A Tale from Pete the Cat

The evening began as an affront to my senses. My primary human and another, lesser human were gathered before the Great Glowing Rectangle, clutching those strange plastic controllers and producing a series of agitated grunts. On the screen, a tiny swordsman and some sort of electric yellow mouse were engaged in a flurry of undignified motion. It was loud, chaotic, and utterly beneath my notice. I gave a sigh of profound disappointment, loud enough to signal my displeasure, and began my ritual evening bath, pointedly turning my back on the crude display. But as I groomed, a curious thing began to happen. The chaotic noise started to resolve itself into a kind of rhythm. The sharp *thwack* of a hit, the electronic *pew-pew* of a projectile, the deep *boom* of a major blow—they weren't just noise. They were percussion. The frantic clicking of the humans' thumbs became a frantic, desperate string section. The triumphant fanfare that erupted when the yellow mouse was launched into the digital ether was a brass flourish. My ear, mid-lick, twitched. This wasn't a fight. It was a symphony. I abandoned my grooming and leapt silently to the arm of the sofa, my preferred observation post. From here, I could see it all: the flashing lights, the flailing characters, the enraptured faces of my bipedal staff. I was no longer an annoyed spectator; I was a critic in the royal box, observing a bizarre and violent opera. I began to participate, in my own subtle way. As the little swordsman charged his special attack, my tail began a slow, deliberate sway, a conductor's baton building the tension. When he unleashed it in a flash of blue light, my tail snapped still, marking the crescendo. A low, appreciative rumble started in my chest, a purr that harmonized perfectly with the controller's vibrations. The humans, of course, were oblivious. They cheered and groaned, believing their clumsy inputs were responsible for the masterpiece unfolding before them. They thought they were *playing a game*. How charmingly naive. They were merely the orchestra, and a rather clumsy one at that, channeling the raw energy of the performance. I was the silent maestro, the sole being in the room with the refinement to appreciate the brutal, chaotic artistry on display. This "Ultimate" creation, while offering no direct service to me, provides a surprisingly complex audio-visual tapestry. It is a worthy, if noisy, distraction for my underlings, and for that, it earns my temporary, and very conditional, approval.