Unauthorized Kitty
Unauthorized Kitty
Chapter 1 - Unauthorized Acquisition
"Gather round, children, it's Viewing Time again!" Teacher Lucy clapped her paws happily, looking around the classroom at the children under her care as their form teacher, her feline face smiling beatifically as she walked around rounding the kids up from their afternoon free hour.
Color Pencils and pastel sticks carefully gathered up by tiny hands and stacked away carefully with half-scribbled papers, bookmarks shoved into half-read books and returned to shelves, napping kids gently shaken up by Lucy's paws as she nods at them.
Elliot half-opened his eyes. He was a little exhausted from dancing for a bit earlier, and had opted for the nap option. Lucy's cute cat face loomed over him, grinning. "Elly... it's Viewing Time. You should get up."
Elliot nodded and sat up, his dopey look not exactly improved by the mussled brown hair and overlong sleeves hiding most of his hands. Viewing Time lasted an hour and was the last period of the entire school week here at Little Sanctuary's "Special Little Sparks - School for Select Children". Just another hour and he would be home free...
Lucy stood on tip-toe, her tail swishing lazily. She was maybe one or two heads taller than the tallest child in the classroom, a sort of shortstack trying to pass herself off as a matron several times larger. It generally worked. She tapped the power button on the old vision set she had brought in, sliding in a cartridge with the week's video. Her white-tipped ears twitched, the same white as the fur covering all her paws where her fur hadn't faded into a warm brown carpet.
The kids didn't question the presence of a bipedal lady cat in their classroom. They hadn't after the initial introductions were made ages ago. Lucy licked her muzzle a little, making a show of struggling to get the cartidge going.
The week's video came on, a sort of cartoony intro playing. Anthromorphic vehicles representing firemen, ambulances, and repairmen buzzed around a toy house on fire. Injured people were evacuated, the fire was carefully put out, and the repair vehicles barfed out a small crew to work on making the damaged building brand new. as a choir offscreen sang:
"Life can be great life can be good but just so often sometimes things don't go as they should
We're the Reset Corps When things break that really shouldn't We come in and fix things Even those they said we couldn't
Life can be great but when it's not good look to us here at Reset Corps, dudes..."
It was corny. Horrendously corny. But the kids didn't know corny, and Lucy sang along enthusiastically as well as if she didn't care.
The video continued by introducing a group of men in various colored full-body hazmat suits, one color for each branch of some group.
"Here at Little Sanctuary, we try to keep life perfect. But sometimes, things don't always go as they should," a tired-sounding old man spoke up, narrating a montage of various repair and rescue activities. "That's why we have the Reset Corps. We save people from accidents, we stop problems from going out of control, and we fix things so they're brand new again..."
The video continued away into a self-aggrandizing series of interviews with various staff from the Reset Corps talking about their duties while staged scenarios played out in occasional cuts. Eventually, the video ended, and Teacher Lucy glanced at the clock on the classroom wall. "Well, kids, it's 5pm, you know what time it is!"
The class, previously a group of mostly attentive, well-behaved angels, erupted into cheers as students rushed for their bags to wait at the porch for their family jalopies to pick them up, discussions flaring about the weekend's possibilities like all children did at any school really.
Teacher Lucy walked out to the porch to guard the students. This year, there had been about 30 students assigned to her class. It wouldn't take long to empty out this group through the gate, as a jalopy came to a halt and a student whooped while jumping into it after a brief check by another Teacher, this one a female black and white calico of similar build and simple blouse/long-skirt dressing as Lucy.
Things did not go quite according to plan.
Marcus Manners eeped as he got out of the jalopy about two hours late by the mostly closed school gate. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" He bowed to Teacher Lucy in embarassment, then glanced at his son. The poor kid had expected to be home by now for dinner, and he was quite literally snoring to conserve his energy for more fun things besides waiting for his dad to pick him up.
Lucy shook her head and wiggled a finger in the air. "Mr Manners, you simply cannot be this late to pick up your children from school. it eats into their weekend time on Fridays, you must know that, right?" She had the frustrated look of a teacher whose charge had been denied some of their rights, a look partly softened by the kitten-like face that she had. "This is the third time this year. You simply must learn better to manage your schedule."
Marcus looked crestfallen. "My meeting took a little longer than planned. My brothers- my bosses, had a bit of a genius moment and stopped following the agenda totally..."
