About Bad Tidings From Queen Sophie:
Excerpt:
Three AM. Dark in the apartment. Completely still.
Except for the cat.
Clicka. “MOM.” Clicka. “MOM.” Clicka. “MOM.”
Cass had trained her cat Sophie in the use of push buttons for communication. It’d looked cute on YouTube.
The cat was good with them.
Clicka. “MOM.”
Cass was beginning to regret the buttons.
A drawn-out waul—demanding, not lonely. Monkey, attend me IMMEDIATELY, is how Cass would translate it.
Cass and Queen Sophie normally enjoyed a peaceable relationship. But the buttons couldn’t solve all their communication problems. Two months ago, Sophie began pooping outside her litter box. Cass had changed litter brands to no avail, and the vet had ruled out any illness.
Besides, it wasn’t a consistent error—it might happen three times in a single week, none the next. Sometimes with wailing. Sometimes without. And it never happened during the day.
Nope. It happened in the dead of night, so Cass could step in the creamy surprise first thing in the morning on the way to work.
But tonight, for the first time ever, Cass wouldn’t have to guess at what Queen Sophie was trying to tell her.
Cass pulled up the app her friend had shown her. Blue light shone in her face. She squinted hard, swiping.
Clicka. “MOM.” Yowl. Clicka. “MOM.” Clicka. “MOM.”
Sound of kitty nails on laminate. Cass paused the arcane sequence of swipes needed to access the secret app to hear what Sophie would press next. Her guess was “mad”, second guess, “snack.”
Clicka. “FOLLOW.”
“Will in a second,” muttered her owner. Dang. She’d lost her place. She exited the app to restart the sequence.
Dragon’s Dream. Copyright 2019 Edmo Software.
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On first glance it was cheap, asset-swapped shovelware, a 2D platformer where a knight float-jumped across green fields set against a purple mountainscape. But if you pressed right, died three times in the first chasm, a pay screen came up, trading seven-league boots (actually a double jump) for cold, hard cash.
But if you pulled up your phone’s keyboard, held the “e” until a pop-up with additional symbols came up, then entered the first smiley emoji followed by three lightning bolts, swiped up once, then hit your phone’s back button three times, the phone would reboot into an animal speech translator.
Her best friend frequented some odd forums, but Cass had zero—no, less than zero—clue how anyone in those forums dug up these obscure secrets, too elaborate to just stumble upon.
Cass wouldn’t have believed it, except her friend had shown her in person on her own phone, and then used it on her elderly pug, Bruce Wayne, who (through the phone) requested medicine for his doggy arthritis before trotting to the cabinet where his pills were kept.
She’d been convinced.
