If there was one thing the Enterprise crew was confused about, it was the origin of the beloved cat Marlo.
Despite having been deemed Pavel Chekov's cat, he was sort of everyone's pet. He walked around the ship like he owned the place, and everyone loved him.
The cat had a personality and attitude that rivaled that of their captain, and Marlo wasn't afraid to show Jim who was in charge.
The first reports of Marlo's existence began around the second month if their five year mission. Scotty was down in the bowels of the ship, inspecting the machinery. It was something he did every other week, and it brought the peace of mind only the silence could give.
While walking down the path, he tripped on a pipe and fell hard, his nose smacking the ground hard. He felt blood beginning to drip from his nose, and he sat up, bringing his sleeve up to staunch the flow.
He eyed the pipe, and grabbed a random railing to help himself stand. He always tripped on that specific pipe. Scotty turned, intending to head to the med bay for his nose, when he heard a meow. He turned back, hoping he was just hallucinating. A cat on the Enterprise would be a disaster.
He heard it again, and he crouched down to look under a pipe. There, all the way in the back, was a small, orange tabby cat, staring back at him.
Scotty had dismissed the incident as just a simple hallucination caused by his fall.
The very first time anyone had seen Marlo on the Enterprise, though, was when it was being repaired after the Khan incident. The ship had been docked on the orbiting station around the earth.
The workers who were hired were the best of the best. They worked, they went home, and then repeated the process. On board that star station, was a little, orange kitten. It had been brought, and abandoned on the station by an engineer had been reassigned.
The hungry cat followed the line of workers as they made their way to the almost complete Enterprise. He had never been in this part of the station. Everything smelled new, and he relaxed when he realized there were no people in certain parts of the ship.
The cat was living the good live, eating food that had been thrown away, and drinking from the leaking water pipes. He soon began to find some of the humans very intriguing. More specifically, the young the one with curly hair.
Marlo had watched over the kid every time he came down in engineering, finding the smaller one the most friendly out of all of them.
Finally, after coming to a conclusion, the cat followed him to the bridge, and made himself known. He was more than happy to find out the young one liked him back. He talked to the cat as if he could under his words, and he petted him, and gave him food.
Never had Marlo the cat been more happy to be with a human, and after seeing him injured, he decided this human was one he would protect until his last breath. Because no one messed with his human and got away with it.