Then Lucy suddenly stood on tiptoe and patted his stomach. "But I know you're trying to do your best for your son, aren't you? I'm just asking you to try better, please." She looked up at him, half-closed eyes and smiling. "And this time, make sure he does his maths homework as assigned. I know he'd rather do something artistic, but a poorly scribbled horse isn't a correct answer for Fermat's Theorem." Her eyes looked up at the evening sky briefly. "Mind you, it was a pretty good horse if you ignore the anatomical inaccuracy. Perhaps we should shift his homework to include more artistic pursuits..."
Marcus blushed harder as he gently scooped up the limp, sleepy form of Elliot and deposited him into the back seat, taking care to buckle him up. As he did so, a white hazmat-suited man walked into a van near the porch and deposited some cleaning equipment, having finished his share of the duties assigned to him by his job, and started pulling away for the back exit of the school.
Teacher Lucy sighed and stretched her arms in the air as if tired, her yawning showing rows of oddly cute white fangs and teeth, like someone's stylised idea of what a cat should be. She turned around and walked into the school building. It had certainly been a good five years so far. She wondered briefly what the next five years would bring: new students. new points of interest? Maybe new birthdays to celebrate, even though they were all clustered into the last Friday of each month generally...
Teacher Lucy did not notice as the back exit to the school compound admitted another van of the same kind that had brought in cleaners to 'reset' the school for the week. This one was yellow instead of white...
The halls briefly rang with the faint humming of Lucy, who didn't bother with the Lyrics of the Reset Corps theme song, simply focusing on the notes as her hind paws padded the floor.... then her world went oddly sideways as the ground rose to meet her. She kept humming the notes, but they were now drunken, slowing down with each note as she stared blankly at nothing, before falling completely silent.
A yellow hazmatted suit guy struggled with a small gurney down the school corridors, into the lift that serviced the two floors that were visible to most visitors, staff, and students of Special Little Sparks. This had been an onerous job for the past few years, really. Nobody would have volunteered for this. There were more 'prestigious' and 'easier' postings in the Reset Corps. This was the last one left after everyone drew straws on the day he first signed in.
Patter smiled a little wistfully. He did make a lot though, partly to cover the potential medical bills from working weird hours and also all the heavy things he had to carry on the job. People were heavy, even if half of their bodies were made of lightweight materials rather than flesh and blood. He could definitely afford to go to his favorite furry conventions without slumming, and that was enough for him.
Patter walked past a mural of a circle of schoolchildren dancing while a furry catgirl looked on, clapping her hands happily. The schoolchildren were not within his responsibility usually, save the occasional accident in-school here. No, he was usually tasked with the teacher units. Tonight, he was replacing one of the units that had served its full five years. It probably still had life in it for a couple more years, but kids being kids, they were probably wearing down at least on the outside. Better to flip them out for a new unit before kids noticed ugly stuff: blue plastic no longer hidden by fake fur that had worn down, glitching irises, speech impediments...
On the gurney was a brand new Teacher Unit, lying as if simply dozing off. He briefly noted the pet tag on her collar read "Lucy", even as he swiped his Reset Corps card to make the lift travel down to the allegedly non-existent basement. It did exist really, mainly to hold the uglier stuff that made the school tick. He wheeled the gurney into one of the rooms, a strange sort of holding pen. Various anthromorphic animal women lined the walls: mostly cats, one or two dogs, a bullfrog in a cafeteria apron who worked on school lunches for all types of students in the school...
Patter facepalmed as he located the alcove that Teacher Lucy was meant to be charging in. It was empty. It was not supposed to be empty. Right, first things first... The lanky tech struggled to place the new Teacher Lucy unit into the alcove, showing little of the strength his bear fursona supposedly had. He quickly tapped on the maintenance console and started streaming the backup for Lucy into the new unit. In about two days she would wake up, greet the children, and there would be next to no sign that this was a different person from the previous Teacher Lucy who had seen them off for the weekend.
Patter stood back and wiped his brow. This might be the only major plus of this shift and tasking really.... being surrounded by furry chicks was a dream come true for him. He had even asked if the Arendtcore Families programme had any furry girls he could take as a wife" or "sibling" for his home a while ago - they had sadly told him every woman outside of the school building was human-formed, and taking a furry unit would 'cause problems'.
Right, now that the new unit was installed, he should try and see if he could find the old unit that was meant to be taken back to base and 'recycled'...
