Xenoverse origins / R-070
Rattie RaeOrigin story
Rattie Rae and the Great Cheese Recession
A Junkyard Rat Wrangler who pays rats to cooperate discovers that a perfect system can teach its participants to leave.
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Rattie Rae did not chase rats. Chasing implied that the rat had set the agenda. She offered appointments, modest refreshments and the opportunity to embarrass a rival rat in public. Business was excellent until she made the mistake of explaining it to management.
Rattie's most profitable idea gives the Junkyard rats a reason to find better employment.
Don't look at me like that; you're the one who read the poster.
From the dossier
Prologue — A Very Small Business Partner
Her best assistant was a battered brown rat she called Button. He had one pale ear, a talent for recognizing cheese through packaging and no respect for motivational speeches. Every morning he appeared on the rim of her bucket, accepted payment and led the others into the counting run.
Rattie worked as Junkyard Rat Wrangler. She knew the Goblin Council by its polished boots and the Council knew her by the bait receipts she refused to disguise as stationery. Their quarterly meetings were brief. She showed the numbers, they complained about the cheese, and nobody mentioned how much their lunch cost.
The arrangement required patience. Rattie preferred cleverness. She loved a shortcut so much that she sometimes followed it after discovering it went in the wrong direction. When Button learned to ring a little bell for his portion, she saw an opportunity to automate several dull minutes.
She made a board: ONE BELL, ONE PORTION. Button studied it, rang the bell and took his cheese. A second rat repeated the performance. By midday, the counting run held every familiar whiskered face in the yard. Rattie pictured a chair, a book and an afternoon without arithmetic.
Councillor Skerr arrived just in time to admire the queue. He announced a productivity exhibition and promised Rattie a discretionary biscuit allowance. She knew that discretionary usually meant imaginary, but an audience was an audience. She agreed to show the system at the next morning's gathering.
Before she left, Button rang the bell again. “One per rat,” Rattie told him, adding the rule to the board. Button studied the new line. Then he climbed down, walked along the fence and began a conversation with a rat she had never seen before.
Act 1
The Queue Around the Fence
Act I — The Queue Around the Fence
By sunrise, the Junkyard contained more rats than scrap. They arrived along pipes, through wheel rims and under the visiting officials' carriage. Every rat queued politely. Every rat took exactly one portion. The system was working so perfectly that Rattie wanted to hit it with a shovel.
Button stood on an overturned tin, directing traffic with his tail. The unfamiliar rat wore a twist of blue string around one paw. When Rattie tried to move him aside, six others formed a respectful barrier. It was the first time she had been politely escorted away from her own bucket.
Skerr praised the turnout. Rattie explained that the point had been to count resident rats, not attract visitors. He said the distinction showed a troubling lack of ambition. A clerk began preparing a certificate for the largest controlled rat gathering in the district.
Rattie cut the portions smaller. The rats accepted them, but the queue slowed. She hid the bell. Button produced a second bell. She changed the appointment time. The rats changed their arrival time and brought sleeping material. Her clever creatures were making her look remarkably underprepared.
At last she wrote NO MORE CHEESE on the board. Button read it, stepped off his tin and left. The others followed him through the fence. Within minutes the Junkyard was silent. Skerr congratulated her on achieving complete clearance and took the certificate back for revision.
Rattie should have enjoyed the quiet. Instead she kept glancing at the bucket rim. She had counted Button as a reliable part of the place, like a gate hinge. The hinge had gone to lunch elsewhere, taking the gate, the fence and her entire professional reputation with it.
Act 2
A Vacancy Nobody Advertised
Act II — A Vacancy Nobody Advertised
The absence of rats made the Junkyard strange. Nobody heard the usual scurrying warning before the shadow moths emerged from the scrap stacks. The moths ate colour from painted directions. Soon every route sign was grey, and three carts spent the morning circling the same empty bath.
Rattie asked Skerr for time to bring the colony back. He pointed to the new RAT-FREE ACHIEVEMENT banner. A reversal would make the Council appear indecisive. He suggested she recruit different rats, preferably ones unfamiliar with her previous management style.
She followed Button's trail beyond the fence to a disused ticket kiosk. The colony had made a town beneath it. Button sat beside the rat with blue string, sharing a crust that had never appeared on a Council invoice. Rattie offered cheese. Nobody moved towards her hand.
“Fine,” she said. “You have principles now. Very inconvenient development.” Button groomed his pale ear. She sat on the ground and waited. Without a bucket between them, she had nothing useful to do except notice how the colony arranged itself when she was not arranging it.
The smallest rats ate first. The confident ones watched the approaches. Button inspected a loose board, then waited while another rat pulled bedding through the gap. It was work Rattie had never counted because it had not helped her complete a report.
She took the bell from her pocket and placed it between them. Button pushed it back. After a long silence, she understood enough to be uncomfortable. She had made cooperation conditional on her rules, then called departure a failure of cooperation. She asked whether they would visit, without promising a system.
Act 3
Terms Without Small Print
Act III — Terms Without Small Print
Rattie brought an empty bucket to the fence the next morning. No cheese, no bell, no queue. She sat beneath the achievement banner and began telling Button everything that had happened with the moths. It was a dreadful presentation. The visiting councillors could hear most of it.
Skerr asked why she was addressing a hole. “Because the hole hasn't interrupted,” she said. He warned that she was becoming a spectacle. She agreed. Then she described the colourless route signs and the carts trapped in their ridiculous procession, without pretending the rats owed her a solution.
Button appeared on the fence. Behind him came a handful of familiar rats. They explored the stacks, disturbed the shadow moths and drove them out beneath the open sky, where their stolen colours fell like dusty rain. One clerk acquired a green eyebrow. Rattie resisted calling this an improvement.
The whole colony did not return. Those who did came and went through a gap she stopped calling a breach. She resumed feeding them, but the portions no longer bought attendance. The counting board became an estimate, which Skerr considered a regrettable decline in certainty.
Button kept his home beneath the ticket kiosk. He visited the bucket rim when he pleased. Rattie missed the old reliability more than she admitted, yet she found that watching for him was different from expecting him. On good mornings, that difference felt like the beginning of competence.
A week later, the blue-string rat arrived carrying a folded scrap of poster. It showed a grand cheese festival at the Council hall. Button appeared behind him with both bells. Rattie examined the poster, then the rats, then the bucket. “I am not organizing this,” she said. Neither rat had asked her to.
Counting creatures with their own plans
The Junkyard Rat Wrangler works among salvage piles where paths change whenever a crane moves. Rattie's tale treats the rats as inventive neighbours whose cooperation cannot be reduced to an impressive number on a board.