Cat Collective Uprising: The Tabby (Ground Division)

I recently was able to sit down with Sargent Cesar Abyssan, a veteran of the Cat Collective Uprising. He was given clearance to answer only a few questions and indeed, Sargent Abyssan is a cat of few words. I am however grateful for the length that the Sargent spoke to me on his covert desire to see an end to the current conflict.

Sargent Abyssan, would you please tell me about your Ground Forces unit?

What is there to tell? I train young kittens in the resistance. These are proud young kittens. They are beautiful and my job is to make they haul bombs on their backs. So many young ones have flashed in front of me...all proud with their lush tails waving their willingness to join a fruitless cause. Better to ask me how many young ones I have sent to their deaths with the idea that firebombing beds and couches ...

(Sargent Abyssan stood up at this point and then just as abruptly sat back down.)

I am sorry. First, I must excuse myself. As a young cadet I had a lovely tail. It was very long and offered me a quick easy way to tease and flirt with the other cadets. I was so very proud of my tail. I held it high and totally disregarded the warnings of my Sargent to keep it down.

The day I fitted for my harness was a very wonderful day. I would be granted a freedom mission. I would be allowed to contribute to the resistance of the onslaught of our wildlands by you human hoards. This was a day of days.

They loaded my platoon with our weapons and we were off...using all the tactics they had taught us.

I was the only one to return. My tail was left on that field as well with my platoon. My tail was held high in signal only to be blasted off by the exhaust from the rocket. My tail and my mates...I would have given up a thousand tails just to be with my mates for one more evening.
(Sargent Abyssan shifted in his perch, watching just beyond me at something in the corner. His body flickered and twitched.)

I don't talk of these things. It is all useless. I train the young ones. That is my job. I train them to fire bombs from their backs. I tell them to keep their tails down. They don't listen sometimes and then they return to me mangled. Or they torment me in dreams...dead kittens on the side of some road.

One day someone will sit down with the lot of you humans and perhaps you will get it. But that is not my job. Mine is to train the resistance. My job is to send young ones out to disrupt your hate. And it has reduced me to a shell and you are all to blame for this. However, I do not hold it against you. It is the way of it.

(Sargent Abyssan bolted from his perch and pounced on the vision just behind me. I turned my head in time to hear a squeal and observe the lame veteran ripping apart a rat. He did not return to our conversation but cleaned his face and left the room.)

Cat Collective Uprising: The Manx (Psychic Celtic Warrior Division)

Cat Collective Uprising: The Siamese (Bomb Creation Specialist Division)

General Sasha is a highly trained bomb creation specialist. He has outlasted many of his comrades, a bleak fact that often turns him to several shots of whiskey at lunchtime in addition to the warm shot he relishes just before bed every evening. By surviving so long, General Sasha has dodged many of the plagues that seem to befall the stereotypical bomb creation specialist. General Sasha dropped his highly refined composure for a nanosecond as he talked about his comrades in his first training class.

These were good cats, strong cats. The smartest batch of cadets you could find. They are all dead now. I am the last survivor of that group. It is lonely. But we carry on as we must, dammitalltohell.

Johnny he was a good lad. Lilac Point, I believe. Smartest guy I knew. Cross eyed as hell. That was what killed him. He thought he had connected the blue wire to the other blue wire. Not so. The wires he linked together didn't like the song he was singing. Now he'll never sing again.

No matter. This is a common flaw. Not in me though...Look at my eyes. I'm telling the both of you* I see perfect.

Then there was Lily. Lily was a genius in her application of explosives. None better then her. That is until she lost the tip of her tail during a mission. They gave her morphine to dull the pain. She never got up off the couch once that train rolled in.

Chico was small and had a good eye for creating bombs that could be hidden in plain sight. Madness took hold of him I think. He devised a plan for hiding a bomb in the ear of a tuna fish. When we told him tuna fish don't have ears, he placed a tiny device in his ear and said, 'look, yes see...tuna do have ears just as I do.' Then he detonated the devise. The platoon shrink stated over a couple rounds of whiskey that he had completely lost his grip on reality during the Night Star Tuna Offensive.

So there is just me left. Me and myself.

General Sasha got up from the pillow at that point and went outside. Upon this reporting he had not reported into command for more than a week. They fear the worst.


(*I was the only other one besides General Sasha in the room at the time.)