|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- CARNE'S MOISTURE DETECTION FRIEND--CUP 21--"YEARS OF BEATHCAT" <-------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  Carne's Moisture Detection Friend  ||  -------> (Cup SRcm021, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = ***YEARS OF BEATHCAT*** Story Treatment by Donamin Roostal I see them there, by that castle wall. A woman, Natthalie Hove Mound, and a big cat, Beathcat. Pronounce it like beth cat. And natalie huv mound. Natthalie is blond. She looks happy but tired. And Beathcat, he's deep blue. And he's got some white marking here and there, stripes and spirals and spots. They spent many years together at castle. It may not be what you expect. You wanna call them superheroes, go right ahead. That's only a small part of it, though. Natthalie has this great childhood. Her world was resplendent, she was right there in the biggest renaissance ever. Wow, it might have been the best childhood anywhere, anytime, in the whole universe. But within all the wonderful celebrating, trouble was brewing. Big trouble. Natthalie was like sixteen, and she was beautiful and super popular. Some dissonance there, between the innocence of the times, and all the sexual stuff being directed at her, though in a subtle way. I guess it was that her people had become too dependent on a certain energy source, and when it fizzled out, they were toally screwed. Totally. It was like, almost overnight, everything fell apart. Natthalie was horrified, there she was, just at the apex of her flowering, and the rug was pulled out from under her. But she thought she'd be okay, with her rich family, that somehow she was above the disaster, that she'd be able to get by without too much inconvenience. But the ruin was too total. Her lifestyle fell by many quantum leaps. She was wrecked. We're talking fantastic opulence one day, and a few months later, utter despair, barely surviving. Okay, this energy source, which had been in use for several centuries, scared off Beathcat and his kind. Yeah, he's that old. Hundreds of years old. His kind is effectively immortal. "You must never crack sinkhole mathnota.", Natt always heard smart people say. Sinkhole mathnota, "math" for short, was the energy source. Looking like light purple abstract sculpture, the mathnota were bulbous and twisty, hard but light. They were discovered in a sinkhole, in some hills, and the oldest people Natt knew as a kid were kids themselves when the mathnota were found. The mathnota were strong, but they were not invulnerable, and one was damaged once, early after their discovery, and the result were very strange. Warpings of reality, and disappearances. The immediate area of the disaster was still affected at the time of Natt's childhood, though not nearly as strongly as it was initially. The reality warp was such that mathematics were different in the affected area. Square roots were much lower than they should have been, some subtractions acted like addition, but only with certain numbers. And those who were near the epicenter of the disaster, but not near enough to vanish, were changed. Their bodies and minds were altered drastically. But a day after the event, the effect had subsided enormously, and presence in the area only resulted in "mathness", a mild kind of madness. And as the years passed, the effect diminished, along with the extent of the math differences, but it never went away totally. Natt knew about the cats, great beasts, very rare. But everyone had their encounters, before the sinkhole mathnota were discovered. After that day, not even a single encounter with the cats was reported. Natt read all she could about the cats, and interrogated the elderly for personal accounts of encounters with the cats, which were sketchy and vague but still stoked the fires of interest in the cats within her. She wanted to meet a cat. -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----