Stray Cat Strut

Interlude - Stay At Home PR Manager/GF

"Wow, there are a lot of haters out there," Lucy said. She shifted, reaching down to rub at her calf where it was a little itchy.

The motion caught the eye of the other person in the room who looked, then immediately snapped her attention away. "Are they saying anything about Delilah?"

Lucy grinned. It was just her and Franny in her and Cat's bedroom. Fortunately the room was massive, and they'd snuck a couch in next to the kid's pool in the corner with a good view of a big-screen TV Lucy had acquired with her discretionary funds.

Those funds came from her efforts to fundraise and raise money for the Burlington branch of the Kittens, who were actually doing very well. She was slowly allowing the group to expand into New Montreal. That meant appointing managers--of a sort--and arranging both online and IRL meetups and discussion groups. It was fun busy work, and it was giving her a pretty nice chest of spending money.

A lot of corporations were willing to throw money at the cause. Lucy suspected that it was because they thought it would get them in Catherine's good graces. She accepted the money and promptly forgot everything about those giving it to her. Morons.

"You wanna see if people are talking shit about your girl too?" Lucy asked.

Franny frowned. "No," she lied.

Lucy smiled, all teeth. Their nun friends might have had a posh education in their little nun-house, but they lacked some vital skills, like how to lie or properly hide their feelings. "Don't worry, they're not being too mean. I saw her name pop up here and there, but not too much. I think people just associate her with Cat."

"I suppose. They are samurai partners," Franny said. She shifted in her seat. It was a simple single-person seat with a few plump cushions on it. Franny sat on it as if it was a pew while she worked hard not to look Lucy's way.

If Lucy were a more vindictive, evil woman, she'd flaunt her stuff some more, but there was only so much teasing she could do before even she started to feel bad.

"Might you please consider putting something on?" Franny asked.

"Oh, fine," Lucy said. She was getting a little cold. And while being all chilled and perky was fun for sending pics to Cat, it was less than comfortable after a while. She padded across the room and plucked a clean-enough shirt off the floor. It was her old Cat's Got My Tongue shirt. One of her favourites.

She pulled it on, then returned to the couch, but not before grabbing a blanket from the foot of the bed to wrap herself in. "Omph," she said as she flopped onto the couch. "Okay, did I miss anything?"

"In the thirty seconds it took you to cross the room?" Franny asked.

"Hey, this is the internet, shit moves fast."

Lucy blinked, and with a small gesture she brought up a dozen screens across her vision. Without a Myalis to cheat for her, she had to arrange things on her own. She'd gotten a few programs to help sort and moderate chats, and now she was using those to pause the live feeds to catch a glimpse of what people had said.

It was thankless work, of course, so she didn't plan on doing any more than the bare minimum. Honestly though, she didn't expect that reading even a thousandth of what had been said would be necessary.

She was in the middle of said work (after teasing Cat with those bikini pics of course) when Franny showed up to help handle the media side of things.

There wasn't really much they could actively do, but keeping abreast of people's opinions might be valuable moving forwards. Lucy needed to know which memes to capitalise on for maximum success.

[User: Alia, Anxiety Prone]
THE ALIENS ARE COMING!
[User: WakiestWombat]
Can a cow fit into the railgun? Cows a % of c please!
[User: Freija]
Why does Stray Cat have perfect hair? AAAAAA
[User: TwiTwiTwi]
#SpaceHair
[User: OneOfTheSols]
RIP Phobos
[User: Bobble]
RIP Phobos, you were a good moon
[User: FeralSlider]
Flung Phobos at Earth? How???
[User: BlazeBrightly]
Yooo, that's a big gun!
[User: ShortFused]
Kilometre-long railgun? #WTF
[User: DiceyFrew]
She's blushing!
[User: MythologicalSelkie]
Bets on what that message had?
[User: PrinceofHemlock]
Show us the GF pics!
[User: S'tella]
Lmao, gay
[User: FanaticalFirefly]
"Big Gun." Solid name. Very creative. Definitely didn't name it last minute.
[User: WhoNow]
Aliens are coming and soon so is cat!
[User: HarpingLili]

"Hmm, yup, the people on the internet are all weirdos," Lucy said.

"That's not very kind to say," Franny replied.

Lucy scrolled up a little. "This one here wants to eat Cat's hair... and this other one wants to lick her toes. Even I don't want to do that, and I've definitely licked her before."

"Ah," Franny said. "I think I've just started to naturally filter those kinds of replies out."

"Like ads," Lucy said.

"Exactly," Franny replied. "Just get so used to them that you barely perceive them at all. I don't know if that's healthy or not, to be honest."

"Oh, definitely not," Lucy said with a sardonic laugh. "But whatever. Overall, it looks pretty positive?"

She moved her arm across the air before her a few times, resorting her various feeds. She had no idea how Cat had managed to be on so many sites at once. At least, initially.

Back when Catherine had murdered the mayor, the news was only carried by a few local news channels, but then it had been picked up by a bunch of bigger ones, meme sites, and aggregators before finally the react streamers got in on it and spread it even further out.

This though? This was being streamed on every major steaming platform, right at the top of their pages, it interrupted live news broadcasts too.

Lucy initially expected people to comment on it. It was rather funny to see newscasters jump and try to handle the screens behind them switch out to Cat's stream, especially with her opening. The AI newscasters were a lot more confused, some of them still looping through the story they'd been covering before.

The stream had also shown up on TV, but Lucy didn't know anyone who actually watched TV anymore, so it was kind of just a weird footnote.

Her sorting ended with roughly four piles. At the top left, the most ignorable streams and older forums. The reactions there were muted, though a few of the more scienc-y bunch were going on and on about the Big Gun and its implications. That's also where she shoved the political echo-chambers. They were already working to try and spin the whole thing against each other, but their memes had stopped being funny thirty years ago.

In the top right, she placed the celebrity stuff. Media aggregators and influencer dumps, as well as all the hangouts for the big paparazzi chains. The chats there were split between gushing at the samurai that showed up in the background, speculating about Cat's lovelife, and yapping about hair, clothes, and possible new fashion trends.

The bottom left was for the people freaking out about the end of the world. It was a small chunk of the overall number, and yet she couldn't decide if that was a disturbing fact or if it being the largest chunk would make it worse.

Finally, the bottom right of her vision was filled with reaction Andies. Streamers and quick-media platforms that usually specialised in small, high-dopamine content. They were in it for the spectacle. It was also the corner where Lucy started to sort through the most memes.

The meme trends were wild at the moment because Cat had unwisely fed them all with so much to work with.

"T-Minus Not Very Long" was doing great on some of the more wargamer-ish sites and was on T-shirts already. People were talking about a huge jump in tech-hair prices, and images of Cat's cute blush were all over.

She'd hate that.

But memes made the world go round, and memes pushing things from the mainstream core of the internet and deeper into the mesh, where the permanently-online sequestered themselves.

Memes were like... rain, Lucy imagined. No matter how deep someone was in the underbelly of things, they always found a way to leak through the ceiling and leave mould on the walls.

Or something like that. She'd workshop the analogy some more.

"Hey, are you hungry?" she asked.

"Me? I suppose," Franny said.

"Cool! You can help me cook something up for Cat, I need to talk to her, and food distracts her better than anything else. Plus I want to give the rule thirty-four artists some time to cook."

Franny sighed. "Of course you do."

***