[Lauchenoiria]

Several days later...

The Thraxian armada approached Salad Land ominously. The ships crept forward as the Saladians watched and waited to see what horror would be unleashed on them this time. On the beach, the members of the Salad Land Lizard Capture Service (still in lizard uniforms) stood next to some of the local police, watching the approaching ships.

Citlalnite was beside himself, telling anyone and everyone who would listen that he didn’t want to get killed by Thraxians and they were cruel and heartless forcing him to be here. Even José seemed subdued by the uncertainty. Cranston looked unusually cheerful, which was in itself a cause for concern. Yousef felt resigned to whatever fate. He’d had no control over his life for years now. What was even t”he point in trying when, clearly, God hated him?

Suddenly, an ageing landing craft shot towards them, which had probably last seen use in the Great War. It landed on the beach and opened. The Saladian defenders collectively held their breath, expecting attack. Nothing happened. Indeed, nothing came out of the craft at all. Fearing a trick, the Saladians held back, watching, when eventually a small figure shot outside, darting across the beach and grabbing a lizard from underneath the sand.

The cat held the lizard in its mouth, biting hard enough to trap it but not enough to kill. Then it dropped the lizard and clawed at it, playing with its food. The gathered Saladians watched the cat in confusion as it bullied the lizard before swallowing it whole. Then the cat promptly curled up in a ball and went to sleep.

“What the…” Yousef said.

“You, go check it out,” Boisselot said, nudging Yousef.

“Oh, come on,” he complained.

Boisselot pointed a dagger covered in fake gemstones (personally gifted to him by the Marquis, much to his embarrassment) at Yousef in warning. He groaned and stomped forward towards the Thraxian craft.

Inside was about a thousand cats, all curled up in a pile, mostly asleep. A few were batting at each other’s tails. A couple came towards Yousef, meowing, batting at his ankles as if asking for food. Yousef knelt down to give one of the cats some pets, and noticed it was wearing a collar with a tag. He read the text. In Persian, with Arabic below, the tag roughly translated to “Mr Fluffles, Thraxian Royal Army, service no. C-198-325-843”.

“What in the lizard-infested insane island?” Yousef muttered to himself. He turned back to the Saladians and called aloud. “Uh, they’ve sent cats.”

“They’ve sent what!?” Citlalnite replied.

“Cats! They’ve sent cats with military service numbers! There’s like a thousand of them! Most of them are asleep!”

Boisselot stared at Yousef in shock for a moment, before he began to giggle. The giggles became a full-throated belly laugh, with the policeman bending over and slapping his knees in amusement. "Cats! They sent cats! Are they expecting us to sneeze to death?"

Next to Boisselot, Valentin Daucourt grinned. "We'll have to wait and see if they land any more ships. But if they are only sending cats...that just gives us more animals to deal with."

As if to hammer home the point, a hawk swooped down towards one of the cats, which responded by extending its claws and hissing. The hawk dodged, and the cat gave chase, jumping on top of an abandoned ice cream stall, knocking a display of cotton candy to the ground. Seeing the hawk, many of the other cats also shot out of the landing craft, running across the beach.

Towels, ice cream, a couple of Saladian flags that had been planted, and more were dislodged as the cats spread out, chasing hawks and being chased by hawks. Then lizards started appearing out of the sand to get away from the cats, jumping towards the Saladian defenders. Yousef, meanwhile was staring out to sea as about ten more landing craft rapidly approached.

Boisselot and Daucourt no longer looked amused. "Cat-astrophe!" Daucourt shouted, ducking from a lizard. He stepped on a cat's tail, causing the cat to hiss and swipe at him. Daucourt tried to dodge the cat and ended up tripping on Boisselot, knocking both men to the ground.

The Saladian defenders were now thoroughly confused. "Uh...are we supposed to shoot the cats?" one of them asked. "I don't want to shoot cats," his fellow Saladian soldier replied somberly.

One of the new landing craft got knocked around by a big wave, causing a terrifying howling to erupt from inside. Once it reached the beach, another thousand cats shot out - angry, furious cats who had been disturbed from their nap.

"Hey, at least now we know where the lizards have been hiding," José remarked as more appeared from beneath the sand, running away from the cats. The appearance of lizards attracted the hawks, which began to dive down to eat lizards.

A hawk swooped down to pluck a lizard from near Yousef's feet; only for a cat to jump on the hawk's back, hanging on with its claws as the hawk rose into the sky, with the lizard still in its jaws. The three battled each other in the sky for a while. Someone on one of the Thraxian ships - presumably a human - began to blast Thraxian pop music out of speakers at full volume.

Seeing that there was no actual shooting about to take place, a group of young tourists emerged from a nearby hotel and began dancing to the pop music while streaming both their dancing and the chaos. "It's a beach party of the sort you can only find on Salad Land! Lizards and hawks and cats, oh my!" the person streaming the video giggled.

Meanwhile, the Saladian authorities on the ground began desperately trying to regain control of the situation. Some tried to herd cats. Others tried to shoo away hawks. Boisselot turned to Yousef and his companions. "Catch something! Lizards, cats, birds, anything!" he shouted.

Yousef immediately obeyed, picking up a pair of cats he'd begun petting. He grinned at Boisselot as José began waving around his lizard net, and Cranston went after the hawks with grim determination. Citlalnite was too busy protecting Tlotli, who several of the cats had decided would make a good snack.

"The song playing is literally about cats," Yousef remarked, as the only Arabic speaker in the vicinity.

The music could be heard as far away as the Palace de Salad, where the Marquis cursed and covered his ears. He called in a set of orders to Daucourt, who relayed them but not without some cursing of his own.

Some minutes later, the Saladian "navy" began sailing into the harbor from their docks. The ships didn’t have much in the way of guns. But they did have hoses.

Led by the ship Yousef and the others had brought to Salad Land, the Saladian ships began spraying the Thraxian ships with blasts of water. The goal was to make the music stop, and to encourage the cats to turn on the Thraxians instead of continuing to storm the beach.

A yowling out of a horror movie could be heard as chaos erupted on the Thraxian ships. Unfortunately, those cats already on the beach could not turn back now, but the cats still on the ships went wild. One of the Thraxian ships careened to the side as a cat attacked the person steering; while another ground to a halt, and still another sped up, seemingly unintentionally. Unfortunately, the speeding one was heading right for one of the Saladian navy's tiniest ships. If it could even be described as a ship.

The tiny converted fishing boat, now known as the SPS Grande Salade, hastily tried to move out of the way of the speeding Thraxian ship. It was only partially successful. The Thraxian ship clipped its stern with a loud crunch. The Saladian vessel began to take on water. It's captain hastily ordered the ship to proceed to the beach before it sank. The Grande Salade beached itself, then continued to use its water cannon to fend off cats and hawks.

The Thraxians managed to get their ship under control (or, perhaps the cats had mutinied and taken control. You never know) and began to hastily retreat from Salad Land's territory. The others began to follow, except one ship where a cat came flying across the deck, landing and letting out the loudest hiss ever. The cats on that ship then turned on the humans, who began screaming and jumping off the ship into the water in their haste to get away from the cats.

The animals on the beach had mostly dispersed by this point, disappearing deeper into Salad Land, where they would need to be hunted down and captured. Yousef glanced around as he held about six cats who had climbed on him. He sighed in resignation. They weren't getting to leave anytime soon.