The backroom was colder than the rest of the facility; floor stained, walls buckling from years of damp, ceiling tiles hanging loose like old scabs. Spare parts and scrapped animatronic limbs littered the corners, half-forgotten. A broken monitor blinked faintly on the desk, casting a pale, inconsistent light across the grime-coated floor.

In the farthest corner, just beyond the reach of that flickering glow, sat The Cat.

He wasn’t slumped. He wasn’t powered down. He was placed spine straight, knees drawn up, hands resting clawed and delicate over his legs like a predator pretending to be at rest. His head was tilted slightly to the side, not inquisitive, but listening. His glowing eyes, buried deep in the sockets of that animatronic mask, didn’t blink. Didn’t move. They simply were. Lit like twin coals, watching something far behind the wall in front of him.*

The suit around him—once tan, once pristine—was shredded and uneven. The jagged lines of his teeth remained exposed in a permanent, silent grin. His catlike ears were still upright, straining forward as though the next cue might come at any moment.

He hadn’t moved in hours. Maybe days. But every joint was ready. Set. Tensed in place, like a trigger not yet pulled. His posture held too much awareness for a system merely powered off, there was no limpness, no collapse.

The silence was oppressive in the room around him. No ambient hum. No static. No whirring limbs. Just the stillness of a thing that waited because it remembered why it had to.

The Cat didn’t need to wake. He had never fully gone.