Karyn was jogging to Jon's house when a black van screeched to a halt and out poured several of those monkey versions of humans wearing full-body yellow plastic suits, walking on two legs, and holding guns. One of them fired and Karyn reactively raised a paw at the rapidly approaching projectile, and mostly by chance, but also because of her catlike reflexes, she succeeded. The dart lodged harmlessly in the sole of her running shoe. At least it wasn't a bullet. Was that a tranquilizer dart? Or some lethal poison?
"Stop! Don't shoot!" Karyn cried, waving her arm/front leg she had caught the dart with. Two of the creatures looked at each other, and hesitated. They knew that this town was apparently now occupied by human-sized cats who seemed to be versions of the humans who lived there and ostensibly were intelligent, but this fact still didn't really set in without seeing it and hearing it for themselves with this example. She looked to be a dangerous big cat, a beast, even though wearing clothes and four running shoes, but once she cried for her life and acted so human, that kind of changed things and drove the point home. Well there was another obvious thing that was different about her physically from the cats they were used to seeing. She had some sizable breasts hanging below her. And not one, not two, not three, but four pairs of them at that. Should they be called teats? They certainly looked out of place even if she was pregnant or nursing. In a way, it seemed rather human. Maybe having big breasts even when not pregnant was a trait of the females of all mammal species that built civilizations?
"Will, you come, willingly, without resistance?" one of them asked.
"I'm not, big on being kidnapped," Karyn said. "But if the alternative is being shot."
"We're not, kidn..." the figure in the haz-mat suit said in a man's voice. "Do you have a name?"
"Of course I have a name. I'm Karyn Black."
This too staggered the man. This being before him was a cat, but it, she, was all just so human, especially the name. There wasn’t anything catlike about her voice, her speech style, or even her name.
"Karyn, we're, trying to figure out what's going on here. We just want to perform some tests. And talk to you about what you're doing here."
"I live here. What are you doing here?"
"I mean, on this planet."
"I could ask you the same thing, as far as I can see, everyone outside of this town has been replaced by monkeys like yourself. I'm American as apple pie, and you're a bunch of monkey creatures that have taken over the world. Prove you're not the aliens."
The man in the plastic suit sighed. "I need you to be honest with me, Karyn. I need to know if this is some sort of act, or if that's really the truth."
"Funny how the burden of proof is on me to prove it to you as if I'm the one who's so suspicious. You're the one driving a van around kidnapping and shooting people off the street. Which one of us is acting more suspiciously?"
"We don't know what happened here, or if you're dangerous, Karyn," the man said.
"Well obviously I'm not armed. I'm wearing four shoes. How could I possibly shoot you?"
The man thought this preposterous thought over for a moment. It was true. It seemed impossible for her to shoot or threaten them in any way other than the threat of biting them. But the very fact that she was a huge cat wearing clothes and four running shoes and talking to them in a human girl's voice was such an absurdity in the first place.
"I'm trying to protect people, and do my job. I work for the CDC." The man held out a badge that identified him as Darrian Ford, working for the CDC. "How old are you, Karyn?"
"I'm 16," she answered.
The man flinched at that. "How long, do, you live?" He had no idea if they aged in cat years or what. Was 16 like a teenaged human girl? Was he just treating a 16 year old girl in such a way? Or was 16 old?
Karyn understood the question though. She had been wondering the same thing about them. "I think life expectancy, in my kind, is 80-something, 100 is very old but not that unusual, but some have lived to something like 120."
"120 years, cycles of the Earth orbiting around the sun."
"Yes, 120 years, were you thinking I meant 120 days? Even 120 months would only be 10 years."
The man even inside his plastic suit, visibly looked down and shook his head. "Jesus, you're really the same as us. Karyn, we're just trying to solve this mystery, of what happened to this town."
"Or what happened to the rest of the world," Karyn replied.
The man sighed. "Wouldn't that be a hell of a thing, if that was actually it," he said. For a moment, there was a tiny bit of doubt in his mind, just a brief thought, that what if that really was the case. No, it couldn't be, right? But if the cats, the people, in this town, to them, the situation was the same, was it really less likely? No way, that doesn’t make sense, she’s a quadruped, wasn’t having dextrous fingers for fine manipulation a requirement for civilization building? Then again, he didn’t really know what her paws looked like under her shoes and socks, maybe they were nimble like a raccoon’s?
Of course Karyn knew exactly what the most likely explanation was. But she didn't want them taking the stone, so she would have to give an alternative. "From what I've seen, on the internet, in the last 2 hours since it happened, I think, there are two alternate universes, and my town crossed over. Everyone is the same, I mean, there's a counterpart for everyone, and all of history is different, and yet not. We come from the cat world, and you come from the monkey world. The people who were monkey people living in this town from your world to begin with are our counterparts, and maybe right now they're in cat world and right now my monkey counterpart is trying to convince your cat counterpart that she's not an alien invader, but we're actually the same people. Everything that exists in our world, exists in yours. I've seen it. Monkey versions of familiar movies, of everything. I could show you my DVD collection, I'll bet they're even the same movies, but if you see them, they will be acted by cat people counterparts of the monkey versions you know well. If you want to know what I think, that's what I think happened."
The man was speechless. Could it be true? "Well, that is incredibly intriguing, and now I really want to see what those movies are like, and the rest of your culture, if there's a cat Arnold Schwarzenegger and a cat Abraham Lincoln in your history books, but if it isn't too much to ask for now, could we, get a small blood sample anyway?"
"That's fair," Karyn said in relief. "But you want me to get in your suspicious van I take it."
"Sorry," the man admitted, feeling guilty of the arrogance of his position and what he was asking given the circumstances from her perspective. "But actually that shouldn't be necessary. I can take it right here, if you'll just hold still for a moment, I have what I need in the van. But if we could take your information, name, phone number, you have... I guess you must have a phone number." He almost told Karyn that he thought her kind was very cute, just as a random compliment, but decided that would be awkward and maybe it would be taken the wrong way. Nevertheless there was something he really wanted to know, and hoped it wasn’t going too far. "One other thing, can I, see, one of your paws?"
"My paws?" Karyn asked.
"I’m just, curious about your, um, well, you see…"
"Front or back?” Karyn asked with a hint of a wry smile.
"Front."
Karyn pressed down on her right front shoe with her left one and then slid out her right forepaw, and then pulled off its sock with her teeth and held up her paw for the man. She couldn’t see the look of amazement on his face through the mask of his haz-mat head-piece. It was 100% a cat’s paw, with nothing human or raccoon-like about it. How did they get by with these and get done everything that needed to be done? Were they actually more capable as hands than they looked? For that matter, how exactly did she put on the socks and shoes in the first place? He soon got his answer as she adeptly put them both back on. But not before asking for a pen and something to write on, and writing down her contact information on the back of his business card, followed with a little heart, and handing it back to him. And it was all just so perfect. It was insanely perfect.
"Fucking hell, not only can you write, this is the best goddamn handwriting I've ever seen," Darrian said, as amazed by that as anything else.
"Well of course I'll have good handwriting by your standards, I've got normal hands with normal fingers, not those weird tentacle hot dog fingers like you," Karyn said in a mocking tone. Darrian laughed at that, deciding he would make a point of not having low expectations on their capabilities in the future.
After that, Karyn let the man take the sample, and he cordially gave her his own information and thanked her and drove off. Karyn trotted a little more slowly and anxiously the rest of the way to Jon's house.
Meanwhile, at Jon’s house:
Jon’s bare paw on the stone, he began speaking with, "I wish..."
