[Zoophilos]

Anthony and Mike were finishing up dinner late in the evening, a simple meal of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.  Ralphy stood on the table eating with them, only his meal mostly consisted of dried fruits and nuts, with a side of a piece of ham.  Downing the last bite of sandwich, Anthony stood up somewhat painfully and stretched.
       "Would'ja mind doing the dishes tonight, Mike?" he asked.  "I'm pretty tired after work today, and I did them last night."  Anthony had managed to get a job at the Evelon zoo.  It involved a lot of manual labor, and it was a little more exercise than to what Anthony was accustomed.        
       "Oh, yeah, okay," Mike agreed absent-mindedly.  Anthony went to their tiny bedroom to change his clothes for bed, while Mike hunched over the sink.  Ralphy just preened himself, still perched on the table.
       When Mike finished the dishes, he went to the teleporter to fuss over it and the notes he had draped all over it, as he usually did from morning to evening.  The young men had eaten quite late this evening, though, and he soon followed Anthony's example and went to prepare for bed, turning the lights off in the main room as he did so.  Ralphy was left in the dark.
       Not that he minded.  Rattegans are made for scuttling through dark tunnels, and he knew the place well enough by now to know it's layabout from memory.  He scurried under the small arm chair in the sitting room, sniffing about.  The boys were going to bed, but Ralphy wasn't.  He had slept much of the afternoon, something he often did, and wasn't at all tired.  He was going to stay up for several hours still, which he also often did, exploring through the night inside, and outside the apartment.

(0.1)

[Zoophilos]

By 11:35 pm, the light in the boys' room had been turned out, and the only light in the apartment was a few stray gleams from the city lights outside that managed to get through the blinds.  That, and Ralphy's fire.  The green flame on the Wood Rattegan's rump gave off a faint glow that made his outline just visible.  He peeked out from under the small armchair wedged next to the teleporter before scampering into the kitchenette.  There, he prowled under the dining room table for scraps from supper.  Having eaten so recently, he hardly needed a snack now, but his hoarding instinct insisted he look for something he could store for leaner times.  Also, there was a chance one of the young men had dropped candy, a wonderfully sweet treat they had introduced to Ralphy, who had found it irresistable.
       Score!  Anthony had dropped a jelly bean.  He happily popped it in his mouth and chewed.  It was lemon-flavored.  He eagerly perused for more, but the only other scraps he could find were bread crumbs and a bit of cheese.  He filed it all away in his cheek pouches for later use anyway.
       The kitchenette had nothing more of interest, so Ralphy headed for the boys' bedroom.  Mike had left the bedroom door open an inch, for which Ralphy was grateful.  He pushed it further open squeezing into the room.
       In the tiny bedroom, there was only a set of bunk beds, a small dresser, and a pair of doors opening into a narrow closet set into the wall.  Anthony snored softly from the top bunk.  Mike seemed to be asleep but every now and then he would stir and turn over.  Creeping silently over the floor boards, Ralphy explored under the bunk, nosed through Anthony's clothes thrown carelessly on the floor, and squeezed his head under the dresser.  The dust bunnies gathering under the dresser made him sneeze before he could stop himself.  The boys remained undisturbed, though, even Mike for all his restlessness.  So Ralphy wiped his face and whiskers clean and moved onward.
       He found a tiny 1-piece keystone just under the dresser and scooped it up.  Then he bounded up to the top of the dresser, climbing easily with the tops of jutting drawers and drawer handles for footholds.  He left the keystone there where one of the young men would surely find it.
       Ralphy jumped down from the dresser and left the bedroom.  The only room in the apartment left unexamined was the bathroom.  He didn't like the bathroom much, as it was often damp and sometimes smelly, and he had yet to find anything interesting when exploring its nooks.  Just the same, he darted across the tiny corridor dividing the bedroom and the bathroom, scrabbling on the bathroom tiles.  A look through the cabinet, on top of the sink, and in the bathtub yielded nothing of interest.  Satisfied that he had least looked to be sure, Ralphy bounded out of the bathroom and back into the sitting room.
       The window of the kitchenette was open a crack.  Ralphy onto a chair and then to the top of the table, and from the edge of the table made a flying leap at the window.  He caught the sill and just managed to squeeze through.  From there, he made another leap to the drainage pipe on the side of the building, and scuttled down it to the ground.

