Make life underground work

Sophie: "We can make life work underground. We'll build ourselves a whole secret society free from the ogling of normie humans. We'll build apartments, shops, gardens, art galleries! We will refuse to cower in the darkness - we will live, I tell you! WE WILL LIVE!"

The other catpeople look a bit flabbergasted. Robert is the first to speak up.

Robert: "You know, I guess we could try that. You're right, Sophie. I'm fed up with just hanging out in here all day."

A guy from under the table shouts out that he wants to go to bars again. A woman wants a bathhouse. Izzy says he wants a skate park.

Sophie: "Hell yea! We can do all of that. People forget about our existence, so we can just steal whatever materials we need during night time. We don't need to eat and we're all hella strong, so we'll be able to work thrice as hard as any normie human. Give me a paper and a pen, I need to edge this out."

The other felines look on curiously as you scribble your plans with the acumen of an architect. As it happens, you received a degree in structural engineering from university, and have worked as a contractual architect for several years now. This is really the only thing which enabled you to suggest such a radical lifestyle change to these catpeople to begin with.

Once the plans are done, you write in large letters at the top of it: "The Community of Spectre Connect". A reference to the Rainbow Bridge, as a paradise for cats to start their new lives in.

Time to hand out jobs. One of the transformees happens to be a landscaper, one is a welder and one has a hobby in interior decoration. Izzy also worked at a construction site, and still has the electronic key to enter it.

Already on the following night, your delinquent posse sneaks to Izzy's former workplace and steals as much construction material and as many tools as possible. Your transformations have made you so strong that a single catperson is able to carry a large steel beam under each arm. Getting them through the spinning one-way gates of the construction site is a hassle, but you find a workaround by tearing a hole into the chain link fence.

You spend every night siphoning more material from the outside world, and every day tirelessly labouring to build your own world. At first you clean the abandoned factory, build more rooms and refurbish them for living space. You scout out other abandoned factories nearby and build walkways and tunnels into them. As a fortunate consequence of you constantly pilfering such immense amounts of material, at least two entire factories end up having to close due to a bankrupcy, and you are able to expand into them too.

During this time, you send out disguised scouts into the city during daytime, with the purpose of finding further transformees who may have gotten stranded and not been able to find their way to your lair. You create a covert ad campaign to persuade catpeople to gravitate towards your lair, and then intercept them at the first opportunity. Your numbers grow at several people per day. You acquire further construction workers, two more welders, an electrician and a middle-aged man with a luxuriously comprehensive tool shed.

Eventually, as you've assimilated every viable building in the industrial zone, you start to develop the available space. You fully bridge the gaps between the buildings in your territory, close down the roads between them and start to fill this new inner courtyard with all the promised additions. You take trees, bushes, flowers and grass from nearby forests and local gardening shops to create a blossoming park. The former factory buildings are relegated for new recreational and cultural areas.

While new recruits keep piling up and more requests are added constantly, the only way to expand is down. The subfloors of the pre-existing buildings are assimilated first, after which new ones are added according to what structural integrity allows. Here would spring up bathhouses, malls and smaller stores. Your society doesn't adopt a currency, seeing as how stealing from the outside world has become nearly risk-free, and the lack of hunger means that there's hardly any reason for consumption beyond as a luxury.

It is at this point that you begin to receive news that other, nearby cities are starting to be affected by the transformations. They are clearly centered around your home city, as that is the only place where the occurrence is high enough to warrant a sanctuary like Spectre Connect to exist. You send out rescue units in large, conspicuously painted trucks to retrieve catpeople from other cities and move them here. Your crews have a 100% success rate, and become so adept that they are able to take detours through people's homes so that they can retrieve their sentimental or strategically important possessions.

After about a year, Spectre Connect has assimilated the entire industrial zone of your city. Normal people begin to move away from the city as any kind of business is impossible to remain standing due to the immense amounts of inexplicable thefts. The local police department is accused of both incompetence and corruption. People refuse the Mayor's office even by forcible appointment, knowing that they won't be able to resolve these issues.

Six months later, your home city is thought to be a ghost town, but it is in fact fully inhabited by catgirls and catboys. At around this time, the transformations in nearby cities begin to die down, and your population stabilizes. Spectre Connect is a mostly-lawless utopia of free sex, all thanks to the boundless efforts of its inhabitants.

You made life work underground, and in return you got to live overground.

'ENDING 68 -Spectre Connect-