The house had a wound in it. Where a tapestry of familiar scents—of aged wood, of dust motes dancing in sunbeams, of the giants’ own peculiar musk—had once been, there was now a void. A clean, chemical nothingness that scraped at the back of the throat and set the whiskers of the three cats on edge. It was a blank patch on the world’s map, and its existence was an offense.
Moxie was the first to venture toward the void. His was a world of physical truths, and he moved with the certainty of a creature who trusts his senses above all else. His striped body flowed through the doorway of the small room and paused. Cold light bled from the ceiling, glinting off a landscape of hard, sterile planes. And in the center, a great, silent chasm of porcelain. He regarded it not with fear, but with an unwavering curiosity. A soft leap, and his paws met the rim. A second, powerful bound, and he was in. The coolness of the porcelain surface was instantaneous. It was not a mere sensation, but a gospel that spread from his pads and belly through his very bones, a deep and profound sermon of relief.
He settled into the smooth basin, the world’s heat and anxieties leaching out of him. This was a place of restoration. He knew it as he knew the sun.
From the doorway, Bagheera watched, her obsidian form a sliver of judgment against the light. She saw Moxie’s blissful surrender and dismissed it with a slow, contemptuous blink. The fool thinks the world is his cushion. Her mind worked on a higher plane, one of purpose and mechanism. She slipped into the room, her paws silent on the tile, and her gaze fell upon the singular point of intrigue: a polished chrome neck that arched over the basin’s edge, a promise cast in metal. She sprang onto the rim, a queen surveying her domain. This was not a bed; it was an apparatus. Logic dictated it. The giants did not craft such intricate things without a function, and the most valuable function was the dispensation of treats. She nudged the cold, unyielding handle, confident that she alone had deciphered the puzzle.
A soft, hesitant tapping drew their attention. Maisie, a ghost in the harsh light, felt her way along the rim of the tub. Her sightless eye perceived the room as a cacophony of sharp, flat echoes and the foul, clean scent. The air itself felt wrong, brittle. As she navigated the unfamiliar terrain, the worn plastic spring she carried fell from her mouth, tumbling into the porcelain chasm.
The sound it made was a revelation. Clack-a-zing-SKITTER-thwip!
It was not a sound; it was a shape, a texture, a life. It scurried along the curved walls, its voice magnified and made glorious by the space. For Maisie, whose world was built from such vibrations, it was the discovery of a new dimension. She leaped in, her paws landing in the silent center of the phenomenon. With a gentle tap of her nose, she sent the spring on another frantic, ecstatic journey. This place was not for resting or for eating. It was for listening. It was a chamber built to give sound a stage on which to dance.
That night, the three solitary truths were annihilated.
A shudder in the floorboards announced the approach of the Great Upright. Light flooded the room, and the cats drew back into the hall, three pairs of eyes gleaming in the shadows. The giant grasped the chrome promise and twisted. A deafening roar shattered the stillness as a torrent of water assaulted the sacred space. It was an act of pure violence. An alchemical fog, thick with the sweet poison of flowers, rose and choked the air.
They watched, paralyzed by a shared horror, as the elemental chaos consumed everything. Moxie’s place of cool was drowned in scalding heat. Bagheera’s logical machine was made to spew endless, useless liquid. Maisie’s beautiful chamber of sound was bludgeoned into a sloshing, roaring mess. Their separate realities, so perfect and so true, crumbled to dust.
Then came the final desecration. The giant shed its skin and, with an obscene sigh, lowered itself into the ruin it had made.
The three cats stared. In that moment, their individual worlds—of sensation, logic, and sound—died, and a new, unified consciousness was born in their place, forged in the crucible of absolute, soul-shaking disbelief.
They knew, with a certainty that dwarfed all their previous convictions, that the giant was utterly and irrevocably insane.