25

Stu and Scout on the Hunt

Scout bounded through the front door and back into the Inside, clawing and climbing her way up to the top cushions of the nearest couch for the best view. She didn’t know why she liked to be up high on things; she just had this need to be there.

Stu watched from the hall. He was operating more slowly after his last skirmish with the DirtSlurper and Tipsy. He peeked carefully around the corner, still thinking about their last encounter.

Fortunately, the DirtSlurper had cleared all the stray strands of cat hair on the floor and was now nowhere to be seen.

Phew. Not that I couldn’t have taken him. I so could have taken him—

Whether or not that was true, Stu was proceeding with caution, especially when it came to the Inside. He’d learned his lesson: when you saw one of those metal things, you ran.

Same with the JoJos or whatever. The metal-heads around this place—

“Did you understand a thing the old man said?” Scout called down from the couch to her brother.

Stu scrunched up his nose. “Not until he got to the part about the treat. The sparkle . . . thingy . . .”

“Duh.” Scout bit her own tail. “The SparkleTreat!”

“Yeah, well. I don’t care what you call it. I just want to find it. So come down off that thing and get looking. It’s in here somewhere, right? The Inside?”

Scout came flying down off the cushions and skidding across the well-polished floor, scratching at the wood with her nails to try to stop before she hit the . . .

KRKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

Wall.

After what felt like a lifetime later (twelve whole minutes!) both kittens felt like giving up. The hall was boring. The living room was empty. There was one good juicy cord hanging beneath a table, ripe for chewing, with a bonus paper tag hanging off it.

Aside from that . . . nothing.

“Let’s try over here.” Stu wagged his head, padding down the hall.

Scout followed his butt—then froze.

The doorway to the nearest room was cracked open.

“You seeing this, Stu?”

He joined her at the crack, coaching her as she wedged the door open with one paw. “Easy . . . easy now . . .”

The door swung open.

The first things the kittens saw were the lights—tiny and glowing and blinking—and way, way more than they could count.

But the next things they noticed were the sounds.

“Do you hear that?” Stu whispered. “What are they? They’re incredible.”

“Shhh,” Scout said.

The noises inside were . . . hard to describe. Like a kind of melody where everything clashes with everything else, especially to finely tuned Feline ears.

And it isn’t really music, Stu thought. At least not any kind of music I’ve heard before.

What there was, was a lot of this:

WHRRRRRRRRRRR!

And some of this:

HMMMMMMMMM!

And way, way too much of this:

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

“What is this place?” Stu backed away from the door, then looked at Scout, worried.

“I guess we better find out,” Scout said.

“Great, have fun in there,” Stu said. Then he looked at his sister and sighed, taking off through the door first . . .

Stu peered into the dim lab, instantly mesmerized. Everywhere he looked, he saw something he wanted to bat, boop, or pounce on.

On the walls were shelves—floor to ceiling, except for the few that were busted into ramps—loaded with all kinds of junky, wiry, plasticky, dusty, glowing, beeping, flashing, magnetic, fragile, big, and small treasures.

SNIFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!

Stu breathed it all in.

He moved beneath a table dangling with clusters of tantalizing wires—flowing waterfalls made of cords and cables and connectors—just begging to be clawed at and batted and grabbed.

There were plugs to chew. Stacks of papers to roll on. Keyboards to use for butt massages. Warm laptops to nap on. Sharp edges of metal sheeting for cheek scratches. Stiff wires for head scritches . . .

“Stu,” Scout whispered. “You okay?”

“Are you kidding me? You gotta see this for yourself,” Stu whispered back.

Scout slipped inside.

Lights shone on the floor, reflecting across what looked to be a slick and slippery surface, the kind that ached for a good claw-scrabbling chase, followed by a few butt slides . . .

“WHHHHOOOOAAA.” Scout was so stunned, it was the only sound she could make.

Stu smiled. “OH YEAH, WHHOOOOOAAAA!”

And so the kittens stared, frozen in place, victims of sensory overload. They immediately forgot why they were there . . . and did what any cat would have done . . .

They started hunting.

