Slug Cat

Species/Type

Cat (Gray-and-Black Tabby)

First Appearance

Episode 5

TL;DR

A spoiled and very heavy tabby who treats Sunrise Sanctuary as her personal estate and its residents as mostly acceptable roommates, Slug Cat saves her effort for the rare thing she decides is worth it, then spends all of it at once.

Slug Cat — Original

A heavy gray-and-black tabby with enormous dignity and very ordinary cat priorities: warm boards, regular meals, her own space and anything small that moves in the grass. She can hold one spot for an entire afternoon. She can also wedge herself into a box that is plainly too small and carry on as though that was the plan.

Slug Cat — Post-Mutation

After the mutation, Slug Cat keeps her size, her stripes and every one of her opinions. What's new is a pair of glowing green antennae, like a slug's, and a glowing green ridge running down her back. Underneath, she is exactly the same cat.

Backstory

Slug Cat came to Sunrise in 2013 as a kitten, the only kitten born to a tourist's house cat. The tourist did not want to raise her, decided the sanctuary looked like a place where a kitten would find a good home, and left her there.

The tourist turned out to be right. The people at Sunrise fed her, kept her healthy and handled her enough that she grew up easy around humans, with a whole sanctuary looking after her from the start. She learned which buildings stayed warm, which windows caught the afternoon sun, and which people would stop what they were doing if she walked over and stared at them.

That last discovery had consequences. Sunrise had a lot of people, and they did not always know who had already fed the cat. Slug Cat worked this out before they did. With a little patience near the food area, breakfast could turn into a second breakfast, especially once she had perfected the look of a cat who had never eaten in her life. Nobody could point to one meal and blame it. She simply grew, and kept growing, into a twenty-five-pound tabby who can still run, climb and jump whenever she decides it is necessary. She rarely decides it is necessary.

When a wooden footbridge went up over the koi pond, the humans had finally built something she considered useful. The koi caught her eye first. They were bright, slow and unmistakably fish. Catching one was probably possible. It also involved water. She looked at the fish, then at the pond, and the koi lived. The bridge was the better prize anyway. Its boards warmed in the sun, and from the railing she could see the nearby paths without going anywhere. People tried to move her at first. These days they walk around her.

Her laziness is a taste for comfort, and it can vanish in a second. When a tour group stopped for a picnic by the stream, she lay in the exact middle of the sunniest blanket while the family who owned it ate around her. Then a red-eyed otter hauled a trout as long as a man's forearm onto the gravel, left it there and went off to roll in the grass. Nobody saw Slug Cat cross the glade. One moment she was a heavy loaf on a blanket. The next she was sprinting for the trees, belly swinging, with the trout hanging out of both sides of her mouth and the otter behind her. She reached the ferns first.

Later that afternoon the otter climbed onto her bridge for his fish. She hit him across the face with her claws out. He shook his head once, came at her from the other side and went off the edge with the trout into the pond. That was as far as she would follow. She lay back down as if she had lost interest some time ago and watched him eat it with one eye.

Kagen, the Sunrise caretaker who can fix almost anything, is the person she is most attached to, although she would object to anyone ranking her relationships. She treats him as part of the normal order of Sunrise and notices quickly when anything about him changes. One night, after a long and difficult day, he climbed onto her bridge and sat down on the boards beside her. She allowed it. From Slug Cat, that is affection.

She considers herself fiercely independent, despite thirteen years of being fed, sheltered and stepped around by an entire sanctuary because she refused to move. She assumes the arrangement will last forever, and that any problem she ignores long enough will be handled by someone more motivated. Someday something she cares about will need her to get up. When that day comes, she will get up, and she will make it clear the whole inconvenience was somebody else's fault.