Not Staged
"Nabi! Nabi!"
"Yeah? What is it?"
I answered casually enough, but my mind was already elsewhere. I was hatching a plan to pester Yuyeon for a phone of my own the moment the timing felt right.
I'd gone back to my old studio apartment earlier and handled my own phone, sure — but living in Yuyeon's place like some invisible ghost, without a single device to my name, was genuinely unbearable.
For a human navigating modern society, not having a smartphone was simply absurd. Barely a decade ago people had managed just fine without them… and yet humans were such treacherous little creatures. Right now, the idea of lasting even a single hour without a phone felt impossible. My brain was demanding dopamine every minute, every second, like a full-blown addict — and the single fastest, easiest cheat code for filling that craving was scrolling a phone screen.
"How do you know so much about how society works, Nabi?"
Yuyeon propped her chin in her hand and stared at me, tossing out the question out of nowhere.
"About what?"
"Just… everything. You know about the internet, about TV…"
I caught on instantly to what she found so strange — and so suspicious. On the surface I was nothing more than a cute beast-human cat. So why did I understand the complicated machinery of human society like some kind of expert?
Not that I had any honest answer I could give her. I hadn't started life as some alley cat. I'd been an ordinary Korean adult man who went to work and paid his taxes!
"I just… picked it up as I went along."
"Really? That's weird. Even for a spirit beast, that's a stretch…"
"Hnn…"
I let my tail droop and looked away as if the words had dried up in my throat. Luckily, Yuyeon didn't press any further and let it drop with easy grace.
"Anyway — it's about to start!"
"Ooh…!"
With Yuyeon's shout, our conversation bounced cleanly onto a new topic: the famous public-broadcast program we'd filmed last week after every kind of hardship imaginable. The live airing of Animal Farm!
"I wonder how we turned out! I'm so excited!"
"Same here, Yuyeon!"
It was the first time in my life — fur and all — that my face was about to be officially beamed out across a public television screen.
How many times in an ordinary citizen's entire life did their face actually end up on TV? Outside of extreme cases like getting caught on camera at a protest or landing in a news interview after some accident, the answer was basically never.
Of course, if you wanted to be on television and planned for it, methods existed. Sending in a personal story the way we had was one of them; there were plenty of others. There were even programs that gathered audiences for that exact purpose.
Bam-bam-bam~
While I was lost in thought, the familiar, bright opening theme of Animal Farm burst from the little television sitting in the corner of the living room.
Flashy opening titles rolled, and highlight clips from tonight's episodes stormed across the screen. A puppy thrashing through a mud puddle, a monkey pranking its keeper — and then, filling the entire frame, a cat I knew all too well.
"That's Nabi!"
Plush white-and-blue-toned fur. Deep blue eyes that looked as if they held the ocean itself. That was me — my cat form.
Seeing myself not as a bipedal beast-human, but as a perfect four-legged feline body, captured objectively through a third-party camera lens… that was a first. A strange, ticklish embarrassment bloomed in my chest.
Did I really look like that…?
It felt a little like the way women flinch when they catch their bare, makeup-free face in the mirror before putting on a full face. Except a woman's makeup still kept her human. My situation was on a completely different level.
Between the pretty little beast-human girl currently reflected in any mirror and the perfect four-legged Ragdoll on that screen, there wasn't a single common feature to point to. At best, the ears twitching on top of my head and the tail swaying behind me. The soft, addictive fluff under a hand was the same, though.
"Viewers, today we received a tip about a cat so brilliant the world calls it a genius — and we raced straight over~"
A veteran voice actor's crisp narration rang in my ears, and then the screen cut to a proper two-shot of Yuyeon and me.
"Nabi really is the smartest cat in the world! I'm telling you — she understands every word I say!"
Under the image of Yuyeon passionately addressing the camera, the shot caught me staring straight into the lens and letting out a thoroughly chic little meow.
"Ah, no way! I look so weird~!"
Seeing herself on screen, Yuyeon let out a mortified shriek and clapped both hands over her face. At the end of the day she was still a woman in her twenties who cared about her appearance, and the merciless broadcast lens clearly hadn't captured a version of herself she liked.
From where I sat, though, that wasn't true at all. She'd put on a full face of makeup for the shoot like a beauty YouTuber, and on screen she looked bright and pretty enough. In my eyes she hadn't come out weird in the slightest — she looked like a celebrity.
"Wait — is that cat on the computer???"
"One look and she knows! Ask her to fetch a tissue and she brings it. When she's hungry, she pulls out her own food — a true genius cat!"
"And for the finale, a farewell greeting aimed right at the production crew!"
"Nabi~ You really are human…!"
And just like that, the broadcast ended.
"We came out well, right, Nabi?"
"Yeah. I think I looked pretty good too."
Yuyeon and I talked it over — about how the show had wrapped. I figured the production team had edited everything together nicely enough.
But the communities exploded far beyond anything we'd expected.
An animals discussion gallery.
The world was full of adorable animals. Cats, dogs, squirrels, hamsters, and on and on… Honestly, even apex predators like lions and tigers were ridiculously cute as cubs. It was as if every living thing on earth carried DNA specifically designed to make their young adorable. Almost no animal started life looking ugly. Even the ones famous for being homely could still pull off cute as babies.
But if you had to pick the animals people loved most right now, it would almost certainly be cats and dogs. They were easy to keep at home, and animals like cats and dogs actually recognized their owners — which only made people want to raise them more.
And then someone posted.
Fr she seems human. Uses a computer, greets people and everything. And that face — neighborhood strays don't even compare. THIS is what a real purebred house cat looks like.
People refused to believe a cat could operate a mouse and open a webpage on her own. Fair enough — these were people who knew cats better than anyone.
But then a counterargument dropped.