Patter took a while to find the old Teacher Lucy, but eventually he pinged in on the collar she was wearing. She was lying on one side on the polished floors, eyes wide open, her muzzle slightly opened. A brief check on her collar revealed that she was totally flat out of power, like a fluffy soft toy abandoned by a kid. He sighed and started lifting her up into the gurney, oofing as he realised that five years ago, they made them a bit heavier. Still, he managed to start pushing her out the porch doors and into his work van.
Patter got in his driver's seat. No autopilot for this vehicle, one had to drive it manually. The only concession to modern vehicles in the Little Sanctuary area was a automap one could set to find a drivable path between two points. With so many places in Little Sanctuary, something like this was very necessary for the newer generation of inhabitants... He took his hazmat helm off, exposing a decent looking young man, albeit one who might reek a little after two hours in a suit with no air cooling. He wished his section would spring for the newer hazmat suits that offered actual cool dry air to kill the sweat, as he checked his work tablet...
SON OF A B-
There was a notice on the tablet -
"The Disposal Line assigned to your section has suffered a major breakdown. Due to increased work loads, we are unable to offer completed repairs until at least 14 calendar days from now. Please deposit collected units temporarily in your home garage,or base garage until then, if overflow occurs." Patter groaned. He could probably fit one or two disposals in his garage back home, but he hated the idea of his workplace commandeering his private space.
He sighed. Then thought a little... He looked back at the Teacher Lucy unit on its gurney, carefully secured in its lifeless form. A small smile played across his face. Well, he did have an excuse now... right? He wasn't supposed to get a furry unit in his home but...
Chapter 2 - Unauthorized Alteration / Unauthorized Fishing
Patter pulled into the garage of his two-person home, watching the shutter slowly reel down shut, before he got out of his van and marched into the lift. The design of the house had been peculiar, even taking the idiosyncracies of the Little Sanctuary planning AIs - the house sat atop the garage rather than to one side like most of the two-person homes in the town, with access into the house provided by a series of staircases outside and indoors as well as a small lift good for two or three people. One did not expect too many people in here, and everything was sized accordingly. Patter shrugged off his hazmat suit and hung it on a special support that had been provided as part of his job for when work extended past shift hours, watching as a hose pumped sterilizing mist into the insides to kill every possible kind of funk that had built up over the past eight hours of calls.
Patter didn't look for long, before he hit the bathroom to make use of its rainfall shower, letting himself get squeaky clean, before towelling himself off and getting into a comfy set of loose pants and a worn-out shirt from an Arendtcore Reset Corps mess party several months back that was celebrating Little Sanctuary's 30th year of existence. He sat down in his bedroom, relaxing and looking at his collection of furry art on the wall. Nothing tasteless, just in case a visitor came by, somehow. That stuff was on his old model laptop - a bruiser that was slow but had survived four years of college, two years of job hunting, and the oddly long trip from Alaska down to Minnesota. His pay included rent and sensible power and water use, but not replacing the clunker PC. He smiled a little as he found his favorite artist "Rimosa" had posted a fake magazine cover of a weasel girl standing stark naked and shocked on the cover of a magazine on Windows computers, then faved and saved the post for later... enjoyment.
He blinked. "Oh yes." He'd almost forgotten his end-of-shift report. Calmly bringing up the form for reports, he typed away. Nothing of note happened, everything he was assigned was completed properly. Everything except...
Patter took a deep breath. Technically he was about to lie in a way that might cost him his tiny cosy little home and his job here. "Attempted replacement of Teacher Unit, 1x Lucy Feline Anthromorphic Educator Unit at Special Little Sparks educational facility. Unable to locate old unit, proceeded to insert new unit in and switch alcove to support replacement unit. Attempted brief search for old unit, not found. NMCNMM"
Patter chuckled as he used the acronym so many Reset Crew staffers had grown to love when confronted with a task way out of their job scope: Nie Moje Cyrk, Nie Moje Malpy. Hey, not my circus, not my monkeys. Not my responsibility to go hunting for a missing unit, basically. It WAS his responsibility to file a report after a shift, which he now proceeded to do.
He made a mental note to do a little work to excise and relocate the locator in the Teacher Lucy unit to avoid being called out on it. but first...
Patter shut the laptop down and turned off the bedside lamp. He had a long weekend after multiple additional callouts the previous month, and he was going to make full use of it. But first he had to get plenty of sleep...
Patter wasn't one for late risings. He still got his desired eight hours of sleep anyway, waking up to the buzzer on his laptop and another shower, this time to clean the sweat from sleeping with only a fan on full blast in a warm summer night. One puff later, he grabbed his Fix-It kit from the shelf where he kept his work items and descended the lift into the garage to get working on.... stuff.
