A Trip To A Lumpy Little Mewn

 

            It was a heck of a hot day. Suzy was sitting on the black chair grooming her side in a sleepy, desultory manner. Something kept disturbing her little noodle.
            Maybe someone wanted to talk to her. Since she only ever talked to Toots by KittyComm™, she figured it must be Toots!
            It was Toots!
            “Suzy? Are you there?” said Toots. (telepathically, of course)
            “Mrrrp?” said Suzy, sleepily.
            “You want to get out of  here?” said Toots.
            “Wha? I’m not there. I’m here!” said Suzy.
            “Don’t mess with me, Suzy. It’s too hot for that nonsense. You were joking, right?” said Toots.
            “The weather is stupid here too. Where do you want to go?” said Suzy, squinting at a spot on her paw, wondering if it had always been there.
            "Boss was listening to a video. Two guys, Jesse and Max. There were talking about a mewn. Not this mewn. Another one. Around Mrrrz. Remember Mrrrz? Yeah, well, it’s got this lumpy little mewn and on this mewn there is a mondolith,” said Toots.
            “What’s a mondolith?”
            “Maybe they said megalith. People want to know what’s in this megalith,” said Toots.
            “Back up a minute,” said Suzy. “Is it a building? What, they think it’s full of aliens?”
            “They don’t know! We could be the first to check it out, Suzy! Think about it. If we could just communicate it, we could be famous. First cats in a megalith, on Phobos, I think that’s the mewn’s name.”
            “It sounds like ‘big rock thing.’ What if it’s just a big rock thing and nobody was ever there?”
            “You know, it’s cold in space?” said Toots. “Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference to cats on an Exoprowl. Still….”
            “I’m sold. Let’s do it,” said Suzy.

***

            And before you could say Holly Golly Buttered Biscuit, the girls were off.
            First they hovered about our own blue planet, noting with approval how beautiful it was.
            “Let’s press on to Mrrrz,” said Toots. And in a cosmic blink they floated in orbit over Mrrrz, looking for the lumpy little mewn.
            They had to orbit Mrrrz a couple times before they spotted it. But at last….
            “It’s awfully small, and it’s not round!” said Suzy. “Where is its megalith?”
            “We better go down there and check. Maybe it’s all human malarkey! We must search,” said Toots resolutely.
            So, round and round the little mewn they orbited, altering their orbit each time to see more of the surface. Finally, they saw something that looked way too big to have just happened like stuff usually does. It didn’t look like a hill, a crater, a desert, or anything natural, and it was way too tall.
            “That must be it,” said Toots.
            “It looks like a messed up skyscraper,” said Suzy.
            “It’s probably old,” said Toots.
            “How old could it be?” said Suzy, dubiously. (Cats don’t grok time much.)
            It was very tall and thin for a building. It was dark in material, and dark inside. No lights brightened its windows. There were many stories. If there had ever been glass in those windows, it was eons gone.
            “I’m afraid,” said Suzy. “It looks scary!”
            “Remember we are intelligently curious as well as Cautious™, Dear,” said Toots.
            “Very well,” said Suzy. “I must remember we aren’t really here; we’re just looking!”
            “That’s right, let’s try this window here,” said Toots.
            Inside, there was a room with a regular flat floor. In the smaller room off that one there was a table. On the table were four plates and some odd looking implements. On the plates were some ancient ghosts of scraps of food.
            Around the table were four things much like stools, two were knocked over, and two just sat back from the table.
            It looked like whoever had been there had left in a hurry.
            “I wonder what they looked like,” said Suzy.
            “Now, that could be scary. Maybe you don’t really want to know that,” said Toots.
            There were 15 floors, and each one showed signs of rapid departure. They found drawers hanging open. Tools scattered. Broken machinery.
            There were closets open with contents spilling out. The remaining clothing appeared to be some sort of uniform, roughly hominid in configuration. These garments appeared to have been dark green with some kind of shining insignia.
            The girls began to wonder  if the inhabitants had left voluntarily or if something else had happened to them.
            Floor by floor it was the same, all the way down to the bottom.
            The very bottom floor was a single large room. Doors opened out onto the rough surface as it they had stood open forever. The floor was covered in fine grey dust in drifts. Whoever had lived and worked here was long long gone.
            “Toots, look at that,” said Suzy. She was staring at an image engraved into the black stone wall.
            “It’s a cat! An impossibly regal and mighty cat! An ancient ancestor of all cats, surely, Suzy,” whispered Toots, in awe.
            And so it was. Carved into the stone was a great tabby, stripes and all, wearing one of the green uniforms they had seen upstairs. The image was huge, far over the size of an Earth lion.
            “We’ll never know why they left, or how, but we know one thing,” said Toots.
            “Yes!” said Suzy. “Cats were here first!”
            “Not those bossy talking monkeys!” said Toots.
            “How will we ever tell them?” laughed Suzy.
            “I don’t know! Maybe someday they will figure it out themselves,” said Toots, “Oh, let’s go home.”
            It was nearly night, and starting to cool down when the girls got back home, each to her own little world on Earth. Each held in her heart the knowledge that cats had been to the mewn of Mrrrz first, and that was enough.
            The megalith continued its vigil. 
 

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