It went all very quickly for Blythe. One moment she was on the storage path of the Largest Ever Pet Shop, the next she was being hauled in by its security robot and put into one of the small cages they kept animals in. The whole set of events was within the timeframe of one minute, making it very hard for Blythe to follow what had happened and before she knew it, she knew there was no escape.
She also knew what this meant; she would be kept in here until someone bought her or someone would come to picked her up. But since only the pets knew about her predicament, nobody would be picking her up. A rescue party by the pets was also unlikely, especially since last time all of them would get captured if not for Blythe herself to save the day.
Blythe knew what was going to happen; she was going to stay here until someone was going to buy her. And that happening within the next three-and-a-half days was very unlikely. That, and then she would have to do one of those vague solutions to make herself human again.
And if she couldn't do both of these objectives, she would become a cat forever. That realization made something loose inside her. Now she finally realized exactly what was at stake. She broke out of the initial shock and opened her mouth.
"Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no!" Blythe yelled out in terror. "It cannot end like this!"
Maybe I should have jumped off a building after all. "What am I to do?!"
"It ended like this for all of us, sister," a voice to her left said. Blythe reckoned it had to be a ferret. She couldn't see him though, since there were walls between the pets. "Better get used to it. Perhaps, if you're acting nice, the two evil abominations will give you a treat or something."
Blythe ignored the ferret and instead turned around to look at her surroundings. So this is what it must feel like to be in one of these cages. It was just a concrete cube with a plastic transparent door at the front of it with breathing holes in them. To her right there was a bowl filled with water and one bowl with kibble.
Those look dry and nasty. How can any pet eat them?
Looking at that dry kibble made her actually sigh in relief. She was glad she already ate better pet food at the Littlest Pet Shop before going off to the park.
But she knew she would have to eat this food sooner or later.
But not for now.
Blythe, defeated, couldn't do anything but sit tight.
I will get out of here. It will not end with me being a cat for the rest of my life. The others will free me, I'm sure of it!
She tried to calm herself down by lying down on her belly and then putting her tail behind her forelegs.
What are the others doing right now?
"Minka, how could you lose Blythe?!" Sunil asked Minka.
At this moment, they were all called back by Mrs. Twombly. The latter then noticed the cat was missing, but couldn't find her. Mrs. Twombly figured she just had to go back to the Littlest Pet Shop and face the anger from the owners of that strange cat. Or at least, so she thought. So she took the rest of the pets with her back to LPS.
"Well…" Minka said in response to Sunil, "I found the Cubicle, but then the Catalyst snatched Blythe away! And now she's busy choosing a solution!"
"Minka, that's the security robot from the Largest Ever Pet shop you're talking about!" Zoe said. "That's the only one that snatches away pets! Or…" she hesitated, "at least I think so. In any case, she's probably right now at the Largest Ever Pet shop! We'll never get her out of there!"
"So…" Vinnie said. "Am I the only one who thinks this is probably for the best? She will be sold and then she will have owners, and then she will come back to us in the day care! It will be the perfect solution for her problem!"
He immediately got a smack from Pepper. "Hey! What was that for?"
"For saying some really dumb things! Can't you remember that Blythe only has until Friday afternoon until she becomes a cat forever? She'll never get sold before that!"
"But I was talking about her getting a good pet life, with owners, just like all of us!" Vinnie objected.
He then got a smack from Zoe. "And what about her human life that is almost completely gone?!"
"Oh, yeah, right," Vinnie said. "There was that too."
Penny Ling ignored Vinnie and instead wanted to focus on the problem at hand.
"But how are we going to get Blythe out of there?" Penny Ling asked the other pets. "That place is like a fortress!"
"Hey! I've got an idea!" Sunil said. "Maybe we can use those tubes we discovered when we followed those hamsters!"
"We've disbanded those!" Russell said.
"Oh, wait, you're correct. Hm…" Sunil thought. "What if we made a distraction and then take Blythe out of there, make her human and then let her get the others out of her with her human authority?"
"…if we can make her human again…" Russell said. "Otherwise, we'll be locked up there forever!"
"We'll just go there and make a plan as we go along!" Penny Ling said. "We can't leave our friend Blythe in there!"
"Is she actually in the Largest Ever Pet shop?" Pepper asked the group. "All I've heard is that Minka rambled about that Catalyst guy who…"
"…took Blythe into Largest Ever Pet shop to provide her a solution! Eek!"
The skunk sighed. "Never mind."
It didn't take long for the group to get back to Littlest Pet Shop. "Okay, sweeties, we're back," Mrs. Twombly said. "But I'm not happy you let our guest escape! And I can't risk you getting the same idea, it could ruin my business! I'm sorry sweeties, but I'm keeping you locked up for today!"
All the pets gasped. When they got back inside, Russell find broke the silence.
"Noooooooooooo!"
Blythe had awoken from her nap. How long have I been out of it? From where she was, she could see a clock hanging on the wall.
15:30.
It's already in the afternoon. Sue, Jasper and Youngmee must be getting out of school now… and wondering why I'm not responding on their mobile phone calls or something...
"So, Blythe got ill? She's almost never ill!" Youngmee said.
"Should we go to her house or something, spend time with her?" Jasper asked.
"Nah, I don't think she'll like that. She's not responding to anything and I think she turned her phone off. We better not bug her and just let her get her rest," Sue said.
The three friends concluded that was the best thing to do for the moment.
There was one thing thought that Sue found strange. Why is Jasper looking at me like that? She thought. It's not like him.
Time went by slowly in the Largest Ever Pet shop. With nothing to do, and be confined to a space where she could barely turn herself around, Blythe slowly began to lose her sanity.