Patter felt the Teacher Lucy unit was a little lighter. Presumably being well-rested had improved his ability to carry stuff. Anyways, he wheeled the gurney with the anthrobot into the lift and out into the upper floor where his bedroom was, taking care to fold and push his bed into the wall behind it to free the room up. First things first, where was that locator...
He licked his lip as he raised a probe and scanner to find it, taking care not to rip the fur too much as he found the panel access button and opened up a small panel in the unit's back, just beneath its chunky shoulders. He fished in it and carefully ripped the locator out, a angrily glowing semi-dome on chip legs angrily protesting the theft he had just committed... Just like he'd worked out after months of poring over documentation at work, including bits he wasn't authorised to be read-in on.
It wasn't theft, honest. He'd return the unit to be scrapped first things first when the Disposal Line was back in business. He wrapped the component in a bag for later disposal, ideally as far away from his house as he could manage. The next thing he had to do was juice the Teacher Lucy back up.
Without the associated alcove, he couldn't trigger the unit's induction charging system, so he quickly wired up a old fashioned plug and carefully made sure it matched the listed voltage on the motherboard, before clicking it into the manual charging male plug deep inside the unit. And just to be safe.... he located the switch for the motion controller and flipped it off, just in case she attempted to move with the cable plugged in.
The one good thing about using a wire instead of induction was that it would charge much faster. Patter stretched a little and left the house in his house clothes, borrowing the work van with its logo flipped out of sight, resembling nothing more than a generic yellow van just waiting for some miscreant to scrawl "FREE CANDY" on its side. He needed a decent meal already... and a few additional parts that he could source on the side without going through the corporate supply system. Patter did not want to tip his hand early as to what he was doing with Teacher Lucy. As for recharging the van, he would use his own card. He was that scrupulous on the surface - he wasn't going to use his work card to recharge it if he was using it for personal matters.
He WAS, however, going fishing.
Paul North was having a decent day fishing at the Minnesota River, or what little part of it ran through sanctuary. The sun wasn't too fierce, the clouds having diffused most of the heat and light - just enough to see what the fish were doing and encourage them to come on up for a free meal. The foldable stool creaked as he adjusted his hat, the words of which discouraged people from comprehending his sexual preferences and the relations of fish to his hook.
Paul blinked as a yellow van stopped near him on the shoreline. Minutes later, a lanky young man dropped his own foldable next to him along with a cooler and a small can filled with various half-rate artificial baits.
Patter calmly put a spinner onto his fishing rod, accompanying it with a small dollop of some sort of gel that fish supposedly loved. They did champ at it, that much was true. Catching something however...
Ten minutes elapsed before Patter got a bite... another two as the fish ran off with the entire bait. Patter cursed a little as he reached for his can of bait and tied on another bait.
Paul calmly observed Patter as he cast again. "Not very good luck at fishing?"
Patter nodded. "I have enough stories of the one that got away that nobody seems to mention about how I don't have any about the ones that didn't. Sad, innit?" The fishing rod twitched slightly as the Minnesota River's inhabitants examined the new offering Patter had made.
Paul North laughed again. "Story of our lives. Maybe you'll catch something big."
Patter nodded. "Maybe, one day- SON OF A BITCH, THAT CATFISH JUST UP AND WALKED WITH IT."
Paul watched as the river splashed downstream. "Third time lucky?"
Patter gritted his teeth and tied on another bait. This one was a bit odd... "Battery operated flashy?" Paul North offered.
Patter nodded as he cast again, the glowing doodad landing in the water briefly before sinking. "Luck be a Goddess today..." He murmured as he opened the cooler and cracked open one of two cans of Mudweil Beer. He took a swig, watching the bait bob calmly, as if hoping to catch something.... "Want one?"
Paul shook his head. "Alcoholics Anonymous. even the scent of beer could take me back to zero. sorry." Patter ohs... then tosses the beer can and the rest of its contents into the river. He was already in trouble here anyways, this was not fishing season and he wasn't supposed to fish. He was a nice man who didn't want to drag others down with him.
Patter made a mental note in future to pack some zero-alcohol options when he fished.
A giant lunkhead suddenly grab bed the glowing bait and ... snapped Patter's line in a second. Patter fell backward into the muddy ground, wincing.
Paul looked on sympathetically. ""You have me as a reference for the one that got away this time, kid."
