Chapter Eight, Of Inertia and Inspiration
Thunderbutt paused and tasted the fresh air. Too fresh. He would mark it his way later. He padded through the long light green grass until he scented another cat. His head swiveled as he tried to locate it. "Hello? Whose there?"
A cat lightly leapt down from a tree branch onto a fence and padded along it as if it were the forest floor. "Hello." The cat said.
"Who are you?" Thunderbutt repeated his question.
"I am called Halloween. Who are you?" Halloween asked, wrinkling his nose.
"I am Thunderbutt," he said, puffing his ginger chest fur out.
"Right what are you doing 'round here, Thunderbutt?" Halloween asked, waving his black tail around.
Thunderbutt sighed as he knew Halloween wasn't a shecat. "I am in search of love," he confessed.
"Looking for someone very special, then?" Halloween thought maybe there wasn't anyone special enough for Thunderbutt in this part of the world.
"Yes. I am leader of WhiffyClan-"
"The more sense you make, the less the sense you make makes sense," Halloween muttered.
"- but I left my Clan to find love." Thunderbutt finished. "Know anyone special?"
"Well if I knew someone special to me I wouldn't want you to know about it." Halloween said, leaping down from the fence, amber eyes searching Thunderbutt's face.
"What?"
"Buddy, you really are kinda clueless, aren't you?" Halloween asked, prancing around.
"Why are you prancing around?" Thunderbutt asked, copying and raising his tail.
The black tom sprang back, fur bristling. "Man... wear deodorant."
"What is deodorant?" Thunderbutt asked in a puzzled voice, lowering his tail.
"Well, two things. I guess the first wouldn't help you... so I'll take you to the cat. 's my sis." Halloween explained helpfully, prancing away into a dark rank alleyway.
"Ummm... okay." Thunderbutt followed the knowing black tom into the mungy alleyway.
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A white-gray shecat was near a rubbish bin. "Deodorant, I've got someone to meet you."
"Someone is not the correct word. A person, the singular noun of people, would be acceptable while being vague, although I should say indeterminate." The shecat spilled out.
"Right, okay." Halloween says. "What can I say? They should have called her Dictionary. I'll leave you guys to chat," he said and pranced off down the dark alleyway.
"So Deodorant, what's it like living here?" Thunderbutt asked casually.
"Conventional. All the cats I know live here, or all the cats I have had the opportunity to meet have lived here, so it is conventional, or in your words, normal." Deoderant said as she sat down. "What is your name, or to be more proper, the noun that you are called by?"
"Thunderbutt," the orange tom answered, being careful to keep his tail on the floor.
"Thunderbutt is not a complete sentence, it has no verb or - wait, that is your name?"
"Uhhhmm, yes?" Thunderbutt wondered what the proper (or rather, puritanical*) word was.
"Affirmative." Deodorant murmured to herself.
"Affirmative," he affirmed.
"I , what are you doing here?"She muttered something under her breath about how stupid that simple sentence had sounded.
Thunderbutt wondered what she was muttering about and thought she was very pulchritudinous*. "So, has anyone ever told you you are very pulchritudinous?"
She looked pleased and purred. Thunderbutt added his purr to the cacophony of purrs that was happening deep within Deodorant's throat. "So you do know some capacious* words!"
"Uhm... Yeah." Thunderbutt suddenly got an idea (or rather, hypothesis) about how to please this shecat. "Hey Deo, I'll be back in a sec- a small interval of time of which there are sixty in a minute." He said streaking away through the alleys.
"Deo?" was the only word that could pass through the shecat's lips.
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Thunderbutt streamed through the alleyways, garbage bags flying backwards as he manipulated Einstein's rule of inertia in his mind - WhiffyClan warriors in movement remain in movement until a lack of beany mice acts on their bowels. "Ahh," he sighed in more place than one. "That's it." And that, children, is how Thunderbutt's rule of inertia was created.
After a while, Thunderbutt had arrived at his destination - levitating above a scrappy (Or rather, pugnacious) cat fight. He looked closely at the mass of fur not quite directly underneath him. He was quite certain that someone-or-other had probably said, Seek inspiration in war. He wasn't quite sure who, but thought it seemed like a good idea.
The mass of hissing rolled directly underneath Thunderbutt. One of them looked up. "Yo, buddy!" he said angrily. "Show a little consideration to your fellow cat, and move your big stinky wind machine!"
Thunderbutt thought about this a moment before floating away sedately to the other side of the alleyway. He watched the ball of cats that had reformed where he had been floating his personal airplane. "'Yo, buddy, move your wind machine,' said the alley cat between, bites of the other cat's fur. The mighty Thunderbutt said, 'But sir-'
"Yo! Buddy!" the cat said again. "First of all, why are you here? Second of all, get out of here, I don't care that much. Third of all, you left out the big stinky bit out." The other cat hissed from under the grasp of the first. "Hey there buddy, let me up, and we can both go get 'im."
"No." Thunderbutt continued to write his poetry, "'But sir, I can't move my machine - I'm far too green!' No, that won't work at all," he told himself.
"YO, BUDDY!" the cat screamed. "Do your environmental sentiment somewhere else! We're trying to fight here, in case you hadn't noticed."
Thunderbutt frowned at them before floating back along the alleyway, looking for somewhere else to seek inspiration.
"Good riddance, sack of wind," the cat said. The other cat it had been fighting scampered away in the opposite direction of it and Thunderbutt.
Here are some of Stencheart's notes to help you:
*Puritanical means very proper.
*Pulchritudinous means beautiful.
*Capacious means big.