"Okay! What if I stay a cat my whole life? Can I then run around for a while? Please?" she shouted out. "Come on!" she angrily said. "I don't know how much more you want from me!"
"The new cat is loco!" Blythe heard a Chihuahua say. "Who is she talking to?"
Blythe decided to shut her mouth for the moment. But it began getting unbearable inhere.
What time is it? She looked at the clock. 15:47? I just wasted an eternity in this misery and only seventeen minutes passed? Come on!
She sighed. How long until my friends will bust me out from here?
"Watch out!" she heard the ferret say. "The two abominations are here!"
Blythe stood up and tried to look at what caused the disturbance. What the 'two abominations' were of course was clear as glass; the Biskit twins. They were standing at the doorway with Fisher Biskit –their father – for some reason.
"Now, girls," Fisher Biskit said, "you two need to learn on how to deal with animals. If you cannot understand the most basic things about the place you're in charge of, you will have failed already!"
"Yeah, like, whatever, dad," Britany said. "Why are we even here?"
"Yeah, because, like," Whitany said, "I don't understand the job of anyone who works for us and we seem to be doing okay, so why should we be learning all of this?"
She then proceeded to chat to someone on her mobile phone. Blythe grinned at seeing these two silly girls being total dumb nuts again, especially right in front of their father.
"Oh, girls…" he facepalmed as he said those words. "How am I going to teach you to get your earnings through a long and honest hard days' work?"
"What does that even mean?"
Fisher Biskit noticed there was a person – probably a customer, Blythe reckoned - to take a look at the pets, so he decided to pass judgment on his daughters later. "Just brush them already!"
Blythe heard yelps in fear – and perhaps also pain, she wasn't sure if it was true – of pets being brushed by the Biskit Twins. The latter, of course, were barely able to do their job. This was mostly caused by their own stupidity.
After a few minutes the Biskit Twins left the room out of boredom – Blythe was relieved that she didn't fell victim to their… methods.
O boy, hopefully their dad won't send them back to finish the job…
"Well, doctor, we've got two new pets that need the routine treatment. They're in cages 3B and 8E. Do you require my help?" Fisher Biskit asked.
Wait… doctor?!
"No, I'll be fine. I will just analyze and chip them," the vet said.
Normally going to a doctor wasn't a big issue for Blythe, but now she was frightened to death by the appearance of the vet. And it seemed like she was the first one to bear its treatment.
"Now, come here little one…" he mumbled under his breath. He opened Blythe's cage and pulled her out of it.
Blythe protested but knew resistance was futile, even though she tried to use her nails to keep from being taken out of the cage. Before she knew it, she was on a table and being examined.
"And now open your mouth… that's a good girl…" the vet said as he pried open Blythe's mouth. She recognized this vet – it was the same one who did the regular checkups on the pets from Littlest Pet Shop. He was a very pleasant man, but at this point in time didn't Blythe want to be in close proximity to him.
"Now those are some fine teeth… healthy fur… good outlook…" he put down his tools as he was done examining. "You're the picture of health. You're making my life easy. I'm sure you will get adopted in no-time!"
Blythe figured that her healthy human lifestyle was being reflected on her cat body. She wasn't sure though. And despite the fact that a human was talking to an animal like that – well, a human that cannot understand pets – Blythe found his voice very soothing. It was like he was trying to comfort her the whole time in order to get the process done smoothly. That's probably his intent. Suddenly, she was grabbed in her neck and felt something painful near her ear.
"Calm down, it will be over soon… and that's it! Done!" the vet said. "The chip is in! Now that wasn't so hard, was it?"
Her eyes went big. The what is in what?! Blythe thought, panicking. She almost want to scratch it out, but knew that they would then put a cone on her or something, and even if she did get it out, they would just put it back in, so she decided to wait for that until she turned human again.
Can I even turn back into a human with that thing in the back of my ear?!
"So… that's that, then," the vet said. "For now I'm doing with you."
He picked Blythe up from the table and put her back into her cage, and did the lock back on. "Next week I need to take you to my place to get you 'helped'. I'm sure you can handle it."
Wait, what does he mean by 'helped'? Does he mean…
And then the realization kicked in.
"Noo! Noo! Noo! Not that! Please!" Blythe begged. She shivered, cried and backed down into the corner of her cage all at the same time. At this point she heard how the pet from cage 8E being taken care of by the vet, but she couldn't care less about that pet.
"Please!" she yelled. "What did I do to deserve this?"
She turned around, her face to the back of the cage. She started lying down on her belly with her new tail around her forelegs. She wanted to pull that tail out. It was alien to her. But she knew she couldn't. Blythe began crying and sobbing for more than half an hour in a row, and there was no one in there to comfort her. She just wanted this nightmare to end, to get back to her friends and family and spend time with her pets in the Littlest Pet Shop.
She then looked at the clock. She noticed the vet was gone by now.
16:35. She then saw that the vet was already gone. That vet really had done it quickly. He's more efficient than I thought.
She heard in the background how Fisher Biskit was helping out a customer. From the voices she could recognize it was a teenager he was talking to, though through the plastic door she couldn't quite hear who it was.
"So, young man, what is it that you exactly need?" Fisher Biskit asked the customer.
"I'm here to buy a cat and some accessories," the guy said.
"Well, I am sure I can help you out with that!"
That voice made Blythe perk her ears up. I know that voice! She turned around to see if it really was the person she thought it was.
Her cat ears did not betray her – that guy see saw was certainly the person she thought it was.
It was Josh.
What is he doing here?
