Tell this cat a bedtime story about Second Life

[Charlemagne Allen]

Edited September 24 by Charlemagne Allen

[Midnoot]

There once was a murry purry kitty that spent her days as a furball and her nights as a voluptuous green twi'lek . She just wanted to help the newbies and show them a fun time , but was shunned by the " official " helpers for being too charismatic and chaotic . They said " you're distracting me from doing my job , by doing my job better than me ".  They said "  We do not dance here , we do not gesture here , we do not give out fun toys here , we do not offer technical support here . For you to do those things in our presence is a crime ." Thicc kitty didn't understand why it was bad to do all of the things that seemed good in the eyes of the dictator officials. The end . 😭

Edited September 24 by Midnoot

[Chery Amore]

Once upon a time my lovely, there was a social club in the fantasy world know as Second Life. The married couple who owned the club proclaimed they were madly in love. They wore tags identifying each other as their property and penned great love notes to each other on their profiles. There were even warnings to others on their profiles to "Stay Away!" Even adding in the possibility of bodily harm to those who dare trespass, oh my!  But, that's how very deep their love ran you see?
Envy was rampant as you can well imagine, "Oh why, oh why", the fair maidens that frequented that club lamented "why can we not find such a handsome gentleman to be true to us!"
But... in reality a shadow had been cast over the couples love, because reality is also a thing as you well know. The wife was suddenly whisked away from the world of imagination to deal with things in another for a seemingly short time.
A fortnight later when the wife's reality had been attended to, she arrived back in the wonderous world,  all smiles.  She couldn't help but fantasize about the rapture she would feel to be back in her one true love's oh so muscular arms.  
Unfortunately, the husband had found a replacement for her tootsweet! The horror of it!  Yes, the name of her replacement was TootSweet, and the wife landed on them doing the ol' rumpy-pumpy. Shocking I know! Oh, it gives me such pain to retell this story to you for I know...I deeply feel you are such an innocent.  But retell it I shall,  because these bitter lessons need to be passed on.
So beware and guard your heart. Know, you are safe here in your home.. in your bed. Sweet dreams my lovely!

[InnerCity Elf]

Once upon a time, there lived a cat that wasn't like the other cats. It did not want to kill mice, it did not enjoy chasing birds and squirrels, it sat still for hours, watching spiders crawl about and do spider things, without even the slightest impulse to tap away at them until they wouldn't move any longer. 

The cat often pondered life, and could not help but wonder what it would feel like on the other side, as a mouse, as a bird, a squirrel, a spider. If only it could be one of those for a day, it really wanted to know how those felt, what flying was like, and if the spiders even were aware of the paw of doom that tortured, and often unalived them. 

The cat was not allowed to sleep on its person's keyboard, it was well aware, its person was so concerned about things like cat hair in their keybord, not being able to type, and other such minutiae.

The cat was not interested in being a person, not even for a day, incidentally, persons' lives seemed so abysmally boring and meaningless. Why drink coffee to continue doing boring things, when you could just take a nap? 

However, lately, its person had been spending not just the days but also half of its nights at their desk, tapping away on its keyboard and staring into the monitor.

One night, its person had been computering all evening, as customary by now, and gone into the kitchen for a midnight snack, and then right to the bedroom, the computer still glowing and making sounds, forgotten.

The cat idly jumped onto the desk and walked over the keyboard to leave a few hairs in it, if things went well, and then it would... But then, the usually boring movements on the screen caught its attention. There was a tiny person representation standing idle in what looked like a giant playground sandbox, but close by, another tiny person representation was, piece by piece, turning into... a horse!

Now, the cat was hooked. Being a very smart cat, as you surely noticed, the cat started to investigate, and soon enough found out how to use the marketplace of SecondLife, how to buy animal avatars, how to put them on, and even how to obfuscate all of that from its person, its person bought so much that it didn't really notice some Lindendollars missing here and there, and the cat happily ever after spent most of its remaining nights as a horse, a mouse, a squirrel, a spider, ... 

Edited September 24 by InnerCity Elf

[Love Zhaoying]

Here's the bedtime story my mother told me: "Shut your mouth, close your eyes, and go to sleep."

[JacksonBollock]

In the dim amber glow of a dying sunset, Mortimer, an old black tomcat, sat atop a suburban fence.

This old cat, living more in memory than reality, was a creature of habit, his life playing out as a receding and softening morendo percussion to a world becoming less real to him with every passing day. The once-vivid rhythms of his life — the early morning birdsong, the warm sun pooling on a windowsill, the satisfying crunch of gravel under his paws—had become muted, like the distant echo of a long-forgotten symphony.

