So Theres This Weird Port of The Space Station

I. Disjointed Greetings

“Plane of Scavenge, Land of Beast.” Brick paused. “I know your reputation. Acid, the killer.” With an appetite for the innocent, which they did not say. These strings of words were thrown about like war cries among the few border residents, spacecat and not, who surfaced with guns and forks, impressively breaking down Brick’s spaceship in lieu of a greeting, driving it straight down a pond where the ease of impact spared their life, but not their soaking wet fur. An entrance to their new, dark satellite, with Brick’s only mode of transport exploding to highlight its resolution. Glorious.

Finding Brick apparently of nothing these feline folk had expected, they withdrew as fast as they flocked upon them the moment they swam ashore alive from the blast. A custom no different than at Central, they supposed.

Right at home, then.

Aforementioned Acid didn't budge. From his spot atop the high boulder against the night sky, the wanted feline leered, like an unconcerning guy just poking out to inspect a neighborhood accident. When his voice rang, jarring the atmosphere, it pierced Brick’s head, already reeling under the pressure of bloody eyes and trying, in vain, to adjust to the unwelcome landscape. 

“To think the honor of recognition would grace me tonight, I'm touched.” Acid meowed, smug with something Brick couldn't place. “Twinkle.” And with that, pulled the carpet from right under their paws.

Twinkle. The name logged into the registration of his birth, granted with little finesse from his mother, as fleeting in its meaning as the misfortune that befell her belly and planted them. A name driven to disuse as Brick renamed themself in departure. Mother encouraged it; but it wasn't the point. The point was, they had never in their life kept any of this public. Yes, for the special molly their mother was, they ensured it the last time they set aflame their satellite’s archive together. Conflict knotted their stomach.

"Got under your skin, haven't I," Acid smiled, sharp. He was good at pressing their buttons so. First time meeting this cat after hearing of him on radio alerts, yet it escaped them to consider Acid’s penchant for a cat and mouse chase. An event straight out of a horror novel, in bitter afterthought. Of course he would hide in a realm too wasteful for the Central security budget, and of course, this had to be where they crashed. Dying reported at these paws would be a miracle, it should be their carcass slumped on the jungle floor instead.

"It's Brick," they gritted, "No spacecat comes to this land in goodwill. You’re probably not from Central, maybe the other satellites, but it's unlikely. Your pelt. It looks foreign." Brick meant to say it stands out too much to be tolerated for a local, as if it’d sound any better, like mine, but in the face of death's harbinger their jaws had clamped shut. Acid was a massive force, like a blackhole, rendering every practiced courtesy useless and sucking from their well-masked temper like a leech after merely a mouthful of words. Not something the unskilled could do, though Brick couldn’t begin to guess if this was even deliberate. Either way, it seemed like child's play for the other side.

"Foreign, hm?" Acid was still very calm, humoring their inquiry. "Young mister, please tell me what of my nature that gave it away. Surely can't be this shining flank of mine?" Mustard in color, etched in mutated pawmarks Brick noticed were distinctly human, "Or maybe it's this?" and it took a moment under the dim starlight to notice Acid’s dark head twisting. It peeled apart in black strings first, the yellow mass within standing erect, slick and freakish like a banana slug writhing in its silk bed, deflating when his green hair receded, as black tendrils stitched into tendons into meat a newly formed maw in place, one longer and with higher of a slope, all within a deep inhale under the starry sky. To salvage their respect, Brick remained unfazed.

“That was the first time you showed me your shapeshifting,” Brick doesn’t turn, but hears Acid huff in acknowledgement. He’s somewhere in the proximity of beyond their left near their bamboo bed, moving about, fiddling with something wooden, too, by the textured scratch of his talons. Their head pounds. “It almost made me think,” they croak, regret mobilizing their airways, but onward they go, “That you were warning me.”

The next choked sound will never leave their memory. Surprised, they turn around, the moment a steaming hot towel was dumped unceremoniously on their eyes.

“YIKES,”

“Quit yammering,” Acid demands. Brick raises a paw to bat the damp towel away before Acid beats him to it and their paw gets swatted instead. The towel is lifted and Brick blinks rapidly, their vision focusing only in time to catch Acid’s rear at the shed exit.

“Don’t humor yourself with it, either.” And to prove what that means, Acid leaves, half assed with his treatment of Brick’s concussion just like that.

Several hours earlier saw the two meeting for the second time in a moon since Brick’s arrival. The first time, they trod right into Acid’s ambush, hungry with many things, too far gone to care. This time, they wouldn’t even question why they continued to walk, alive. 

Their pelts shone in tandem, by the time they were well blended within the flow of crowd on the street, ebbing in and out of shadows as they passed under a sky chokeful with lanterns suspended beneath a dark web of ropes. Persimmon, orange, olive, some purple even, coloring the dark spine of the leading feline like a lake reflect fireworks.

To be following a tiger to its den, Brick must be out of their damn mind. How did they delude themself to end up conspiring with some murderer on the loose? Was it when Brick discovered all his targets to be their planet’s stations, their proud guards? The elite ones that drove their family out? Did it amend it, the common goal to see Central authorities and their accomplices toppled?