In silence, with a good low crouch, cautious tails, and cocked ears.

Stu kept his eye on a dangling fluffy ball, swaying hypnotically from the air-conditioning vent below.

Scout crouched . . . then attacked a workbench, knocking over a tray of shiny screws, bolts, wires, and . . . “Hold on—what is this magical thing?”

The kitten carefully picked her way over the circuit boards and battery packs toward a pulsing, glowing keyboard. “What the—?”

Stu wasn’t listening. Stu ran up a broken shelf—springing nimbly up to a second and a third and a fourth—until he’d scaled the entire bookcase on his quest to reach the tempting, teasing puff ball. The one that he only managed to bat further away every time he pawed at it.

But this was about something bigger than even a puff ball. It was about the climb. Each shelf he ran down felt great and was chock-full of interesting things to bat and sniff and kick over. Plus, he liked the way they sounded when they clattered to the floor . . .

KRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

A box of screwdrivers went flying . . .

CRASSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The soldering iron toppled free . . .

“This place is THE BEST!” Stu yelled over to Scout.

“I KNOW!” Scout yelled back from her perch on the shiny keyboard that sat in the center of the desk.

Now she settled in, wiggling bits of tummy and fur down into the spaces between the keys. “Ohhhhh, this feels good! Nice and waaaaarm . . .” Behind her, a monitor lit up and characters started flashing across the screen.

Stu laughed at his sister and went back to picking his way across the third-from-highest shelf.

As he kept climbing, though, he started to feel . . . uncomfortable. He looked down at his sister, trying not to panic.

“Um, Scout, you know, I gotta go, like real bad.”

“So find a freaking box . . . you know the rules.” Scout stretched out her left paw to hit a few more keys. Then her right paw. The monitor behind her shot out more and more glowing characters as she moved . . .

Stu sent a stack of DVDs flying. “But what do I do now? The box is . . . where’s the box again?” He couldn’t think.

Scout rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Somewhere Inside. You know, one of those places with . . . the walls . . . and the floor.”

“Not helping,” Stu called from the shelf.

Scout rolled her eyes again. “Come on, Stu. This is you we’re talking about. You always have to go. You should be a professional box finder by now.”

Great. Thanks, sis.

Stu turned around, looking for a way down . . .

But what he found was something better. It was a box—a big one.

I mean, a weird one, Stu thought, but yeah, a big one.

It had four arm-type things sticking out from the sides, but there was also a big open space inside the box, just the right size for a blobby gray pudge of a kitten like Stu.

Besides, everything was so weird and wired up in that freaking room, why wouldn’t the box be weird and wired up too?

“I guess this counts,” Stu said to himself as he sniffed his way in.

“Stu?” Scout was watching him now. “What are you doing?”

“Obi said whiz in the box, so I’m whizzing in the box,” Stu said as the small puddle formed inside the box.

“Wait, what?” Scout stared.

The puddle was bigger and bigger. It splashed on his paws and his fur—but he was already feeling much better. He looked over at his sister, who was still gawking. “Come on. You just told me to find a box. What’s the problem?”

Now the puddle was getting almost too big. Stu looked around for some sand to claw over it . . . but there was nothing there.

Huh.

Weird box.

Scout twitched her ears with concern. “Yeah, you know . . . I don’t think that’s a box, Stu.”

Stu snorted. “What, are you crazy? It’s a box, of course it’s a box. I know what a box looks like, Scout.” Except he didn’t.

The box wasn’t a box. The not-box was Min’s pride and joy. Elmer sat stoically, slowly dripping, unaware that he had been turned into a port-a-potty.

“Aaahh, much better,” Stu said, scrambling out of Elmer’s storage compartment. He was eyeing his next sniff target when a loud buzzing noise erupted in the lab. Scout shot up in the air when she saw Joan coming to life on the nearby shelf.

“Stu! It’s that creepy flying bot! We gotta get out of here!” As Joan’s propellers spun faster and the buzzing grew louder, Scout and Stu scrabbled and flailed wildly, slipping on the smooth surfaces of the lab as they sprinted toward the exit as fast as their little legs could carry them.