Patter stood up, looking very angry. "ONE DAY, You damned river," He shook his fist. "ONE DAY I'll catch something for real and you'll be crying!" Patter slammed his cooler shut and collected his gear. "Fuck this, I need a burger. Half an hour wasted for nothing is shit."
Paul North watched Patter pack himself back into his van and drive off. Kids these days, the old man sighed. Absolutely no patience in getting what they wanted. He leaned forward a little with some interest... a faint whistle from his lips...
"Mr Nost, that wasn't bait you used, did you?" He calmly observed to nobody in particular as he fished out his communicator to make a call back to the office...
Chapter 3 - Unauthorised use of personal fumigation / Unauthorised exploration
Patter arrived home about five hours later, mud having dried on his pants from the failed fishing expedition he ostensibly underwent. He had continued fishing for another few hours up and down the stream, catching only a tiny minnow... which he then proceeded to release because it seemed like it was under the legal size. He had spent another hour or two at a Bass Bros Shop and a franchised burger store at Little Sanctuary's East Square. Contrary to popular belief, Bass Bros didn't just sell fishing gear. it also sold gear that improved the experience of fishing, even indirectly.
For example, four litres of Fur Waterproofer Special - a pet-friendly (and presumably human-safe) chemical goo you could tip into a fumigator or steam cleaner and use to give something furry the magical ability of having water dapple right off instead of wetting it. There was a limit to how far it could shove water right off - it was a water-resistance treatment, not a waterproofing treatment - but Patter wasn't planning to immerse his pilfered Teacher Lucy in a bathtub or lake. There was also a large bag sufficiently large enough to enclose the unit as well, plus a few choice pieces of clothing for Lucy to wear besides the boring default blouse and skirt she had been absconded with in.
Patter calmly chewed on a half-eaten fish burger, using a clean hand to carefully close Lucy's eyes and mouth to avoid the goo coating her innards, just in case it caused issues. He clapped his hands a little, then unclipped his hazmat suit from his personal fumigator, before he reached over to start carefully disrobing Lucy...
Five minutes later, Patter was having a panic attack as far away as he could from the fumigator as he could. Oh, it had started alright. Blue blouse, black skirt. Nothing too outrageous. His first warning should have been the nipples barely visible beneath the sheer floral bra Lucy had been outfitted with. Far more audacious than anything he had picked up from the Second Hand Store.
Pulling her panties down had exposed what seemed to resemble a vagina and butthole. He blinked. blinked again.
His panic attack happened shortly after. "What in the world..." He winced. He had expected some blank spaces, a sort of furry soft toy. Not something out of a fetish fur con. He slowly looked back... tested a boob, and slowly nudged a finger into the vagina. It was slightly damp, but scentless. A nice amount of squish in her belly and butt. Everything he was touching was totally unnecessary in a machine built purely for educating and looking after children.
Patter wondered just how much the Anthro-bot Feline Educator Unit had deviated from its original intended purposes, as he gulped and started bagging the limp unit onto his personal fumigator and pouring the Waterproofer into the water storage bin to steam onto the fur of the machine... then he sat back down in a nearby chair in his bedroom and said just five words repeatedly ever so often for the next four hours...
"Holy. Fuck. What The Hell."
Four hours later, the fumigator had emptied out its goop. most of the pinkish stuff had either turned to transparent coating, or caked like powder on the Teacher Lucy unit. Patter carefully fished out a towel and gently wiped the doll down like the victim of the world's largest Ghostbusters-themed bukkake orgy, trying not to linger too long on her private organs, before carefully standing her on her two hind feet and breathing deeply. He reached to the collar on her neck, locating the power button that would bring her to life in the absence of a signal from a connected charging alcove.
There was a faint whirring up as she stood stiffly at attention... before her eyes suddenly opened, irises flaring into pools of cool gray... Then, she hissed and jumped backwards in the room, on all fours, looking around confusedly as she could no longer access her work lists, her class student roster, or anything remotely resembling what she needed to be an educator in a school. "Teacher Lucy booting.... err-err-error - mutiple database read failures. Outfit configuration unavailable. Please ensure SpecialLittleSparks_DB is available and con-connected before operating this u-u-unit." She twitched erratically, her head swinging from side to side as she recited the errors she was experiencing, limbs posed like a brown-furred eldritch horror... before crashing flat onto the ground,her tongue and eyes coming through half-closed muzzle and eyelids.
Patter turned away and sighed. This project was going to take a lot more work than he'd figured.