station systems.
So when an arrogant tourist clutched a fistful of a Skitty that had leaped up onto his table, he expected a yowl and a hiss before he hurled it to a distant corner. What he got was a hyperactive ball of claws and teeth, attatched to a call that summoned every Skitty in a twenty sidu[1] radius.
The Skitties swarmed, claws and teeth flying. For an entire minute, the tourist was covered in angry felinoids. Passers-by only stopped long enough to determine that the attacking creatures were all Skitties, and moved along. They knew better than to interfere.
Two sitting at a table nearby watched and recorded most of the whole thing. Once the "catscade" swarmed, the kinder one alerted Station Security and the Emergency Response Teams.
It was still priority low.
The entitled tourist would survive, and the local Mediks would make sure he survived intact. With luck, he might actually learn something. Including how to be polite to a cat.
"He did deserve it," said Miss Lilcoon. "Perhaps he didn't deserve so much of it."
"That's where you and I agree to disagree," said Jay.
[1] Sidu: Common slang for the Standard Distance Unit(SDU) which is roughly equal to a Terran meter.
[Photo by Victoria Tronina on Unsplash]
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