Each sunrise was softer than the last, each evening a little more blurred at the edges. Mortimer seemed caught in a slow diminuendo, his presence in the world quietly dwindling into a soon to be silence. The sights and sounds of his once-vibrant territory now felt faded, like old photographs left too long in the sun, their colours washed out, the details frayed at the seams.

Finally, as the sun fell away and the dark grey dusk turned to night, Mortimer slipped carefully down the fence and landed like a fluid pool of oil upon the grass.  He started to wander through the garden, his steps light and aimless, following pathways etched into his mind rather than his surroundings.

The smells of earth and dew that had once stirred something deep within him now seemed other worldly, as if separated from him by a thin, invisible veil. It was as though the present were slipping away, replaced by the familiar and comforting cadences of his own memories, looping softly in his mind like a quietening, unending refrain.

Old as he was, the ancestral feline instinct still flickered within him, ringing with a discordant note at any anomaly—alert to the slightest hint of prey or predator, even now attuned to the world’s quiet disturbances.

This evening the note rang, not demanding or urgent, but insistently asking for attention.

Mortimer stopped.

His cat’s eyes glowing in the dark, reflecting back a blue flickering light from an open window, guided him to the source of the discord, of the anomalous note within the usual familiar refrain.

Mortimer flowed across the grass and up onto the windowsill, pulled along by an alert curiosity which felt new and familiar all at once. The old cat, a young cat, just one last time.

The old man sat, hunchbacked, his face dancing with reflections of the moving shapes glaring back at him from the bright shiny box in from of him. His eyes barely blinking, his full attention focused on the contents in the shiny box, immersed albeit remotely in the world on the other side.

Mortimer’s nose twitched, pulling in the smells of the room beyond the window. A faint, stale scent of age and solitude lingered, tinged with a faint whiff of tobacco and something sour. The old man’s world felt as faded and blurred as Mortimer’s own—a space where the colors had drained away, leaving behind only shadows of what once was.

With the practiced ease of a lifetime of stealth, Mortimer slipped through the open window, his body flowing into the room like a whisper. He landed soundlessly on the old, threadbare carpet, its fibers worn down to the warp by years of pacing and wear. The old man, lost in the glow of his bright, flickering box, did not stir.

Mortimer approached cautiously, every step deliberate, his senses piqued by the strange play of light and sound. The man’s face, deeply lined and sunken, was illuminated by the shifting hues of the screen—blue, then green, then a sharp, cold white. His eyes were wide, fixated, unseeing of anything beyond the screen.

For a long moment, Mortimer simply watched him, the rhythmic rise and fall of the old man’s breath matching the steady beat of the cat’s own heart. It was a strange synchronicity, as if their lives—both now receding into a world of half-remembered sensations—were playing out the same quiet coda.

Mortimer moved closer, the light painting his fur in strange, fractured patterns. The images on the screen flickered chaotically: scenes of faraway places, unfamiliar faces, and moments that seemed so vivid and yet so utterly disconnected from the room’s stillness. To Mortimer, it was a jumble of colors and shapes—nonsense visions that danced before him, teasing his tired senses.

But something in the images caught him. There, fleetingly, was a glimpse of green—lush, vibrant, unlike anything he’d seen in years. It was the green of life, of summer gardens and thick, cool grass beneath his paws. It was a memory, but also something more. Something immediate, pulling at the distant threads of his awareness.

The old man shifted slightly, his attention still locked onto the screen. Mortimer’s eyes flicked up to his face. He saw something there, a reflection of his own experience: a sense of yearning, of being caught between the tangible and the intangible, the real and the remembered. The man’s hands moved surprisingly quickly across an array of buttons in front of him, his lips moving in time with his fingers, his expression a fragile mix of concentration and something closer to need.

Mortimer felt a pang of recognition, a silent understanding that passed between the old cat and the old man. They were both watchers now, observers at the edges of their own lives, connected by the quiet rhythms of a world that seemed just out of reach.

As Mortimer turned to leave, his gaze lingered for a moment on the man’s hunched form. There was no sudden epiphany, no grand realization—only the quiet acknowledgment of another life, equally fragile, equally real. The cat slipped back through the window, his body once again melding into the night.

Outside, the garden was cool and still, the air heavy with the scents of evening. Mortimer moved through it slowly, his steps guided less by sight and sound than by the faint, persistent echoes of a world that was fading, but still his.

And as he walked, the old cat felt, for a moment, something stir within him—a brief, fleeting flicker of the instincts that had once defined him. It was the smallest spark, but it was enough to carry him forward, step by step, into the gathering night.

Edited September 25 by JacksonBollock