Mr. Fluffington, a gray cat with a gray bow around his neck, stared up into two black pits of death. The snout between them pointed down, and the sixty foot dragon leaned toward him until their faces nearly touched. One step forward from the dragon and he would be crushed. One bout of fiery breath and he would be nothing but ashes. One bite and he would be digested whole. Instead, the red, scaly dragon sighed and complained.

  “I mean, I dunno. It just stopped workin' for no reason whatsoever.”

  The dragon held a three foot long device in her shiny, red clutches. It looked like a gear, mostly because it was a gear; blue lights glimmered off its bronze surface, and they created images that danced, flickered, and stuttered, but which mostly stuttered.

  “I gave it to my grandson, Scorched Fiery Earth, to use for a day. He gave it back to me the next mornin' saying that it was already broken.”

  “Don’t worry, I can fix it,” said Mr. Fluffington. He picked up the device, which was weightless for its size because of magic, and prodded at it with a paw. He shook his head. “Did you try turning it off and back on again?”

  The dragon growled. Billows of smoke shot out from her giant nostrils. Her yellow eyes narrowed.

  “Yes, of course, but the load of junk keeps doing that. I’ll tell you what, I’m never buyin' off any wizard ever again. In fact, if I so much as see one tryin' to peddle his devices off again I will tear his―”

  “Alright, alright, relax,” said the cat absentmindedly, having dealt with his fair share of disgruntled clients. He proceeded to take a step back in case.

  There was plenty of room for him to move because they were standing on a hill in the middle of a grassy plain. Normally, there would be other animals. For some reason, today it was empty. No birds sang. No one ran along the downs. Nothing moved. Even the wind held still on a break.

  Mr. Fluffington appraised the device handed to him solidly for several seconds before making up his mind. He grabbed one of the levers connected to the center of the machine and pulled. The lights turned off completely and the machine went dark. The dragon groaned, but before she could say anything, he pulled a different lever and set the device down on the grass. It began to make a whirring noise.

  Ah, so that was the problem, he thought. The center console had overheated. Anyone with the manual or an ounce of knowledge could’ve avoided the problem altogether, but―he looked up into the eyes of the dragon―you couldn’t blame her. She was pushing a thousand years old, and she was born in a time when they had to physically write down incantations. Back then, cats ate mice, hawks swooped down on rodents, and wolves hunted deer. Now wizards went around selling magical trinkets without caring whether their buyers would be able to use them or not, dragons were nearly extinct, and cats like Mr. Fluffington helped their neighbors fix easily solvable problems for a living.

  In the end, it all worked out though, because Pillars Of Sky paid out three golden coins and flew back to her cave with a mostly working nexus. She would surely be back by the end of the month, but that at least meant another three gold coins.

  Mr. Fluffington, otherwise unfortunately known by the name Fern Five Fluffington, headed back home. The luck which would influence the rest of his life began at birth when his mother took her nearest surroundings in consideration for naming inspiration. That was why his siblings were named Pebble One, Branch Two, Leaf Three, and so on. It was also why he went by his last name in public. It was a leftover habit from when he naively believed it was less embarrassing than going by Fern Five. He was wrong. Oh, well.

  It was now noon, and the unlucky cat still had some way to go. High above, the green sky reached its maximum brightness. There was no sun, only greenish white light pouring down from somewhere an infinite miles above. No one knew why it happened. The birds had tried flying up to no avail. Squirrels and the like had attempted climbing up the rare great trees which seemed to touch the sky, but even they tired before the trees ended and the answer could reveal itself. Rays of light came down from the untouchable canopies during the day, little to no light came down at night, and that was all that was known about the infinite mirage above.

  During the mysterious light’s zenith, the forest became the most liveliest. Sheep and horses grazed in the fields (when they were certain no dragons lurked nearby). Trout and carp skipped along the river. Birds circled the sky. Through it all, no one noticed the cat walking down the main dirt path except for, ironically, Cattrap the mouse. She appeared from beyond the reeds and tall grass which grew off the side of the road while waving a bundle of rolled paper in the air. She scampered toward him using only her hind legs rather than on the more traditional all-fours. Sophistication, thought Mr. Fluffington, a plague on animalkind. Then again, he was the type of cat to believe everything was a plague on animalkind.

  “Fluffy! Fluffy!” Most animals that couldn’t be bothered to use his full name especially couldn’t be bothered to pick a suitable, non-humiliating nickname. “Did ya' hear the news? Did ya' hear the news?”

  Mr. Fluffington stopped and slowly turned around. His eyes were little slants with how hard he narrowed them at her.

  Cattrap’s fur was as white as cloud and snow, never mind that their part of the Forest never had snow or clouds. Her pink eyes looked blank while focusing on the area somewhat behind him. Shortsightedness paired with a nocturnal animal trying to stay awake during the day generally had that effect. She needed to use her hearing and smell. In contrast, he needed to use extreme patience when dealing with her salesmice attempts.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “I am fine,” said Mr. Fluffington calmly. “I don’t want the paper.”

  “But ya' should see the news, it’s incredible!”

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “It’s incredible! It’s incredible! It’ll only cost ya' a morsel of food. Please.”

  She continued to wave the papers in the air as if waving them might magically persuade him to buy one. It persuaded him to do something alright, but it certainly wasn’t buying a paper.

