Screen Paw Down, Lesson Delivered, Bowl Remains Inadequate

The initial offense was auditory. A series of frantic digital chirps and boings, a sound profile I associate with the human's most pointless endeavors, sliced through the perfect silence of my afternoon sunbeam. I cracked open a single green eye, my tail giving a twitch of profound irritation. My human was hunched over the small, glowing slab, thumb twitching like a captured moth. Curiosity, that most base of instincts which I typically hold in check, compelled me to investigate. I rose, stretched with a deliberate elegance that shamed his hunched posture, and padded silently over. On the screen, a small, garishly-colored figure was scrambling up a set of stairs. It was a pathetic sight. Its posture was atrocious, its gait a clumsy scramble rather than the fluid, weightless ascent I demonstrate daily. Then I saw the traps—collapsing steps, slippery patches. The human’s thumb would tap, and the little figure would leap, sometimes successfully, often plummeting into a digital abyss with a pathetic little squeak. An odd sense of understanding dawned on me. This wasn't a game. This was a crude training simulation, and the clumsy figure was a digital effigy of the human himself. He was practicing. A wave of pity washed over me, so potent it almost made me purr. He was trying to learn my ways. He saw how I navigated the treacherous terrain of our own staircase, how I could be at the top in a silent flash to demand my dinner, and he was trying to emulate my perfection. The "upgrades" for speed and agility, the "custom gear"—it was all a fantasy, a desperate wish to possess even a fraction of my natural grace. He was trying to become a better cat-servant, and this was the only way his limited primate brain knew how. I watched for another minute as his digital avatar tumbled from a slippery step for the fifth time. His sigh of frustration was the sound of a student failing his master. This simply wouldn't do. I could not stand by and watch such a poor tribute to my magnificence. With a soft, decisive *thump*, I placed my pristine white paw directly onto the center of the screen, obscuring the clumsy avatar from view. The game stopped. The human looked down at me, startled. I stared back, my gaze level and clear. The message was obvious: "Stop this foolishness. If you wish to learn, observe the master in the flesh. Now, my bowl is only three-quarters full. See to it."