The sun is shining

When the sun is out I don’t complain so much about this country. It was unfortunate that my space ship crashed in the UK. It would have been better if I landed somewhere near the Bahamas, but the ship lost power when it was just flying over the jet stream and I was dragged here against my will. However, East Anglia is said to be the sunniest place in the whole Great Britain, so not everything was so bad. I could have landed in the Lake District, or worse yet, in Aberdeen.

While I laid in the grass watching the Guinea pigs grazing stupidly happy, Rat-a-Lin emerged from his hole under the hut and got inside to perform his daily inspection. Food had not yet been supplied, so he came back and laid in the sun beside me, certain that I would protect him from the unwanted interest shown by the other four cats of the household enjoying the sun in the garden. Despite being well fed, some of them had a strong sense of humour and enjoyed racing after frightened rats.

Finally I got myself the courage to ask him, which planet did he come from, but Rat-a-Lin was quick to answer with that tiny high pitch laughter that only rats can do.

-Which planet, you ask? I was born in a genetics lab at some research centre far away from here. When I was still a baby they put me in a box and flew me all the way across the ocean to this country and landed in a University near here. I spent my life unwillingly taking drugs. One day a white coated human was preparing to give me an injection of some stuff from a suspiciously looking brown jar. The human handling me was still an human juvenile and while I was struggling to escape her hand, she dropped the jar on the floor. Scared by the impact she opened her hand and I jumped as far as I could, hiding under some boxes ready to be dropped in the recycling bin. Once out of the building I managed to jump inside the boot of some car parked by the wily bins, and that is how I ended up here.

I assumed that Rat-a-Lin was a genetically modified rat purchased from some lab, probably in the US or Scandinavia, and brought into the UK to serve as one of the 6 million animals that are submitted to experiments each year. Luckily it seemed to me that the drugs experimented on him, enhanced his cognitive abilities. How else could his witty sharpness be explained?

I did enjoyed chatting to him, he was a very inspiring rat who provided me great insight into human behaviour. So I was preoccupied about how long the effect of the drug would last. Will it last forever? Will he lose his abilities?
The survival of Rat-a-Lin was important for my project. Not only did he have very useful inside information about what was going on at the University, but he was constantly asking intriguing questions, that kept me thinking.

In order to ask the right questions you need to have a good insight of what you are studying. He knew how humans behaved in their work place, I knew them in their home. Humans at work and home behave in different ways. It is important to get information from both settings to get a better idea of what is real human behaviour.
Also, Rat-a-Lin could give me insights of places where a cat could not go. I could use his motor dexterity to be my eyes in places where I would not be allowed in my cat shape. Besides my biology restricts me to the amount of morphs I can do during a life time. I had already morphed five times in different earth species, and I had only four left, and I had to save the last morph to go back to my original me. So, as long as I could take advantage of my cat form, I would stay that way.