  “Does it look like I have food? Go away.” He said the last word with an edge that only a small mouse, its sole target audience, could miss. Besides, he didn't have anything on him but the bow tie and three gold coins, none of which were items he was willing to part with.

  “Please, just take one. For free. It’ll be on me!”

  She peeled one of the papers away from the pile and dropped it. The slightest of breezes that had been running through just so happened to blow it into the cat’s face. He pinned the paper to the ground with his nose and stepped on it with a paw. He decided then that the least he could do was read it for her. Besides, he needed something to distract him from his soon impending outburst.

  But as expected, the paper was a poorly woven sheet of linen. The words at the top read: “Cattrap News: Weekely Editon”. The rest of the paper had similar spelling with grammar and handwriting to match. There was a story about lost eggs (two sentences), a weather prediction, and an ad promoting Cattrap’s very own hiring services: for only one “morsl” of food, she would offer in exchange to find an exclusive inside scoop for you―something some animals would call snooping around. Mr. Fluffington read the entire paper in less than a minute and most of that time had been spent trying to decipher the words. The poor little mouse watched him the entire time. She had set the papers on the floor beside her, pinned under her feet to resist the wind, so that she could free up her paws in order to anxiously rub them together in anticipation for his response.

  Mr. Fluffington looked up and tried, and he really tried, to smile.

  “Wow. It’s very good.”

  “Really? Would ya' be willing to pay then?”

  “No, I’m leaving right now.”

  He turned around and marched off.

  “Please!” she shouted after him.

  “See me about it another time,” he said, something he would later regret, and then he was gone.

  Mr. Fluffington’s mind didn’t so much race as it hovered over each memory from earlier in the day and spat on them one by one. Stupid day, stupid job, stupid life. Stupid mole couldn’t find the entrance to the burrow right in front of him. Stupid snake knotted her tail. Stupid dragon couldn’t figure out stupidly simple technology. Stupid mouse tried selling her stupid papers. In a stupid world made up of stupid animals, he knew he was a beacon of light. His mere existence as a cat gave him all the self assurance he would ever need. The mere existence of his home, however, brought him back down to reality as it did every day he returned after work. It was hard to be confident, assured, and proud when you owned a house like his.

  He stopped short of his own abode, a hollow cutaway in a short hill. A tree sprouted from the top, but its roots had been hacked away long ago. It had enough leaves to feed a single deer, and it was about as tall as one too. At the bottom of the hill, where it flattened considerably, there was a small sign that read “Form” instead of Fern. He didn’t bother fixing it because most animals were illiterate anyway, and those that weren’t wrote papers about stolen eggs and weather predictions. The same effect applied to the straw mattress on the ground before the door. The words that had been carved into it almost got half the letters in ‘Welcome’ correct, but they were also in the wrong order.

  Mr. Fluffington rubbed his paws on the rug to get off the dirt, because he had principles, and then opened the door with the key which was also just one of his sharper claws. It swung open with a creaking sound reminiscent of the final neigh of a dying horse, something he should not have been familiar with but was. The room was dark, but he could see after shutting the door by using the light that seeped from the crack underneath it. He walked past his drab room furnishings. There wasn’t much walking to do because his house was one room large. It had one icebox, a cabinet, a rug, and a mattress consisting of straw and leaves. It was more fitting of a bird than a cat but he didn’t care as he went past everything else, dropped the coins he’d collected that day on the dirt floor, and headed toward the silhouette of his mattress. He flopped on top of it, exhausted partially because he had to deal with incompetent animals all day, but also because he was a crepuscular animal awake during peak daylight hours. There was something about the daytime that unnerved animals like him. It was due to an old gene passed down from ancestors long ago, but he believed it was because the daytime had been ruined by the other animals. There were the cocky daytime birds that thought they were better than everyone else simply because they could fly, deer afraid of their own shadows, and squirrels with enough stashed hoards to feed a family of ten, but who were certain to only feed themselves. Cattrap was also awake during the day so there was that too.

  Curtains worked enough to emulate the night in his home by shutting out the daylight from his house’s only window. The well-padded walls and ceiling blocked out most external noise, and most animals knew to stay away enough. As he tried to sleep, Mr. Fluffington’s eyes and ears would have to do the rest of the job in shutting out the world.

  On his first attempt to fall asleep, he was awoken by a screeching hawk. It happened some hundreds of feet above, but it woke him up anyway. He cursed the skies in tired gibberish and turned over on his pile of straw. On his second attempt to fall asleep, he was interrupted by his own growling stomach. He cursed his stomach before getting up to eat some synths―that is, synthetic meat―which all carnivores and omnivores put up with despite it tasting worse than its real equivalent. After eating three strips, he went back to bed finally content. However, it wasn’t the end of his sleepless plight as on his third and final attempt, he was awakened by an exhale of breath. It wasn’t his, and it was the only interruption he wasn’t able to curse out or fix in time. Instead, the following events that transpired marked the second worst day of Mr. Fluffington’s life. The number one worst day of his life had yet to occur, and he didn’t know it yet, but it was due to be the next Saturday, six days away.

  In the meantime an arrow shot out from the dark recesses of his home, killing him instantly.