(0.2)

[Zoophilos]

Once on the ground, Ralphy paused for just a second to glance about himself, before scurrying away to hide under the bottom stair of the fire escape, where he was considerably less exposed.  In this relatively safe spot, he looked out at the night and sniffed the air.  It was a very pleasant night.  Pretty cool, but not bitterly cold, with only a slight breeze.  The stars gleamed and twinkled between the large, puffy clouds gliding under them.
       Ralphy gave one more glance at his more immediate surroundings to be sure there was nothing dangerous around.  Then he began his night time outing in earnest.
       First, he scuttled to the dumpster sitting a short distance away from the fire escape.  He perused beneath it briefly, to see if anything interesting had fallen under it, but he found nothing.  So he crawled out from under it, climbed to its top and jumped in.  The dumpster was a little over half full, which made it a heaping treasure trove for a curious dumpster-diving rattegan like Ralphy.  Ralphy pawed at old clothes, turned over broken knick-knacks, picked up the occasional keystone, and sniffed at discarded food, taking the odd bite.  In the past, such food had formed a large part of Ralphy's diet.  Now, living on the generous portions Anthony offered him, he was much finickier, and ate little of this stuff.
       A loud thud made Ralphy freeze.  Footsteps sounded from the end of the alleyway, heading toward the dumpster.  Ralphy darted under a old sweater that had several holes worn through it, carefully peeking out from under it at the top of the dumpster.
       A head appeared just over the rim.  It was obviously not human, with a muzzle and triangular ears.  A more human-looking arm appeared over the rim and tossed in a bulging plastic bag.  It hit the interior of the dumpster with a crash.  Footsteps then receded.  Ralphy waited a minute longer, nose twitching and ears perked, before cautiously poking his head out from under the sweater.  The night returned to its previous calm, but Ralphy decided this interruption signaled that it was time to move along.  As it got later, other, larger creatures would start searching the dumpsters, and it was better to be gone when they did so.  Besides, Ralphy had already found plenty of interesting things - a candy dispenser with a rattegan's head, a pen that sometimes lit up when clicked, a strange contraption made of interwoven wires that changed shape depending on how one pulled on the wires.
       He climbed back to the top of the dumpster and made a quick check of the alley.  The place was now deserted, so he jumped down to the ground and scurried out of the alley.

(0.3)

[Zoophilos]

