Our cat Hermes – who I’ve often described as very clever, if not actually smart – is trying to use the Star Trek Communicator. And doing it pretty successfully.
This year, like the previous one, we let our daughter and her friend decorate the tree (at their request). we came home to find that they had decorated the tree with all Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who ornaments. It was a SciFi Geek tree*. I can’t complain too much. Most of those space ships and constructions really do look like ornaments. Especially Deep Space Nine.
The thing is that we have cats. The cats no longer try to climb the tree, but they’re unable to resist those glittery, swinging, hanging ornaments. Hermes, especially, loves batting them around. Moving them up the tree doesn’t help – he’ll climb onto the end tables and the windowsill to reach ornaments.
One of the ornaments is a Hallmark Star Trek Communicator. And it works. It’s got a little battery inside and a suite of recorded messages in James Doohan’s and William Shatner’s and Leonard Nimoy’s voices. And it makes that Queep! sound and the weird beeping. When Hermes bopped the communicator, he hit the button that did that, and we heard Queep – beep – beep “I canna gie ye more power!”
Hermes had that same burst of insight that comes when he pushes something off the edge of the table and it hits the floor and bursts apart. He bopped the communicator again, and it beeped at him. every now and then we’ll hear the communicator go off as if we had a Star Trek marathon running on the TV.
Worse, he is now going from ornament to ornament and bopping each of them, in the hopes of finding another one that does something. We do have other “live” ornaments, but I don’t think he’s succeeded in getting any f the others to operate. But he’s persistent.
P.S. – I know you want pictures “or it didn’t happen”. Pepper Mill tried repeatedly to catch him bopping the communicator, but something always went wrong. If we get a picture, I’ll post it.
*My wife and I are SciFi geeks – we met at a WorldCon. and though we’ve taken her to Arisia every year since she was born, our daughter turned out to be relatively normal, at least in this respect – she’s not a SciFi geek, although she speaks fluent fan. So I was a little surprised at her choice of décor for our tree. Pepper Mill and I have never done an exclusively science fiction tree.