Brick’s excitement showed, because Acid turned around and immediately commented. “Like what you see? You must’ve been depraved back home if this simple sight is enough to rock your brain.” He smirked, “Steady now ‘cause what I’m about to show you will probably wet your pouch.”

“It won’t!” Brick flushed, not that a face already mottled in red and golden speckles was any more obvious when flushed, “...But. I’ll admit that the tales were nothing short of truth. Descending alleyways of bricks and slates, uneven stacks of hip roofed houses with large shop signs.” They could not stop even as it dissolved into a mutter, a hated habit. Acid didn’t seem to mind, or care, though. They kept going. “I always paid the most attention to scrolls that illustrated our ancient architecture, since the Central base was very bleak. I could never fathom what they saw on smooth platforms that they couldn’t in tiled streets and thick banisters. There’s life in these.” Brick granted the environment an appreciative lookaround, and meant it. They liked clear signs of erosion on these rocks, liked the way a shop’s overhang split in half to hug around a really tall tree. In a desecrated realm, rare preservations like these really stayed hidden gems, for their own good. Back there, they flattened a forest to make way for a parking lot. But then again. “What got me most, though, was the talisman documentation—”

Brick’s track of thought came to an abrupt end when Acid stepped on them and said, “Stop dreaming now because we need to get fucking low,” and on cue, broomed his massive smelly tail on Brick’s face. They beelined for the edge of the street behind dense thickets as a flash of yellow flickered onto Brick’s periphery, the other side where Acid didn’t stick out like a thorn. Their nose itched.

“These are calamansi. Try not to sneeze or you’re deadmeat,” Acid hissed, red eyes urgent. Brick’s glare was short lived when they glanced and saw paws planted right across the leafy barrier. Tracking dogs in Dragon emblem! Shit, even this far out from the banks? They thought this was rural! Brick watched Acid’s hair lift and the corner of his eyes twitch in that telltale way one prepared for a shapeshift. “Is there no other way around this,” they pleaded, fully aware of how imposing the looming wall behind them stood. Shit.

Congratulations Brick! Their inner voice raved. That’s what ya got for frolicking when you’re supposed to be dead! Their direct combat skills wouldn’t hold up, rusty as they were.

Shit.

“Like you’ll survive.” Acid whispered encouragingly. “While I distract them, run for the warehouse I mentioned. Don’t try any other shit.” And with that, silence broke.

Brick does not recall beyond this recollection.

II. The Backdrop

A space station isn’t stationary at all; On smaller scales, definitely not; On a wider scale, tentatively. A space station hosts ports within a galaxy which are known to house at least a planet’s worth of spacecats, with a few exceptions where certain communities within or as their own ports have inhabited satellites instead, though usually under the control of a central planet. Each of these ports has its own administration that answers to the space station, regulating peace in frequent spaceship delegates patrolling across the central hub and every port in connection.

Spacecats are a species renowned for their strength and affinity for space travel & industrialization. If their name suggests anything, it shows on their pelts as well: miniature stars and spacedust encased within mostly feline bodies, reflecting universes. Recent history has been made with a spacecat by the name of Moonbeam whose coincidental collision with a Sodaplanet has changed the course of the space station forever, for spacecats no longer just communicate amongst themselves, they now share borders and link societies with sodacats and guppymanders as well. No doubt this new era has turned a fresh page in the history of all three nations.

A little more than 4 light years to the east of Moonbeam’s Port Borealis, a planet orbits its golden star, three main satellites and some sub satellites orbiting in tow. This port, Siling in its regional language, Quanima on the official English registration, is one of the more distant sites, detached enough that its spacecats have maintained a clashing cultural hotpot of different time periods through Quanima’s trade with a non-space traveling feline kind neighboring their belt. For instance, the main planet, Dragon, is furthest into modernization, cyber structure well integrated into every corner of its systems. The first satellite, as big as Dragon but technically orbiting it, nestled a society that functionally straddled the line between the Earthling dubbed Three Kingdom Period and the 21th Century. For a good few hundreds of years this had been maintained, however, a port war between its authorities and those on Dragon had upended the satellite societies, transforming them into a major shell of their glory eras, reducing them to a realm that welcomes criminals banished from the Central while their young talents are summoned permanently to Dragon. This was how satellite Phoenix became the Land of Beast.

Two more major satellites which orbit what was once Phoenix were also thrown off their tracks from the civil war, a historical intervention so big it was documented in the space station’s archives and taught in a few closer peripheral ports. So big, that satellite Qilin and Turtle of Port Quanima orbit Dragon now. Funneling life to all of these, is their star, Phoenix. Central scholars still debate to this day star Phoenix title prewar, many coming to the conclusion that it was colloquially “Sun” influenced by Quanima’s nonspacecat neighbors or perhaps even Port Borealis and their ally Sodaplanet, but all stayed mere claims and the controversy remained.

Remained, too, in the year ◼◼◼, Twinkle’s maternal side in the Land of Beast.