Ralphy scurried from the dumpster and scrabbled back up the drainpipe.  Once he reached the roof, he crawled sure-footedly over the tiles until he came to where the telephone lines connected with the apartment complex.  Here he paused a moment to hide the items he had found in the dumpster in a safe place.  Then he picked a line and began running down the cable, almost as nimbly as a squirrel would have.  Ralphy found telephone lines a very convenient highway; most predators couldn't reach anything on them, and they formed a bridge between buildings all over the city.  He ran over roofs and scuttled over cables.  The cables rocked slightly in the breeze, which was a little stiffer this far above ground.  A Doom kitty sleeping on top of a dumpster sat up and hissed as he passed over it, but Ralphy paid no heed.  He froze briefly at the sound of soft flapping,  but it was only a Batti on his own night outing.  Finally Ralphy reached the roof of a small building with clotheslines strung up between it and another short building.  He climbed down onto the clothesline and shimmied down it to an upper window in the second building.  This window had no paning to close it off from the outside; it was simply a rectangular hole.  Through here Ralphy entered, dropping to a plain concrete floor in serious need of sweeping.  He paused to look and sniff about himself.
       The room appeared to be empty at first, but near a doorway leading to another room something moved.  Ralphy, upon seeing this, dropped to all fours and trundled meekly over to the doorway.  A small shadow a little larger than Ralphy stepped forward to meet him - another Rattegan.  This one had the Common coloration, rather than Ralphy's Wood colors.  The two sniffed and looked each other over, nose to nose for a moment.  Then the larger Rattegan seized Ralphy and began grooming and brushing him like a mother rat grooming her tiny newborn ratlings.  Ralphy squirmed and pulled to get out of her grasp, but couldn't get free until she released him.  Once free of her overbearing affections, Ralphy pulled from his cheek pouch the cheese and bread crumbs left over from dinner and some crumbly crackers he had pulled from the dumpster, and offered them to the other Rattegan.  These she accepted, tucking them into her own cheek pouches and then turning back into the room she had come from.  Near the far end of this room was a half-collapsed, dusty, dilapidated bed frame.  Under this was a nest made of various shredded rags, with about nine or so tiny little rattegans squirming in it.  The mother Rattegan fed the cracker and bread crumbs to the squeaky little nestlings, eating the cheese herself.  Ralphy hadn't brought a lot of either, but apparently it didn't matter much; both mother and babies were apparently well fed and desired no more than the small snack Ralphy had to offer.  Ralphy sniffed curiously at the nestlings, making an attempt to groom one.
       Once the mother Rattegan had finished feeding the nestlings, she turned back to Ralphy and began grooming him again.  Ralphy struggled again, but after a moment he gave up and just let her do it, until she finally decided Ralphy met her standards of cleanliness.  The two of them squeaked back and forth while the mother nestled with the babies to keep them warm.  Ralphy occasionally made more attempts to groom them.

(0.4)

[Zoophilos]

Eventually, Ralphy decided it was time to leave.  He nuzzled his mother good bye and headed back to the window that looked over the clotheslines.  There was a faint paling in the eastern sky, indicating the coming of dawn.  It was also far colder out than it had been when Ralphy first came out.  Ralphy shivered and began moving briskly to keep warm.  The city was very quiet.  Apparently much of the night life had gone to bed.  Ralphy's brisk pace meant it didn't take him very long to get home, but even so, the paleness in the eastern sky had turned pink by the time Ralphy got to the apartment.  He crawled wearily down from the phone lines and, after checking on his cache and picking up the most interesting item, squeezed into a small hole near where the cables entered the building.  He wound his way between the rafters supporting the roof, clambered down inside the walls, until he reached a tiny hole in one wall.  This he squeezed himself through, with some difficulty.  He came out into the young men's closet.  He heaved the door opened, and jumped down to the floor.  He paused for a moment, looking wearily at the dresser, before going to the bunk.  He placed on the floor two keystones where the boys were likely step on them when they got up.  Finally, he trundled to a cage wedged between the boys' bunk and the dresser that Anthony had set up for him.  The door was always left open, since Ralphy had figured out how to open it himself, and the cage was filled with shredded newspaper.  Ralphy crept into the little cardboard box Anthony had given him to use as a nest inside the cage, and curled up in the thick bedding packed in there.  He was asleep in minutes.
       At 7 am, Anthony's wrist watch alarm began beeping.  Anthony started from sleep and turned it off, so Mike wouldn't be disturbed.  He sleepily climbed down from the top bunk, wincing as he put his foot on the floor, and removed a keystone from under his toe.  He picked up the other one and put both on the dresser.  He glanced over at Ralphy's cage and thought he would check on the little guy.  The cage looked lifeless, but when Anthony stuck his head inside (lying on the floor to do so) he could just see Ralphy's furry ribs rising and falling in slumber through the hole in the box.  He smiled at the sight.  Something else caught his eye, lying in the shreds of newspaper: a pile of smoothly curving wires interwoven with each other.
       "What the thunder is that?"

(1!)