There it was, all finished and oh! my!... What a thing! The new (rebuilt shuttle) looked splendid beyond words, absolutely glorious. It appeared much bigger and more sturdy then before. Its outer metallic surfaces gleamed like burnished copper bronze. It had a finish so polished that it literally shimmered all over with rainbow ripples of reflected light.

Inside was just as breathtaking. There were no little pokey corners all crammed with instruments any more. It was all roomy now and curiously continuous in all directions so that whichever way you went, you ended up back where you started. Flooring and furnishings were finished in fabrics made of superfine merino woolen materials constructed from sheep molecules in the wreck. Trims were of bone ivory and intricately worked to complement the effect of those superb woolen fabric textures. On the bridge, banks of extensively reconstructed instrumentation wrapped three dimensionally, floor to ceiling, around each of three separate command positions.

The new “super shuttle” had been reconstructed by wraith folk with more than just a little creative flare. Everything was brand spanking new. The whole thing was splendid beyond words and standing on that command deck was now like being alone on the stage of a great auditorium. If you, dear reader could have been there, I promise you would have felt truly freaky weird… because the whole thing was alive, you could feel it breathe! To stand there was like being a physical part of that great, living, creature of space… poised… vibrantly questing into the cosmos. It was wow!, pow!, blow your mind… awesome!

And there, right there… So help me God… Right there…. Standing on that command deck now were also two kelpie people… and a cat person! Oh my hat! Animal people awesome enough to scare the very hell out of anybody. Larger than life they were and very, very full of them selves with it.

Get that! Those playful wraiths had not just recreated the shuttle from the mixed up molecular puddle they had found in the wake of that cosmic storm. They had also made a whole new crew of “animal-people” to command it. The new shuttle was something else, but there was no doubt the new crew was something else again – and then some! All three of the new shuttle crew stood a full 7 feet tall. They each looked much as you might expect a super athlethic animal-person to look – god like - nothing less!

I know what you are thinking, dear listener… two kelpie-people is not so hard to understand, but a cat-person? .. Where on earth (or in space) had the cat molecules come from? No mention of there having been a cat on the shuttle mission has been even hinted at so far. So what’s with the cat story now?

Well, the answer is that the cat was always there - right from the beginning - but no body knew. The cat had been aboard the shuttle before anyone else. The cat was in fact a special animal agent of the Australian government so no wonder no one knew about it. The cat was Truffaldino de Cataldo Casolin and it was his DNA that the Wraiths had tinkered with to create that third member of the new shuttle crew.

Truffaldino had been assigned to the shuttle mission right at the outset by the Department of Defence and ASIO in Canberra. Truffaldino was not your average kind of domestic cat. He was, at the time of the sheep-shuttle flap, a top agent of Canberra’s deepest of deep cover counter espionage groups that included various other specially trained dolphins, dairy cows, Border Collies, fruit bats and so on. Anyway, Truffaldino was an unavoidable part of the shuttle meltdown along with all the rest of it and that means the cat molecules had every right to be a part of the shuttle puddle that the Wraiths had rebuilt.

Now then, good readers all. I’m sorry to say that’s your lot for now… next episode coming up in our very next WSVC newsletter.

Don’t miss it. Stay tuned. If you want, read through all the previous episodes.

Best regards, Possum Pup (Kelpie author person herself)